“See ya guys”: The one producer that walked out on Aerosmith
The producer should always act as the emotional translator for any great rock and roll band. It’s one thing to have great songs going into the studio, but in terms of getting the sonic aspects of everything down, every musician needs an outside opinion who can see the forest for the trees. But working with musicians also involved a heavy dose of patience, and not everyone who stood behind the board was necessarily equipped to work with a band like Aerosmith in their prime.
Then again, anyone with a stable pulse needed to know what they were getting into with ‘The Bad Boys From Boston’. Whereas Led Zeppelin set the blueprint for what rock and roll excess could look like, Aerosmith weren’t too far behind when they hit the big time. They went through every single piece of America that they could on their first tour, but they managed to party even harder when they finally came up for air, usually drowning themselves in everything from cocaine to heroin when working in the studio.
You can practically get a contact high from listening to albums like Rocks, but it was only a matter of time before their producer started to get in on the action. Despite Draw the Line being recorded in a secluded area away from their usual dealers, it didn’t take long for them to get into some misbehaviour, with most of them being strung out, too tired to work, and firing off guns in the middle of sessions when they got bored.
That amount of chaos was bound to catch up with them, but when they finally straightened themselves out for Done With Mirrors, no one seemed to care anymore. Their brand of rock and roll had been taken over by the Van Halens of the world, so if they wanted to get back into everyone’s good graces, they needed to have the right people on their team to reach the big time.
And looking at Permanent Vacation, Bruce Fairbairn was clearly the perfect man for the job. He had already proven himself by working with Bon Jovi on Slippery When Wet, but he wasn’t about to treat them like rock gods. If they wanted to get back on the charts, they needed to work, and he wasn’t above leaving the band on their ass if they weren’t following his instructions.
Since studio legend Bob Rock was also on-hand during these sessions, he remembered Fairbairn leaving the rest of them out to dry in the middle of the studio, saying, “We’re in the studio and Aerosmith is on the other side of the glass. Bruce would go out for dinner and would say, ‘See ya guys’, and I’m going, ‘He just walked out on Steven Tyler and Joe Perry’. [But] he had a method where he could just get the job done, and that’s what Aerosmith needed.”
But that didn’t mean there weren’t some growing pains, either. There are some tunes like ‘Magic Touch’ that manage to sound a bit too much like the Bon Jovis of the world, and it took some convincing for the rest of the band to get onboard with tracks like ‘Angel’, but as as they had tunes like ‘Rag Doll’ under their belt, they were ready to conquer the world again and show all the new kids that they were as dangerous as they were back in the day.
And judging by what they did on Pump and Get A Grip, they weren’t looking to simply compete with people like Poison and Motley Crue. They were reminding all of them that they were the only reason why the Sunset Strip sound existed, but if it weren’t for someone cracking the whip for them, they may have never found their sense of direction.
