Aerosmith are in Sydney, Australia to play the Stone Music Festival this weekend with headliners Van Halen and Billy Joel, but their minds were on their hometown of Boston, the site of this week’s bombings at the Boston Marathon.
At a Thursday press event for the festival, Aerosmith were asked to comment on the situation.
"My love goes out to everybody there,” said frontman Steven Tyler. “Joe [Perry]’s son was a mile from that area. God bless the people that got hurt. Hopefully it's a lone wolf, it's a one-off. What can you say? It's a crazy world right now, and people are echoing what they see on the news. And we just have to be more careful about it."
"It was really tough getting on the plane, I have to say,” commented Joe Perry. “The news was just dribbling in as they were putting the body counts on the TV. We were in the waiting room to get on the plane and I'm flying a hundred thousand miles away from where my kids are. They were watching the race and both of them have lost friends. It's really tough. But, man, the show goes on, you know. I'm still digesting it. It's tough."
“It's really strange,” added bassist Tom Hamilton. “I had just left my house for the airport, and I was just chatting to the driver about the best way to go, because we needed to avoid the marathon traffic. So the thing just started happening; we heard it happening over the radio, gradually getting more and more and more intense. It's just bizarre, because we were heading right for that area of the city. And the more they talked about it, the less it sounded like something that could be happening in my home town. By the time we got to the airport, it was on every screen at the airport and it had blown up into worldwide news. So it had that feeling of 'unreality' about it. And then after that, you start to realize, 'Wow, some asshole planted a bomb on Boylston Street.' It's just [like], 'How dare you? How dare you come in and hurt the people who live in this city?' It's just infuriating."
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