Guitarist Joe Perry reported last week that he thinks the band have at least one more album in them before they retire – and hinted that the upcoming live dates weren’t the last they would play together.
Now Tyler has told People.com that he “can’t say for sure” if the end is in sight.
He explains, “We’ve gone through trying to get a job in a club that we thought was the only way we could pay our rent – to being in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, and everything in between – rehabs, arguments, children being born, marriages coming and going, ups and downs, different managers, lawsuits and record labels.
We’ve done so much – one thing we’ve never done is a farewell tour, so you never know – it may wipe the slate clean of some of the problems, things that happen with each other.”
He adds, “The band’s been together for 40 years. Can you imagine? There are no marriages together for 40 years where the passion still runs as deep as it did the first 10 years, in my humble opinion – but the passion is still there.”
Tyler also admits he still gets emotional when Aerosmith are onstage and playing their classic tracks in front of their fans.
He says, “At rehearsal the other day, I haven’t seen the guys in a long time, and we have our differences. It’s outrageous the s–t that sometimes gets in the way.
But once we start playing, I get as emotional as people in the audience when they hear songs like Love In An Elevator or Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing or Walk This Way. It triggers their remembrances of way back when.
“The feeling you get playing, there’s nothing else like it. It’s like sex, it’s like an orgasm – what music can make you feel like – it’s the best friend you have, times 50.
“So I’m really looking forward to being on tour with them. Performing for two hours, my body wakes up, so it’s totally aerobic and it just turns into the way it was when I was 18, so it feels great.”
Martin Kielty of Ultimate Classic Rock wrote a feature article on guitarist, Berne Tome, who played seven shows with Ozzy Osbourne, after Randy Rhoads was tragically killed in plane crash. Excerpts from the story appear, below.
Former Black Sabbath vocalist Ozzy was suffering on the road in 1982. The Diary of a Madman tour, supporting the release of his second album, had already featured his notorious bat-biting incident, his collapse on stage, his even more notorious Alamo scandal and a heated disagreement between him and guitarist Randy Rhoads. The singer would later go on to shave off his hair in an attempt to escape his personal torment, while several sets of dates were postponed as he struggled with addiction and depression.
On March 19th, Rhoads was killed during a flight on a small plane. The musicians had loved and respected each other – but they were in disagreement about their future directions when the tragedy struck. Ozzy’s manager and later wife, Sharon Arden, seemed to feel that if Osbourne stopped at that point, he might never return to music. So their thoughts turned to replacing Randy, and they quickly settled on Torme, who’d recently quit Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan’s solo band.
“I’d been on Jet, Don Arden’s label, and I kind of knew Sharon,” Torme told Ultimate Classic Rock. “I was on the periphery of the family, and I’d just left Ian. They thought, ‘He’s out of a job – he’ll jump at it!’” But he had his own album and tour to work on. “Big artists have a thing where it’s totally incomprehensible that anyone would say ‘no.’ When I was saying, ‘I can’t, I have all this going on,’ David Arden [Don’s son] was thinking, ‘He’s probably only saying that to up his price. Typical muso!’”
Bills need to be paid, and so when David offered Torme £2000 a week, and paid a week’s wages in advance, the guitarist agreed to step in – as long as it was only for a month. So he flew out to the U.S. to join a band that included keyboardist Don Airey, bassist Rudy Sarzo and drummer Tommy Aldridge. “When I got there Sharon told me it wasn’t 2,000 pounds a week… it was 200 dollars a week. She said, ‘David’s on drugs. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ I said, ‘But I’ve had two grand already!’ She said, ‘Well then, we ain’t going to pay you anything until it’s paid off.’ Start off on the best footing!…”
…“It was horrible,” he said of the emotional situation. “I was out there on the Thursday and Randy had died the previous Saturday. It wasn’t even a week. I don’t think anyone spoke to me the day I arrived, other than Don Airey. It was a really bad atmosphere, and understandably so. I suppose, on some level, Tommy and Don wanted to carry on. Ozzy had no desire and Rudy certainly hadn’t.”
