The Back-Burner: Aerosmith Outtakes & Demos

On June 25, 2001, Aerosmith stood inside Cipriani’s on 42nd Street in New York City to announce their partnership with Dodge, tethered to the rollout of the all-new 2002 Ram. Steven Tyler wielded a can of spray paint and tagged the tailgate of a Ram truck on stage. Robot women styled after the Hajime Sorayama gynoid on the Just Push Play cover posed alongside the vehicles. The truck would travel with the band on tour and be auctioned off for charity. A dedicated website, dodgeaerosmith.com, went live. (Getty Images archive · rockthisway.net archive)

The idea to link Dodge and Aerosmith originated with Fusion One, the Connecticut ad agency DaimlerChrysler had recruited that spring. According to Jim Schroer, Chrysler’s executive vice president of global sales and marketing, Fusion One initially worried the band might be too outrageous for DaimlerChrysler’s management. As it turned out, everyone loved the idea. Aerosmith, who had been in talks with another car company outside the US, signed on with Dodge instead. It was the band’s first-ever corporate sponsor. Tom Hamilton put it plainly: “We’ve been playing and touring for 30 years and have never had a corporate sponsor. But when Dodge asked if we would be interested, we thought it would be a great fit for a touring band like us… cars, trucks and racing. It’s all rock and roll.” Tyler, characteristically, offered his own take on the product: “What does ‘Ram’ stand for? Ready, Aim, Meet me in the backseat.”

The deal was steered on the Dodge side by Julie Roehm, Director of Dodge Marketing Communications, who had arrived at DaimlerChrysler weeks earlier with a mandate to turn around a brand bleeding sales, down over 16 percent through the first five months of the year. The outgoing campaign, “Dodge Different,” had been fronted by actor Edward Herrmann in a three-piece suit on a clean white stage. Roehm wanted the opposite. As she later recalled, the shift was “streetsmart versus booksmart,” and she reportedly took a helicopter ride to personally book Tyler. At the press conference she signalled the scale of what was coming: “Trust me, this is just the very tip of the iceberg. We have plans in the works that will touch every element of the Dodge family, customers, dealers and employees.” The new tagline, “Grab Life by the Horns,” replaced “Dodge Different” in August 2001. Schroer told UPI the ads would be “bold and uncompromising, a little edgy and occasionally confrontational, but always fun.” (UPI, Aug. 9, 2001 · Orlando Sentinel, July 5, 2001)

The activation went wide quickly. Dodge sponsored Aerosmith’s 48-city Just Push Play US tour. A concert video was edited to open some of Aerosmith’s shows, further confirming the depth of content created for the partnership well beyond the broadcast spots. A limited run of Aerosmith-branded Rams was produced, with Joe Perry telling LAUNCH on the day of the announcement: “I think it’s gonna be a pickup. We’ll have some influence over it, some input.” A private concert was planned for consumers who purchased the new truck. (Adweek, Sept. 24, 2001 · FleetOwner, Aug. 24, 2001)

On July 12, 2001, the band took a day off from the tour to visit DaimlerChrysler’s Technical Center in Auburn Hills, Michigan. More than 1,500 employees turned out, standing three and four deep around the railings and lining the escalators. Just Push Play tracks echoed off the ceiling of the Pentagon-sized building’s covered plaza. The crew wore black T-shirts reading “July 12, 2001. Live, Aerosmith does Dodge at DCX.” Tyler spray-painted another all-black Ram on site, then the band was whisked to the test track out back to drive Vipers and preview the 2003 Viper RT. An AP photo by Duane Burleson of Tyler writing “Aerosmith” on the hood of the Ram became Photo of the Day on Canada’s Canoe entertainment network.

Perry, meanwhile, summed up the Viper: “It’s everything your mother warned you about.” Footage of the Auburn Hills visit, including the band walking through the facility, survives in a production sizzle reel by Andor Steven Czompo, who worked as staff director at Ross Roy Communications and BBDO between 1996 and 2003. Ross Roy was DaimlerChrysler’s near-captive marketing services agency, handling merchandising and internal production across all Chrysler divisions.

A 60-second Dodge/AEROSMITH commercial — also titled Legends of Rock—Legends of Roll — debuted on May 24th and is scheduled to run through June 28 in 2,400 movie theaters (18,000 screens) in the continental United States. It was an advertisement for the dodge concert contest and showed pictures and video clips while playing ‘Just Push Play’.

