The Back-Burner: Aerosmith Outtakes & Demos

Mama Kin Music Hall had been open barely eleven months when Aerosmith decided to sneak back onto its stage. The band had christened the club in December 1994 as a kind of pay-back to Boston’s bar scene, and they never stopped boasting about its specs. “Mama Kin was the first song I wrote. I poured what I knew into the piano, the guitar, and that gave birth to ‘Mama Kin’. So I took that title and named the club after it,” Steven Tyler told visitors, adding with a grin, “Now, with the big microphone out, people come from all over the world to try our brew of the month — some of Aerosmith’s famous sanctified mead.” Joe Perry spelled out the engineering brief: “We wanted a good sound system and a recording studio in the basement. One of the things when you’re playing clubs is that the sound always sucks, so the most important thing for us was to make sure it sounded good — and it did sound good.” Tyler pushed the pitch over the top: “Four-thousand screaming watts of sound, which will raise or lower your socks at any given moment.”

Those watt-meters would red-line again on 10 November 1995. The Get a Grip world tour had wound up a year earlier, the band were knee-deep in song-writing for what would become Nine Lives, and everyone was itching to feel an audience. Word leaked that Aerosmith would play two tiny warm-ups under the tongue-in-cheek alias “The G-Spots.” Tickets — US $7, cash only — vanished from three downtown record shops within hours. On show day Lansdowne Street filled with believers; club staff handed out hot drinks against the chill while security wanded every body for hidden DAT machines. Bootleggers went home empty-handed, and that single act of vigilance is why the concert has haunted collectors for three decades. No tape, no audience cassette, not even a fuzzy VHS — nothing but memory.

At 11 p.m. the houselights fell and Tyler, wearing ripped jeans stamped with lipstick kisses, sauntered to the mic: “Good evening. As you already know — we’re the G-Spots.” Behind him hung the band’s old Woodstock-era demon banners, this time pointing away from one another, a subtle hint of tension that fans would puzzle over years later when drummer Joey Kramer revealed he’d slipped into what he called a “big blues funk.” Within weeks of the gig, Kramer’s depression would deepen so badly that he left Miami pre-production sessions and the band were forced to track parts of Nine Lives without him. On this night, though, the quintet sounded anything but fragile — tight, explosive, and visibly thrilled to be crammed onto a three-foot stage again.

They opened with “Make It,” barreled through “Bone to Bone,” and then detonated four songs no one outside their rehearsal room had ever heard. “Trouble” rasped like a souped-up Albert King riff. “Something,” fronted by Perry, thumped so hard it would lie dormant until 2012. For “The Farm,” Tyler triggered a loop of a wailing infant through a white cassette deck, a trick jettisoned on the eventual studio cut. “What Kind of Love Are You On” roared like mid-seventies Aerosmith and would resurface two years later on the Armageddon soundtrack. In the middle of “Sick as a Dog” Tyler swiped Tom Hamilton’s bass while Hamilton shook maracas, and the set barrelled on through Yardbirds, Zeppelin and swamp-blues covers until the finale of “Immigrant Song.” The definitive set list has since been confirmed by fan diaries and by setlist.fm’s archive.

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Boston Herald critic Steve Morse called the evening a “knock-down wallop,” while DJ John Laurenti floated out muttering that it was “the best show I’ve ever seen Aerosmith play.” The band’s own tour staff later acknowledged that a single fixed camera captured the gig — but that the tape was sealed in the so-called Vindaloo Vault the moment the crowd spilled onto Lansdowne Street. With no audience recording to leak, the show became the ultimate white whale in an already bootleg-rich catalogue. For nearly thirty years die-hards debated everything from guitar tunings to what colour scarf Tyler did not wear.

Then, in June 2025, the impossible happened. Aerosmith’s official socials posted an excerpt of “S.O.S. (Too Bad)” cut straight from the house feed: a wide angle of the entire band, stereo board audio, and the demon banners unmistakably facing outward, not inwards as folklore had always insisted. The clip’s provenance left no doubt that the full tape has been digitised. Instantly speculation flared: was Universal Music Group preparing a Nine Lives deluxe box? Would Joey Kramer’s looming exit — and eventual triumphant return — serve as the emotional through-line? And, most tantalising of all, would fans finally hear pro-shot versions of “Trouble,” “Something,” “The Farm” and “What Kind of Love Are You On” with the original line-up firing on all cylinders?

Whatever the label decides, the 1995 G-Spots show remains a singular moment: the night Aerosmith walked off an arena tour, squeezed into their own 200-cap room, and roared like a band with everything still to prove. Tyler had warned years earlier, “With all the good equipment to play out of here, it’s not gonna make your band sound any better — if you sound like crap, you’re going to sound double-time crap out to the house.” On 10 November 1995 every watt of Mama Kin’s PA testified that they sounded nothing like crap — they sounded hungry, unified, and, for ninety irretrievable minutes, absolutely untouchable.