The Back-Burner: Aerosmith Outtakes & Demos

A short jam appeared on a tape labelled “Done with Mirrors” test pressing. The majority of the tape is the “Done With Mirrors” album out of sequence, but in finished form, sans for a few count-ins.

But this curious guitar-based jam is first up, unfinished and doesn’t sound like anything on the album. The riffs are subtle, cool and stick in one’s head.

The jam is played on the key of A at 119BPM, very simple stuff, and sounds like it could very well be part of a pre-production session with Steven in drums and Joe adding random guitar parts ideas. Sounds like a first take, as plenty of mistakes are present, including out of tune guitar playing and missed beats.

However, there is no real way of knowing who is behind the recording or the real source of the tape, hence the speculation about this being a fan inset (an unknown band hoping to get others to hear their instrumental music or simple tease Aerosmith fans), especially once one asks the obvious question, why would a test press of an album include such an unfinished jam as an opening track? This is one of those mysteries that would be really hard to solve unless someone in the band (or with access to the official Vindaloo archives) was able to confirm if its origin.

The track ends with a voice on the left channel saying something like “it’s over there/glad we got that/without a doubt, ok, Jesus”. After cleaning the audio and carefully listening to this section, we are still unsure if it is Tyler or Perry speaking, while there are hints of Tyler’s tone of voice, we are inclined towards thinking it’s someone else (a bootlegger messing with us all) and the possibility of this instrumental being wrongly attributed to Aerosmith (a random amateur band rehearsing in a garage somewhere).

But what do you think? does this sound like an Aerosmith jam? is it Steven talking at the end? do you know what the real source of the tape is?