Aerosmith “Music from Another Dimension”
Imagine five American brothers. Imagine them all grown up. Now imagine them packing for a family road trip. Imagine their wives and girlfriends are joining. Imagine that every single person in the group is very particular about their clothes. And their hair. And the music they bring. Some bring old Yardbirds records. Some bring The Stones. Most of them bring Zeppelin. OK, now imagine that most of the guys are high on cocaine. Like, really high. And imagine that two of the guys are politically conservative, two are liberal and one seriously could not care less. And imagine that, on this road trip, the five brothers and their wives and their girlfriends stop in a different city every night for fifty nights straight. OK -- stay with me. Imagine that these five brothers do this for forty years. And imagine that every few years, they disinvite one of the brothers, sometimes for petty reasons and sometimes for a serious offense. And, every decade or so, one of the brothers is in the midst of a divorce or new marriage. And, finally, imagine that, every time they go on this trip, they pack new bags but also brought all of the old bags with them. Just imagine all of the baggage.
Maybe all of this harping on about baggage sounds like a bad fable. Or a tedious metaphor. It might -- yes -- except for the fact that those five brothers and all their baggage are almost exactly like Aerosmith.
Aerosmith holds the distinction of being the best selling American Rock band other than The Eagles. Since 1973, they have enjoyed two number one albums and six top ten albums. They have topped the singles charts. And, with “Dream On,” they can reasonably lay claim to the greatest Rock ballad ever recorded. But those triumphs are not the miracle of Aerosmith. The miracle of Aerosmith is not even specifically their music. In truth, they were always just a fraction of Zeppelin’s magic power and a scrap of The Stones’ breadth and depth. They were always a great band, an elite Blues-based Rock band. But they were also, more often than not, limited by their weighty influences and their intoxication. They have great songs and some very good albums. But neither are the miracle of Aerosmith. Because the miracle of Aerosmith is that, for more than forty years, the same five guys -- Steven Tyler (lead vocals), Joe Perry (guitar), Tom Hamilton (bass), Joey Kramer (drums) and Brad Whitford (guitar) -- stayed together.
The wonder of Aerosmith’s great and enduring codependence is not a secret. For years, Steven Tyler has spoken openly (and proudly) about the break-ups, the addictions and the reconciliations. To him, the greatest music comes from the greatest love. And Steven Tyler’s greatest love seems to come after the betrayal and after the tears and after the bottom. According to their lead singer, Aerosmith thrives on the clarity that comes through restoration. This is not a band that leaves their baggage behind. They own it. They carry it with them. Every Aerosmith album and tour comes with a truckload of Samsonites.
Aerosmith is a band with rare technical gifts -- a band wherein every player is an ace and the singer is incomparable. There are not many bands that fit that bill. However, It is rarer still to find such a band who also has lost their gag reflex. Nothing derails Aerosmith. The train may stop. It may need repair. But it stays on the tracks and motors on. For this reason, Aerosmith has never really changed. They never pivoted. They never shifted. They never reconsidered. When big hair and hard Rock fell out of favor in the early 1990s, Aerosmith’s popularity actually peaked. When they got older, they got thinner and more tan. As they aged, they grew their hair longer and wore more make-up. The same genetic material that birthed their debut -- Yardbirds, Beatles, Zeppelin and Stones -- remained intact throughout the twenty-first century.
While Aerosmith did not fundamentally change or wisen in middle age, they did get craftier. At some point in the 1990s they figured out, in spite of their influences and their urges, that Rock and Roll was not their super-power. They were not atomic like AC/DC or pioneering like Led Zeppelin. They could not write songs like The Beatles or The Stones. When they got too fast, Aerosmith could sound like a better version of many lesser bands. Speed is like kryptonite for Steven Tyler. Blessed with a giant mouth and lungs, Tyler is great at fast talk. However, when he fast sings, he comes off like a less clever David Johansen or a more focused David Lee Roth. Fast singing also suppresses the quality and range of Tyler’s voice. It may not be cool. It may not be their inclination. But the power ballad is Aerosmith’s raison d’etre. It is what they do better than any Rock band has ever done before or since. Better than REO Speedwagon. Better than Guns N’ Roses. I get butterflies when I hear “Dream On.” I am breathless when “What it Takes” comes on. And, though I never intentionally put them on, “Angel,” “Cryin,” “Crazy” and, especially, “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” are flawless in their own ways. When Aerosmith slows down the train, pulls out the lighters and holds them up in the air, they are untouchable.