An audition successfully passed, three days of rehearsals took place, and Torme began to realize the lose-lose position he’d got himself into. “Even if I played okay, even if I played a nice solo or whatever, if anyone looked at me on stage they thought, ‘Oh, s—. It isn’t Randy.’ The first show [April 1 in Bethlehem, Pa.] was appalling. I didn’t have my amps, my pedals and I had one guitar. There were three or four tracks where we re-tuned and I had to use a hire guitar that was a piece of s—. And apart from anything else, I did not know the songs.
“It was incredibly hard to hear anything on that stage – you had the castle and everything, and all I could hear was the snare drum and Ozzy. I was literally stood at the bottom of Tommy’s pyramid, staring up trying to see when he was hitting things. It was really terrifying.”
And Ozzy? “He was having a really bad time. I’d come off stage and he’d be standing at the back, crying his eyes out. Any day off he was out of his face. He wasn’t able to cope. I think he had a terror because his career has been in complete s— for years, and he’d had a kind of life again because of Randy. And again, I had this situation where Sharon and him thought I was just playing hard to get. I was saying, ‘I have to go home in a month – I have this tour booked,’ and they were going, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ Ozzy, underneath his persona, is really insecure, so Sharon was protecting him by saying, ‘Bernie really wants to do it, Ozzy.’”
On reflection, Torme feels it’s likely that he was Don Arden’s pawn in a political game that stretched across the Atlantic, between Jet Records in the U.K. and their U.S. distributors. “By the time we did Madison Square Garden I was fairly okay. I wasn’t by any means playing what Randy played; I wasn’t even able to try. When we got to MSG I kept saying, ‘When’s the sound check?’ They said, ‘Don’t worry about that.’ I didn’t get a sound check – they told me, ‘The record company demanded that we try out Earl Slick!’ I was pissed off about that. I’m here, I’ve carried off these shows, you keep asking me to stay… and then you do that?”
He only met Night Ranger guitarist Brad Gillis – who would go on to take over the guitar slot in Osbourne’s band on April 13, after Torme had played just seven shows – by accident…He said, ‘I’m here because the label think you’re going to f— off.’ Don Airey was the only person who had any interest in auditioning anyone, so I said, ‘Don, I want to go home. This guy is great. Give him an audition.’ I’d already told Ozzy and Sharon that I was leaving, but that I’d hang on until they found a replacement. Then I discovered they were carrying a replacement but they wouldn’t audition him!…”
…[Torme] went home the next day, believing that his frontman still had a low opinion of him. “When I’d gone to their hotel suite to say, ‘I’m going to leave,’ Ozzy had looked absolutely flummoxed. Sharon said, ‘It’s because he wants to play a completely different type of music, Ozzy.’ It was protective, and I understand it, so I’d just gawped and said, ‘Yeah!’
“I saw Oz when they did the U.K. tour. Rudy had left and they had Pete Way on bass, and I think Don had left too. We had a laugh, but it was very stressed because there was a massive row in the dressing room between Tommy and Pete. I came away thinking, ‘I’m glad I’m not doing this!…’”
“…For years I regretted that I hadn’t met Randy,” he said. “Five or six years ago I met his brother Kelly and had a long chat. There were a lot of things I didn’t know. He was half-Irish; I’d always thought he was pure Yank. That’s a small, tribal thing to say, but it made a difference to me. It helped with the emotional aspect.
“People just don’t understand what it was like. You get the most inane comments, and people are allowed to say anything, but it was emotionally a terribly hard thing for me. I still have nightmares about it.
“I’m glad I was able to keep people’s wages being paid, but at the same time I think, ‘Would you have done it if you hadn’t been offered two grand a week? You selfish bastard!’ But then I think, ‘Ah yes… but I did good.’”
Beautiful Creatures have released a remixed, remastered (by Anthony Focx), re-sequenced deluxe edition of their sophomore album Deuce, which will include the brand new song Get You High – the band’s first new song released since 2004.
