![aerosmith dude looks like a lady aerosmith dude looks like a lady](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GjDtzHTlEMc/maxresdefault.jpg)
But that particular song did well and people still love it today when we play live. Everything on that record was definitely a step up from Done With Mirrors. “As it turns out it’s one of those songs that did really well, ” Perry says. And almost 30 years on, Dude continues to pass the ultimate test of time.
![aerosmith dude looks like a lady aerosmith dude looks like a lady](https://pics.me.me/thumb_singsasongicalled-dude-looks-like-a-lady-looks-like-a-lady-53895081.png)
Dude (Looks Like A Lady) helped Permanent Vacation become a huge success, setting up the band for the monster smash album Pump that followed in 1989. That was when music videos were at their peak.”Īnd so it was mission accomplished. He’d go: ‘Wow! They let that through but we’re going to have to take this one out.’ He was a lot of fun to work with. That helped the videos like Dude do as well as they did and helped get all of the airplay.
![aerosmith dude looks like a lady aerosmith dude looks like a lady](http://aerosmith50years.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/20171128_132109.jpg)
He loved seeing how much he could get away with. Marty loved trying to push MTV’s buttons. So by Dude we thought: ‘Let’s find someone that does this for a living.’ So we called Marty Callner. “The first video we did for Draw The Line, we tried to direct it ourselves and it really wasn’t that good. Today, Perry admits that the video stemmed from their new outlook of sharing the load. It also clocked up hours of MTV airtime, thanks in part to its cheeky video which featured a red-hot band performance and plenty of bare female flesh. The single hit the Top 20 in the US and gave the band their first UK Top 50 entry. With Fairbairn’s painstaking pre-production methods, they knew the song inside out before the red light went on. With the lyrics finally nailed down, Slippery When Wet producer Bruce Fairbairn was brought in. That song was done except for literally just a couple of lines, and the changes just gave it a different vibe.” We fought it all the way, but once we got to know Desmond it worked. But we knew that we had to change something up. There was a lot of reluctance at the start. Desmond came in and tweaked the lyrics a little bit with Steven. “Steven had lyrics but they just weren’t quite right, they didn’t quite fit. You can’t argue with the results, but Perry admits that there were doubts. In 1987, for Aerosmith the thought of bringing in an outside songwriter was heresy, but Bon Jovi hitmaker Desmond Child was ushered in. Put it this way: the lyrics would have been a lot different if he hadn’t seen Mötley Crüe looking that way.”Įven with smirks at the Strip’s most androgynous bunch of make-up-caked whisky swillers, Dude still lacked something lyrically. It wasn’t like they were the total inspiration for the song but it definitely moved the lyrics along. “I know that Steven saw Mötley Crüe and that lyric came into being afterwards. “There’s definitely some truth to that story,” Perry confirms, almost with a laugh. It’s a tale so fantastic that it must be apocryphal, right? The old story goes that the song’s trademark lyrical line was switched from ‘ Cruisin’ for a lady’ to ‘ Dude looks like a lady’ after Tyler saw a pouting Vince Neil prowling the Sunset Strip. We sampled a guitar chord and messed around with it, and that started the basic rhythm for Dude. It was very crude, early-days electronics. “Synthesisers were getting used more in music, and somebody brought in this sampler. “Computers were starting to come in at that time,” Perry says of the track’s genesis. As a song surprisingly inspired by early electronica and honed by outside songwriter Desmond Child, it encapsulated perfectly the band’s new anything-goes approach. The song itself is a bombastic slice of pop rock perfection that finds Aerosmith at their cartoonish best, underpinned by a hip-swinging horn section. The album’s success was given a big leg-up by second single Dude (Looks Like A Lady).