AEROSMITH Trivia — 120 Entries
120 sourced facts about AEROSMITH.
Trivia
On Universal Music Japan's own track listing for its Nine Lives reissue, track 12, "Falling Off", carries the annotation "Bonus Track for 'NINE LIVES' [Japan] (1997)". The song, in other words, was the extra the 1997 Japanese edition had carried.
Aerosmith saw the year 2000 in on stage at Osaka Dome on 31 December 1999. On the stroke of midnight, twelve thousand balloons rigged to the dome roof came down. After the countdown Steven Tyler read out a poem of his own, titled 世界の祈り — a prayer for the world — in English. He had asked the local crew that same day to prepare a Japanese translation, and a woman read it aloud after him.
On 2 January 2000, in the daytime before the Nagoya Dome show, Joe Perry stopped at a music shop he had spotted by chance from the car. Inside, an oddly shaped guitar caught his eye; he asked the staff about it and bought it on the spot. It was a "Butterfly Guitar" by the maker Brian, a replica of a National model that had only ever been sold in Japan. His guitar tech swapped the pickups inside a day to make it stage-worthy, and four days later, on 6 January at Tokyo Dome, Perry played it on "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing".
On the 2004 Japanese run Steven Tyler took to writing Japanese on his left arm before going on. In Nagoya it read 復活, revival. In Tokyo, 帰京 — returning to the capital. At Rock Odyssey Yokohama on 24 July it was 猛暑, fierce heat. And on 25 July in Osaka, the last Japanese night of the year, 完→始: end, arrow, beginning.
The single-disc Japanese career retrospective issued in 2006 as エアロスミス濃縮極極ベスト had a track list assembled for Japan alone. First pressings also carried a Japan-only bonus DVD of four video clips, which the label announced as the first time Aerosmith video clips had ever been issued as a bonus DVD. The heading above the track list flags one of the songs by its other job in Japan: "Walk This Way", the SoftBank commercial song.
For the compilation Greatest Hits, issued on 18 August 2023, Universal Music Japan put out six different configurations, every one of them on SHM-CD — a Japan-only specification. Four of the six were Japan-exclusive packages pairing the hits disc with bonus live discs which, the label says, the band's side put together for Japanese listeners. None had been issued before, and one of them, Rock For The Rising Sun (Live In Japan 2011), was reaching CD for the first time.
During the 1999–2000 Japanese visit Steven Tyler bought a mobile phone at Kiddy Land in Harajuku. What he was actually after was not the phone but the ringtone machine in the shop, which stocked Aerosmith's "Dude" and "Miss A Thing". He had a nearby staff member's handset loaded with both first, then decided he wanted his own — and bought a phone that could not possibly work in the United States. At 200 yen a song he took both, and played them to his children.
The Japanese product page for Just Push Play carries a disclaimer from the label itself. After bonus track 13, "Face", ends, some thirty seconds of silence are followed by a performance of "Under My Skin (Reprise)" — and nothing in the artwork credits it anywhere.
Honkin' on Bobo ran so late that, by Sony Music Japan's account, bonus tracks were dropped worldwide. Japan was the exception: the domestic edition alone got "Jaded", then a commercial song there, as track 13. The Japanese release date slipped too — an intended 24 March early release could not be met, and the record came out on the 31st.
The Japanese first pressing of Honkin' on Bobo did not look like a CD. It came in a tall card package about the size of a DVD case with an opening cut in the top, through which you could see the mini harmonica packed inside. Catalogue number SICP566-7, 2,940 yen including tax.
Of all the Aerosmith albums in Oricon's chart data, only Honkin' on Bobo carries a tie-up line. In Japan it was attached to Coca-Cola's "Coca-Cola C2" campaign. The album reached No. 6 there and stayed on the chart for twenty-one weeks.
The first Aerosmith album to be released in Japan was not the debut but the second one. According to Universal Music Japan's own catalogue copy, Get Your Wings — issued in the United States in March 1974 — came out in Japan in May 1975, and that is the record that gave them their Japanese debut.
For all the times Aerosmith had come to Japan since first landing there in 1977, there had never been an album you could call Live in Japan. That changed in 2023. Audio from Rock For The Rising Sun, the film of the 2011 Japanese tour, was newly mastered for the domestic market and attached as a bonus disc to Japan-only editions of the compilation Greatest Hits — which came out in Japan in six configurations, four of them exclusive to the country.
Sony Music Japan's staff report on the March 1998 Japanese visit says the band had become the first overseas act to achieve the status of a successful 4大ドーム run. But 4大ドーム here does not mean four cities. The same report's own dated itinerary is Nagoya Dome on 1 March, Osaka Dome on the 3rd, Tokyo Dome on the 8th and 9th, and two added shows at Yokohama Arena — and the characters for Fukuoka appear nowhere in it. The next day's entry settles the question: Tyler asks how many dome shows they had played, and the staff answer four. Four shows at three dome venues.
