JOE PERRY On AEROSMITH's Las Vegas Residency: 'We Wanted To Keep The Thing Real Rock And Roll, But Put On A Big Show'

AEROSMITH was out on the road all month before hitting Las Vegas again as part of its ongoing "Deuces Are Wild" residency at Park Theater at Park MGM. Guitarist Joe Perry took time out to chat with "The Eddie Trunk Podcast" about the shows, explaining: "We really didn't know what to expect when we came in here [to Vegas]. We were talking to different people who have done it. I know that rock bands have come in and done two or three weeks, a month maybe, and what we saw was most bands would just kind of strip down their regular live show, bring in a little bit more production. And then we also saw… We looked at a lot of different shows — everything from 'Love' to David Copperfield to every other choice of acts on the [Las Vegas] Strip. And we decided that if we were gonna do this, we were gonna make it be not just if you wanna see AEROSMITH, but if you wanna see a rock and roll band and have that kind of music. It's like if you wanna go to see the 'Love' show and see THE BEATLES stuff taken apart and put together in a really amazing way, you go to that. If you wanna see magic, you go to see David Copperfield. If you wanna go to a Cirque Du Soleil show, there's a number of 'em you can go to see. So we wanted it to be a little more than just for AEROSMITH fans. We wanted to have it so that even if you just had heard of us, maybe you'd come and you'd be entertained"

AEROSMITH enlisted THE BEATLES archival producer Giles Martin, who co-designed the sound for Cirque Du Soleil's THE BEATLES "Love" show, to supervise its sound in Vegas.

"I think the whole thing is the learning process," Perry continued. "We wanted to keep the thing real rock and roll, but put on a big show. And so when that was being put together, there was always a rub, because there was a lot of computerized stuff, because there are so many moving parts. And there are probably four or five different areas of people running things, because there's so much just moving parts, lights — all that stuff — and you just can't run it like a regular show. But we did study some of the pop acts and things like that, and since we don't have 16 dancers up there, and we probably never will, we thought that we would try a few things to bring up the level of the music itself. And we realized the best thing we could do is just keep it stripped down to AEROSMITH. And we filled in a few things — we have a percussionist and another background singer to help fill it out, just something that we wouldn't be able to do on a regular tour. But what we realized during the first run was that the more of the real essential AEROSMITH we could give, the better the show was inside of the production around it. And playing some of the songs in that setting made it that much more entertaining, and more entertaining for us, 'cause we realized that we could be a lot looser — probably closer to how we would do an afternoon gig at a club. That kind of loose."

AEROSMITH is scheduled to play 17 more shows in Las Vegas before the end of the year — four in September, four in October, seven in November, and two in December.

In 2017, AEROSMITH announced a run of dates called "Aero-Vederci Baby!", but stopped short of calling it a final tour.

AEROSMITH hasn't released a new studio album since 2012's "Music From Another Dimension!"