Weathering the storms
Aerosmith’s tumultuous history, as told by Brad Whitford
By Ken Sharp
Goldmine Magazine
Quietly, and without much fanfare, Brad Whitford goes about his business as rhythm guitarist for the rock ‘n’ roll circus known as Aerosmith.
After drugs and infighting almost killed the Boston blues-based hard rock powerhouse, Aerosmith pulled off perhaps the most amazing resurrection in rock history, emerging stronger than ever to perform for the past 22 years with the original lineup and pile up gold and platinum records.
Goldmine talked with Whitford about Aerosmith’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame career.
Goldmine: It’s been over 30 years since Aerosmith formed. Are you amazed that the band is still going strong?
Brad Whitford: On a daily basis, yes [laughs]. No, I guess not at this point. We’ve just weathered so many different kinds of events and storms and this and that. I have to attribute that to the music that we’ve created and the music we continue to be able to create and the way that we perform together is what really drives the whole machine. Certainly there’s enough things on the outside of that, once you get off that stage, there’s still so much bullshit that can drive anybody crazy.
At this point in my life probably my biggest beef is the travel. I just don’t know how much longer I can do that. It’s a very rough lifestyle. Not too many bands have to do it this long because they just don’t stay together [laughs]. A lot of people return to some sort of normal schedule. The travel is really rough, being away from home; having a lot of separation away from the family does not sit well with my inner self.
GM: As a songwriter you’ve contributed songs to the band on a much smaller scale than say Steven or Joe. Do you regret that you didn’t push your writing with the band earlier in your career?
BW: No, I don’t regret it. It’s just the nature of the way things have gone. I literally got pushed out of the writing circle. I don’t consider myself a terribly prolific writer. I can write music with other people if they’re better songwriters than I am. I really can’t create a song. It’s very difficult to do. That’s why the people that can do it are very few and far between. I’m certainly not that type of a guy. More of a guitar player, more of the kind of [guy] who comes up with enough riffs and ideas to write a song. But to write lyrics and come up with a melody for it, it won’t happen.
GM: Let me throw out a few Aerosmith songs you co-wrote and allow you to share a story behind their creation. Let’s start with “Last Child.”
BW: That was really a lick that I had. Steven and I wrote that together. He sat down behind the drums. He’s a drummer and he liked it. That’s where it started. He likes some oddball things sometimes, kind of out of the way riffs. This was kind of a funky riff and he sat down on the drums and in short order we created “Last Child.”
GM: How about “Kings And Queens” from the Draw The Line album?
BW: I think I came up with some parts of the basic chord structure. A bunch of us sat down and worked on that. Our producer, Jack Douglas, was a writer on that song, too. I think it’s a classic tune. It’s a very interesting tune. It certainly blows away a lot of other songs, not our songs, but a lot of other material that was created in that era [laughs]. It stands heads and shoulders above a lot of other stuff that was being recorded at the time.
GM: Being from Philadelphia, it seemed that every time I saw Aerosmith play live in the ‘70s there was a mishap that occurred, a cherry bomb exploding and hurting the band, a bottle hitting Steven in the face.
BW: I think unfortunately, and I’m afraid to even say it but, that kind of behavior at concerts was the norm. We’ve had everything thrown at us from a penny to live animals. Trust me, we’ve seen it all. Tools, bottles... just everything. It doesn’t happen anymore, which is nice because it was incredibly dangerous.
As for the cherry bomb incident, we were going back up on the stage to do the encore. I was going up the stairs right behind Steven and Joe and I felt the concussion of the cherry bomb going off. Steven immediately covered his face and there was blood shooting up out of Joe’s arm, literally. So pretty quickly we got ourselves to the emergency room. I have to say we were shaken by it and extremely pissed off. We didn’t come back to Philadelphia for quite a while. We had a few offers to come back and we passed on it. We waited a few years before we came back. So we came back and then the bottle incident happened. It was about 20 minutes into the show. Again, here’s Steven covering his face so badly. A bottle hit the monitor directly in front of him and became shrapnel. Pieces of glass had literally gone through his face, through his cheeks into his mouth and out. We basically took one look at Steven.
We had such a sour taste in our mouth. We felt we were gonna make a statement, ‘We don’t know what to tell you but you’re going to have to police yourselves from now on.’ So we literally said, ‘Fuck this, we don’t care!’ and we got into the cars and drove out of the building. We drove out and watched the riot squad pulling up as we were leaving [laughs]. For us it was much more than a coincidence. I really don’t know that Steven could have continued the show anyway. Steven was bleeding pretty heavily and there wasn’t anything else we could do.