For a long time the place Japanese listeners were most likely to meet an Aerosmith song was a television commercial. On 22 January 2018 the band's official Sony Music Japan page announced that "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" was in use in a Cup Noodle advert, linking to the thirty-second 「HUNGRY DAYS 最終回予告 篇」 spot. It was the same route by which "Walk This Way" had reached Japanese ears as a SoftBank commercial song, flagged on the 2006 Japanese best-of.
Between 14 September and 2 October 2023 a song-popularity vote ran on Aerosmith's Japanese official site. First place went to "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing", ahead of "Dream On" at two and "Walk This Way" at three — a 1998 film theme outpolling the signature songs of 1973 and 1975. Two Get a Grip tracks made the top ten: "Crazy" at nine and "Eat the Rich" at ten.
Across the Rocks touring cycle Aerosmith played seven shows in Japan. The rest of the count: 74 dates in the United States and 14 in Europe, four of those in the UK. The American leg included their first big outdoor headline show, to 80,000 at Pontiac Stadium in Michigan in June.
The first Japanese tour was in February 1977. The opening night's ticket was for the Gunma Prefectural Sports Center, and the Nippon Budokan date got an advertising poster of its own. Thirty-four years later all three objects — that opening-night ticket, the 28-page tour programme and the Budokan poster — were reproduced inside a Japan-only limited package, the Rocks 35th Anniversary Edition (SICP-3308) of 23 November 2011. Only the ticket is actual size: the programme was reduced from B4 to roughly A4, and the poster is a modified B2.
A Classic Rock writer describes the reception they met on that first Japanese tour as a level of hysteria close to Beatlemania. The timing helps explain it: in January 1977 "Walk This Way", belatedly lifted off Toys in the Attic, had reached No. 10 in the US, and they landed in Japan the following month.
At the official concert for the 2002 FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan, held on 27 June 2002 at Tokyo Stadium — now Ajinomoto Stadium — Aerosmith brought B'z out during "Train Kept A-Rollin'". Joe Perry, Brad Whitford and Tak Matsumoto ended up trading three guitars at once. It was the first time the two acts had ever played together.
Rock For The Rising Sun was assembled from seven of the venues on that 2011 Japanese tour. The footage had been shot only for Aerosmith's own private archive; it exists as a release at all because the band and their management found what they had too good to keep.
The first Japanese tour Joe Perry ever booked under his own name was set for September 2018: 17 September at Mielparque Hall Osaka and 18 September at the Shinagawa Prince Stellar Ball in Tokyo, behind his solo album SWEETZERLAND MANIFESTO.
The Japanese leg that followed Get a Grip, in the spring of 1994, leaned heavily on one room. The tour ran to thirteen shows in all, and seven of them — added dates included — were at the Nippon Budokan.
Interviewed in Japan on the 1988 visit, Steven Tyler described being thrown by the audience. They would roar, and then in an instant go completely quiet. For a moment it alarmed him — he thought he had done something wrong — though he came to read the hush as a good kind of tension. If Elvis were alive and playing now, he said, his audience would fall silent the same way, because they would want to hear what he was going to say. Japanese audiences were doing the same thing, and he understood from it how long they had been waiting.
Toys in the Attic reached Japan on 21 July 1975, three months behind the American release. The Japanese title was 闇夜のヘビイ・ロック — and the transliteration of "heavy" in it is one you rarely see. The advertisement in the August 1975 issue of Music Life sold the band to Japan as America's answer to Queen. It did so at modest scale: in the same issue Kiss got a full page, while Aerosmith shared half a page with Blue Öyster Cult.
The first show was on 6 November 1970, at Miscoe Hill School in Mendon, Massachusetts. The band's own site explains how they got it: Joe Perry's mother worked at a nearby school, knew someone at Miscoe Hill, and set it up. Rhythm guitar that night was Ray Tabano, a year before Brad Whitford took the chair. Tickets cost about a dollar.
Brad Whitford played his first show as a member of Aerosmith on 24 August 1971, at a room called the Savage Beast in Cavendish, Vermont. Writing in 2017, the band's site marked that night as the one that completed the line-up that had lasted ever since.
On 5 August 1972 at Max's Kansas City in New York, Clive Davis, president of Columbia Records, was invited to come and watch. Aerosmith were not on that night's bill at all: they paid out of their own pockets to buy a place on it. Davis liked what he saw, and the band signed to Columbia in mid-1972 for a reported $125,000.
"Dream On" first entered the Billboard Hot 100 on the chart dated 20 October 1973. It did not reach its peak of No. 6 until the chart dated 10 April 1976 — something like two and a half years later. Its total run on the chart was 29 weeks.
