Aerosmith News

The National
By Ed Lake

Aerosmith
Yas Island
Tonight

The Formula One bandwagon is passing, but there’s still one last show to send the thing off in style. And it would be hard to think of a more fitting choice than Aerosmith, the platonic ideal of rock bands, a group so iconic one suspects they have intellectual property in the very concepts of cheek-bones and leopard-print.

Steven Tyler was bingeing himself skinny back when the Kings of Leon were the twinkle in a twinkle’s eye. His eternal partner in crime, Joe Perry, has strutted about like a thoroughbred in leather trousers for more than 40 years now and gives no sign of going out to pasture just yet.

From their invention of the rock-rap crossover to their establishment of rehab as a crucial staging post in the hall of fame, Aerosmith are one for the ages.

More to the point, they’re your only choice for racing events. Perry, appropriately enough, given his looks, breeds race-horses. The band’s rhythm guitarist, Brad Whitford, races cars himself: last month he took part in the Volkswagen Jetta TDI Cup. And Tyler got himself into trouble a few years ago when he was engaged to sing the Star-Spangled Banner at the Indy 500. He replaced the line “home of the brave” with “home of the Indianapolis 500,” which, although it doesn’t scan and isn’t very patriotic, does strike the authentic fanboy note.

Perry recently dashed off a solo album, Have Guitar, Will Travel, and has been grumbling about a certain unnamed member of Aerosmith (cough cough Tyler) who has been “taking [the fans] for granted”. Tyler, for the record, caused a chunk of the band’s world tour to be cancelled when he fell off a stage and broke his shoulder, so the question of who had unreasonable expectations of whom is a hard one to call.