The television campaign launched in September with two 30-second spots, “Reflections” and “Truckville,” during Monday Night Football on ABC. Creative came from PentaMark Worldwide in Troy, Michigan, with Bill Morden as chief creative director. Production was by Ritts/Hayden in Los Angeles, directed by Lance Kelleher and shot by Sal Totino on location in Irwindale, California, Salt Lake City, and Astoria and Salem, Oregon. Visual effects were handled by Digital Domain; editorial by Rock Paper Scissors. Roehm described the look as having “a real American truck attitude: proud, tough and full of energy.” The monochrome palette, the cinema-grade CGI, and remixes of “Just Push Play” gave the spots a weight that set them apart from standard truck advertising. (Auto123 · SHOOTonline, Nov. 16, 2001)

Those early chapters, “Reflections,” “Truckville,” “Baggage Claim,” are the ones most people can still track down, viewable across multiple YouTube uploads (here, here, and here). By April 3 2002, and Outta Your Head tv ad was airing, and by April 20 one using Sunshine.

None featured the band on camera. The campaign worked. By late November, Joey Kramer was telling Billboard: “The commercial is what is selling that song right now. We have so many requests for it at radio, via the commercial, that we ended up releasing it as a single.” Mainstream top-40 spins for “Just Push Play” jumped 350% in a single week. Columbia had been planning to push “Sunshine” beyond rock formats instead, but the Dodge-fuelled demand made the title track the obvious call. (Billboard, Nov. 27, 2001)

The real pivot came in October. AF1 and later Blabbermouth quoted Tom Hamilton saying the band had shot a Dodge commercial “last week” in which they appear performing both “Under My Skin” and “Light Inside.” Recording took place in an old warehouse in Los Angeles. Hamilton added: “It’s interesting having this giant corporate entity wanting to use deep rockers from the new album. We’ll get our musical message out to the far and wide.” That pins the filming window to roughly October 10 to 21, and confirms that Dodge produced at least one performance-based spot using “Under My Skin.” (Blabbermouth, Oct. 25, 2001)

The same Billboard piece that quoted Kramer also nailed down the air date. In that November 27 interview, Kramer confirmed that “beginning next week, a different Dodge commercial using the same track will be airing with Aerosmith appearing on camera.” That places the on-camera debut in early December 2001.

Everything about this spot set it apart. Where “Reflections” and “Truckville” lived in monochrome, this version was in full colour with a distinctly industrial look. The narrative, as consistently remembered by viewers, follows a young woman working on an assembly line inside a gritty factory. Metallic, harshly lit, all steel and mechanised rhythm. Intercut with her work are shots of Aerosmith performing “Under My Skin” on a matching industrial stage: think metal, hard edges, big fans, the same textures.

The spot reportedly ends with the woman stepping outside, finding the band waiting beside the truck, and tossing the keys to Tyler, as he grabs them and smiles.

An interesting wrinkle: in May 2002, Adweek reported that Aerosmith would make their “first onscreen appearance” for Dodge in a spot running exclusively in movie theatres that summer. Chrysler VP of marketing Jeff Bell confirmed to Adweek that the contract was “open-ended.” Dodge had spent $500 million on measured media in 2001 alone. If the theatrical spot was framed as their first on-camera appearance, that raises questions about the December 2001 broadcast version. Was the TV spot a limited run? Was the theatrical edit a longer or reworked cut from the same October shoot? (Adweek, May 15, 2002)

One surviving trace of the shoot does appear in what seems to be that theatrical piece: a restored compilation often labelled the “Dodge Legends Sweepstake” commercial. At around 0:58 (timestamped), there’s a close-up of Tyler in a pink jacket, a shot that appears to originate from the same industrial set. The full upload contains fragments from that shoot but doesn’t present the performance spot in isolation. (Full video)

If Aerosmith filmed both “Under My Skin” and “Light Inside” on a purpose-built industrial set in mid-October 2001, more footage almost certainly exists than what was cut into the final broadcast or theatrical version. Whether it sits in an archive at PentaMark, a vault at Ritts/Hayden or Ross Roy, a DaimlerChrysler storage facility, or has simply never been digitised is anyone’s guess. The full standalone performance spot remains one of the more tantalising lost artefacts of the Just Push Play era: documented in trade press, confirmed by the band, dated to air by Kramer himself, partially visible in compilation fragments and production reels, but still out of reach.