The 2026 reissue Aerosmith (Legendary Edition) carries a complete live set recorded at the club Paul's Mall on 20 March 1973. On the 3CD edition it is the whole of disc three; in the 5LP box it gets a 180g record to itself.
Sony Music Japan's official profile lists the 1970s albums under the Japanese titles they were sold with. The 1973 debut Aerosmith became 野獣生誕, roughly "birth of the beast". Toys In The Attic (1975) became 闇夜のヘヴィーロック, "heavy rock in a dark night". Rocks (1976) was simply ロックス. The same page calls 闇夜のヘヴィーロック the band's first platinum album.
Toys in the Attic peaked at No. 11 on the US album chart. Half a century later the RIAA has it at 9x Platinum — the highest certification any Aerosmith studio album carries. Exactly one title in the catalogue sits above it, and it is not a studio album at all: the compilation Aerosmith's Greatest Hits, at 12x Platinum.
The caricature of the band on the Draw the Line sleeve was drawn by Al Hirschfeld, the celebrated caricaturist. Hirschfeld is known for concealing the name NINA, in capital letters, inside his drawings — a habit that runs through most of the work he produced after Nina was born.
Draw the Line got no higher than No. 11 on the US album chart. In Japan the story went differently: this was the record that first put Aerosmith inside the Top 10 — at least according to their Japanese label.
Two of the bonus tracks on the Japanese edition of Night in the Ruts are the same songs under other names. "I Live In Connecticut" is a rehearsal of "Three Mile Smile", and "Let It Slide" is a rehearsal of "Cheese Cake", both from the album's own 1979 sessions.
Rock in a Hard Place is the only Aerosmith studio album without Joe Perry, who had gone in 1979. Brad Whitford then quit partway through the sessions, in 1981. Neither original guitarist saw the record finished.
The one Aerosmith album with neither original guitarist on it carries, in Japan only, a bonus track recorded by all five original members. The band picked it themselves: "Riff & Roll", from the 1981–82 Rock in a Hard Place sessions. On the album proper, Jimmy Crespo and Rick Dufay had taken the two guitar chairs. In Japan the record goes under the title 美獣乱舞.
On the original pressings of Done with Mirrors every piece of text on the packaging was printed back-to-front. As the title promises, it reads normally only when you hold it up to a mirror.
Read the credits on the Japanese edition of Permanent Vacation and the title track turns out to be by Steven Tyler and Brad Whitford, with no Joe Perry on it at all. "Rag Doll" carries four names — Tyler and Perry plus Jim Vallance and Holly Knight. And "The Movie" is credited to all five members of the band.
Pump is the middle one of three albums made back-to-back with the same team: producer Bruce Fairbairn, engineers Mike Fraser and Ken Lomas, at Little Mountain Sound Studios. The sessions were filmed, and came out in 1990 as a documentary, The Making of Pump.
The Nine Lives booklet is a recursive object designed by Stefan Sagmeister. It holds twelve pieces of artwork including the cover, and each one contains a shrunken copy of the picture before it. The last image sits inside the first, so the sequence never closes.
The 1999–2000 Japanese leg was billed as "The Roar Of The Dragon Tour". Sony Music Japan's own tour report calls the Osaka–Nagoya–Fukuoka–Tokyo routing the band's second four-dome tour of Japan, and puts total attendance at 200,000.
The Tokyo Dome show of 7 January 2000 was the last night in Japan and, at the same time, the final concert of the long Nine Lives tour. "Back in the Saddle" and "Draw the Line" entered the set for the first time that night — and the six setlists Sony Music Japan printed on the same page bear it out: neither song appears in any of the five earlier Japanese shows.
The Japanese tour of July 2004 ran to five shows: Sapporo Dome on the 10th, Osaka Dome on the 13th, Hiroshima Green Arena on the 15th, Nagoya Dome on the 17th and Tokyo Dome on the 20th. Sony Music Japan's announcement framed it as their first visit in two years, since the World Cup event of June 2002. Tickets were 9,000 yen for an S seat and 8,000 for an A.
That same summer, on top of the five headline dates, Aerosmith played the first edition of the festival THE ROCK ODYSSEY 2004: 24 July at Yokohama International Stadium and 25 July at Osaka Dome, with the two cities running swapped line-ups. The bill also carried The Who, Paul Weller, Michelle Branch, Love Psychedelico and Koshi Inaba (Yokohama only). Tickets were single-day only at 14,000 yen, and the event was co-promoted by Fuji Television and Udo Artists.
The 2011 Japanese tour ran from 22 November to 10 December — Kanazawa, Hiroshima, Tokyo, Fukuoka, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo, eight shows in all. By Sony Music Japan's count the band played 42 different songs across it, a figure that includes single choruses Tyler sang alone. Two of them arrived only at the Sapporo Dome finale: "S.O.S. (Too Bad)" and "Angel", the latter placed fourth in the encore.
