Aerosmith News

BY RICK MASSIMO
Providence Journal

Aerosmith’s summer tour, somewhat confusingly titled “Guitar Hero: Aerosmith Presents Aerosmith,” will roll through the country with the Boston-based hard-rock legends using ZZ Top as their “co-headliner,” as Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry has put it.

But when they get to the Comcast Center, in Mansfield, Mass., on Tuesday, it’s going to be a hometown affair, as the opening act will be the Boston-based Dropkick Murphys, who mix punk rock and Irish music with a kick in the you-know-what that recalls The Pogues at their best.

On a recent conference call, Perry and Dropkicks bassist-singer Ken Casey talked about their bands’ Boston roots and the generational twist to Tuesday’s show.

Perry says that when Aerosmith started, “We used to have to go to New York to get signed or have an agent. Nobody came to Boston. This was the blues and folk center. But kids wanted to rock.”

Perry said the influx of college students to Boston every year has also helped boost Boston’s, and Aerosmith’s, rock profile. “When you win those fans over, and they go home, what are they going to talk about?”

Aerosmith not only started in Boston; they stayed there, which won them fan loyalty that helped them through the hard times, particularly their ’80s spiral of drug addiction, lousy record sales and breakups. They’ve been to the mountaintop of fame at least twice, and Perry says that “to be from this town, that we basically formed in, I think that’s why we’re still alive. . . . We weren’t some band that just came through on a tour; we live here. There’s something different about that, I think.”

Casey has a similar love for his hometown.

“If we hadn’t come out of Boston we never would have succeeded,” Casey says. The grass roots of the Boston punk scene were so strong, he adds, that the Dropkicks were selling out matinee shows at the Rat when they had only one single out.

“People support their own here,” Casey says. Early in the Dropkicks’ career, he says, they would get more support from the Boston fans than would the nationally known headliners they were opening for. And when less-known bands from other towns would share Boston bills with the Dropkicks, they’d play for bigger crowds than they were used to.

That was great in and of itself, he says, but it also helped out down the road: When the Dropkicks would go play on the home turf of those other bands, the hometown bands made sure that the crowds were huge and supportive as well. “What better way to develop and be ready to play in markets that are new to you? That made us a way better band and gave us more confidence.”

Perry interjects, “I’m watching the Dropkick Murphys’ career, and that’s how they’ve been doing it. They haven’t been waiting for a record-company person to drop something in their laps. They’re giving the fans what they want and then giving them more.”

Casey says that he first heard Aerosmith as an eight-year-old, and that it was the first rock band he grew to love in a Boston house filled with Irish music and Neil Diamond.

He adds that the pairing is “two different worlds colliding in some ways, but in some ways it’s similar.” And he cracks that, with the popularity of the Aerosmith version of the Guitar Hero video game, “their fan base is probably younger than ours!”

But seriously, folks …

“This one’s going to be a special one. I’m really looking forward to it; it hasn’t happened very often.”