The Back-Burner: Aerosmith Outtakes & Demos

“Thirteen” is the working title of an unreleased song from the 1992 Get a Grip sessions. “13” was most likely used because it was the 13th song on the song chart they were working on and as the song didn’t have lyrics they just refereed to it as “13”.

The song “13” initiated its recording journey with a master session at A&M studio on January 14, 1992. It was revisited for another recording at the same studio on October 1, 1992, as per the details from a leaked archive database last updated on January 27, 1993. Additional basic track recording took place at Little Mountain studios between Sep and Nov 1992, as evidenced by the song chart featured above.

This is a great example of a mellow dark ballad that never saw the light of day. Basic tracks sound great, it features some interesting Brad/Joe guitar arrangements. It starts with a slow, soft and gentle clean guitar intro, followed by the arpeggio verses. The pre-chorus has nice guitar work with an almost country flavor string pulls and is perhaps one of the better structured sections of the song.

Even when the lyrics were basically nonexistent, Steven did throw a few words through his scatting and expressed his feelings through the melody. The song was clearly meant to talk about a lost love, loneliness, missing a person, regretting wrong choices, believing in the mystic arts -“down on the things in a crystal ball”-, and confusing reality with a dream -“did I wake up from a dream?, it was the one she told me”.

The chorus is another highlight, it speeds up the tempo and changes to a more energetic rocking section that has an Asian flavour in the sounds used, including additional percussion. Steven sings “mokimoyo”, “monkī” means “monkey” in Japanese, but was clearly was used as a place holder word with no real meaning; or perhaps it was used to point to a drug related issue, just as “Monkey on My Back” did. Steven did scat all through the demo marking a vocal melody that is beautifully haunting when mixed with the guitar arrangements. A second layer of vocals harmonises on top of his first scatting attempt, and also works remarkably well. Over the main line of the chorus a high pitch voice screams, “somebody take me away, get out!” also implying a cry for escape, to get away from a difficult situation.

The second chorus is followed by an extended rock jam that works as an outro, until the song seemingly ends in descending chords, much ala “Pandora’s Box” ending. The demo did not include a clear guitar solo section, perhaps this was meant to include Joe’s solo. But as the song fades away, it starts again with a gentler acoustic reprise of the verse and pre-chorus, that takes the song close to the 8 minutes mark before coming to a real end.

It was most likely rejected because Steven didn’t finish the lyrics on time, and because of the length of the initial demo, the 8 minute mark would have been a problem for an radio friendly album like Get a Grip.