The two Tokyo Dome nights of the 2011 tour, on 28 and 30 November, drew 70,000 people between them. In the same weeks the mobile release of "I Don't Want To Miss A Thing", out the previous week, entered Japan's weekly overall chart — domestic releases included — at No. 5. A thirteen-year-old song, selling because the band were in the country.
The Tokyo-area date of the 2013 Japanese tour was staged as a two-name event with B'z, called AEROSONIC: 8 August at QVC Marine Field, the former Chiba Marine Stadium, doors at four, on stage at half past five, promoted by Creativeman. B'z's own site announced it as their first time on a stage with Aerosmith in eleven years, since the official concert for the 2002 FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan.
At the two Osaka Municipal Central Gymnasium shows on 14 and 16 August 2013, Aerosmith brought HIKAKIN on for "Walk This Way". The official setlists Sony Music Japan published credit him on both nights, printed as "WALK THIS WAY (with HIKAKIN)". The same document marks "MAMA KIN" at the 8 August AEROSONIC show "(with B'z)".
Aerosmith have won four Grammys, and all four came in the same category: Best Rock Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal, for "Janie's Got A Gun", "Livin' On The Edge", "Crazy" and "Pink", between 1990 and 1998. Their first performance on the Grammy stage came earlier than any of them — at the 33rd ceremony in 1991, where they played "Come Together".
In 2020 Aerosmith were named MusiCares Person of the Year. It was the thirtieth edition of the gala, and thirteen performances went by before the band's own set. The first of them was Cheap Trick, who chose "Rats in the Cellar" from 1976's Rocks.
The first song Jim Vallance wrote with Tyler and Perry was written on the day the three of them met: 25 March 1987, at Vallance's home studio in Vancouver. The next day they cut a basic track — guitar, bass and drums — and he and Tyler started on the lyrics. That second day, 26 March, was Tyler's thirty-ninth birthday. The song was still called "Rag Time" at this point; the title "Rag Doll" arrived weeks later.
About a year after the song came out, the band were sued over the chant that opens "Hangman Jury". Tyler had taken it from "Linin' Track", also known as "Line 'Em", in the belief that it was in the public domain. It was not: the copyright was registered to Folkways Music. The account is co-writer Jim Vallance's, on his own site.
By Oricon's reckoning, Aerosmith's best-selling album in Japan is Nine Lives, from 1997: it peaked at No. 3 and spent sixteen weeks on the chart. Their Japanese commercial peak, in other words, was not the Get a Grip era that gave them a US No. 1 — that album reached No. 7 in Japan across twenty-seven weeks, and Pump had reached No. 10 in seven.
Only two Aerosmith CD singles have ever entered Oricon's weekly singles Top 50. One is "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing", the Armageddon theme, which stayed on the chart for twenty-three weeks and still stopped at No. 11 — it never made the Japanese top ten. The other is "Jaded", from 2001, which reached No. 39 and lasted three weeks.
The official concert for the 2002 FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan was staged by FIFA and the concert's own organising committee across 27 and 28 June 2002, at the roughly 50,000-capacity Tokyo Stadium in Chofu, Tokyo — now Ajinomoto Stadium. Aerosmith and B'z appeared on the first of the two days, billed as INTERNATIONAL DAY: doors at three, on stage at five, scheduled to finish at half past nine, tickets 15,750 yen including tax. Sony Music's announcement described it as an official concert that was a first-of-its-kind undertaking in World Cup history.
PEACE OUT, the farewell tour announced in 2023, was to open on 2 September at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia and run for forty North American dates, finishing in Montreal on 26 January 2024. Three of them happened: Philadelphia on the 2nd, Pittsburgh on the 6th, and Elmont, New York, at the UBS Arena on the 9th. It was at that third show that Steven Tyler injured his vocal cords, and the tour stopped there. On 2 August 2024 the band announced they were retiring from the touring stage, writing that a full recovery from the injury was not possible. The Elmont night turned out to be their last concert.
It is not only the albums that carry Japanese titles. The track listings Universal Music Japan published for its 2025 paper-sleeve series give each song a Japanese title alongside the English one. On Get Your Wings, "Lord of the Thighs" appears as 支配者の女, "Spaced" as 四次元飛行船 — a fourth-dimensional airship — "Woman of the World" as 黒いコートを着た女, "S.O.S. (Too Bad)" as エアロスミス、S.O.S. and "Seasons of Wither" as 折れた翼, broken wings. On Toys in the Attic, "Uncle Salty" is ソルティおじさん and "Round and Round" is 虚空に切り離されて.
