Black cat stories

Aerosmith get darkly introspective

by Brett Milano

When you consider all the market-testing, second-guessing, and general hoopla that went into the making of Aerosmith's Nine Lives (in stores this Tuesday, from Columbia), it's a wonder that the thing even sounds like a rock-and-roll record, much less a pretty good one. There have to be a few roomfuls of high-powered executives banking on the success of this album, the first product of the band's $30 million re-signing deal with Columbia. If you're keeping track, that's not quite the $80 million R.E.M. got for re-upping with Warner Bros. just before releasing New Adventures in Hi-Fi, but it's nothing to sneeze at.

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Aerosmith
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The surprising part, however, is that Nine Lives sounds a lot like Aerosmith's own version of New Adventures -- a dense, experimental album that finds the group airing some uncharacteristic confusion and self-doubt. Hard as it may be to feel sorry for anyone making $30 million, I find a certain poignancy in the way both bands are trying to recapture their old sound while inadvertently betraying how far they've moved away from it. If there are no explicitly depressing songs on Nine Lives -- one doubts they could even get away with recording one -- there's also relatively little of the usual devil-may-care bravado.

Of course, none of the advance publicity is going to admit that Aerosmith have made a borderline bummed-out album. True to its title, the angle for Nine Lives is likely to hinge on Aerosmith's bouncing back one more time, and the first three tracks all sound like willful throwbacks. The title number is a barnstorming opener à la "Toys in the Attic"; the intro to "Hole in My Soul" is "Dream On" in a different key; first single "Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees)" -- the catchiest number and most obvious single by far -- revives the horn-driven "Dude (Looks like a Lady)" sound.

From there the album visits darker territory. New producer Kevin Shirley (whose résumé includes the two worst bands in rock history, Journey and Silverchair) is the first who's dared to reveal signs of aging in Steven Tyler's voice -- sometimes jarringly so, as on the raspy opening of "Kiss Your Past Goodbye." And though the album is as loud and electric as anything they've done (take a bow, Joe "Fucking" Perry), much of it mines a boozy/woozy Beggars Banquettype groove. If the last batch of Aerosmith albums were all about proving you could still be loose and crazy without drink or drugs, this one suggests you can have a wicked hangover without them as well.

A more upbeat Aerosmith were on display when the band last played in town, doing two surprise club gigs (at the Middle East and at their own Mama Kin) in November '95. I caught the Middle East show, which was easily the best of the dozen-odd Aerosmith gigs I've seen. For the first time in years they played as an unassisted five-piece, without the now-standard keyboards, added vocals, and back-up tapes (all of which have become necessary to re-create the studio sound of their last few albums). Freed of the responsibility to play all the hits, they pulled obscure album tracks out of the hat, jammed on some blues, and introduced some promising new numbers. One new tune, which didn't make it to Nine Lives, had the classic title "What Kinda Love Are You On?"; another had a lyric that immediately got scrawled in my notebook -- "There's been plenty of shoes underneath my bed/I'll fuck with my boots on, I'll sleep when I'm dead." (That line now appears in "Hole in My Soul," but in much tamer form.)

If this were the '70s, Aerosmith would have gone right into the studio, captured that vibe on tape, and had an album out at this time last year. But the band's way of recordmaking changed soon after the original line-up got back together in the early '80s. The first reunion album, Done with Mirrors (Geffen, 1985), was an old-fashioned Aerosmith disc -- no outside songs, no extra players, no studio frills -- and it flopped. With 1987's Permanent Vacation, they found their hit formula by using a hands-on producer (until recently, it was Bruce Fairbairn) and song doctors. Very few songs they've released since then (and nothing on Nine Lives) were written without outside help. In recent years Aerosmith's collaborators have included Don Henley, Lenny Kravitz, former Styx member Tommy Shaw, and schlockmeisters Desmond Child and Holly Knight -- not exactly a list that radiates rock-and-roll credibility.

