Joe Perry revealed that Aerosmith is currently working on a new 50th anniversary box set featuring rare audio and visuals from “Boston's bad boys.” Blabbermouth ran quotes from Perry's recent chat with Philly's WMMR, where he described the package as a “box set that kind of hits on every decade and some videos to go along with it. In the first, say, 30 years of our career, finding video is really hard. . . Finding video from the last 20 years, it's not a problem. It's finding the stuff that you like.”
Perry added: “As it turns out, we actually shot a bunch of songs because the record companies would use them to promote. When they would have these get-togethers every year, all the record companies would show what they have coming out and the latest this and the latest that, so they would shoot promotional videos. So they weren't quite what we know as the MTV-style videos. So we're digging down and finding some of that stuff. 'Cause back then, it was a big camera and they had cartridges that lasted three minutes, so to get a whole song on one, you had to have at least two cameras going.
Joe Perry says that even during the early days of the band, he was privately filming Aerosmith on the road: “I actually started carrying a camera with me, and when we played the Silverdome in Detroit (in 1976) — I think we were the second band to play there and the first band to fill it; it was, like, 80,000 seats. It was wild. . . Anyway, I remember sending somebody up with my camera — way up into the bleachers or whatever — and by the time they got it focused and kind of brought the lens close enough, you couldn't even tell who was playing. Most cameras didn't have sound either, but this one did. And it was kind of rough version of whatever we were playing.”
He went on to explain that archival bits from Aerosmith's past seem to continually find their way back to the band: “I mean, stuff keeps popping up. Fans will say 'I've got a piece of this' or 'I took some video of that', but it's bits and pieces. Most of it are still pictures. We're constantly finding the stuff.”
Aerosmith has shown the ability to connect with many generations of music fans. Joe Perry has always felt that videos played a large part of the group's mass appeal. “We've been fortunate enough to have some really good video directors around us, I think. They call it the MTV generation. Because of the MTV mentality of the visuals, and being able to embrace that instead of reject it, has been a real strength for us. I think to be able to come out with some of these videos, and have just been lucky to have them work and have some good songs, we've been able to bring in another generation.”
There's been no title nor release date set for the new Aerosmith collection.