The name came from the drummer. Joey Kramer had been playing Harry Nilsson's 1968 album Aerial Ballet and liked the sound of the word "Aero"; an earlier band of his back in Yonkers had already used Aerosmith before breaking up some years before. What the other candidates were depends on who you ask. Louder, from the Classic Rock stable, gives The Hookers and Spike Jones, after the 1950s comedian and bandleader. The Recording Academy's own artist page gives Jack Daniels and Spike Jones. Only Spike Jones appears on both lists.
"Movin' Out", on the 1973 debut, was the first song Steven Tyler and Joe Perry ever wrote together. The album itself was cut at Intermedia Sound on Newbury Street in Boston, after two years of the band working as a live act — and it took only a fortnight to make.
By Brad Whitford's account the whole of the debut album was made with two electric guitars and no more: Joe Perry's black Stratocaster and Whitford's own 1968 Les Paul goldtop with P-90s. The Strat was nothing like a vintage piece then — a couple of years old at most. The band set up in a small room and played live, with Adrian Barber producing.
Steven Tyler wrote "Dream On" at an Estey organ that stood outside the studio at the Trow-Rico resort in Sunapee, New Hampshire — the studio where his father gave a recital every Sunday night. The words came much later. The band were staying at an old motel near Boston airport, about to go in and make the album, and he wrote them sitting out on the motel balcony.
The same Legendary Edition collection also opened the vault on studio material that had never been issued: "Harmonica Bass Jam Jelly", an unreleased alternate rehearsal take of "Make It", and a six-minute jam called "Joined at the Hip". In the bridge of that last one, the report says, the seed of the phrase that would become "Sweet Emotion" is already audible.
Whitford was in the room when Steve Hunter cut the "Train Kept A-Rollin'" solo, and what stayed with him was how small the rig was: a little Fender tweed amp and a '57 Gibson Les Paul Junior with a P-90 in it. Hunter set the amp down, picked the guitar up, they rolled tape, and he made several passes at it.
"Train Kept A-Rollin'" was presented as a live recording. Whitford says it is nothing of the kind: Jack Douglas rebuilt it in the studio and treated it so it would sound like a big arena. The crowd, as he remembers it, was lifted from The Concert for Bangladesh.
"Sweet Emotion" came within a day of never being recorded. Tom Hamilton had the riff and a rough arrangement, but was, as he puts it, too musically shy to push it in front of everyone. What rescued it was an accident of scheduling: the basic-track sessions for Toys in the Attic finished a day early, and Jack Douglas asked whether anybody had a riff they could play around with. Hamilton half put his hand up, and by the end of that day the basic track existed.
The instrumental interludes that sit between the verses of "Sweet Emotion" trace back to Jeff Beck's album Rough and Ready. Hamilton had been taken with the energy of the bass playing on it and wanted something with that feel. Note what he is claiming and what he is not: the interludes, not the famous main bass figure.
The "Walk This Way" riff was assembled at a soundcheck in Hawaii. Joe Perry was after a groove like the funk records he liked, so he asked Joey Kramer to play straight, funky twos and fours while he worked the riff out over the top. The title would arrive from somewhere else entirely.
From Hamilton's side, the song was all but finished by that evening: every part rehearsed, the arrangement settled, but no title and no vocal yet from Steven Tyler. That night they went out to the cinema to see Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein. In the scene, Marty Feldman collects Gene Wilder at the station, says "walk this way", and limps off down the stairs — and Wilder limps after him. Perry, who had stayed at the studio, says they were still laughing about it when they got back.
Seventeen seconds into "Nobody's Fault" on Rocks, the vocal microphone catches something it should not have: a door opening. It was opened by the union "engineer" Columbia Records insisted be present at every session. Tyler's call was to leave it in, on the grounds that he doubted he would ever better that vocal take.
The black Rocks sleeve puts the band logo and five diamonds on a mirror. In his memoir Joe Perry wrote that the five diamonds are the five of them, one each, and that they thought of the record as a jewel. The title came from the same place: diamonds are called rocks, and nothing is harder than a diamond. A Classic Rock writer reads the mirror a second way as well — as the cocaine slang the title also carries.
Every horse and cowboy noise on "Back in the Saddle" was made by hand in the room. Steven Tyler stomped cowboy boots on a large sheet of plywood. For spurs he gaffer-taped tambourines and bells to those same boots, helped by David Johansen of the New York Dolls, who had dropped by the studio. The galloping heard towards the end of the track is two coconut halves.
In the last third of "Lick and a Promise" a crowd can be heard calling for more. It is not a crowd. There were six people in the studio, drug dealers and assistants among them. Jack Douglas recorded those six, doubled them, did it again, and pushed the level until what came back sounded like a full arena.
"Sick as a Dog" was cut with the band changing instruments in the middle of the take. Tom Hamilton, who wrote the riff, played it on guitar; Joe Perry moved to bass. Then, with the tape still rolling, Perry handed the bass to Tyler at the breakdown and picked up a guitar for the solo. By Perry's account it took three or four goes just to work out who was running where, and through which door.
