The Aerosmith classic Steven Tyler didn’t remember recording: “Where was I?”
Most of the members of Aerosmith should be lucky that they’re still standing, thanks to the physical toll they took on their bodies in the 1970s. While the ‘Bad Boys From Boston’ have since tried to call it a day and have had their fair share of ailments throughout the years, they put a lot of miles on their nervous system by getting as blitzed out of their minds as they could when they were making albums like Toys in the Attic. That kind of mindstate can play tricks on you, and when Steven Tyler heard the song ‘You See Me Crying’, he couldn’t be convinced that he wrote it.
Granted, it’s not like the ballad stands out as something you would automatically think of when you hear the name ‘Aerosmith’. The band certainly had their sensitive side when making songs like ‘Dream On’, but this is the kind of show-stopping song that deserves to be played in a theatre rather than an arena, featuring gospel-tinged piano and Tyler managing to sound heartbroken while still screaming his brains out.
Although the band tried the same formula on the song ‘Home Tonight’ from Rocks, this is one of the most melodically complex songs of their career. Compared to everything being dominated by guitars, this is the kind of piano showcase that no one saw coming, almost sounding like Paul McCartney’s solo work with most of the whimsy thrown out.
No amount of great music could stop the group from falling apart, though, with Joe Perry leaving the band after feeling that his wife was getting disrespected on the road. While Perry and Tyler eventually got the chance to make up after Aerosmith and Perry’s solo tour hit a slump, Tyler didn’t even remember that he had written the song when they were going over their greatest hits.
During one of their press tours, when promoting their comeback, Perry remembered having to explain to Tyler that they wrote the song in the first place, recalling in Rocks, “It was one hell of a moment when [a DJ] put on ‘You See Me Crying’. Steven said, ‘That’s outta sight, we should cover that tune. Whose original is this?’ ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ I said. ‘That’s us.’ ‘Is it? Where was I?’ ‘In the booth singing.’”
If anything, the fact that Tyler didn’t know about the song may have been a sign of bad things to come. Looking at the way that they structured their ballads going forward, it felt like Tyler had forgotten what a romantic or even sentimental lyric was when the band made their turn as pop stars around the late 1980s.
They did have some great lines on tracks like ‘Janie’s Got a Gun’ and ‘What it Takes’, but somewhere around the time of Nine Lives, Tyler traded in songs about the love between two people for cramming in dad jokes or some of the grossest double entendres you’ve ever heard in your life on songs like ‘Pink’. If Tyler had decided to return to those older ballads like ‘You See Me Crying’, maybe we could have been spared later songs that sounded like Dr Seuss’s Guide to Sex.
