Going Down / Love in an Elevator

The Zoo Crew has got the turntable loaded with a little something from the Boston boys that still makes a room lean in and grin. Aerosmith, off the 1989 album Pump, and the cut is billed the way the record lists it: Going Down / Love in an Elevator. If you have ever stood in an old hotel lobby and heard that ding, you already know why the Zoo Freaks keep requesting it. Steven Tyler has never been shy about where the idea came from. Asked straight on whether he had ever tried love in an elevator, he shot back that yeah, he had done it. The lyrics, he said, were autobiographical. The story he has told more than once starts in a hotel hot tub with two young ladies, everybody in towels and bathrobes, and a decision to take the party upstairs. Somebody dropped a room key. Tyler got down on the floor to grab it. Heads met. One of the ladies, fully inebriated, was punching every floor button she could find. The doors opened on the lobby. Tyler later said it felt like a lifetime waiting for those doors to close.

That little spoken bit at the front, the one that gives the track its double name, was cut in the studio and not lifted from the video. The voice belongs to Catherine Epps, credited right on the Pump notes as the elevator operator. She runs through the floors like an old department-store car, then lands on the pause that still gets a laugh: going down. Tyler coached the take from the side of the booth. An engineer called it the strangest overdub he had ever done. Tyler corrected him. Greatest, he said. Joe Perry has a simpler way of remembering the sessions. It was spring when they cut the record at Little Mountain Sound in Vancouver, with Bruce Fairbairn producing and Mike Fraser engineering. Perry figured some bands just do boy-meets-girl better than others. The whoa-oh hook, Tyler has been careful to point out, was his before any outside writer got near it. It started as a work chant, something like working for the boss man, an answer-back from the old labor songs. If Desmond Child had walked in and asked them to sing whoa-oh, Tyler said he would have told him where to get off. The five of them close the thing a cappella, barbershop style, which is a long way from hair-metal formula and exactly why Pump still sounds like Aerosmith and nobody else.

The single went out in August 1989, a month ahead of the album. It climbed to number five on the Hot 100, sat at number one on the album-rock chart, and picked up a gold record. The Grammy nod for Best Hard Rock Performance that year went to Living Colour instead, which the band took in stride. The video, directed by Marty Callner, opens in the old Bullocks Wilshire department store in Los Angeles. The elevator operator there is Brandi Brandt, and she delivers the same going-down line to Tyler before the band kicks in. Perry wrote the lick with Tyler, and Tyler has always said he does not sit around trying to be profound. Joe throws him a riff, the riff talks, he scats until the blanks fill in. On Pump that method gave them Love in an Elevator and also Janie's Got a Gun, which Tom Hamilton had a hand in. Tyler told interviewers they did not feel extra pressure making the record. If they had caught this kind of success back in the seventies, he figured, they would not have survived it. Clean and sharp, they still had to prove it every night.

The official camp has kept the song in the conversation. On their own pages they have marked the Pump tour opening in October 1989, listed the album with Going Down / Love in an Elevator right there in the track order, and rolled out a 35th-anniversary colored vinyl of Pump with a grape-colored single tucked in. The store still carries Love in an Elevator shirts. That is a band that knows which records the faithful reach for.

None of that swagger showed up fully formed. Steven Tyler was born Steven Tallarico up in Yonkers, drumming and singing in a British-Invasion outfit called the Strangeurs, later Chain Reaction, a band that once opened for the Yardbirds and the Beach Boys. Summers he spent around Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire. Joe Perry was up there too, working a hamburger stand on the harbor and playing in the Jam Band with Tom Hamilton. They crossed paths in the late sixties, jammed, and figured each had something the other did not. By 1970 Tyler was done sitting behind a kit. He packed a suitcase, headed for New Hampshire, and told Perry and Hamilton he would join only if he could stand out front and sing. They said yes. The bunch landed in a roach-ridden apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, amps stacked so deep you had to walk sideways to reach the bathroom. Joey Kramer came in on drums. Ray Tabano held the other guitar until Brad Whitford took the chair a year or so later.

They could not settle on a name. For a while the posters just said Joe's new band or Steven's new band. The first show under the name Aerosmith happened on November 6, 1970, in the gym at Nipmuc Regional High School in Mendon, Massachusetts, a gig Perry's mother helped line up through a teacher. Admission was pocket change. The band got about fifty dollars, which, by their own later telling, covered the rent on that Commonwealth Avenue place. Tyler swiped a school shirt from the locker room and wore it. He and Perry argued about volume before the night was over. Perry's answer was the one he has given ever since: to do his thing, he has to be loud. From that gym they built the seventies records, Toys in the Attic and Rocks, the Blue Army in the front rows, the crash, the split, the long walk back. Permanent Vacation got them sober and back on the radio. Pump, with this elevator ride sitting near the top, shoved them down the world's throat in a way the seventies never quite managed.

That is the long road from a New Hampshire hamburger stand to a Vancouver studio and a spoken line that still makes a room laugh. The Zoo Crew will keep spinning it for the Zoo Freaks, deep cuts and hit singles in the same freeform pile, the way the old Dallas rock stations used to do it before the playlists got polite. You can ride along with the rest of the crew over at THE ZOO.

The band keeps the front door open at the official Aerosmith website, where the catalog and the store still point back at Pump and that elevator cut. They post on Facebook, where the Pump track list and the Love in an Elevator clips live in the archive, on Instagram, and on X, where the 35th-anniversary Pump vinyl got a proper shout. The Blue Army still gathers in the fan group Aero Force One, the long-running room for folks who want the talk kept on the band, the records, and the nights that started in a high-school gym and never really ended.