This makes it doubly improbable that Aerosmith have done their best work since their retooling, but they have, churning out a long string of great singles ("Dude Looks like a Lady," "Janey's Got a Gun," "Love in an Elevator" and their best-ever power ballad, "Cryin' ") that proved how much fun retro/commercial rock could be. With '70s icons (Led Zep, the Who, the Stones) dropping like flies, Aerosmith took their place as the proudest holdover from that era of hard rock, and rock's best argument for sustained adolescence. (Their only real competition would be Kiss, but they haven't released any new material in six years). And with a few minor exceptions -- like the brief rap intro of their last full album, 1993's Get a Grip -- Aerosmith did it without bothering to update their style.

The troubles behind Nine Lives have become the stuff of gossip columns (and a recent Billboard cover feature); in a nutshell: longtime manager Tim Collins was fired last July for reasons that remain unclear. Certain band members may or may not have fallen off the wagon. A full album was recorded with Alanis Morissette producer Glen Ballard -- but without drummer Joey Kramer, who it's reported was kept from playing by a bad bout of depression. (Depression in Aerosmith? If he were in Pearl Jam, it might have made more sense.) The original album was then scrapped, in part because Columbia VP John Kalodner -- listed in the Billboard story as Aerosmith's "guru" (seemingly an industry term meaning "A&R executive with an ego") -- didn't like it. Finally the album was re-recorded, with a different producer and song line-up, and with Kramer reinstated.

Those shake-ups all left an audible mark on the finished album, whose ballads are murkier and whose rockers are more jagged than Aerosmith's norm. That's not to say everything works. Producer Shirley too often goes ballistic with string arrangements, starting with "Taste of India" -- a likely second single that apes Kula Shaker's sound, but why bother? Long, drony codas push two tracks to six minutes and send the closing "Fallen Angels" past eight. And Shirley muffles Kramer's drum sound, which keeps the more good-timey numbers -- notably "Pink," this disc's attempt at a big Aerosmith sex anthem -- from getting the kick they need.

But the murk is better suited to the album's standout tunes. On "The Farm" the multi-guitar sound is downright claustrophobic, and that's certainly appropriate for a song about wanting to head for the loony bin. Instead of finding any fun in Tyler's dark-humored lyric ("I wanna be a Hare Krishna/Tattoo a dot right on my head/And the Prozac is my fixer/I am the living dead"), the arrangement sports cellos and slide guitars that accentuate the undertow. One of the toughest rockers in the band's catalogue, "Something's Gotta Give" could also have been played for laughs, with a lyric that jumps from non-sequitur to nitty-gritty ("Cybererotic head explode/Information overload/And I just can't take anymore/And I'm gonna break") -- but Tyler shouts those last three words as though he weren't kidding. Finally, "Crash" is the most vivid of Aerosmith's many anti-drug songs, because it's not a lecture or a pep talk. It's a chaotic comedown song with distorted vocal overdubs, massed guitars, and a tempo verging on hardcore. ("Crash" may also be the best fuel for the theory that someone fell off the wagon. It's hard to write something like this without a little firsthand knowledge.)

Contrasting with this trio of rockers is a surprisingly touching countryish number, "Full Circle." Although it comes too soon at track five (it would have made a better closer than the weak "Fallen Angels"), it's the album's most telling track: thinly disguised as a love song, it sports a sing-along chorus that confronts the band's recent hassles along with a creeping sense of mortality: "Time, don't let it slip away/Raise your drinking glass, here's to yesterday/ . . . In time, we're all gonna trip away, don't piss heaven off, we've got hell to pay." And that tough-but-wise sentiment sums up this album's best moments. If not the commercial blockbuster that Columbia obviously wanted, Nine Lives is the one that brings Aerosmith, kicking and screaming, into something approaching adulthood.

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Aerosmith
Aerosmith discography
Aerosmith links

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