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With Aerosmith sidelined, bassist Tom Hamilton takes up with Close Enemies
You’ve got to have a Plan B.
As it turns out, Aerosmith bassist Tom Hamilton had one, though he doesn’t choose to put it in those terms.
That alternate plan would be Close Enemies, a hard rock band formed in 2023 with guitarists Peter Stroud and Trace Foster, singer Chasen Hampton and drummer Tony Brock. Hamilton said there’s no way he could be considered the band leader — he joined them — but concedes his is the marquee name in the group.
With just a handful of gigs under their belt, Close Enemies makes its Boston debut at City Winery Jan. 10 followed by the Rex Theater in Manchester, New Hampshire, Jan. 14, part of an eight-date tour.
The 73-year-old rocker has been playing in bands since he was 13 and has no intention of putting down his four-stringed axe. Raised in Wayland and Weston, Hamilton and his family moved to New London, New Hampshire in the mid-1960s.
He met and played with guitarist Joe Perry at Lake Sunapee and in 1970, and after high school graduation, the two moved to Boston and got an apartment. Singer Steven Tyler, whom they also met at Lake Sunapee, got fed up with the band he’d been playing with and moved south to join Hamilton and Perry. With the addition of drummer Joey Kramer and guitarist Brad Whitford, they became Aerosmith.
As is well-known, Aerosmith spent a lot of time over the past few years on the sidelines, due to various issues, currently Tyler’s throat injury. Last year, Aerosmith scrapped a world tour and announced its retirement from touring, while leaving the door open for an occasional one-off if Tyler’s voice heals.
Hamilton sat down recently to talk about his past, present and future in the Brookline home he shares with his wife Terry, their daughter, her fiancée, two dogs and two cats. Comfortably situated in his second-floor home studio, he’s surrounded by 19 guitars and basses, a computer and several amps.
“I listen to a lot of music that isn’t so called ‘hard rock,’” Hamilton said. "Close Enemies is not so much about that — we’re about songs — but we fit into the hard rock category.”
“Playing live is what will probably get out music out there,” Hamilton said. “It’s the hard way but also the most exciting way. Camaraderie is big for me and I love to hang with the guys.”
Close Enemies has nine original songs, plus two of Hamilton’s co-written with Tyler in Aerosmith, “Sweet Emotion” and “Sick as a Dog,” and two by the British group the Babys, “Midnight Rendezvous” and “Head First.” (The drummer Brock was a Baby.) Their first digital release will be a song called “Sound of a Train” on Jan. 17.
“A lot of the songs were being written during the period when Aerosmith was getting ready to tour,” Hamilton said. “We had done some work together earlier, but when Aerosmith announced that our touring days were over the idea of me joining up with these guys came right to the fore.” The band invited Hamilton to join them in Atlanta — where Stroud lives — to work on songs.
“I pulled out a rough demo of a song idea called ‘More Than I Could Ever Need,’” continued Hamilton, noting the song was about the loving relationship between him and his wife. “I had the bass part and some simple lyrical ideas.” The band and another musical collaborator helped get it over the finish line. “By the end of the day, they took that basic arrangement that I came in with and turned out into a lush, mysterious track,” he said.
Hamilton’s trek in the 21st century has not been an easy one. He was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2006, when doctors discovered a tumor “as large as a walnut.” Though now cancer-free, his journey through the debilitating cancer maze was torturous — the disease, the radiation, weaning himself off the fentanyl and oxycontin painkillers, the aftereffects. But the cancer was gone.
Three years later, Hamilton went in for a routine checkup. It turned out there was, what he says was “a brand-new cancer and they told me the surgery would be life-changing and really horrible.”
He was successfully treated with a laser technique by Dr. Steven Zeitels, the Director of the Voice Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, who has also treated Tyler, Adele and The Who’s Roger Daltrey. “When I woke up [from surgery] two hours later and made a sound with my voice,” Hamilton said, “you can imagine what I relief it was. I feel like I dodged a bullet on that one.”
Still, radiation did damage to the nerves in his throat, aftereffects that left him with sporadic numbness and pain in his left arm and hand — the fretting hand — and some issues with clarity of speech “But,” he said, “if you want to do something really bad, your brain figures out a way to get around it. Sometimes, you can almost feel your brain working on new ways to do things I have some challenges there, but so far, the good Lord has let me keep playing on the level I need to in order to play on the level required. I can only hope that keeps up.”
Will Hamilton’s stadium-packing primary band ever make it back to the concert stage?
“Steven’s healing process is going really really well, but it goes at its own pace,” Hamilton said. “Maybe Aerosmith will do something in the future, but it’s a big if and the last thing I want to be doing is to try and push Steven in that direction. If we do anything in the future, it would come from him.”
Right now, Close Enemies will carry the hard rock torch into Boston and beyond. Hamilton rejects the notion that hard rock is purely a young person’s game: “I love to turn the amplifier up and blast away.”
Close Enemies plays City Winery Jan. 10, followed by the Rex Theater in Manchester, New Hampshire, Jan. 14, part of an eight-date tour.
