Seeing a band as big as Aerosmith [ tickets ] perform in a club as small as The Joint must have really been something. Hearing about it later, in the form of the new live CD "Rockin' the Joint," isn't quite so swell.

The DualDisc set, which captures the arena-rock act during an early 2002 gig at The Joint, inside the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, is really intended for big Aerosmith heads (otherwise known as the "Aerocult"). Casual fans will want to walk right by this disc in favor of the band's other, more widely accessible live sets: 1978's "Live Bootleg" and 1998's "A Little South of Sanity."

Straying from the greatest-hits-only party line that governs most live albums, "Rockin' the Joint" finds the Boston band mining its lengthy back catalog for some lesser-known tracks, several of which make their live-album debuts here. There's a good reason, however, why tracks like "Seasons of Wither" (from 1974's "Get Your Wings") and "No More No More" (from 1975's "Toys in the Attic") were left off previous live albums--they aren't very strong in comparison to such classics as "Sweet Emotion" and "Dream On."

Moving to more recent works, the band achieves the same lukewarm results as it churns out mediocre live versions of "Beyond Beautiful" and "Light Inside." The failure there makes sense, given that those two tracks were pretty mediocre as originally released on the 2001 studio album "Just Push Play." The cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Rattlesnake Shake"--reportedly one of the first tunes that Aerosmith played as a band�-really doesn't help matters much.

As one would expect, the album improves greatly as the band wraps it up with a double-shot of true concert classics: "Walk This Way" and "Train Kept a Rollin'"

"One question," Tyler is heard asking the crowd at the end of the record. "Was it as good for you as it was for me?"

The answer, unless you are a card-carrying Aerocult member, is probably going to be "no."