Tickets for California, Dream On: Aerosmith & Friends went through a stack of presales in two days before the general sale on Saturday. The fan club hour was the best deal of the lot, and the shortest. Citi cardmembers went first, on Thursday. From the start, Ticketmaster split the Bowl in two. Standard-priced seats sat … More The Hollywood Bowl Presales: One Good Hour
Three years after Steven Tyler fractured his larynx at UBS Arena, Aerosmith has two dates on the calendar. California, Dream On: Aerosmith & Friends takes over the Hollywood Bowl on 29 October and 1 November. The rollout took three days. On Monday, Tyler appeared up a ladder with photographer Ross Halfin, spelling out the Bowl’s … More Aerosmith & Friends at the Hollywood Bowl: Tribute Night or All-Star Jam?
Three weeks before Aerosmith’s name went up on the Hollywood Bowl marquee, Joe Perry was on a different stage in Boston. On 18 September, Unleashed Spirits: The Rise of the Hollywood Vampires opened the 42nd Boston Film Festival at the Boch Center Wang Theatre, with Perry, Alice Cooper and Tommy Henriksen on hand for the … More Unleashed Spirits: Joe Perry, the Hollywood Vampires Documentary and the Aerosmith Hints Around It
In the spring of 1999, General Motors wanted “Sweet Emotion” for its Olympic advertising. It could not get the record everyone knew. The 1975 master belonged to Columbia, by then part of Sony. Licensing it would have meant a deal with the label as well as the band. So the song went back into the … More The Other “Sweet Emotion”: Aerosmith’s 1999 Re-Recording for General Motors
In the summer of 2000 Aerosmith played Columbia Records the first songs from the album that became Just Push Play. The label liked them and asked for one more thing: a first single. “Jaded” was the answer. Steven Tyler and Marti Frederiksen wrote it in a day at Tyler’s house on Lake Sunapee in New … More Aerosmith’s “Jaded”: A Riff at the Lake, a Weekend Without Joe and a Last Top Ten Hit
Aerosmith’s two previous albums had both been made twice. Get a Grip was rejected by the label in 1992 and written again. Nine Lives was recorded in Miami, scrapped, and recorded again in New York. On 5 August 1999, two weeks after the last show of the tour that followed it, bassist Tom Hamilton wrote … More The Making of Aerosmith’s Just Push Play: Self-Produced, All-Digital and Never in the Same Room
For fifty years, Joey Kramer was the drummer who named Aerosmith: the only original member who never quit, at the back of the stage from 1970 to 2020. Between the spring of 2019 and the summer of 2026, his story bent through a shoulder injury, an ankle injury, a click-track audition, a 4–1 vote, a … More The Bull Inside: The Long Fade and Slow Return of Aerosmith’s Joey Kramer
“Livin’ on the Edge” began not as a typical outside-writer pitch, but as a moment of pressure, instinct and recognition inside Joe Perry’s home studio, The Boneyard. The broader atmosphere mattered. The song was written in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots of April 29 to May 3, 1992, a moment when America’s racial, … More The Writing of Aerosmith’s “Livin’ on the Edge”
In late 1990 and early 1991, Aerosmith were the most valuable band in rock and a band still under contract to someone else. Tim Collins had walked David Geffen out of a re-signing meeting on Robertson Boulevard with the symbolic small win of refusing to pay for lunch, and walked into Michele Anthony’s office at … More The Two Makings of AEROSMITH’s Get a Grip: From “I Don’t Hear the Hits” to Grammy winner, the full 1991/1993 timeline
The Record That Nearly Killed the Band When Aerosmith signed a reported $30 million deal with Columbia Records in 1991 — their original label from the 1972–83 era — the expectation was simple: deliver a blockbuster follow-up to 1993’s Get a Grip, which had sold fourteen million copies worldwide. But the band couldn’t even begin … More Nine Lives, Nine Hundred Lives: The Tortured Making of Aerosmith’s Most Difficult Album
This is the tape that killed the Miami album. Dated 26 June 1996, the Glen Ballard mix tape is the closest thing that exists to the lost Nine Lives — eighteen productions spanning the full scope of the South Beach and Criteria sessions, plus two earlier tracks from May. It was assembled during the seven … More Glen Ballard’s Unreleased Mixes of AEROSMITH’s Nine Lives from June 1996
One month after the AC/DC concert that spawned their album’s title track, Aerosmith documented everything they had. The result — a reference cassette labelled “Aerosmith Demo Songs Tape 2/21/96 Tape 1 of 2” — is the most complete snapshot of the Nine Lives project at any single point during the Miami period. Where the earlier … More The South Beach Sessions Tape: Aerosmith’s Nine Lives Takes Shape, February 1996
A private collector’s tape offers a rare window into the raw material that existed before Glen Ballard formally took the producer’s chair. The tape is a second-generation cassette, later transferred to digital, containing eleven tracks in various states of completion. Quality varies throughout: some stereo elements survive but the sound is often faded toward mono, … More The Album Before the Album: Aerosmith’s 1995–96 Demo Tape
In late 1995, A&R legend John Kalodner heard Brother Cane’s “And Fools Shine On” — a #1 Mainstream Rock hit — and tracked down the songwriter. “He really loved the song and said, ‘Who wrote this song? I want to hook this guy up,’” Marti Frederiksen recalled during a 2020 Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp … More How Marti Frederiksen Wrote His Way Into Aerosmith and the solo sessions with Perry
If you’ve been to an Aerosmith show in the last two decades, you’ve seen Trace Foster and Greg Howard’s work, you just didn’t know it. Trace was Joe Perry’s right hand from 2009 until Aerosmith’s final bow, and Greg was Brad Whitford’s guitar tech from 2002, a partnership that stretched over two decades across multiple … More From Aerosmith’s Crew to AC/DC’s Stage: Catching Up with Trace Foster and Greg Howard in Argentina
Brad Whitford took the stage on March 25, 2026, at the Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame Induction Celebration in Boston, held at the Boch Wang Theatre. The night honoured legendary artists including Muddy Waters, Neil Young, Greg Leisz, Bobby Rush, Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter, recognising the legacy of the Chicago blues scene that … More Brad Whitford LIVE in Boston – Folk Americana Hall of Fame Tribute Night
By the time Aerosmith cut their debut at Intermedia in Boston in September and October 1972, most of the album was not being invented in the studio so much as captured there. The real writing story starts earlier: in the band’s first year, living together around Commonwealth Avenue, rehearsing obsessively, and road-testing songs at places … More Aerosmith 1970–1972: Writing and Recording the Debut Album
Aerosmith’s Legendary Edition of their debut album is now out, and with it comes a fresh 2024 remix of the full record plus a fascinating set of bonus tracks. Below is our detailed track-by-track review, breaking down what stands out in the new mixes, what has changed, and what these alternate takes, rehearsals and jams … More Aerosmith’s Legendary Edition 2024 REMIX and Bonus Track REVIEW
The first Aerosmith album is one of the most important debut records in American rock, yet for a long time it seemed unlikely that it would ever receive the kind of deep remix treatment later albums often get. The reason traces back to a story that began circulating in the late 2000s, when the band … More Aerosmith’s Legendary Edition: from “lost masters” to a 2024 remix, a famous Paul’s Mall tape, and one very intriguing Aerojam
Aerosmith (Legendary Edition) finally made Paul’s Mall an official part of the band’s catalogue, this recording had already spent decades living one of the strangest double lives in Aerosmith history. It was never exactly lost. Collectors had known it for years, traded it in several forms, argued over its date, its completeness and its best … More Paul’s Mall: the definitive story behind Aerosmith’s March 20, 1973 show
