Bass Player Magazine
April 2, 2006
Cookin'! Show up on time (or close to it), tear through the old songs, trot out the classic power ballad for the encore, and cash the check. It’s a formula followed by more and more aging rock stars—mostly because there are more and more aging rock stars. And judging from the size of their live audiences, there’s certainly nothing too offensive about this approach.
But good rock & roll has never had much to do with nostalgia, and it’s worth noting that there is another way to do it: You can pepper your set lists with lesser-known, 30-year-old album cuts that mean as much to the audience as the AOR radio staples. You can continually revisit obscure cover tunes from the band’s earliest days. You can take stylistic chances with entire albums of meaningful—if somewhat left-of-center—material. You can take similar chances by mixing in small-venue shows with the arena gigs. And you can continue producing chart-topping hits, just as you insist on playing your instrument every single day, forever exploring and critiquing your own playing even as you work diligently to expand its boundaries.
Tom Hamilton and his long-time Aerosmith mates (Steven Tyler, vocals; Joe Perry and Brad Whitford, guitars; and Joey Kramer, drums) have chosen Plan B, and if ticket sales are any indication, it’s been the right choice all along. The band’s catalog includes enough all-time rock & roll hits to fill out a set list and then some, but Aerosmith continues to produce radio-ready hits with alarming frequency. Yet the band insists on such adventures as 2004’s Honkin’ on Bobo, an entire disc of blues tunes that surprised everyone—especially Aerosmith—by entrenching itself on the blues charts. And while plenty of fans would show up every night to hear Hamilton’s righteous “Walk This Way” and “Sweet Emotion” grooves, the mellow, soft-spoken bassist insists on a rigid daily practice routine to push his playing in new directions.
The set list for the new live album, Rockin’ the Joint, is a real treat for serious fans. How did you settle on those songs?We’d been wanting to work with Dick Carruthers, the rock & roll documentary filmmaker, so we decided to film and record three shows: one at The Joint [at Las Vegas’s Hard Rock Hotel & Casino] and two arena shows in California. When we got to Vegas and were picking songs, we realized we could take some chances. If they came out well, we’d have them on tape—and if they were bad, well, we’d only screwed up in front of 1,500 people. So we brought out “Seasons of Wither,” “No More No More,” and a song called “Rattlesnake Shake.”
I’m glad you mentioned that song. It’s almost the perfect cover tune for Aerosmith.Yes, that song is like the Rosetta Stone of this band’s style. A lot of people don’t know that Fleetwood Mac was a kick-ass blues-rock band back in the ’60s, but I always like to point that out. Joe and I used to meet at this underground club called the Boston Tea Party and see them play, and I’ll never forget their amp line. It was a solid wall of Fender Showman amps; it was just so unbelievably cool-looking to a couple of teenage kids who were still saving up to buy their first good amplifier.
Anyway, they had an album called Then Play On, and “Rattlesnake Shake” is on there, followed by this fast boogie jam called “Searching for Madge.” I don’t know if they meant those two songs to always be associated with each other, but for Joe and me, it was all one big, long song. Whenever we’d see them live, they’d play “Rattlesnake Shake,” and they always did a real good job of explaining the song’s subject matter. I’m not sure many people realize what it’s about, but whenever they’d get to the part where the band stops, and you hear a maraca shaking, Mick Fleetwood—who used to have hair down to his ass—would jump up from behind the drums and show these two wooden balls hanging from his belt on a piece of rawhide. He’d hook his finger in there and, you know, pretend he was stabbing a duck in his lap [laughs]. It was hilarious, and we thought, Oh, my God, that is so cool! So you can see we’ve always loved that song. In fact, Joe and I used to play it in bands two or three years before Aerosmith got together. Now we almost feel like it’s ours!
It’s surprising how many Aerosmith songs, old and new, work so well in large and small settings. What do you think gives a song this power, regardless of the setting?A lot of it is dynamics, and making sure you have parts where tension builds and parts where it all just spills over. It’s a classic paradigm of hard rock music, really: songs that start out quiet and dreamy, and then the big part everybody loves comes crashing in. That’s when everybody starts putting up the devil sign and making that face you make with your lips poking out when something sounds very, very cool.
At what point did you begin to realize you could be in a band that makes people feel like that?I know exactly when it happened. I remember seeing Spirit at the Boston Tea Party, watching their bass player—who just happened to be a tall blond guy—and saying to myself, “You know, I could do that.” I remember having the distinct feeling that I could. That was really big for me, because as much as I loved music, and as much time as I’d spent learning how to play, I also had the typical disbelief that I could really do things the way my heroes were doing them. The common wisdom is still that your chances of doing that and ever making a living at it are practically nil, and I bought into that as a teenager. At least I did until that moment, at that show, that night—when I saw that bass player and realized, Wow, there’s no reason I can’t play that role.
Did Aerosmith click right away?We have a great combination that’s been there from day one. Joe and I used to play in bands together when we were teenagers, and all we wanted to do was play the loudest, fastest songs we possibly could. We didn’t know how to play with dynamics, and our guitars were probably barely in tune. So we were pretty rough in terms of music theory and harmony....
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