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Aerosmith abandons schmaltz and
gets back to their taste of blues
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The guys in Aerosmith don’t want you to get the wrong
idea.
True, their new CD, “Honkin’ on Bobo,” is billed
as their first all-blues album.
But guitarist Joe Perry emphasizes, “We’re not out to
educate people about the blues. We’re not blues crusaders and
we’re not a blues band.”
“We know that all (the critics) are just waiting to say,
‘This doesn’t sound like a blues record,’”
says singer Steven Tyler, affecting a repulsed tone.
At least, it doesn’t sound like a traditional blues record.
Certainly, no one will mistake “Bobo” for an album by
Robert Johnson, Son House, or even for one of those sober genre
salutes recently served up by Eric Clapton and John Mellencamp.
Instead, “Bobo” is modeled after the English
reinterpretation of American blues in the ‘60s by bands like
the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac and the Yardbirds. It’s a
hard-rocking wallop of a CD that treats blues as slamming party
music rather than as the soul-searching stuff of legend.
In other words, it’s an Aerosmith record. Or, rather, an
Aerosmith record of the ‘70s. Indeed, the most exciting
aspect of “Bobo” isn’t its blues roots, but the
fact that it features no ballads, no pop melodies and none of the
string and horn arrangements that have characterized
Aerosmith’s commercialized music of the past 17 years.
It’s the hardest rocking album the band has released since
1985’s “Done With Mirrors,” the CD it cut just
before its chart resurrection.
Surprisingly, Perry says the idea for the blues record originated
with Columbia Records President Don Ienner in 1996, soon after he
lured the band back to the label that launched it in the
‘70s. (In between, it had spent more than a decade at Geffen
Records.)
The group wanted to kick off its new contract with something more
appealing to radio programmers. So the blues idea was put on hold
while Aerosmith issued slick albums like 1997’s “Nine
Lives” and 2001’s “Just Push Play.”
But last year, the band found itself with a three-month window of
opportunity before it was set to start a huge tour with Kiss. It
turned out their producer from the ‘70s, Jack Douglas, had
room on his dance card, too. Their mutual idea was to record the
band as an organic live unit, as in the old days, rather than go
through the common pop process of having everyone record their
parts separately. The goal was to stress feeling over
technique.
“The only time we capture this is when we play live,”
says Perry. “This was our attempt to get that back on a
record. It’s what the fans have been missing.”
On “Bobo” (the blues term’s meaning has been lost
to history) the band rollicks through pieces like Bo
Diddley’s “Road Runner” Sonny Boy
Williamson’s “Eyesight to the Blind” and Willie
Dixon’s “I’m Ready.” The band cut its teeth
on such pieces in 1970.
As familiar as its repertoire may be, Aerosmith provides some
twists. It performs Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “You
Gotta Move” – best known from the Stones version on
“Sticky Fingers” – but adds new chords and a Bo
Diddley beat.
“We were hellbent on making it our own,” Tyler says.
“We made it more tribal.”
Aerosmith came into its own as a pop act late in its life. Some
longtime fans still consider its ‘80s and ‘90s hits
sellouts. Perry takes the point.
“If you told me, when I was 19 or 20, that we would do songs
like ‘Dude Looks Like a Lady’ or ‘Don’t
Want to Miss a Thing,’ I would have said, ‘Not me,
brother not my band,’” he says. “But as you go
along you realize that you’re an entertainer and whether you
think it’s schmaltz or not, you can’t argue with a No.
1 hit.”
But Perry says that if “Bobo” sells well, the band may
lean further toward hard rock again.
“I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we get some
converts to buy an Aerosmith record who may not have bought one for
a long time,” he says. “Then we’ll see where that
takes us.”
Jim Farber
New York Daily News