Undoubtedly, part of their second act deceleration was intelligent optimization. The mid-tempo singles and power ballads were extraordinarily successful. They crossed radio formats and drove peak, global sales. In the 1990s, Aerosmith transformed from almost has-beens to American Rock gods to, eventually, international superstars; all on account of those skyscraping ballads. Likely another part of the musical slowdown was a certain middle-aged sentimentality, a band of brothers who had become fathers, looking back on unthinkable highs and too obvious lows of their youth. However, following 2001’s “Just Push Play” and a Super Bowl halftime victory lap, it appeared that the years of baggage had them buckling under the weight. For the next decade, there would be no new albums of original music. There was a Blues cover album. There were three greatest hits compilations. Yes -- three. There was Joe Perry solo music. There were autobiographies. There was, famously, “Guitar Hero: Aerosmith,” and its accompanying tours and promotion. And there was, in 2009, on that “Guitar Hero” tour, Steven Tyler’s near tragic stage fall. And then the long recovery. And the fall back into addiction. And the silence. And the resentment. And the fracturing. And the threats. More baggage. Piled to the clouds. Five brothers buried underneath.
However, like a miracle, or maybe a science fiction monster, those same five guys emerged in 2011, dusted themselves off, hugged, kissed and marched forward. That unbreakable, unkillable thing, lumbering towards year forty as a band, entered a studio in the summer of 2011. Between tours, side projects and “American Idol,” the band recorded “Music from Another Dimension” and released it in November of 2012. The album was their first collection of new material in over a decade and marked the beginning of Aerosmith’s uncertain, third act.
As its title and Pop Art cover suggest, “Music from Another Dimension” has a science fiction, B-movie quality to it. That quality, though, is not specifically in the music. Aside from the hypnotic, Twilight Zone intro and outro, the music sounds almost exactly like Aerosmith of the decade before. The science fiction is not in the text. It’s the meta-text. It’s the very idea that these sixty year old men, who had defiled their bodies and broken up time and again, were still together. There they were -- black leather jackets, long hair, jewelry, nips and tucks. They looked great. They looked like Aerosmith.
And they also sounded just like Aerosmith. Not the young, dirty and bluesy Aerosmith of the 1970s. And not the waxed and buffed Aerosmith of the 90s. They sounded like both of those things, but also more wistful, more cheeky and, probably, more distracted. More than anything, though, they sound cogent. And this, of course, should come as no surprise. With the rare exception, Aerosmith had been the same five guys, practicing, touring and recording together, for decades. The Rolling Stones never had forty years as a unit. The Beatles had about a quarter of that. The number of hours Aerosmith has logged a band is staggering. They had been battered and knocked down but, even in 2012, they were an elite, technically advanced organization. They knew their jobs. They knew the system. In the studio, they plugged in and played live together. And that sound, of a heavy, well-built machine, was still there. There were sleeker models out there. And this one might have needed some oil in parts. But it still worked.
“Music from Another Dimension” is a big album. Fifteen songs and nearly seventy minutes. In order to mitigate some of the wear and tear, the guys pull a few tricks. Joe Perry takes lead vocals on two songs he wrote himself. They bring back Desmond Child and Dianne Warren, who penned hits for them previously, for songwriting duties. Steven and his “American Idol” co-host, Carrie Underwood, share a duet. There are some pump fakes and trick plays, but the chassis is still built on Perry’s taut, sped up, Jimmy Page riffs and the hoarse melody and impossible falsetto of Tyler. The music sometimes floats up with sunny, Beatles’ oohs and ahs, but the center of gravity is just a very live band.
By this time, Aerosmith could not rock harder or better than the field. Some store bought shine and a hint of rust had replaced the charm of their younger, dirtier edges. As a result, their straightforward Rock tracks can sound derivative, even when they are full of energy. Joe Perry has a classic bag of tricks, but it’s only so deep. As a result, the best tracks on “Music from Another Dimension” are the surprises, both modest and ambitious. “Oh Yeah,” for instance, is a very retro, slightly toned down, Pop Rock track that evokes The Yardbirds. It’s uncomplicated, charming and very professional. But, in the back half, when the band has settled in and Tyler begins to cook and boil over, we are reminded of what separates the band from their considerable influences: that howl. Later on the album, the band unexpectedly finds a sixth gear of “Lover Alot,” a full throttle raver that is built from the bottom up rather than through the lead guitar and vocals. Tyler and Perry keep up just fine, but it is Hamilton and Kramers’ breakneck pace and focus that most surprises and delights.
