The one band Aerosmith wasn’t allowed to tour with: “We were passé”
By the time that Aerosmith reached their second or third comeback, you’d think that they earned the right to do whatever they wanted.
There was no chance that the band could have survived each other by the late 1970s, but after cleaning themselves up and becoming the unintentional archetype for what every other MTV hair metal act was supposed to be, watching them survive the alternative revolution made them look indestructible compared to any of their peers. But even when you’re up at the top, there comes a point where you don’t get to call your own shots on everything.
On top of dealing with one of the biggest pains in the ass as a manager, half of the band was already dealing with becoming more known for their ballads than anything. Get A Grip is a classic, but when you look at the amount of people who bought that album back in the day, most of them are probably remembering the Alicia Silverstone videos for ‘Cryin’ and ‘Crazy’ instead of any lines from ‘Eat the Rich’.
But the fact that the band even prospered at all in the era of grunge was unthinkable. Most of the Seattle scene wanted nothing to do with that swaggering rock and roll attitude, but even Kurt Cobain had to admit that he held records like Rocks in high esteem next to his copies of old Butthole Surfers records. If ‘The Bad Boys From Boston’ could get away clean, things should have been fine, but Stone Temple Pilots weren’t so lucky.
The alternative giants might have been one of the biggest sensations on MTV at the time, but there was always some question around their credibility. They could play just as well as every other grunge band out at the time, but since they came from San Diego and Scott Weiland was doing a passable Eddie Vedder impression on their first single, they were pretty much tailor-made to look like sellouts before they even performed.
So while getting to open for Aerosmith would have been a huge opportunity, Joe Perry remembered being given the cold shoulder by STP’s management, saying, “We tried to get Stone Temple Pilots to open for us but were told they thought it would hurt their alt rocker image to be associated with an 1980s hair band. Later, though, The Pilots’ DeLeo brothers told me that they would have played with us in a heartbeat had they known about the offer. It was a few biased managers who decided we were passé, not the cats themselves.”
Granted, the managers may have been practical around that time. By the time that the band released Purple, it was clear that they weren’t the same animal that Soundgarden or Pearl Jam were, but since ‘Interstate Love Song’ hadn’t yet taken over the world, it was going to be a gamble putting them on the same tour as a band that was being looked at as the dinosaurs of rock and roll at that point.
They might not have been able to work together, but it turned out that both bands got the last laugh on their managers. Although Aerosmith would walk out of the decade with their first-ever number one hit, Stone Temple Pilots proved to everyone that they didn’t have to be confined to the grunge scene, eventually putting out the kind of glam records that any other band would have killed to have made in the 1970s, like Tiny Music.
So while Aerosmith weren’t going to be able to get the big guns to open for them, it’s not hard to see what they saw in a band like Stone Temple Pilots. The DeLeo brothers clearly knew what they were doing, and when looking through some of their finest work, their aesthetic was as if the New York Dolls had clashed with the riffs of Led Zeppelin. What’s not to love?
