The former "Toxic Twins" discuss Aerosmith's long-awaited return.

Related Content

• Video: Aerosmith Post Footage of Boston Concert
• Aerosmith Post Teaser for "Legendary Child" Music Video
• 60 Minutes with Joe Perry of Aerosmith
• Aerosmith Announce New Album Details, Streaming New Song, "Legendary Child"

Working in L.A. enabled Tyler to rope in several celebrity cameo appearances on the album, including a backing vocal contribution from Julian Lennon on the song “LUV XXX.” It also brought Perry in close proximity to the area’s many high-end luthiers and boutique amp guys. Perry is particularly fond of Echopark guitars, made by SoCal luthier Gabriel Currie.

“What Gabriel does is rummage around old furniture shops and find old wood,” Perry explains. “Literally, antique furniture pieces that are unfixable. He’ll find some wood that’s 150 years old and build a guitar around that. He built a few guitars that I ended up using on the record, and he’s building some more new ones for me. His guitars aren’t that fancy looking, but he starts from the inside out. He starts with the sound of the wood itself.

Once he’s got the guitar together, he’ll go to his pickup winder and they’ll talk and put together the right pickup for it. There have been a couple of times where he’ll walk into the studio with a guitar case, open it up, and all I’d have to do is give it a little tune-up tweak and plug it right in and use it. He’s a real artist.”

Being away from the Boneyard did put Perry a little outside of his comfort zone when it came to having ready access to vintage guitar gear. “I came out here to L.A. with basically my road gear,” he says. “So I had to borrow a few of those more esoteric pieces.”

L.A.’s network of music equipment rental facilities came in handy, as did a few local friends like actor Johnny Depp. The actor ponied up a gorgeous Thirties-era Gibson L00 parlor guitar from his own drool-worthy vintage collection. It is heard on the track “Freedom Fighter,” to which Depp also contributed backing vocals.

“Johnny knows Jack Douglas from way back when,” Perry explains, “back when Johnny was in bands in Florida. And so there are some mutual friendships going back a ways. And Johnny’s a musician. There’s no two ways about it. He’s a musicologist. He loves blues. He’s got one of the finest acoustic guitar collections of anybody I know. And that’s where I got that old Gibson acoustic. I went around the usual places looking for one, and I couldn’t find one that had the right sound. So I called Johnny up and asked him if he had something I could borrow. Let’s just say he has very good taste in acoustic guitars.”

Perry estimates that “Freedom Fighter” might be the album track with the most guitar overdubs. But despite the disc’s massive sound and highly polished production, Perry says that the guitar overdubs weren’t really that excessive.

“‘Freedom Fighter’ was originally going to be a hard rock acoustic song. We built up some acoustic guitar tracks with the acoustic capoed at different frets and everything. But it just didn’t deliver the drive and energy that I felt the song needed. So we ended up putting on some more electric guitar stuff. I know I put a lot of overdubs on that one. But then a lot of stuff was left out of the mix because we didn’t need it. We tried to have one guitar do the job, when, say, in 1995, we would have put down six guitars.”

Depp’s L00 is also heard on the deluxe-edition bonus track “Oasis in the Night,” a rare Perry ballad, penned by the guitarist as a Valentine’s Day present for his wife, Billie. The track may not be Grammy material, but its Zeppelin-unplugged feel will appeal more to rock fans. “Maybe you could put it out there that I don’t have a built-in dislike of ballads,” he says. “That was kind of the reputation I had back in the Seventies. But I’ve come around. Ballads have become something of an acquired taste.”

Perry also seems to have made his peace with American Idol. He performed “Legendary Child” with Aerosmith on the program and also played “Happy Birthday” for Tyler on air, a Kodak moment if ever there was one. But the guitarist also acknowledges a debt of gratitude for the program for helping keep Tyler in fighting form during album sessions in L.A.

“Sometimes Steven would go right from the set of American Idol into the studio,” he says. “And he would be cranked up from doing live TV. So that had some benefit to it—he was already all warmed up.”

“Idol is a seven-hour show,” Tyler adds. “I took the energy from having my way with whatever I said on the air and being in front of 30 million people a night, and I’d bring all that to the studio. And it was magical. I’d leave Idol at seven o’clock or so, and I’d go to the studio and we’d work until 12 or one or two. Plus, I was staying at the Sunset Marquis [West Hollywood’s rock and roll hotel of record]. So I’d go back there and write some lyrics. It was a labor of love and something I hadn’t done in nine years. And when I sat down to write lyrics, I realized what was missing. That little piece had been missing from my life.”

And so a kind of equilibrium was restored—once again—in the Aerosmith camp. “It’s like a family,” Perry says of the group. “Disagreements and misunderstandings are a natural thing. The main thing is, we’re a band and we’re always gonna be a band. It’s not gonna break up. So there’s only one way to go. You gotta deal with the misunderstandings. Live with whatever new paradigm there is.”

Obviously, not every song on Music from Another Dimension! will be to everyone’s taste, but in the final analysis Perry says he’s pleased with the album’s mix of styles and sounds. “At the end of the day, with everybody throwing in a riff here and there, it kind of balanced things out,” he says. “It’s almost like for every ballad there’s a hard-hitting rocker. To me, it kind of feels well balanced.”

But will Music from Another Dimension! indeed be the last Aerosmith album, as some of the advance hype and Tyler’s semi-coherent hints have alleged? Tyler remains cagey on this point.

“You never know,” he says. “Might be.”

But Joe Perry certainly isn’t ready to hang it up. “No, this definitely isn’t the last Aerosmith record,” he states. “But one thing I know is you can’t plan things out and say, ‘This is how it’s gonna happen.’ All you can do is make your best plans and hope for the best. I look at every record, and every performance, like, you know, a lot of things can go wrong between now and the next one. We go day to day. We’re setting up the next leg of the tour we’re currently doing and planning on going out on the road next year and doing a world tour. And who knows after that? We may carve out time to do another record. The way the band has been feeling, how we’ve been playing and writing, it’s felt like it hasn’t felt in a long, long time. This band’s really in a good place.”

Related