Steven Tyler: Solo

AKIE BERMISS: I’ll make this short and sweet.  A Steven Tyler solo album can only go one of three ways.  One, it could suck royally.  It could be a complete and utter disaster, complete with over-orchestration, skits and interludes, scantily(scarfily)-clad photography and vapid rock lyrics that could’ve been mumbled by a nodding junkie on the subway.  Two, it could still suck but be so bad that its actually good.  In these post-modern times, its hard to say whether it’d make a difference if it was deliberately too-bad or unintentionally so.  If it gets there, if its ironic, and funny it’ll do the trick and he’ll at least be able to spin it in to a viral youtube music video or something.

But the final possibility is, to me, the most spectacularly unbelievable.  And, if pulled off properly, it would be the most cathartic for me.  If everything goes just right — the album could be great.

Don’t get me wrong — I find Steven Tyler eminently laughable.  Aerosmith is a fairly accurate representation of the most embarrassing things that draw adolescent boys to rock music.  It fairly rocks, but doesn’t alter your mindframe the way an excellent rockband should.  It all within acceptable limits.  Not too loud, not too rough, not too quiet, nor even too angsty.  Its just so.  And Tyler up-front with his mic-stand and his scarves and his pouty-lips — well, he’s got to be a joke too, right?!

But one thing about Tyler ain’t no joke.  Dude can sing.  He can sing his skinny little butt off.

So let me ask you this, O mighty music-industry, what else do you need?  I don’t care how old the guy is or how weird his body and/or persona may be — how hard can it be to make a damned good album with a kick-ass vocalist out front?  We know Tyler can kill a pop-tune, a ballad, and even rock out if he so desires.  He know that can front a damned band.  He’s got the high-as-hell damned screeching falsetto.  So making an awesome album should be easy.  How?  Just get him out of the rock-pop field.

Tyler’s voice only suffers from our having heard it in the same context for the past bazillion years.  It could get a much needed revitalization if we were to hear it as part of, say, something more classical, or jazzier, or funkier.  There are so many places he could go.  The more off-the-wall, the more interesting the end result.  A couple of ideas?

Steven Soul — Where Tyler teams up with Quincy Jones, Herbie Hancock, and hiphop producer Madlib to do odd live-band-electronica-acid-jazz covers of classic soul tunes by, say, Marvin Gaye, Al Greene, and Otis Redding (which just made me think of how cool it would be for Steven to just do a bunch of Otis Redding cuts like “Try A Little Tenderness” or “Hard to Handle”).

The Future of Science Steven — We put Steven in a studio with Ornette Coleman, Charlie Haden, Joey Defrancesco, and Dave Douglas.  And the writings of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and — what the hell — Maya Angelou.  Hit record, leave, and just see what the mics picked up three days later.

Tyler De Saudade — We take the best bossa nova musicians we can find in Brazil, out favorite Jobim tunes, and we knock them out in a couple of hours late one saturday night at a dive club on Long Island somewhere.  Live stereo recording.

Vintage Tyler – I’ve always wondered what would happen if you took a small chamber ensemble — the kind that normally consists of a few strings, woodwinds, and a harpsichord — and some baroque tunes, a few classical arias, and one or two heavy Wagnerian numbers.  Then, made the harpsichordist play a vintage Fender Rhodes keyboard and have a modern singer try to hold their own with a couple of romance languages.  I think it could be pretty damned interesting.  What’s the worse the could happen (I had to listen to the Three Tenors trying to sing songs from West Side Story… that is a pain that will never leave me)?

Out there? Yes.  Unlistenable? Perhaps.  But you do one or two things like this and suddenly we’re at least able to think of Steven Tyler’s voice in a totally different context.  I really do think he’d have enough chops to hold his own with most of these cats — at least as a stand-up singer.  Its far better than whatever Jimi Hendrix covers everyone is going foist on him when he’s in the studio.  The key thing is: get him in there with a band and let a dynamic happen and get THAT on tape.  And you’re sure to have at least something interesting.

And please, don’t think I stopped listing projects because I’d run out of ideas.  I’ve been thinking about this consistently since news of the possible break-up hit the interwebs.