GM: In the ‘70s the Rolling Stones were the band’s greatest influence. But it seems today that The Beatles exert a more profound influence on the band’s songwriting with songs like “Jaded, “What It Takes, “Livin’ On The Edge” and “Amazing.”
BW: It’s absolutely true. We all love that music, Steven especially. A lot of that Beatles influence comes from Steven’s collaboration with Mark Hudson, both of whom are absolute Beatle freaks. So between the two of them you get this quantified [laughs] Beatles love. They try and apply some of those harmonies, some of those approaches, some of the rhythm changes, some of the guitar sounds. A lot of different things that the Beatles did that make you go, [speaks reverentially] “Woah, man” [laughs]. So I guess the goal is to try and emulate probably some of the best music of the last 50 years, which has to be The Beatles.
GM: That’s true, it’s almost like the band is shying away from the grittier Stones inspired tunes like “Mama Kin.”
BW: That’s the commercial “stay on top” thing. A big part of Aerosmith has become business. It’s where we are, it’s where we put ourselves and there’s a lot of pressure there. There’s a lot of desire for the band to stay where it is as a commercial success.
GM: That brings up the point that in the ‘70s it seemed that Aerosmith was writing from a purer standpoint, not tailoring songs to be radio hits. Today it seems there’s a lot more thought behind constructing songs that will keep the band’s commercial standing. Would you say that’s true?
BW: That’s absolutely true. It’s not frustrating for me. I think that we can manage to do that, which is not easy to do, and I can be part of it. I’m very pleased about it. It’s not a creative outlet much for me anymore. When I play, the creative part for me is going into the studio with guys like Marti Fredrerikssen and Mark Hudson. I’ve been listening to this particular tune and we just roll it and I play some things and they go, “Oh, that’s great, that’s great! Let’s do that, oh man!” They give you a tremendous amount of freedom. It’s not like they say, “Here, we need this guitar part here and this guitar part here.” So that’s a lot of fun for me.
GM: A dichotomy exists between Aerosmith fans. There is definitely a contingent of fans that favor the ‘70s era while others favor what band is doing today.
BW: We’ve got both. So we’ve got the best of both worlds. We can’t do anything about it now. We have some tremendous music from that era that we still play and a lot of people really enjoy it. And then there’s the stuff that we do now.
GM: Are there some vintage Aerosmith songs you wish the band would play in concert?
BW: I push the band to do that stuff all of the time. In fact, Monday night we played Jones Beach and we played a song that we hadn’t played since we were first together, “Rattlesnake Shake,” the Fleetwood Mac tune. We played that Monday night and it was great. We played “Seasons Of Wither,” which we hadn’t played in a long time. We did run through that one at a soundcheck and ran through it acoustically. I think everybody pretty much knows that song. We were doing our encore and we were about to play our very last song, “Train Kept A Rollin’.” On that song we throw in a real quick version of The Beatles’ “I’m Down.” So while Steven was getting ready to announce that I started to play “Milk Cow Blues” and then the band just joined in. Nobody knew we were gonna play it. I just kept playing the beginning riff until everybody followed me and bang, we were into the song. On the last tour we played “S.O.S. (Too Bad)” quite a bit. That will surely get played on this tour.
GM: Share your thoughts on the band’s induction into The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.
BW: Of course we’re not done yet with our career but that’s not what the award is about. The award is about measuring a certain amount of time, that’s what it’s about. For someone who has been in the business at a certain length of time, they say, “OK man, you’re in.” And not many people can do it. It’s reserved for artists who have made a lifetime commitment to their music. Certainly Aerosmith have done that.
GM: Was it a dream come true to be inducted among such hallowed company?
BW: I don’t think it was a dream. I think far exceeding any dream is being in a great band, which is always the original dream, to have a band. When you’re a kid trying to start a band, it’s just one failure after another. So to have a band that does something like we’ve done, that’s pretty amazing.
GM: When Aerosmith reunited in the mid ’80s, how confident were you that it wouldn’t self-destruct again?
