Most hit songs begin with a melody or a title. Aerosmith’s first single of the Pump era began with embarrassment — Steven Tyler, a hotel elevator, a beautiful woman, and a set of doors that opened at exactly the wrong moment. By 1989 the band were two years into the most improbable second act in rock: sober, reunited and riding the comeback album Permanent Vacation. For its follow-up they returned to producer Bruce Fairbairn and to Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver — the same room, and the same producer, who would give AC/DC their Thunderstruck the following year. The album they made there, Pump, is still reckoned by many fans as the finest of their career, and Love in an Elevator, built on Tyler’s mortifying little anecdote, was its opening shot.
Sober, and Playing Like It
Context explains the record’s confidence. Aerosmith’s seventies had ended in addiction, departures and commercial collapse; the comeback sealed by Permanent Vacation in 1987 was built on the band getting clean, and by the Pump sessions the five of them were working sober together for the first time in their history. You can hear the discipline in the grooves — this is a band tight enough to make a filthy joke sound like a Swiss watch. It helped that Fairbairn and Fraser ran Little Mountain like a hit factory with a house style: big drums, bigger choruses, everything in its place. Pump would eventually win Aerosmith the first Grammy of their career, for its follow-up single Janie’s Got a Gun — but it was the elevator song that opened the campaign and set the album’s tone of cheerful, precision-tooled excess.
“It Felt Like a Lifetime”
Tyler has told the story for years, because it needs no embellishment. During the band’s wilder days he found himself making out with a woman in a hotel elevator — and then the doors slid open, in full view of whoever was waiting. “It felt like a lifetime,” he recalled, “waiting for those doors to close.” The image was too good to waste: a song about desire at its most public and least convenient, all bravado on the surface and panic underneath. He and Joe Perry shaped it into a swaggering piece of funk-rock, with the narrator propositioning his way up the floors of a department store of the imagination, and a cool female voice cooing the question every lift passenger dreads and hopes for: “Going down?” The genius of the conceit is its deniability: on paper, and on the radio, it is a song about an elevator, and nothing in the lyric can quite be arrested. Everyone over the age of twelve understood it perfectly, which is exactly why it could be played everywhere, all day, in the summer and autumn of 1989.
Fairbairn Moves the Furniture
What turned a dirty joke into a precision-engineered hit was Fairbairn’s gift for arrangement. The blazing guitar riff that opens the record — the riff everyone remembers — was not written as an intro at all. As Perry tells it, the riff originally sat in the middle section of the song, a breakdown part. Fairbairn heard it and suggested moving the whole thing to the front. The same instinct governed the solo: the song originally ended with a long, roughly two-minute guitar solo, and it was Fairbairn who proposed shifting that solo into the middle of the track during mixing. Both moves are invisible once made — the record feels inevitable — but they are the difference between a good album track and a single that detonated on contact.
Around those decisions Fairbairn built one of the most gleaming productions in the Aerosmith catalogue, recorded at Little Mountain between January and June 1989 with Mike Fraser engineering. A horn section punches through the choruses, keyboards fatten the groove, and Fairbairn himself joins the backing vocals and plays trumpet. Best of all is the smallest credit on the sleeve: Catherine Epps is listed, perfectly deadpan, as “elevator operator” — she is the voice in the lift. Even the group’s harmony stack gets a family joke: keyboard player John Webster, who had sung in a duo called Bite the Wax Godzilla, was credited on the track as one of the “Bongo Boys Choir.”
Listen to what all that engineering serves. Underneath the brass and the gloss, the track is built on a genuinely funky foundation — Tom Hamilton’s bass slinking around Joey Kramer’s drums while Perry’s guitar chops at the rhythm — and Tyler rides it like a ringmaster, alternating between a leer, a croon and a full-throated scream. The middle solo that Fairbairn rescued from the ending gives Perry room to stretch out without stalling the song’s momentum, and the famous operator’s voice returns at the close to bring the whole joke home. It is five minutes of pure forward motion: nothing in the record is wasted, and nothing in it sounds laboured.
Going Down, on MTV
The video, directed by Marty Callner, took the joke at face value and ran with it. It opens in a gleaming department store — the scenes were shot at the historic Bullocks Wilshire building in Los Angeles — where the band prowl the sales floors and the elevator girl, played by model Brandi Brandt, then married to Mötley Crüe’s Nikki Sixx, delivers the famous line. Intercut with a performance of the band in full peacock mode, it was MTV catnip, and the clip became one of the defining images of Aerosmith’s imperial late-eighties run.
First to the Top of the Rock Chart
Released as a single on 15 August 1989, ahead of Pump in September, Love in an Elevator did something no Aerosmith single had ever done: it went to No. 1 on Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks chart, the band’s first chart-topper there. Critics who had written the band off as seventies dinosaurs only a few years earlier now reached for comparisons with the classic run of Toys in the Attic and Rocks, and Pump has kept that reputation ever since — routinely named the best Aerosmith album of their second career, and by plenty of listeners the best they ever made. On the Hot 100 it peaked at No. 5 — entering at 56 and reaching its peak on 28 October 1989 — while in Britain it reached No. 13. The RIAA certified it Gold. Pump itself reached No. 5 on the Billboard 200 and sold more than seven million copies; to this day it remains the only Aerosmith album to produce three Hot 100 Top 10 singles, its other two being What It Takes and Janie’s Got a Gun, and the only one with three No. 1 rock radio hits.
The song also carried the band into the Grammy conversation: at the 1990 ceremony it was nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance, losing out to Living Colour’s Cult of Personality. Billboard would later rank it the 21st best mainstream rock song of the decade. It took its place on the band’s 1994 hits collection Big Ones and has been a fixture of their live shows ever since — the moment in the set where the arena becomes a department store and twenty thousand people wait, delighted, for a disembodied voice to ask if anyone is going down.
None of that afterlife was really the point, though. Love in an Elevator endures because it captures, in five minutes, the exact alchemy of Aerosmith’s rebirth: Tyler’s too-much-information storytelling, Perry’s riffs arranged like architecture, a producer who knew which part belonged at the front, and a band who had learned — just barely — to take the work seriously even when the song was a joke. Going down? For Aerosmith in 1989, there was only one direction traffic was moving, and it wasn’t down. The doors had opened on their worst decade and closed, at last, behind them.
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