Pump

Pump was Aerosmith’s eighth album, the second of three that launched ‘one of the most impressive career comebacks in rock history’. It broke the top ten in eight countries and was the 4th biggest-selling album of 1990 in the US, spawning three top 10 hits there.

Coincidentally, Pump is also the second of three Aerosmith albums produced by Bruce Fairbairn before his death in 1999. It was also their second made since getting clean and sober, with Brad Whitfield telling a reporter who’d asked why the album was named Pump:

Now that we’re off drugs we’re all pumped up.

Pump also marked a return to the approach the band took in writing their first album, doing ‘tons and tons of playing and woodshedding – just letting ideas flow’ instead of the approach taken on Rocks, Toys In The Attic and Done With Mirrors where they’d ‘start with four or five songs and try to write the rest in the studio’.

The album surpassed 10 million in sales worldwide and remains the band’s 2nd biggest-selling album behind 1993’s Get A Grip. Its second single “Janie’s Got A Gun” won a Grammy in 1990 for Best Rock Performance and its lead single “Love In An Elevator” was nominated the previous year for Best Hard Rock Performance.

Pump was followed by the 1990 release of the video The Making of Pump and the 1991 box set named Pandora’s Box containing 53 tracks recorded during the band’s first seven albums.