The Back-Burner: Aerosmith Outtakes & Demos

By late 1983 the alternate Aerosmith lineup of Steven Tyler, Tom Hamilton, Joey Kramer, Jimmy Crespo and Rick Dufay was running out of road. Rock in a Hard Place (August 1982) had stalled at #32, the tour had wound down that summer, and Columbia, still unrecouped on the album’s $1.5 million cost, refused to advance money for a follow-up without hearing demos first. Roughly November 1983 through early 1984 the band tried anyway. Final instrumental tracks for a few songs were definitely recorded before it all fell apart, and within weeks the original lineup was reuniting.

The Songs: The Ideas They Brought In

The material did not start at the studio. By the time sessions began, the band had a pool of ideas, some new, some reaching back years:

• “The Reason a Dog.” The one confirmed track. A rehearsal tape dated November 7 and 8, 1983 catches its development: a Tom Hamilton led session working “Tom’s Tune” through six takes. It later appeared on 1985’s Done With Mirrors, credited to Tyler and Hamilton, consistent with its origin as a Hamilton idea. Douches remembered it by name: “Many of them just had working titles, and Steven was still writing lyrics, but one was ‘The Reason a Dog’, which wound up on Done With Mirrors I believe.”
• “Well Run Dry.” An original Aerosmith instrumental from the early Rock in a Hard Place writing period that the band jammed on (a jam appears on a July 1980 writing tape), then tried during Crespo’s 1981 Renegade project without finishing it. Back in Aerosmith it became a Tyler and Crespo collaboration under the title “Well Run Dry.” We do not know if it ever got finished lyrics, but a basic track with Steven scatting over it exists. Bootlegs like .999 Pure Gold carry it as “Whatchya Gonna Do” or “Whip it Out.”
• “Hey You.” An extended version of “Riff and Roll,” the Tyler and Crespo instrumental first recorded during the Rock in a Hard Place era, later released on Pandora’s Box.
• “On the Bus Song.” A Rick Dufay song. While Rick was in the band they would jam on it on the tour bus, and a few takes exist with Steven scatting nonsense, funny, raunchy words over it. Steven never wrote real lyrics for it, and Dufay released it himself in 1989 as “Written in Stone.”
• A Crespo track and a Tom and Rick co-written track, both worked on in this period per Jimmy’s own site; titles unknown.
• Other untitled riff ideas were also available and rehearsed by the band, most carrying only working titles while Steven’s lyrics stayed unwritten.

A CD’s worth of material was reportedly sketched out, but almost none of it got finished. Tyler could not commit to lyrics.

Grand Slam: The Sessions

The formal sessions took place at Grand Slam Recording Studios in West Orange, New Jersey, with Jack Douglas producing and Alan Douches assisting. Douglas, the man behind the band’s classic 70s records, got the call because, as Douches put it, “the band’s management at the time had felt the band was ‘cleaned up’ enough to get ‘back in the saddle’. So who better than to get them back to the roots that brought out those original classics.” Douglas loved the big wooden room, the vintage gear, and a virtual lockout whenever he wanted it. That suited management too: seclusion, minimal temptations, drugs strictly barred from the studio. The band was, in Douches’s words, “supposedly clean and sober… supposedly.”

Management booked roughly three months for basic tracks. The start was pure old school rock star scheduling: one full day of just loading in, two more days setting up the band’s gear with the road crew, including a kick drum monitor system of eight 18-inch speakers so the band could feel the music while rehearsing on headphones (“very stupid idea,” per Douches). Joey arrived on day four for drum sounds, the rest of the band on day five. A full week of setup before a single song was attempted.

Then it briefly worked. “Initially, things went well for a couple weeks as we wound up recording keeper drum tracks for about 5 songs, and then began the overdubbing process. However, after a couple weeks together, the vibe started to fall apart and eventually Jack Douglas walked out because of ‘too many cooks and difference in opinions’.”

Management was careful that no copies or duplicates of any songs were made or released to anyone. Douches rated the material itself: “it was good, and a bit on the classic side of Aerosmith with a bit of a metal edge rather than a blues rock influence.”

The work did not end entirely at Grand Slam. Even later sessions produced overdubs at the Record Plant in New York with engineer Lee DeCarlo. Exact dates for any of this are unclear, and it is unsure whether the Douches assisted block was the only tracking session or simply the last.

Nobody Showed Up

Douches’s clearest memory captures where the band stood in the world by 1984: “Management was very concerned about the band being swarmed by fans and groupies, and gave us quite a warning that no one was to enter the studio that was not on a cleared list. Well… as it turned out… no one ever showed up and no one cared. I remember watching Steven walking across the street into the store, and no one even noticed who he was.”

Inside the room, each member handled it differently. Tyler was “a pretty amazing guy… very friendly and humble,” intense, and the band’s voice on the creative side of production; at one point he phoned Paul McCartney to ask how he had gotten a sound they admired on one of his songs. Hamilton was laid back, well prepared, and “the most ‘unaffected’ by what the band had been through.” Kramer was a little difficult, his drum performances under scrutiny, and not thrilled about recording in any studio in New Jersey. Crespo “seemed happy to be doing what he was doing. He was always on-time and ready with his parts.” Dufay was the most difficult of the bunch, still trying to prove himself, often making the interns do the stupid tasks, like finding specific food in the middle of the night. The crew had its own color: band-aids and towels for Joey had to match his skin and hair color, and, as Douches noted, it was the roadies who still needed to be in rehab.

One exchange points straight at what came next. Just before bringing Aerosmith in, Douglas had been working on a new Whitford St. Holmes album with Brad Whitford on guitar. “Steven knew this and was dying to hear some of the material that Brad was writing.” Weeks later Brad was guesting at the band’s New Year’s Eve show.

The Stalemate, in Crespo’s Words

“There were a lot of ideas, but not many extra tracks recorded. There were maybe a handful of extra tracks that didn’t make it, but we didn’t get very far. Columbia wouldn’t advance us any money for the follow-up album; they wanted to hear the demo recordings first. This created a stalemate situation, especially as Steven wasn’t in the best health. But there were a few ideas floating around. One of those tracks even surfaced on a bootleg CD. And another, ‘Riff and Roll,’ found its way onto ‘Pandora’s Box.’ There were maybe two or three others, and I’m not sure where they ended up. I also remember there was one other track I was working on with Renegade, which Steven and I ended up collaborating on, called something like ‘Well Run Dry’.”

What Happened to the Tapes?

When Grand Slam was later sold, Douches went by the studio and found that someone had bought all the used two inch multitrack reels. At least a half dozen Aerosmith outtake reels were still there. “Maybe someday they’ll show up. Or maybe they were just bulk erased… No one really cared about Aerosmith at that time… Too bad.”

The End of the Line

The collapse of these sessions closed the book on the alternate lineup. On February 14, 1984, Joe Perry, Billie Perry and Brad Whitford turned up at the band’s Orpheum Theater show in Boston; reunion talks began that night, and by April, Crespo and Dufay were out. The reunited five debuted that June, on the road to Done With Mirrors and the Permanent Vacation comeback.

The follow-up itself survives only in fragments: one repurposed song, a few bootlegged jams, and maybe half a dozen reels sitting unrecognized in somebody’s storage, waiting.