01:53 PM EST on Tuesday, November 15, 2005

BY RICK MASSIMO
Journal Pop Music Writer

PROVIDENCE -- As promised, Aerosmith went deep into the back catalog last night at the Dunkin' Donuts Center.

As guitarist Joe Perry said in a recent interview, a band that's been around as long as Aerosmith can do a whole set of "new" material that's 20 years old. They didn't quite do that last night, but without an album of new material to promote, they threw a few curveballs into the set list.

Granted, the deep-cuts-to-hits ratio wasn't quite as heavy as on their latest disc, Rockin' the Joint, but album tracks such as "No More No More" and "Seasons of Wither" held the stage along with evergreen classics such as "Dream On" and "Sweet Emotion."

After opening with the Beatles' "Helter Skelter" and charging into "Walk This Way" and "Same Old Song and Dance," "Cryin' " represented the apex of the band's power-ballad side of the last 10 years. "Don't Want to Miss a Thing" made its schlocky presence felt later.

But the encores were the pure '70s hard-rock classics "Back in the Saddle" and "Draw the Line," with Aerosmith still showing the energy of a band half its age.

Frontman Steven Tyler exclaimed several times how glad the Boston-based band was to be back in Providence, at one point reading out a list of all the times the band had played the former Civic Center. "1987 -- and boy were we [expletive in the past tense] up at that gig," he roared.

Tyler and Perry were the obvious onstage axis of the group. Long ago, they were derided as American knockoffs of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the archetypal frontman-guitarist pairing. That may have been true, but after the two Stones barely acknowledged each other's presence during their show at Fenway Park this summer, the easy interplay between Tyler and Perry was refreshing, on and off the huge arc that extended halfway into the crowd. At one point, they stood back to back, suggesting nothing more than a scruffy-haired Hydra.

Perry grabbed a highlight during his vocal spotlight, "Shakin My Cage," a rollicking slab of garage rock with slide guitar from his last solo album. And Tyler remains a marvel -- he didn't swing by his feet from a trapeze over the audience this time, but he's still a frontman to be reckoned with, managing at once to inhabit and parody all the frontman cliches. You have to hand it to someone who'll put on any hat he gets thrown.

Opening act Lenny Kravitz's appeal is purely retro, but that doesn't mean it's not real. He wasn't terribly convincing on flower-power numbers such as "Let Love Rule" and "Fly Away," but he combined boogie-oriented riff-rockers and I-don't-want-to-lose-you-baby ballads, all with excellent backing vocals from his band, for a classic-rock appeal that resembled -- well, Aerosmith.