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On Billboard Just Push Play has moved up to #19 (up from #22 last week) with sales of around 74,000 copies. Jaded fell one spot on the Hot 100 to #14 and on the Adult Top 40 to #7.
Aeroforceone members wanting tickets go to Aeroforceone.com and fill out the contact information sheet to get on the ticket info list.
Aerosmith.com and sfx.com have the official tour dates up for about half of the tour. vh1.com is listing the whole tour, but i'm not sure if those are all confirmed or not. Still no news on how the new fanclub is working with tickets for members.
Rolling Stone this month (Steven & Joe on the cover) has a great story on the boys and some new and old pics.
AF1 is no longer Aerosmith's fanclub, they are in the middle of changing to Fansrule (www.fansrule.com). From what I've heard the benifits and miles are going to be continued and they are trying to make it even better. I'll get back to you with more when everything gets straightened out.
Just Push Play has been certified platinum. It dropped to #9 on Billboard's album chart. Jaded has fallen to #8 on the hot 100, but climbed to #6 on the adult top 40. On the pop catalog, Big Ones has dropped to #9 and Greatest Hits to #13.
From UK's Daily Telegraph:
In a Brazilian interview the boys listed their fav songs from the new album as follows:
for last months news click here
Who would have believed it? Stadium rockers Aerosmith are cooler than ever. Andrew Perry meets them
'DUDE," asks Steven Tyler, in all seriousness, "have you got any Sudafed?" As luck would have it, I have some herbal aromatherapy oil for sinus pains. Tyler shakes a few drops on to a napkin, runs it back and forth under his nose and, his huge mouth stretched into a grin, snorts lavishly.
His partner, guitarist Joe Perry, slumps into an armchair and dramatically thumps a half-litre bottle of beer on the table. He picks at the edges of the label, which reminds him that this is the kind of beer that has no alcohol in it.
If you had run into these two 25 years ago, of course, the drink and the drugs would have been premium-strength, and the ensuing conversation pretty much incomprehensible. Back then, Tyler and Perry were known as the Toxic Twins, and their band transgressed new frontiers in superstar decadence.
In the mid-Seventies, when stadium giants such as the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin were taking two or more years to make an album, Aerosmith became America's favourite rock 'n' roll band, touring voraciously on a diet of booze, pills, cocaine, heroin and little in the way of food.
Between 1977 and 1985, their consumption took its toll, their records stopped selling and their lives fell apart. But pragmatists if nothing else, the band's members, now in their early fifties, have since shrewdly transformed themselves into one of the biggest fixtures in the modern rock world again.
Of course, Aerosmith in 2001 are more than faintly ridiculous. They are wilfully, gloriously, mercifully ridiculous. And for rock fans who have had it up to here with the Limp Bizkits and the Radioheads telling them that stardom is a bad trip, man, they are saviours.
Our interview takes place in Munich, where the band are spending a couple of days promoting their energetic new album, Just Push Play (WEA). It's the kind of chore that other artists might resent, but Tyler and Perry, who are jet lagged, having just flown in from their home of Boston, seem positively happy to be here.
"All the talk shows, all that s-, it sucks, man," says Perry, "but you know . . . I get to drive an Aston Martin."
The new album's cover features a cartoon of a very female robot, whose skimpy yellow dress billows up a la Marilyn Monroe. Five real-life versions of these robo-babes are draped around the set of a meet-the-fans show that is being filmed for MTV Europe shortly before we meet.
One of the models has an arrow through her helmet, like a cyber Tommy Cooper, and clanks past me in a huff. "Bloody hell," she moans in thick Bavarian German, on her way back under the lights, "I'm sweating like a pig in here." It's a very Aerosmith moment.
Perry is in black, right down to the skiing shades that save him from the glare of our interview room's harsh lighting: two candles. His partner is wearing rose-tinted spectacles, which seems appropriate, and has hippy-dippy scarves draped all over him.
Though Tyler clearly finds it hard to concentrate on the question at hand and answer it, he is lucid enough to see that salacious stories from the band's past are grist to the mill when it comes to promotional work. There's a famous one about the time, towards the end of the Seventies, when they were so bored with playing the same set every night at enormogigs that they decided to play their set backwards, starting with the encore. Unfortunately, they were so "confused" at the time that, after they had finished the first song, they all walked off.
"That's such a crock," says Tyler, shaking his head in disbelief at my gullibility. "So, we recognised the first song as being the last, and thought the set was over? Yeah, right!"
"It's not exactly true," Perry corrects, "but it sounds good. What actually happened was that we played the same song twice because we'd forgotten that we'd already played it. I remember that happening. We're not exactly proud of it. The bottom line is, our fans stopped coming to our shows."
"We felt so good," Tyler concludes, "that our fans walked out. We didn't realise what was going on."
In 1979, Perry and rhythm guitarist Brad Whitford quit the band. In 1984, Perry's manager, Tim Collins, persuaded them both to rejoin, and the whole band to go through rehab. "We saw that it was killing us," Tyler says.
While the band were in recovery, they were approached by the fledgling stars of rap, Run DMC, to try recording a hip-hop version of Walk this Way, the libidinous anthem that Aerosmith first recorded in 1975 and whose title came from a catchphrase of Marty Feldman's Igor in Young Frankenstein. "We just thought, 'What's this gonna be?' " Tyler recalls, but the track swiftly became their biggest worldwide hit, and the accompanying video a staple on the increasingly influential MTV. Since then, it's been onwards and upwards.
'Hey, man," says Perry, "it's still a party for us. Some people have trouble with the balance of having a home life. I don't see it as being two separate things. It's part of what fulfils me, having a family, but they know me for what I am. I was doing this long before I met my wife and had the kids. It's like, this is what we do.
"I'm a rock 'n' roll gipsy. It's what I was, and always will be. And it's a gas to get out there and play. Tomorrow night when we play, it's going to be a wild ride. It's going to be electric and it's going to be lubricated."
Indeed, the following night at Munich's 1,500-capacity Babylon club, the shades are off, the shirts are unbuttoned and everything is very much as Perry predicted. It's as if punk, Spinal Tap, political correctness, Aids, Radiohead and all the little nuisances that have ever threatened Aerosmith's methodology never happened.
It's the band's first full gig together in 18 months and, in these abnormally non-stadium surroundings, they choose to treat the audience - mostly made up of kids who probably weren't even born when Walk this Way first came out - to a set mostly made up of their classic Seventies powerhouse R&B material.
"The creative power," muses Tyler afterwards, "or whatever it is that this band is when five of us are on stage, I think we've all been in awe of that. It's the original tyres on the Ferrari. It's still there, and it works, and we all feel like doing it, and no one's going bald and fat and doesn't give a s-. Everybody looks good and wants to rock.
"The same questions come up: how long are you planning on doing this? Well, no one thought we'd be doing it this old - or this young." Perry leans back and sighs into his alcohol-free beverage. "I'm just glad the Stones are still doing it, so we don't have to be the oldest ones."
Tom: Avant Garden
Joey: Beyond Beautiful
Steven: Just Push Play
Joe: Under My Skin
Brad: Luv Lies