BW: Oh I didn’t think it would self-destruct. I don’t know why. There were certainly some incredible low points. But it just seemed like somehow we would get through this. All that stuff then was really just all about getting out of the drug lifestyle. That was really what was in the way at that point. A lot of the creativity just couldn’t happen because people couldn’t think. Your brain has got to be free, you gotta be alive to be able to write and perform music. You’ve got to be healthy. That was dwindling at different rates for each individual [laughs]. So it was that process which took quite a while to finally deal with and go through. But somehow we were doing it. We were just doing it. We were doing what we had to do to just try and keep the band together and be able to perform.
GM: Discuss the unique guitar interplay that exists between you and Joe Perry.
BW: It’s always been second nature. Joe and I never sit down and work out a part. We literally create the parts on the fly. Joe will come up with something and I will build something around it and that’s pretty much how it’s always worked. It might take me a while to find the right part, but I usually find it. So it’s always been this kind of organic approach to it. We still surprise each other. There are things we do on the guitar that just keep getting better. A lot of that happens live, the spontaneity of live performance. We create some spaces in the show where we have a lot of improv going on, especially with the guitars. It’s never the same so it makes it a lot of fun.
GM: Although traveling has become a grind for you, once you’re up on the stage it makes it all worth it.
BW: Yeah. I think it’s more fun than it’s ever been. The band plays at such an amazing level now. The intuitiveness that we have as players together, it’s like a very well-oiled machine. That’s very appealing to a musician. You want to play with other people and create. When you’re doing that kind of orchestrated music, it’s not just you sitting with a guitar. It’s about getting all those elements combined to make one sound. And we’re doing it so well now; every night is a unique experience.
GM: Share the experience of playing at the Super Bowl with some rather unlikely musical cohorts, Britney Spears, N’Sync.
BW: It was surreal. This band has a problem saying no to anything. If it’s somehow edgy or risky, we still dive into it.
Traveling around like we do, in Europe it’s such a better environment for music because you don’t have all this compartmentalized thing of this guy’s into R&B, this guy’s into hip-hop and this guy’s into hard rock. And nobody can talk to each other. Over there, they can appreciate it all. They have these music festivals where everybody plays.
That’s the thing about the N’Sync thing. We rehearsed for about five days with the N’Sync guys and we became friends. We became friends because we’re all cut from the same piece of cloth. All of us were playing air guitar in our bedrooms at one time or another including them. We all just wanted to do the same thing. We had this desire to have a band and be in something and it just so happens those guys ended up being in N’Sync and we ended up being in Aerosmith. But we’re really not a whole lot different.
It was a lot of fun playing at the Super Bowl. That’s the part that people don’t get. They see all these hard lines between music and there isn’t. People should open their ears in this country. Radio and everything makes it the way it is. It’s a tremendous loss that we don’t have that, especially for kids that don’t get exposed to all different types of music.
GM: Lastly, share your impressions of the group’s seminal ‘70s albums starting with your debut self-titled album, Aerosmith.
BW: My recollection of that first record is it was literally recorded on a recording console that was literally homemade. Part of it was cardboard with knobs the size of headlights. That’s what sticks out for me.
GM: Get Your Wings.
BW: Recording in New York for the first time, that would be the real thing that stands out about that record. It also marked the beginning of our collaboration with our producer, Jack Douglas.
GM: Toys In The Attic.
BW: There was more experimentation on that album. We recorded it at The Record Plant in New York. I remember setting up amplifiers in these hallways and 14th floor staircases to get echo from.
GM: Rocks.
BW: We recorded about half of the Rocks album at our home warehouse where we rehearsed, so it was kind of our first experience with recording with a mobile truck, up in Waltham, Mass. It really made for some very unique sounds.
GM: Draw The Line.
BW: Draw The Line was the beginning of the end [laughs]. Steven and Joe were disappearing kind of as people and musicians. I remember we recorded at an old estate... it was converted to a nunnery, a bunch of nuns lived there. The place was empty and we built a studio inside of it. Rented it out. It was a wild time. There must have been hundreds of acres of land there. But it was very difficult. We all showed up to go to work and Joe wasn’t there and Steven wasn’t there. So Jack Douglas, Tom (Hamilton), myself and Joey (Kramer) started writing our own music. It was like, “What are we gonna do?’ ‘I don’t know, let’s just play [laughs].’” So we started playing and [laughing] waited for those guys to show up.
GM: Lastly, Night In The Ruts.
BW: Tensions were very high. It was taking forever to get anything done. There was a lot of wasted time in the studio. A lot of very, very frustrated people.
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