On the record’s second half, Joe Perry takes the mic for “Freedom Fighter,” one of two songs on the record that he wrote exclusively. Although Perry does not hold a candle to Tyler as a singer, “Freedom Fighter” works both as relief and on its own merit. The song has a whiff of the Keith songs on a Stones’ album, although Perry’s flat pitch is still much stronger than Richards’. Perry’s riff is less red, hot and showy and more bare white and naked, like something AC/DC would export to America. “Freedom Fighter” is atypical for Aerosmith in many ways, a “political” song about gun control and the hypocrisy of vigilantism. But, like “Oh Yeah” And “Lover Alot,” it works because it is focused in its idea where the band elsewhere gets lost and buried among all the baggage.
“Legendary Child,” the first single from “Music from Another Dimension” is exceptional in that it is heavy, to the point of resembling Rage Against the Machine, and autobiographical. The lyrics directly reference past Aerosmith hits while guitars swirl and explode. Musically, it is interesting in its force, but the self-awareness of the story reads as self-indulgence. The song was originally written for 1993’s “Get a Grip” and was ultimately left off the album. And while it is absolutely a great band playing a good enough song, in retrospect, it sounds obvious why it was left on the shelf two decades before.
On an album with many exciting moments but few great songs, “Beautiful” is the basement floor. Tyler raps the verses, the chorus does absolutely nothing and the song completely lacks a riff. It’s not even a germ of an idea. Whether it was overconfidence or some personal attachment, it’s not a song that should have made the final cut. Fortunately, it’s dispatched early on for bluer skies ahead.
The pinnacle of “Music From Another Dimension” is “What Could Have Been Love,” an irresistible, take out your lighter and hold it up high, ballad co-written by Tyler, Marti Frederiksen and Russ Irwin. There is almost nothing cool about this song. It’s cloying, twenty-first century Adult Contemporary. And yet, it’s an unmistakable achievement. Even at sixty-something, when Tyler slows down and lets himself breathe, there may not be a better singer in Rock and Roll. He milks the verses and wraps himself around the tune. There’s the voice, some piano and a hint of Country slide guitar. It’s completely epic and contains itself to four minutes.
Just two songs later, the band tries a similar trick on "Can't Stop Lovin' You,” this time adding Carrie Underwood for the ride. As contemporary Country, the track works well and holds its own admirably alongside most anything from Blake and Miranda. As an Aerosmith song on an Aerosmith album, it’s almost a bridge too far. Tyler’s voice is so big that it can drown out his very able duet partner. Similarly, Underwood’s voice is so pitch perfect that it floats directly above the melody rather than stretching and bending it the way Tyler can. Both are obviously among the greatest living Pop singers and they handle their verses with aplomb. But the sum is lesser than their parts.
Most everything in between is good enough to be appreciated as deep cuts by loyalists and to be ignored by anyone less casual. “Music from Another Dimension” cannot boast more than one timeless track. However, it is nothing short of impressive to see the same five guys, playing with the same toys, packed in the same bags. The band seems to say farewell with one hand, while they cross the fingers of the other hand on "Another Last Goodbye," the album’s closer. On top of mostly a piano and some strings, Tyler’s voice has rarely sounded so naked and aged. He falls short of a couple of notes. And, by the end, whether he’s saying farewell to his lover or to his brothers, he sounds both tired and ready for what is next.
It has been almost ten years since “Music from Another Dimension” was released. It is fully possible that this was Aerosmith’s swan song. Though, I wouldn’t bet on it. Since 2012, they’ve toured the world when it suits them and set up a residency in Las Vegas. There are always whispers of another hairline fracture or a permanent break. But, where would they go? What would they do? Where would they put all that baggage? Who would even have them? I mean --they’re Aerosmith. You can write them off. You can kill them. But they don’t die. Even after they’re dead.