During a tenure that lasted more than 50 years, bassist Tom Hamilton played many of Aerosmith‘s classic favorites and plenty of deeper cuts as well. But there was always one particular song he was wishing they’d put back into the set.
He’s finally getting that chance, with his new band, Close Enemies.
“I knew that we’d be playing a couple of Aerosmith songs,” he tells UCR in a new interview. “You know, as far I’m concerned, ethically, it had to be songs that I had co-written. It’s not like we’re going to get up there and play ‘Walk This Way,’ ‘Dream On‘ [and songs like that]. [But] ‘Sick as a Dog,’ I’ve been dying to play that song live for so long. I was having trouble getting the guys in Aerosmith to put it in the set. I realized, ‘Alright, this is my chance! Now I get to hear that song on stage again.'”
READ MORE: Top 10 Aerosmith Songs Never Played Live
“Sick as a Dog,” a song he co-wrote from 1976’s Rocks, is a favorite of Hamilton’s for a number of reasons. “It’s simple and it’s very freeing. It rocks and has this arpeggiated guitar part, sort of a jingly, jangly kind of thing, which I loved,” he explains.
“I was always into the Byrds and they had a song called ‘Mr. Tambourine Man‘ back in the ’60s that was a giant hit – and it was a hit with me,” Hamilton added. “It really embedded in my mind, that love of hearing [guitar sounds like that], especially when it was combined with a hard rock beat.”
He has similar feelings about “Sweet Emotion,” another song he helped to co-write from 1975’s Toys in the Attic. It’s one of Hamilton’s signature performances with Aerosmith and features an unmistakable, slinky bass line that grabs instant attention to this day when it comes on the radio.
“I knew how good it felt to play it and hear it,” Hamilton says now. “I was too young and inexperienced to know whether it was something that would be a hit or not. I just knew it felt really good to play it.”
That’s why Hamilton “kept working on it and came up with the parts that are in between the verses, where it rocks out and then it goes back to the verse,” he continues. “Then in the middle, it goes back to the intro with that bass riff again. Those three elements are a lot of what matters as far as what I love in Aerosmith’s music and also, now in Close Enemies.”
When Will Close Enemies Release New Music?
The band plans to release its first single in January, the same month that they’ll hit the road for their first proper tour. As guitarist Trace Foster tells UCR, TLG / Virgin Music Group will handle distribution and internally, they’ve already got a coordinated plan for rolling out additional songs.
“Unlike the way [bands] used to release music back in the ’70s [and subsequent decades] where you released the whole record, we’ll put out the initial single January 16,” Foster said. “The next songs will probably come out in February and March and either we’ll do a fourth single [after that] or we’ll just release the whole thing at that point.
Foster says Close Enemies knows “how fast things come and go in this era that we’re in. So we just want to put a song out there, push the heck out of it, then do another one and do it again. We worked really hard. There was a lot of blood, sweat and tears, and we don’t just want it to come and go. We want people to really get into this and enjoy it.”
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