The Aerosmith album Joe Perry thought wasn’t “up to the standard”
Aerosmith never needed to be one of the most forward-thinking rock and roll bands of all time to impress their audience.
There are more than a few times when they could try some zany experiment and get away with it, but if you look at the lion’s share of their classic material, there’s a reason that people come back to ‘Mama Kin’ a lot more than they do songs like ‘Jaded’ or ‘Girls of Summer’. But when looking back on their catalogue, Joe Perry felt there were definite peaks and valleys where things weren’t always working right.
But if you want to fast-track this whole thing, it’s easy to go back to the moment where Perry left the band as the lowest point of their career. Here they were at the end of one leg of a tour and midway through cutting an album, but after one too many fights with Steven Tyler, Perry felt that it was better for him to work on his own with songs that he could get behind without Tyler complaining about the guitarist’s relationship with his wife.
The whole thing can feel a little bit juvenile in retrospect, but it’s also a fair issue to work out. There are plenty of artists who try to make the best music they possibly can for the rest of their band, but when the extracurriculars start getting to interfere with everything, it’s healthy to talk through it. Then again, someone disrespecting their bandmate’s significant other was never going to go over well, and even if it ended with the cliche of milk being spilt everywhere, Perry wasn’t going to stick around.
That gave him free rein to do what he wanted, but given their states of mind, both of them needed each other. No one could say that a Perry-less Aerosmith was going to go the distance, and while The Joe Perry Project had a few highlights, it’s not like they were going to be setting the world on fire with anyone other than Tyler. So when they finally made up, that should have been the moment that they emerged like a phoenix from the ashes, right?
Well, when asked about which album he considered a bad album by their standards, their comeback album, Done With Mirrors, ranked pretty high on Perry’s list, saying, “Done With Mirrors, as far as I’m concerned, is our least inspired record. But I’ve heard fans really like it, so I’m not gonna stand here and tell ’em: “No, it sucks”. We had to do that record to get to the next one, so it served its purpose. I just don’t think it’s up to the standard of some of our others.”
In all fairness, that might be a little bit harsh on Perry’s part. No, the songs are not anywhere near the standards that the band set for themselves back in the day, but there are more than a few moments that come somewhere close to that magic, especially when they redid old songs from Perry’s solo catalogue like ‘Let the Music Do the Talking’.
All they needed was a bit more guidance half the time, and while they did make a Faustian bargain by bringing in outside songwriters on Permanent Vacation, it’s not like people like Desmond Child didn’t have their best interests at heart when he started working with them on tracks like ‘Angel’ or Holly Knight working with them to bring a song like ‘Rag Doll’ to life.
If nothing else, Perry is right on the money, saying that the record served its purpose in Aerosmith’s catalogue. Most of them were afraid that they couldn’t even make another album with the same kind of swagger that they did back in the day, and even if their rebirth didn’t get off to the greatest start, it was only a teaser of what they could do once they had everything completely straightened out.
