AEROSMITH Guitarist Wants RICK RUBIN To Produce New Album

Matt Ashare of The Phoenix recently conducted an interview with AEROSMITH guitarist Joe Perry. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

The Phoenix: Have you decided on a producer for the next album?

Perry: I can't speak for the rest of the band, but we've been talking to Rick Rubin, and I think that's a possibility. We've worked well with him before. He's sort of in charge now at the label, so we're talking, and we'll see what happens. We've set November 1 as the date to start working on material from the album, and we'll have to see where things go from there.

The Phoenix: Are you testing out any new material live?

Perry: No, no, no. We've got so many songs that we have to put into the set when we're playing in front of our fans that it just wouldn't work. We want to take what we were doing over in Europe and give our fans a chance to see that before we start working on the new album.

The Phoenix: I have to ask about your sons and about their band TAB. How involved in that are you?

Perry: Well, we've got the studio right downstairs, so they usually wake me up about an hour before I'd like to get up. And they've come to me for advice sometimes. You know, about the music business and that sort of thing. But they're into their own thing, their own kind of music. I just made sure that they knew the basics, you know, the roots of it all. Like Chuck Berry, and B.B. King, and Robert Johnson. You have to have that on your iPod because that's where all of this music comes from. I made sure they had a good foundation to start with.

The Phoenix: Okay, let's get away from music and talk food: how did you get into the hot-sauce business?

Perry: When you travel as much as we do, you have a chance to try a lot of different things. And I've always liked barbecue and hot sauces and spicy foods. I mean, when we were just in India on this last tour, I had some of the most amazing food. Of course, we were taken to a lot of the fancier places. But even at some of the more regular restaurants, the food was unbelievable. So we came up with the idea of putting together the "Boneyard Brew", which is more of a barbecue sauce than a hot sauce, and the "Mango Peach Tango", which has more of a Caribbean thing going on. You can get it right on my Web site. And Newbury Comics was really great about carrying it for while. Now, we're working on some recipes for mac and cheese, you know, just trying to spice it up a bit. My [step]son Aaron is in charge of all that.

Read the entire interview at ThePhoenix.com.