The narrative of 90s rock is carved in stone. The grunge scene, according to the media party line, swept away all that excess, culled all those cosseted dinosaurs with their gratuitous guitar solos, teased hair and ravaged septums. But that doesn’t quite square with the second coming of Aerosmith: a band whose sound and persona ticked all those boxes, and threw in songs about elevator sex and a mic stand bedecked with silk scarves for good measure.
The Bostonians had indeed stumbled, but that was a lifetime before, in the newly sober and rudderless mid-80s. Stick a pin in the band’s imperious 90s run, by contrast, and you might have found them toasting back-to-back US No.1 albums, being inducted on Hollywood’s Rock Walk, sweeping the MTV and Grammy Awards, or finally reaching a crossover audience with their first and only US chart-topping single. As Steven Tyler beamed in one late-decade interview: “The last eight years have been what the first ten were supposed to be like. We climbed out of the ashes.”