Following Beautiful Creature’s self titled release in 2001, the core band (Joe LeSte (Vocals), Kenny Kweens (Bass) and Anthony Focx (Guitar) immediately entered the studio with a new lineup which included lead guitarist Alex Grossi and began recording material for the follow-up to their debut, which would end up being titled Deuce.
Produced and mixed by guitarist Anthony Focx, with additional production by Beautiful Creatures founding member Kenny Kweens, Deuce was released worldwide in 2005 and ultimately landed premier placements on the hit FX TV series Sons Of Anarchy, the Walt Disney/Touchstone hit film The Proposal starring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds as well multiple other TV & movie soundtracks.
Kenny Kweens states, “Deuce was NEVER properly released digitally due to all the changes in technology during that particular time period – We are really looking forward to everyone hearing “Deuce” as it was meant to be sonically in a digital medium.”
“We are really excited to be doing this”, says Joe LeSte “We have all been through a lot both personally and professionally as a band – and even though we have all gone down different roads, whenever we see each other or chat on the phone, it’s like no time has gone by at all. I saw Kenny (Kweens) and Alex (Grossi) on the last Monsters Of Rock cruise, we ended up all onstage together playing a Beautiful Creatures tune, it was really fun – within 48 hours, all of our phones lit up. So, we collectively said – F#ck it, let’s go for it- and well, here we are!”
Beautiful Creatures Deuce Deluxe features every track the band recorded for the Japanese Release (JVC Records) as well as the U.S. Release (Spitfire/Eagle Rock), In one digital package that has been re-mixed and remastered. It will also include new album cover artwork and edits that up until now, were not included in either initial release.
Anthrax have released a stream of their cover of Kansas classic Carry On Wayward Son, listen to it below.
The song appears on the seven inch vinyl box set of For All Kings, which was released earlier this month.
Drummer Charlie Benante tells The Aquarian that he has long been a fan of the song, which originally appeared on Kansas’ 1976 album Leftoverture – and played along to it as a teenager.
Ben ante adds, “I had to go back into the hard drive of my brain and remember how to play the song. We wanted to do it justice.”
The new box set contains a total of ten seven inch singles, with each disc featuring a For All Kings track along with B-sides showcasing demos and covers.
Anthrax will head out on the road with Killswitch Engage and Code Orange next week – but the drummer says that despite their busy schedule, he’s already thinking about their next album.
He says, “I think there are two or three tracks that we could dust off and use as a starting point. I’d say maybe sometime this summer we could work on new material.”
However he adds, “I feel like we’re not done with For All Kings yet. We’re all so proud of it, and I feel like it still has some life to it.”
Anthrax previously released a stream of the track Vice Of The People from the box set. Find a list of their 2017 tour dates below.
Anthrax, Killswitch Engage, Code Orange 2017 North American tour:
Apr 3: Silver Spring The Fillmore, MD
Apr 4: Wallingford Oakdale Theatre, CT
Apr 5: Philadelphia Electric Factory, PA
Apr 7: Grand Rapids 20 Monroe Live, MI
Apr 8: Detroit The Fillmore, MI
Apr 11: Raleigh Ritz Raleigh, NC
Apr 12: Atlanta Tabernacle, GA
Apr 13: Orlando House of Blues, FL
Apr 15: Austin Grizzly Hall Texas Independence Fest, TX
Apr 17: Houston House of Blues, TX
Apr 18: Dallas House of Blues, TX
Apr 22: Los Angeles The Wiltern, CA
Apr 23: San Francisco The Fillmore, CA
Apr 28: Denver The Fillmore, CO
Apr 29: Omaha Sokol Auditorium And Underground, NE
Apr 30: Kansas City The Midland, MO
May 1: St Louis The Pageant, MO
May 3: Toronto The Danforth Music Hall, ON
May 5: Huntington The Paramount, NY
Throughout his forty year music career Bob Kulick has worked with an astonishing array of artists: From Meat Loaf to Motorhead. From KISS to Michael Bolton. W.A.S.P. to Diana Ross as well as legends such as Roger Daltrey, Alice Cooper, Lou Reed and Paul Stanley’s first solo album and tour.
