AEROSMITH - Spot The Orphan! Page 3
by Martin Popoff

As I chided Joe a few months back, I brought up the band's bigger and bigger productions. Still, with Honkin' On Bobo comparatively stripped down and raw, I wondered if some of that might matter to the next Aerosmith platter...

"I think it's going to be Bobo-influenced. You can look at... you know, as far as where Joe's at, he's got an album that he put out earlier in the year, which is sort of a 'how Joe feels about the guitar' album. It's cool. I feel like a return to fundamentals, but at the same time, we love to play with the studio. To us it's just fun, because we come from the psychedelic era, and it's just a lot of fun to do all these cool little things. Even our earlier albums had a lot of little studio creative things going on. So, I don't know, maybe we should restrain ourselves, find a happy medium."

Like I say, hearing the band tear a strip off 'Draw The Line' is definitely a personal highlight on this record. Tom walks through the origins of this legendary 1977 anthem.

"Well, we recorded that at a place called The Cenacle, which was a former nunnery in upstate New York. And I was just up there, the engineers and a couple of other people, Jack Douglas. Joey and Brad and I had already done about a month rehearsing, just the three of us. Steven and Joe were kind of unfindable during that period but then we all moved into The Cenacle; everybody was there. But you know, people talk about a band's self-indulgent period. That was it, where we had a couple of successful albums so we were really wallowing in the sort of rewards of the flesh, if you know what I mean. And you know, that album took a ridiculously long time to make, and the sessions started at 10 o'clock at night. It was just disorganized. But in the midst of it, it was a statement of where we were at the moment. Joe was really into the punk thing. You can hear that in just the flailing of 'Draw The Line'. It took the longest time. We never really played it, and we just started playing it again - well, we've played it for the last seven years. And it serves its purpose. It's really fun for the band. You flail a way at your guitar. It's very simple. You know, you can play it on one string if you want, and actually I'm going to try it on Sunday night. You can like strum away on the string, and play percussion on the bass. But it's fun for that, and it's rah rah energy and Joe does these spectacular slide guitar solos, so it's just an energy moment."

AEROSMITH - Spot The Orphan! Page 4