Two songs in the catalogue were written on guitar by the band's bass player. Tom Hamilton used a Fender Stratocaster to write and play the guitar parts on "Uncle Salty" from Toys in the Attic, and when they came to make Rocks he came up with "Sick as a Dog" on a Fender Esquire. Teles and Esquires, he says, are a weakness of his.
Rocks came out while the band were touring in London. Melody Maker, then the most-read music paper in Britain, ran a review that praised "Last Child" and said the guitar on it stood comparison with Jeff Beck. The trouble was the next clause: the paper stated the guitar was Joe Perry's. Every note of it was Brad Whitford's, and reading that, he says, made him furious.
The "Back in the Saddle" riff was written not on a guitar but on a six-string bass. Perry had once watched a guitarist put down a Les Paul and pick one of these up — he thinks it was Peter Green with Fleetwood Mac, during a jam, but he is not sure — and decided he wanted that sound in his own corner of the world, so he tracked an instrument down. It does not work for everything, so live the roles swap over: Perry plays the six-string bass and Brad Whitford takes the solos.
Draw the Line was not made in a studio. The band rented a building: the Cenacle, a disused convent — a vast mansion on a hundred acres near Armonk, in New York State. Jack Douglas's team set a mobile recording rig up on the ground floor and ran heavy cable from room to room. For natural ambience, Joey Kramer's drums were tracked in the chapel and Joe Perry's rig was installed inside a walk-in fireplace.
Joe Perry is on the cover of Night in the Ruts although he had already left. The image is a photograph of the band dressed as coal miners, shot in March 1978. A press release dated 10 October 1979 confirmed his departure; the album came out on 16 November; and that same night Perry's new group, The Joe Perry Project, played its first show at Boston College.
The title Done with Mirrors works two ways at once: stage magic on one side and, on the other, a cocaine user's habit of snorting the drug off a reflective surface. Perry later turned the pun back on itself — after Done with Mirrors, he said, they realised they had to be done with mirrors.
Done with Mirrors shipped with different running orders depending on what you bought. The original vinyl carried eight songs; "Darkness" was tacked on as a bonus closing track only on the CD and the cassette.
The Run-D.M.C. version of "Walk This Way" began with a phone call from Rick Rubin of Def Jam to the band's manager, Tim Collins. Only two of them took part: Perry on guitar, Tyler on vocals. The track was done in a single day, 9 March 1986, and the famous wall-breaking video was shot a fortnight later.
Steven Tyler ended up splitting the songwriting royalties on "Rag Doll" with Holly Knight, whose contribution was to suggest changing the title from "Rag Time" to "Rag Doll". Tyler was not reconciled to it, and complained to Geffen's John Kalodner that half his royalties were going for that one suggestion.
"Dude (Looks Like a Lady)" started out being sung as something else: "Cruisin' for the Ladies". Desmond Child — brought in by Geffen A&R man John Kalodner, the first outside writer Aerosmith had ever worked with — told them flatly the first version was no good. At which point Tyler sheepishly explained where his other line had come from: in a bar he had mistaken Mötley Crüe's Vince Neil, seen from behind, for a woman, and started singing that a dude looked like a lady. Child's reaction was that this, not the other one, was a hit title.
On Pump, "Janie's Got a Gun" is introduced by a ten-second interlude called "Water Song". It is played by the Canadian experimental multi-instrumentalist Randy Raine-Reusch, on glass harmonica, wind gong and Native American bull-roarers.
"Janie's Got a Gun" began as "Danny's Got a Gun", Danny being a real friend of Tyler's. He had the melody for months and could not write words to it. What broke the deadlock was a magazine: a Time article tallying handgun deaths across the United States minute by minute over forty-eight hours. That gave him the chorus. The name — and the gender — changed to Janie afterwards.
The solo on "Janie's Got a Gun" is played on a guitar built to sound almost acoustic. Joe Perry used a Chet Atkins signature model with an early piezo pickup — an instrument that stops sounding acoustic the moment you turn it up. He put it through a 15-watt Marshall practice amp with everything set to maximum. The producer told him it sounded terrible and would never work. Perry's answer was to ask him to run the track anyway.
Tom Hamilton's writing credit on "Janie's Got a Gun" was not planned. He had brought a demo to the studio with an intro that combined harmonics with a climbing riff on the E string; nobody took any notice, and he drove home annoyed. About a month later Tyler turned up with "Janie's Got a Gun" — and inside the chord progression was Hamilton's bass figure. He decided to say nothing. A couple of months after that, with Tyler and Perry still mixing in Vancouver, the phone rang in Boston: Tyler was putting his name on it.
