“We lost the vision”: The album Aerosmith fell apart trying to record
As rock and roll found its way out of the Summer of Love, people were ready and willing to take things in new directions. There had been those who were willing to embrace the Flower Child approach whenever they played, but there was something a lot more feral going on when someone like Jimmy Page strapped on his guitar. The world was wide open, but Aerosmith never forgot how a bluesy groove made them feel until the moment that everything dried up for them.
Looking at what they had to offer circa 1973, though, this should have been a recipe for success. They had the same kind of heaviness one would expect out of Zeppelin, but there are many times when they also cribbed from The Stones a little too much as well, which made for the tastiest riffs ever committed to tape when they started making their way through albums like Toys in the Attic and Rocks.
They were already shaping the minds of kids like Slash when they first started, but there was also a secret element behind their success: drugs. Even when the Guns N’ Roses guitarist caught them live for the first time, he remembered not being able to recognise a single lick they played because of how strung out they were behind the scenes, and when someone’s playing fire that much, they were bound to get burned.
In the middle of their tour in 1979, guitarist Joe Perry hit his final straw after an altercation happened backstage between his wife and bassist Tom Hamilton’s wife. There had already been tension beforehand, but after a long screaming match with Tyler after the gig ended, Perry said goodbye with his middle finger aloft. It also didn’t help matters that the band were in the middle of an album cycle as well.
Night in the Ruts was about to be released, but there was too much on Perry’s mind to carry on for too long, saying, “I wasn’t really mad at them; we just weren’t getting along. We just had too much, too soon. We had just kept going since the early Seventies, and the glue that kept us together started to get unstuck. We kind of lost the vision and didn’t know what was next.” So while the album itself works fine as a project, bringing in Jimmy Crespo to provide some guitar parts is like night and day.
Richie Supa was also around to provide the odd guitar part to a tune, but there’s also a disjointed feeling knowing that the band had fractured into two. It’s easier to forgive the moments when the band are doing covers like ‘Remember (Walking in the Sand)’ and ‘Reefer Head Woman’, but it also sounds like Tyler gave up halfway through and tried to write his own solo record on tracks like ‘Mia’.
So, listening to a song like ‘No Surprize’ only makes people feel sad. This was supposed to be the big celebration the band wrote when they found out they got a record deal, but in celebrating their humble beginnings, all they were doing was reminding everyone that they were being held together with stitches and duct tape, which didn’t help matters when Perry didn’t even bother to show up for the video.
Even though Night in the Ruts holds together as a decent record all around, it does hold a special place in fans’ hearts as the end of their classic period. There was certainly room for them to grow a little bit more, but anything that he made after the fact would only be considered hollow without Tyler having his Keith Richards figure next to him.