Any interest in hearing about my Steven Tyler Does Joni Mitchell concept…

DAVE TOMAR:  Wow.  Aerosmith is finally finished.  It’s hard to believe they waited this long.  Now Steven Tyler can cut his hair and start playing golf like Alice Cooper.  People will be like, ‘hey when did Carol Burnett join the country club.’  Seems like the right move to me.

Two weeks ago, longtime front-man of the hard rock outfit shocked his bandmates by leaking his intention to quit through an internet source.  According to guitarist Joe Perry, this is how he found out.  Bandmates have speculated that Tyler has fallen back into his crippling drug addiction after 20 years of sobriety.  Contrary to the native theory about rock stars, drug use and sobriety, the return to chemical dependency has not produced any positive artistic results, unless you count the band’s impending breakup.

Truly, it has been quite some time since Aerosmith was even worth the virtual space that its tunes are downloaded on to.  And of course, it’s easy to make fun of guys who wear leather, spandex and buttonless blouses in their 60s.  But I have to admit, I was a great big fan of this band from the time I learned how to unzip my fly (thank you very much Alicia Silverstone).  Get this . . .my sensibilities were even offended when the band strayed hard in the late 1990s and began covering Diane Warren tunes.  (For Warren’s total body of work beyond the Armageddon soundtrack, check out Celine Dion, Meatloaf and Milli Vanilli).

This prompted me to write a blistering article in 2002 denouncing the band who provided me with the giddy copulating counterpoint to the abstinent bleakness of Pearl Jam and Nirvana during those rocky adolescent years.  I wrote the following:

“I spent a good portion of my youth addicted to the hard-edged, candy raunch that Aerosmith used to churn out effortlessly.  It’s true that many of their greatest moments wore the influence of heroin, a vice-grip from which the band-mates have long been freed.  But they’re no longer making the music that earned them a reputation as America’s greatest rock and roll band.  And instead of heroin, it’s the far darker, more nefarious influence of Britney Spears that they’re under.  Ever since the Great Superbowl Halftime Show Massacre, during which Steven Tyler and Joe Perry invited Spears, *N’Sync, et. al. to help them rape, pillage and plunder Aerosmith classics like “Walk This Way” and “Sweet Emotion,” the band seems hell-bent on destroying its own credibility.  Taking old age as an opportunity to reinvent themselves, they have welcomed a new status that will surely make them the ugliest and oldest men ever to qualify for Bop Magazine’s pinup roster.”

Obviously, I had sort of missed the point.  Aerosmith was always a shallow band.  But at a certain point, they became embarrassing like the dirty old uncle who hits on your girlfriend at a family brunch.  It’s like, somebody needs to tell this guy how old he is.  Well, evidently Tyler got the message when he fell off the stage during a concert in August and broke his shoulder.  And I have to imagine that once erectile dysfunction sets in, being a throwback to the age when you got the clap from groupies instead of AIDS seems much less worth it.

I differ with Akie on the capacity of a guy like Tyler to reinvent himself.  After 40 years as the face of a band suspended in the sexual maturity of a junior high locker room, the idea of Tyler doing anything else can be nothing less than a parody of himself.  Evidence suggests that Tyler is probably not going solo, that he is in fact retiring.  And since I always enjoyed his personality, I should hope that it’s the latter.  He may yet make a brilliant second career as something other than a musician.

I’ll say this about Tyler, having seen Aerosmith several times in concert during the 1990s (with mostly positive reviews to report in fact), the dude is as limber as anything.  He’s built like Gumby with Cesar Romero’s face.  He could make a fine living being a guy who squeezes behind furniture to fetch lost keys.  Or, so as not to have wasted decades accumulating his unique jungle-print wardrobe, Tyler might consider communing with leopards and zebras a la ‘gorillas in the mist.’  A guy with so little meat and so many toxins is unlikely to be eaten.

The point is, whether or not we’ve seen the last of Tyler, this is an appropriate time for us to have seen the last of Aerosmith.  Like all great bands of the 70s and 80s, there will come a time when the next generation of listeners knows them only through car commercials.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under Arts & Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.