The producer who claimed Aerosmith was “too much work”
Any member of Aerosmith were bound to be a handful when they got the ball rolling back in the day.
Their reputation as some of the hardest partiers in the industry wasn’t lost on any of the promoters that booked them or even their road crew, but even if things were bound to get messy, it was guaranteed to be a lot of fun along the way as well. Even if Steven Tyler and Joe Perry made their toxicity work every time they made a record, though, there were bound to be a few people who weren’t as impressed.
Then again, let’s play a game real quick. You have five of the best players in the States playing the most raucous rock and roll, and yet managing them would mean having to make sure that they don’t blow it all up due to drugs, keep them on the road for a good portion of the year, and somehow find time for them to hopefully not party too hard when it comes time to make a record. That already felt like a headache for me typing it, so it’s not exactly hard to think that it would be even worse in real life.
But on their debut record, they sounded fairly together from a musical perspective. They had already come out of the seedy side of Boston at the time, but outside of Tyler’s strange vocal cadence on a lot of the songs, all of the magic is there. ‘Mama Kin’ is practically their mission statement in song, ‘Dream On’ is the ballad that would make them stars, but there was always going to be something holding them back as far as the studio was concerned.
They were always ready to crush onstage, but it was hard for anyone with that much shock value to translate everything onto the tape. And for any act with that problem, the number-one person to call was Bob Ezrin. He had already worked the magic for Alice Cooper and Kiss, so why not try the same thing with America’s answer to The Rolling Stones?
It’s not like Ezrin was a choir boy by any means, but when producer Jack Douglas recalled the idea of Ezrin working with them, he shot it down the minute that it was suggested, saying, “Bob said, ‘They’re two years away from being anything, they’re too raw, they’re just too much work for me, I can’t do it.’” That would have been the kiss of death, but all it did was leave the door wide open for what Douglas could do.
If the band didn’t have money coming in, though, they were determined to build their fanbase the old-fashioned way: one show at a time. It took a lot of grinding to make sure everything worked out, but if Get Your Wings was far from the best album they ever made, it did at least establish them as one of the most reliable touring acts of the time before finally going into the studio to work on Toys in the Attic.
And by keeping everything raw, Douglas managed to capture a lot of the spontaneity that someone like Glyn Johns captured on those later Stones records. Toys in the Attic and Rocks both feel like capturing a feral band running loose in the studio, and even if a tune like ‘Rats in the Cellar’ feels like a freight train about to run right off the tracks, it does have a lot more swagger to it than if Ezrin made sure everything was in perfect time.
So even if they were a handful, Douglas did make out like a bandit trying to reign them in as best he could. Because had he not had the success with Aerosmith, perhaps he wouldn’t have found himself sitting next to John Lennon a few years down the road when working on the album Double Fantasy.