After the first tour of 1977, eleven years went by before Aerosmith came back to Japan. The 1988 concert overran its scheduled length by half an hour, to two hours and fifteen minutes, and included songs the band had not played live in fifteen years. Keikiko Imaizumi, who interviewed them afterwards, writes that they were plainly enjoying themselves.
"S.O.S. (Too Bad)" was played exactly once on the whole 2011 Japanese tour — at Sapporo Dome on 10 December — and that single performance is what went into the live film Rock For The Rising Sun. Every show on that tour, incidentally, opened with "Draw the Line".
Midway through AEROSONIC, Steven Tyler called Koshi Inaba and Tak Matsumoto up and the two bands played "Mama Kin" together. B'z had gone on at half past five and played sixteen songs; Aerosmith opened with "Draw the Line" and played seventeen.
A court had been busy in the run-up to that weekend. In January 2020, Judge Mark Gildea of Plymouth County Superior Court in Massachusetts turned down Joey Kramer's request for an order compelling his bandmates to let him play the MusiCares benefit honouring Aerosmith and the Grammy Awards two days later. The reasons the judge gave were that Kramer had not played with the band in six months and that there was little rehearsal time left before the performances.
The state of Massachusetts declared 13 April 1993 "Aerosmith Day". The proclamation came from the then governor, William Weld, on the grounds that the band had been founded in Boston in 1970.
In April 2026 Joe Perry named the album he means to remix next: Toys in the Attic. He was speaking after the remixed and remastered Legendary Edition of the 1973 debut, which had come out that March. They had never been happy with the drums on the debut, he said — flat and flabby, and not how they had actually sounded in the room. Toys, by his account, came closer to what they were after, sonically as well as in the songs, though there are still things he would correct.
Get a Grip was made twice. Early in 1992 John Kalodner, Geffen's A&R man, listened to the first completed batch of songs and told the band to start again — the album was no good, and either they wrote a new one or he would take his name off it. That is Tyler's recollection in the band autobiography. Aerosmith moved from Los Angeles to Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver and wrote a second set of songs.
The three heavy drum notes that close "Livin' on the Edge" are a bass drum Steven Tyler took out of his high school. He had been expelled from Roosevelt High for drug use and told not to come back in September; at the end of that June, after his own band played the senior prom, he carried the marching-band bass drum he had been playing straight out of the building. Writing in the band autobiography in 1997, he said he still had it.
Kalodner did not like the lyrics to "Cryin'" either. Tyler spent a month rewriting them, the walls of his room papered with Scotch tape and scraps of paper, going back over the song three or four times. At the end of the month he gave up and sang the words he had written in the first place. The account is his own, from his 2011 book.
Alicia Silverstone was sixteen when she appeared in the "Cryin'" video. What brought her to director Marty Callner's attention was her film debut, The Crush, released in 1993. Callner used her again in "Amazing" and in "Crazy", and "Cryin'" took Video of the Year at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards.
The Get a Grip sleeve drew protests from animal rights activists. They subsided once it emerged that the pierced udder on the cover was not a photograph of anything but a digital creation.
In 1994 Aerosmith put "Head First", a B-side from the Get a Grip sessions, online as a four-megabyte WAV file for CompuServe subscribers. Over a modem, pulling down the three-minute-fourteen track took somewhere between sixty and ninety minutes. American Songwriter, citing a 2014 Vice retrospective, puts the take-up at around ten thousand people in the first week.
At Woodstock '94 on 13 August 1994 Aerosmith were bound hand and foot by their contract: no custom staging, no pyrotechnics, and just one souvenir T-shirt for sale which was not allowed to carry the name of the event. Metallica went on straight after them with their own stage set and a festival-specific shirt, and backstage the band's manager Tim Collins and co-producer John Scher came to blows. Scher later described the episode as an unfortunate incident that had been exaggerated into folklore.
To get Done with Mirrors onto tape, producer Ted Templeman took the bulb out of the studio's red RECORDING light so that the band would not know they were being recorded, and caught them as they played. Years later he was less happy about the result: not knowing the room, he said, he had ended up muting Joe Perry's and Brad Whitford's guitars and Joey Kramer's drums.
What broke the ice between Geffen A&R man John Kalodner and Aerosmith was a handgun. At a show at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles he pulled up the trouser leg of his white suit and showed Brad Whitford's wife the .357 Magnum he wore in an ankle holster — this, he told her, is how he got around LA. He was showing off, by his own account, but it worked: the moment the band learned he was armed they decided he was all right, because they liked guns. The Geffen deal followed.
The 1984 reunion started with Joe Perry nearly becoming Alice Cooper's guitarist. Cooper's manager Shep Gordon sounded Tim Collins out; Perry, who could see no long-term future in his own project, jumped at it and went to Gordon's country place to meet and jam with Cooper. The next day, while Cooper was out playing golf, Perry rang Steven Tyler to gloat — and it was that call that got Tyler moving.
