Produced by Bruce Fairbairn. Recorded at Little Mountain Sound Studios, Vancouver Canada, April-June 1989.

I came up with the basic track (music minus vocals) for "The Other Side" between Christmas and New Year 1988, and mailed a tape to Steven Tyler in Boston (see the story for "Deuces Are Wild").

Steven added vocals in  his home studio and mailed me a finished recording for my comments.

At first I was disappointed ... Steven had taken what I intended to be the verse and used it for the chorus.  It sounded wrong to me, upside-down, backwards.  I phoned Steven to tell him how I felt about it.

"It's beautiful the way it is", he said. "Listen to it again. You'll see!".

Within a day or two I came to realize that Steven was right. In fact, this is a perfect example of Steven's brilliance ... he doesn't think like the rest of us ... he sees things from a completely different perspective. It just took me a while to catch up to him!

All these years later, whenever I hear "The Other Side" on the radio, I can't believe I ever disagreed with Steven's original concept for the song.

Steven liked the bass part I'd played on our demo, and he asked me to play bass with Aerosmith on the master recording. 

"Are you out of your mind?", I said.  "Tom Hamilton's one of the best bass players on the planet ... he'll play it 100 times better than me". 

And he did!

An unfortunate "wrinkle" surfaced in the early 1990's. Holland-Dozier-Holland (the songwriting team responsible for many of Motown's biggest hits) claimed that the melody for "The Other Side" closely resembled their song "Standing In The Shadows Of Love".

They'd already successfully sued KISS for a similar infringement on the song "I Was Made For Lovin' You", and Steven's lawyers recommended we not contest the charge. That's why the credits for "The Other Side" read: Tyler-Vallance-Holland-Dozier-Holland.