September 12, 1989. Beloved Boston rockers Aerosmith release their tenth studio album. But I don't hear it until almost a year later.
I need to come clean: as a young rocker, I didn't like Aerosmith. They were one of those bands my parents liked that I never quite understood. Don't get me wrong, I liked a lot of the records my mom and dad played: The Kinks, The Stones, The Who. But not Aerosmith. I found the scarves off-putting.
Then came Christmas, 1989. My aunt Carol and uncle Kenny gave me two cassette tapes as a gift: Disintegration by The Cure and Pump by Aerosmith. I spent the winter immersed in Disintegration--it's a perfect wintertime album, bleak and cold and full of death. Then springtime came and I was ready to come to life, so I popped in Pump. And it was surprisingly good! It didn't hurt, either, that MTV had been barraging me with videos from the album over the last six months.
Thirty years later, and I'd say it's still a pretty good entry point to the band. I wasn't as lucky as fans who cut their teeth on Toys In The Attic, but I think I was better off than the fans who first heard Aerosmith during their "AmazingCrazyCryin" era. So get pumped with Pump, still pumpin' after three decades.
