Let the Music Do the Talking

The Zoo Crew has got a reunion record spinning for the Zoo Freaks, and it kicks the door in the way a band does when the old gang has finally piled back into the same room. "Let the Music Do the Talking" opens Done with Mirrors, the 1985 album that put Joe Perry and Brad Whitford back beside Steven Tyler, Tom Hamilton, and Joey Kramer. The single hit the streets in September of that year, climbed to number 18 on the Mainstream Rock chart, and then the album itself landed on November 4. Radio folks who lived through it will tell you the comeback everybody remembers came a couple of years later. This was the first swing, raw as a garage rehearsal and proud of it.

The tune did not start life as an Aerosmith number. Perry wrote it after he walked out in 1979, fed up with the crawl of the Night in the Ruts sessions and the money mess that came with them. He put together the Joe Perry Project with singer Ralph Morman, bassist David Hull, drummer Ronnie Stewart, and old producer Jack Douglas, and the song became the title track of their 1980 album. That record moved about a quarter of a million copies, the best the Project ever did. Perry later said the title track spoke for itself. He did not need to explain. He wanted his own timetable and his own speed, which was pretty fast. In his book Rocks he called the songs largely autobiographical, and this one was the plainest statement of the bunch.

When Perry came back in 1984, Tyler and the rest wanted that barnstormer on the new record. They cut it again with a slightly different melody, a shorter running time, and fresh lyrics from Tyler. It is one of the few Aerosmith songs with no writing credit for the singer on the original. Perry owned the whole thing the first time around, a guitar player's letter about letting the amp do the talking. Tyler kept the spirit and bent the words toward the reunion, the brand-new drug of the five of them in one room again. Critic Chuck Eddy heard the Aerosmith take as tougher than the Project version, with Perry's guitar talking like an elephant while Tyler rode the lyric.

The session itself was a strange marriage. Geffen had signed the rebuilt band, and Ted Templeman, the man behind so many Van Halen records, took the chair. They worked out of a room that did not suit him, and years later he said his unfamiliarity with the space left the guitars and Joey Kramer's drums muted in places. Perry has looked back on the rest of the album as raw and dirty, the record they had to make before they could figure out the next step. He still wishes a few more overdubs had landed, but the opening cut did what it was built to do. It hurtles out on a murderous slide riff and does not apologize.

The sleeve was a gag only a rock band would try. Every bit of type on the original jacket was printed backward, so you had to hold the thing up to a mirror to read the name. Done with Mirrors was the joke, a kick at the coke years and a dare to the mirror. Some folks in the business figured the pun, or the decision to lead with a five-year-old Project song, kept the album from catching the wider crowd. Viacom hand Doug Herzog later recalled that after this record a lot of people thought Aerosmith was finished, a bit of a joke. The loyal Blue Army bought it. Everybody else waited.

The clip that went with the single was shot at the Orpheum Theatre in Boston, directed by Jerry Kramer, and staged like a bunch of kids filming the band on the sly. The white-shirted security in the frame were not the theater's usual crew. They were bouncers pulled in that evening from the old Channel nightclub. The song stuck around after the album cooled. It turned up on the live set Classics Live II in 1987, rode the Permanent Vacation tour, and has rotated through the set ever since. On THE ZOO it still sounds like a band that had something to prove and a guitar that was done explaining.

None of that reunion happens if the original five never find each other in the first place, and that story starts in the lake country of New Hampshire, not in a boardroom. Perry was working part-time at a hamburger joint on the harbor in Sunapee in the summer of 1966 when a loud outfit called Chain Reaction came through. The singer was still going by Steven Tallarico. They made a mess of a table, started a food fight, and left Perry to clean it up. He has called them loud, obnoxious, big fish in a small pond, playing the part before they were anybody. A few years on, Tyler and future drummer Joey Kramer crossed paths with Perry again around The Barn in Sunapee. Tyler had been behind the drums himself, got into a fistfight with his guitar player one night, packed a suitcase, and headed north to where Perry was playing.

Perry and bassist Tom Hamilton had a band of their own. Tyler heard them and wanted in, on one condition. He was going to be the frontman, not the drummer. They agreed. Ray Tabano came along from Tyler's old circle and was soon replaced by Brad Whitford. With Kramer on the kit, the lineup that would own the seventies was set by the end of 1970. They piled into a roach-ridden apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, the place fans still call the Aerosmith apartment. Perry has said every room turned into a party room, and the hallway was so jammed with amps you had to walk sideways to reach the bathroom. They ground it out in clubs around Massachusetts and New York until Clive Davis caught the bar band in 1972 and signed them to Columbia.

The first album arrived in the fall of 1973 and barely charted. "Dream On" was a modest hit. The road did the rest, opening for the Kinks, Mott the Hoople, and whoever else would have them, until Toys in the Attic and Rocks turned the denim crowd into the Blue Army. Perry's exit in Cleveland in 1979, Whitford's departure a couple of years later, and the long walk back to Done with Mirrors are the middle chapters. "Let the Music Do the Talking" is the door they kicked open on the way through.

The band keeps the story posted at the Aerosmith official website, where the Done with Mirrors notes name the song right at the top of the track list. The same cut is listed first on the Done with Mirrors CD in the official store. Day to day chatter runs through Facebook, Instagram, and X. Die-hard Blue Army talk collects in the Aero Force One group, the long-running fan circle named for the club Ray Tabano helped start back when the wings logo was still a fresh T-shirt idea. Put the record on, turn it up, and let the slide guitar finish the sentence.