I'm going to dream off until my dreams come true. What are you gonna do about it?

One thing I've noticed lately is that Aerosmith is basically done.  That's a shame, they've always been one of my favorite bands.  But drummer Joey Kramer was injured last year and hasn't been allowed to be in concerts since because apparently the band says he doesn't play up to their standards anymore, and yesterday I saw an interview (from August) with guitarist Brad Whitford who said he had no idea what the band was planning to do and didn't care.

That's two people basically out of the band after 50 years (49 for Whitford.)  Some bands can get away with changing members but one thing that's been awesome about Aerosmith is that they've had the same five guys since the start, except for a couple years in the early 1980s when Whitford and lead guitarist Joe fuckin' Perry left.  Ok, Perry and Steven Tyler are the only ones commonly known but the other three matter too.

Creatively they're gone but at least that's expected from old bands.  I was surprised to realize that they'd actually released three albums in the 21st Century, one of which was a bunch of blues covers and another was some bizarre mix of their past styles.  Joe Perry has released over a half-dozen albums in the same time.  My understanding is that at this point, none of them really like each other, but they all loved being in Aerosmith.  Now even that's not happening.

They started out like any other band, playing hard rock and earning a fanbase with concerts until the point that they had a genuine hit album.  Then another one.  Then the fame and drugs (mostly drugs) took their toll and they went downhill.  Perry and Whitford left and Aerosmith was basically past-tense as far as any success was concerned.  But they quit drugs (on and off) and got the two guitarists back and with record company help, they started making hits again.  Ostensibly returning to the top made them better people although I'm not really sure about that.

They were definitely given information that wouldn't be known to the public.  The 1993 video for "Amazing" basically showed the internet just as the Get a Grip album that year was the first major internet release.  They made a point of including young sexy chicks in their videos, promotion for their movie careers.  It mostly didn't work for them - I thought there was one but checking the internet says it was Angelina Jolie and a Rolling Stones video - but I suspect a lot of that goes on in Hollywood.  Tyler made sure his own daughter looked as sexy as possible in the videos.

Anyway, they're another example of people at the top being there for a long time.  As I said, they're one of my favorites, so it's kind of a shame that they just fall apart in the last couple decades.  Then again, who would have ever expected them to be around this long?  As Steven Tyler wrote back when he was a teenager, years before the band formed:
Sing with me, sing for the years
Sing for the laughter and sing for the tears
Sing with me, just for today
Maybe tomorrow the good lord'll take you away