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MA: Yeah, you know, it was the oddest thing. I became the featured saxophonist for American
Idol, back in 2011. Don Was called me and he just said, hey, I don't know if this is something that
you’d want to do, but I'm producing one of the artists that's on American Idol, and we're going
to do ‘Old Time Rock & Roll’ and we need a sax solo and he goes if you do it, you’ll probably be
in front of 26 million people. It seemed like a cool thing. He's all nonchalant about it, and I thought,
wow, okay, let's go. And so Don Was brought me into this crazy cool world of American Idol and
Steven Tyler was a judge at that point. And so, you know, we went on and I played with this artist,
Paul McDonald, and the first thing that came out of anyone's mouth after we finished the song
was Steven Tyler just saying, hey, forget you. Who's your sax player [laughing]? And by the end
of the season, I got this call
Mindi with her dad Lance Abair from Steven and it was this
kind of unintelligible call
you know, hey, we got to do
this. Time’s a wasting. You
know, we gotta make this
happen. And I just thought,
what are you talking about?
And so he brought me in his

trailer the last day of
American Idol and played
me the new Aerosmith
record. And he stood there
like a foot from my face and
he goes, I want you to play
along. I want you to play
along to that record. Play
me something because all
he'd seen me do was
American Idol. He hadn't
seen me play with Aerosmith, obviously, and so I did. I just played along and rocked out to this
record. And then he came back and he goes, alright, I hear you sing, so sing this, you know? And
he'd sing something to me and I'd sing it back to him. Sing this, you know. And so he looked at
me and went. I want you to join Aerosmith and I want you to go on the road with us. He goes, the
band doesn't want another member. They don't, want to make it bigger than it is. They just want
to be the blues band, the rock band that we are. But I want you. I think you're going to add and
he goes, you got three shows to prove it to the guys. [Laughs] I just thought, what!?

So I did it. They didn't give me a set list. They didn't tell me what I was going to play. There was
no rehearsal. It's a really good thing I'm a huge Aerosmith fan and I knew those songs and I just

went in. I played, I sang. Joe Perry the first night, called me into his dressing room and, you know,
I guess he had made some inquiries because he knew Steven was going to hire a sax player from
American Idol, so he had called Waddy Wachtel, who's a very well known, rock and roll guitarist
who's played with everyone. And you know, Joe was like, well, who should we get? You know,
Steven wants to hire this person, but who would be the right fit for us? And I guess Waddy said,
well, I don't know who Steven Tyler hired, but probably the right person for you guys would be
Mindi Abair, but she'd probably never do it because she's got her solo career. And it happened
to be that I was the person that Steven Tyler hired so it all worked out because Joe Perry thought,
okay, if Waddy’s, going to give me the same person that Steven did, I'm going to go with this. And