Count your blessings - and theirs. By now, after thirty years of big rock, hard drugs, wasted fortunes and seesaw chart rides, singer Steven Tyler, guitarists Joe Perry and Brad Whitford, bassist Tom Hamilton and drummer Joey Kramer should either be dead or babbling incoherently. Instead, Aerosmith are our most treasured and reliable warrior clowns,
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the original Ol' Dirty Bastards. They don't carry on with the dignity of old blues buddhas - Aerosmith just plain carry on.
Tyler, in particular, is an ageless marvel: a fifty-three-year-old sex pistol, cocked and loaded with the newly minted lust of a teenage buck. His barn-dog yap can still turn blithering nonsense like "Just Push Play" - "No pimp daddy jack/It's Cadillac wack no Cadillac wack back" - into diamond vocal theater. In fact, the entire point of the song seems to be the impish pleasure Tyler gets from belting "Fuckin' A!" over and over in the chorus.
Yet for all of their contagious denial of late middle age, Aerosmith have not made a Great Album - a platter equal to their original pirate-rock mettle and jubilant stage manner - in a very long time, since Rocks in 1976. Pump came close. That 1989 hit was as good as hard rock's song-doctor era ever got - the band's raw meat meticulously charred and sugared to AOR taste by producer Bruce Fairbairn (Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet) and melody repairmen Jim Vallance and Desmond Child.
Just Push Play is another near-killer for different reasons. For one thing, it is a work of largely native snazz, the first-ever Aerosmith album to be produced by Tyler and Perry (albeit in collaboration with co-writers Mark Hudson and Marti Frederiksen). For another, it is the least self-consciously commercial record Aerosmith have made since their Eighties return from Smacked-Out City. When Just Push Play shakes and snorts, it does so with an honest cheer: the sucker-punched-ELO glow of "Jaded"; the way the Tower of Power horns blast in behind gibbering guitar and Tyler's chrome yowl in the fat chorale of "Trip Hoppin'." When the album goes blah, though, it's usually because of a power ballad.
There are actually two Aerosmiths. One is the garage-soul squad that ripped out of New England in the early Seventies like a supercharged child of Nuggets and James Brown's Live at the Apollo. Combine the Yardbirds' "I Ain't Got You" with Brown's "Mother Popcorn" (as the group really did in a 1973 Boston radio broadcast preserved on Live! Bootleg), and you have "Walk This Way."
The other Aerosmith actually invented the power ballad. Written by Tyl