Kalodner's first call for an outside writer on Permanent Vacation went to Jim Steinman, who did not get the job because he was unwilling to work away from his own house. The plan to use Ted Templeman as producer again fell through too: Kalodner insisted that, unlike on Done with Mirrors, the band's A&R man be allowed into the studio to watch progress, and Templeman would not have it.
Partway through Nine Lives Joey Kramer dropped out ill, and the Miami sessions were drummed by session player Steve Ferrone. By the time the band moved to New York, Kramer was well enough to return. The first attempt was to replace Ferrone's takes with his own; it did not sound right. So Aerosmith threw the Miami material out and played it again from the beginning, as a five-piece.
Kramer later made a heavy allegation about that absence, in an interview with Mojo. While he was away being treated, he said, manager Tim Collins lied to the rest of the band — telling them the record company was pressing for the album to be finished, which was not true. Collins, in Kramer's account, was trying to get rid of him.
Complaints from Hindus about the original Nine Lives cover produced a response from Columbia in April 1997. According to a spokeswoman for the band, the label stopped manufacturing CDs with the existing cover, and new copies would carry replacement versions of the first three pages of the booklet — the pages that carried the image in question. Copies already in shops, however, would not be recalled.
Stefan Sagmeister, who designed that sleeve, told a different part of the story at the D&AD Festival in 2026. Without consulting either him or the band, Sony paid the Hindu group that had objected $500,000 to make the problem go away — and then informed him that it intended to recover the money from his tiny studio. Sagmeister flew to India himself and came back with centuries-old depictions establishing that the imagery was long-standing cultural heritage, not protected intellectual property.
"Pink" was written with Richie Supa at the Marlin Hotel in South Beach, Florida. It came close to being called something else: Supa wanted the title "Kink", and Tyler turned him down. The line about kink that survives in the lyric is what is left of that argument.
Just Push Play was built the other way round from every Aerosmith album before it. Instead of the band cutting rhythm tracks together and adding vocals and solos afterwards, the drums and bass were the last things recorded. Nearly every part was added separately, each player responding to what was already in Pro Tools. The consequence is that the finished record contains no performance of any song by the band playing together.
Tyler later repeated something a label executive had told him: if that hit had not come along, Sony had been getting ready to drop Aerosmith. The hit in question was "Jaded".
World Series of Rock, Cleveland Municipal Stadium, 28 July 1979. What set the backstage row off was a glass of milk, thrown. Joe Perry's then wife Elyssa later explained that she was holding milk because milk was all she drank — and in her account it was ice, thrown at her after a sarcastic remark of her own, that came first. Perry left the band after that night, with the album unfinished.
During the Honkin' on Bobo sessions Joe Perry opened the morning paper and read that Johnnie Johnson — the pianist in Chuck Berry's band — was in town that day for a gig at the House of Blues. A few phone calls and a car later, as he tells it, Johnson was sitting behind a piano in the basement of his house.
Honkin' on Bobo was tracked with the whole band playing at once — the guitar solos included. Vocal shields were set up around Steven Tyler to keep the leakage down. By Perry's account the only real work left afterwards was the mix.
The 1930s Gibson L-00 parlour guitar heard on "Freedom Fighter" belongs to Johnny Depp. Joe Perry had gone round the usual places in Los Angeles looking for one and could not find an instrument with the right sound, so he rang Depp and borrowed from his collection. Depp also sang backing vocals on the track.
The rest of the band did not know about the Carrie Underwood duet on "Can't Stop Loving You" until the vocals had already been cut. Underwood was on the point of leaving Los Angeles, Tyler says, so he told her to come straight over; she arrived that night and sang it inside an hour. He had not had time, by his own account, to mention it to anyone.
The Stand called Aerosmith, wielded by Narancia in part five of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, is named after the band. Sony's Japanese download service mora said so directly, in a column series unpacking the musical references in the Golden Wind anime — introducing them, for a Japanese readership, as the hard rock band known there for the Armageddon theme.
The first stage HIKAKIN shared with Aerosmith was not in Japan. It was on 23 May 2013, at the inaugural Social Star Award ceremony, held at the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore. The Japanese appearances three months later he announced himself, on his own channel — posted on the evening of 13 August 2013, the day before the first of the two Osaka shows.
Founding drummer Joey Kramer was not on that farewell tour. The chair belongs to John Douglas, Kramer's long-serving drum tech. It started in 2019, when Kramer was injured partway through the band's Las Vegas residency and Douglas stood in. In March 2022 Aerosmith announced that Kramer would sit out that year's concerts, and Douglas has been behind the kit ever since, PEACE OUT included. Douglas's own line on it: Joey Kramer is still the drummer for Aerosmith, was and always has been — and he is not there to make a statement of his own.