AEROSMITH ‘86: REUNION RENEWS THAT OLD ZEST

“I think God gave us a gift and this band is bigger and better than anything that’s out there, and the public has the right to see it.”

Aerosmith’s singer Steve Tyler was brimming with confidence and his famed brashness. The occasion was a recent phone interview during the reunited band’s current tour and first album (“Done With Mirrors”) since guitarist and co-leader Joe Perry’s return to the Boston-based group two years ago. Perry left Aerosmith amid a flurry of intergroup conflicts in 1979.

While many would question Tyler’s assertion that Aerosmith (headlining at the Los Angeles Sports Arena today and the New Orange Pavilion in San Bernardino on Saturday) is at the apex of today’s rock pile, the rowdy quintet was the prototype American hard-rock band back in the ‘70s.

By 1978, Aerosmith was packing football stadiums and hockey arenas. A year later, however, the band was in disarray. Ego and drug-related problems within the group finally drove Perry from the fold. In 1981, the band’s other guitarist, Brad Whitford, left as well. But without Perry’s fiery guitar playing and stellar songwriting, Aerosmith seemed to wither and die.

The only post-Perry Aerosmith album, 1982’s “Rock in a Hard Place,” seemed almost fraudulent. The band recycled old riffs established by the real Aerosmith, but with none of its original heart and soul. It was obvious the band missed Perry.

Perry, 35, had also become disenchanted with his flagging solo career. Tyler finally asked Perry to rejoin in 1984, just when the guitarist was about to embark on a recording project with Alice Cooper. “Time heals old wounds,” Tyler remarked.

According to Perry, the band members have been on friendly terms since the reunion. “Especially, now that our private lives have been sorted out, you’ll find all five of us sitting down at a bar together after a show, which you wouldn’t have seen since 1974,” he said.

“We were out on the road after we did the new album and we ended up jamming in some club together. It was something we hadn’t done since 1974. That’s how it is now. We try to keep each other straight.”

This bliss is a far cry from the acrimony that pervaded the recording of 1979’s “Night in the Ruts,” Aerosmith’s last LP before Perry’s departure. Recalled Perry, “There was so much animosity. I wasn’t talking to Steven; we’d go into the studio in shifts.”

While Perry and Tyler say they’ve grown wiser, they claim they’re still not choirboys: “That decadence never left. We just learned how to refine it,” Perry said. “We’re not a bunch of a kids running around like drunken idiots. We’re still the same maniacs we always were. We’ve just added class to our decadence.”