Who did Joe Perry call “the sixth member” of Aerosmith?
If you want to know why American rock ‘n’ roll music in the 1980s was the way it was, look no further than Aerosmith. The only other band that could come close to the bad boys from Boston in terms of influencing that decade of hard rock were Van Halen and they were an ‘80s band in every way that counts. In terms of who from that decade shaped the immediate future of the genre, It’s Aerosmith and it’s not close.
Just look at the facts. What did ’80s rock have? Skyscraping riffs? Joe Perry had them in spades. Killer live acts? Aerosmith were ready for arenas long before they were actually playing them. Androgynous frontmen with magnetic, screaming vocals? Preferably dressed in trousers so tight they might as well be sprayed on? Yeah, literally every frontman from ‘the decade that taste forgot’ is doing Steven Tyler cosplay to the extent that the man is probably owed likeness royalties.
What’s more, the band earned that level of influence, too. Aerosmith weren’t just influential, they were damn good too. ‘Same Old Song And Dance’? ‘Last Child’? ‘Dream On’? Their greatest hits collection is the rival of any band of their generation even if they’re a few classic albums short of their peers. Plus, their version of ‘Walk This Way’ is absolutely better than the Run-DMC version. I don’t make the rules, I just live by them.
However, the band didn’t just leap into existence, fully formed. The band had to earn every scrap of quality they had and when they first started on the scene in 1970, they were something of a joke. After their first album wasn’t the hit their label expected, Columbia assigned Alice Cooper producer Bob Ezrin to helm their second album.
How did Aerosmith become the band we know today?
As Tyler himself wrote in his 2011 memoir Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? “Bob Ezrin came and saw the band and wrote, ‘They’re not ready.'” This view did not change when Ezrin joined them in the studio. In fact, he became so convinced that this group couldn’t be anything other than a jumped-up bar band that he left almost the entire project in the hands of his recording engineer, Jack Douglas.
In doing so, Ezrin failed so hard he went full circle and succeeded better than if he gave any actual input on the project. Douglas didn’t just like the band, he understood them too, knowing what made them special and how to bring out the best in them. Sometimes this involved bringing in outside musicians to work on the record, like the brass section that decorates ‘Same Old Song and Dance’.
Mainly though, it involved pushing the band to be their best selves. Pushing Steven Tyler to drop the faux-English accent he’d used on previous records. Pushing Joe Perry to develop his guitar skills and ability as a riff-writer. Pushing the band to sound as powerful and flamboyant as they did live but with the precision and clarity that studio work could allow.
In the end, Get Your Wings is arguably the band’s real debut album, and they owe it to the work that Jack Douglas put into not just the record, but the whole band. Perry himself gave Douglas the ultimate compliment in an interview with Classic Rock magazine, saying that “Jack was like the sixth member of the band. He had great ears and was really encouraging.”
Something we can all learn from. Sometimes the best way of becoming your best self is to trust the word of someone outside your inner circle. Or else you’ll never know how far you’ll go!