After serving as a sideman and producer for much of his professional career, Kulick has decided that it was time to release a solo album – and he brought along a few of his good friends to support him in the endeavour.
Joining Bob on the album are:
Lead vocalists – Dee Snider, Robin McAuley, Andrew Freeman, Vick Wright, Todd Kerns, David Glen Eisley, Dennis St James
Bassists – Rudy Sarzo, Chuck Wright, Bobby Ferrari, Bruce Kulick, Dennis St James, Kjell Benner
Keyboardists – Doug Katsaros, Jimmy Waldo
Drummers – Vinny Appice, Frankie Banali, Eric Singer, Brent Fitz, Scot Coogan, Chuck Burgi, Bobby Rock, Jay Schellen
With Bob himself providing all of the guitar tracks and co-producing the album along with Bobby Ferrari at Vegas View Recording in Las Vegas, NV.
Skeletons in the Closet will be released in late Spring through Vanity Music Group (distributed via RED / Sony Music).
Half of Skeletons in the Closet is comprised of brand new material while the other half is comprised of retrospective material from Bob’s albums with Murderer’s Row and Skull.
“After finishing the five new songs, the idea of including five of my favourite songs from my past rounded things out nicely,” Bob says. “Brand New songs and then the ‘skeletons in the closet!'”
The tracklisting for Skeletons in the Closet is as follows:
Player
Not Before You
London
Goldfinger
Rich Man
India (from Murderer’s Row)
Skeletons in the Closet (from Murderer’s Row)
Guitar Commandos (from Skull – also features a guitar duel with Bruce Kulick)
Can’t Stop the Rock (Previously unreleased track)
Eyes of a Stranger (from Skull)
His talents have earned Kulick a dozen gold and platinum records, and aside from writing for the traditional album format, he’s written and performed songs for Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob Square Pants (David Glen Eisley’s “Sweet Victory”) and the theme song for WWE’s Superstar Wrestler Triple H, The Game.
Chickenfoot will release Best + Live on March 10th and the band has released a video of their cover of the Deep Purple classic, Highway Star.
The performance was filmed at the historic Fillmore in San Francisco during the band’s debut run of shows in small clubs in May 2009 and it can be seen viewed below.
The band recently released an official video for Divine Termination, their first new song in five years, which is also included on the album. It can be viewed here.
Best + Live includes over 90 minutes of live music – for the first time released on CD.
Sammy Hagar says, “Listening to this collection of songs from the ‘Foot brings back memories of some of the most fun I’ve ever had in a band. The chemistry between Chad, Joe, Mike and me is very special. It’s almost like visual music — you can see us having fun when you listen to these songs.”
Both the extra CD “live” and the bonus tracks on the best of feature a 13 song strong set list including almost every song from Chickenfoot’s debut album as well as Sammy Hagar’s old Montrose classic Bad Motor Scooter, The Who’s My Generation and Joe Satriani’s interpretation of The Star Spangled Banner – all recorded live in Phoenix 2009 and available for the first time on CD (previously only available as video on the DVD/Blu-ray Get Your Buzz On.
The group’s last album, Chickenfoot III, debuted at #9 on the Billboard 200 when it was released in 2011.
Tracklist Best + Live:
CD1 – Best Of
1. Divine Termination (Brand New Song)
2. Soap On A Rope
3. Sexy Little Thing
4. Oh Yeah
5. Get It Up
6. Future In The Past
7. Big Foot
8. Different Devil
9. Lighten Up
10. Dubai Blues
11. Something Going Wrong
Bonus Live Tracks:
12. Highway Star
13. Bad Motor Scooter
14. My Generation
CD2 – Live:
1. Avenida Revolution
2. Sexy Little Thing
3. Soap On A Rope
4. My Kinda Girl
5. Down The Drain
6. Bitten By The Wolf
7. Oh Yeah
8. Learning To Fall
9. Get It Up
10. Turnin’ Left
11. Future In The Past
, re-sequenced deluxe edition of their sophomore album Deuce, which will include the brand new song Get You High - the band's ... )
