Aerosmith Member Was Secretly Replaced In Studio

Legendary session musician Steve Hunter recently reminisced secretly recording a solo for an Aerosmith song. He also noted how it happened during a weird time when “labels were signing bands with people they thought could play.”

The time that he is talking about was the early ’70s, as the song Steve tells Guitar World about was Aerosmith’s rendition of the blues standard “Train Kept A-Rollin'” previously made popular by The Yardbirds, and which ended up as one of the most memorable songs from Joe Perry & Co’s 1974 sophomore “Get Your Wings”.

Steve noted that the incident occurred during a particularly sensitive time when record labels started realizing that the people they were signing weren’t necessarily good as they seemed, the session legend says that Joe had simply “hit a block”, not questioning the other musician’s skills.

He began:

“It happened out of the blue one night. I think there was a sort of political thing going on. All these labels were signing bands with people they thought could play, and they’d get upset that albums were coming out with all these studio musicians on them. They were paying all this extra money for additional people, and second, they signed these bands in good faith that they could play.”

He added:

“They definitely didn’t want people to know. But the thing is, when you cut an album, it’s set in stone. It’s not like a live gig where you can have a bad night and make up for it with a good one.

“It was important that these albums be as good as possible, and that’s basically why I was called into the studio to play on Train Kept a Rollin’. The way it was explained to me was, ‘Joe [Perry] had hit a block,’ and they needed to get the take done and start mixing the next day.”

He was also asked whether Joe Perry himself was aware of his intervention at the time and Steve said:

“Probably not. But it was no big deal; I had hit blocks like that in the studio hundreds of times. And that’s what happened with Joe on ‘Train Kept a Rollin”.

“So, they saw me sitting in the studio lobby smoking a cigarette, and [producer] Jack Douglas poked his head out and said, ‘Hey, do you feel like sitting in for a session?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, sure. What do you need?'”