Aerosmith
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Aerosmith

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“I was really ready for a break but once it gets to a certain point you start to wonder, ‘Is this real? Do I really do this? Do I even have a job anymore? What if it’s been too long and we go back to do it and it’s not there anymore?’ but every time we go back it seems to be there,” Hamilton says. “I know I’ll always be able to play our songs, I don’t worry about that, but after taking too much time off it does feel like something that could just blow away.”

Apart from the band taking time off, Hamilton has been personally dealing with illness for quite some time. In 2006 he announced he was battling throat cancer and in December of that year he announce he was cancer-free. It returned in 2011 and after treatment, he again went into remission.

“I’ve benefitted from modern technology and knowledge in a huge way,” he says. “I owe not only my life but my way of life to some of the doctors I’ve been able to reach out to. Most of them are right here in Boston, people come from all over the world to get treated for some exotic and really scary diseases and I was fortunate to live right here. I’ve had cancer twice and it was intense and not at all fun. I’ve had challenges that I‘ve had to deal with that are the consequences of being blasted with radiation but that’s the way it is. If it was ten years ago I probably wouldn’t even be here.”

He’s not just referring to advancements in technology either. After all, Aerosmith were always immersed in the rock star lifestyle and although they – like a lot of other aging bands – try and propagate that written-off rocker myth, it’s simply not the case.

They’re older (Christ, most of them are in their sixties now) and life is different now.

“We’re more in command of what we’re putting out on stage for those two hours and it’s much better than it was in those old days,” he says. “When you’ve got new songs off a new album you have no idea what reaction you’re gonna get. It’s fun having that unknown and because these songs are fairly new we can mess them up. It’s more intensely focused on the performance than it was. We always cared about the performance but we were pretty stoned out and drunk in the process and that’s changed. You like to think that’s what puts you at your best in those situations then you realise that it really doesn’t work out that way.”

In lieu of bullshit rhetoric, Hamilton expresses both his pride and mild criticisms of the latest album. “We’ve really put it out there on this record; we probably put too many songs on it though but everybody in the band had a very intense desire after not doing any albums to really make a statement,” he admits. “I know I felt that way. I was very glad to be a part of that monster of what that record became. I kinda wish we could go back into the studio now and do something quick and off the cuff. We spent hours on tiny details on this album.”

Watching Aerosmith doing the rounds on morning TV in the States is a humorous affair. Apart from banal questions, it seems that the interviewers want Aerosmith to be more rock than even the members want to. Any successful band that straddles the rock and pop realm eventually finds themselves playing a role but it seems like the interviewers and the audiences are determine to get every last juicy drip of drama out of Aerosmith despite the fact the well dried up a while ago. Hamilton has battled cancer, Tyler himself had surgery for an “undisclosed illness”, and is a grandfather as is Joe Perry. Times have changed but the myth remains.

“Things are really different to what they were,” he says. “Morning TV is an interesting one. The record company will come and say, ‘We can get you guys on The Today Show or whatever’ and we think that by doing it we’re gonna hit a massive audience of people that maybe wouldn’t have bought your album but when they hear you on those shows you might win people over. You’d have to be pretty nasty and negative to say no. But we’re rockers, that’s what we do. We play slow songs every now and again so the lovers in the audience can get inspired but when you come to an Aerosmith show you’re gonna leave having seen a real rock show.”

Will the rock continue for the foreseeable future? “We’ve always been I control of what we’re doing,” he says. “Nobody in the band has a quitting date in their sites. The energy of knowing that there’s still so many people out there that want us to play trumps everything else.”

BY KRISSI WEISS