‘Make It’: how Aerosmith’s first song predicted their future
Long before Aerosmith began serenading asteroids on Armageddon, before the rehab, the scarves, or the ‘Dude Looks Like a Lady’-isms of their late-1980s MTV pomp, there was a pivotal car ride in early 1971.
A 22-year-old wannabe Steven Tyler, not yet a rock star but clearly already behaving like one, was in the backseat, heading from New Hampshire to Boston, staring out the window and projecting himself onto the skyline like a delusional clairvoyant.
“I was in my bubble in the car,” Tyler later wrote in his memoir, “Screening our future on the windshield… 20,000 people fused into my fantasy.” Normal stuff for an aspiring rock star. Then, as the skyscrapers appeared, rising out of the trees like some chrome-and-concrete prophecy, inspiration struck him. That was the moment, the epiphany to be; God knows what he’d been smoking.
With no paper at hand, Tyler grabbed a box of Kleenex and started scribbling down lyrics, imagining what he’d say to the crowd if they were opening for The Rolling Stones. What came out was ‘Make It’, a kind of rock’n’roll mantra of sorts. Not a song about being famous, but one that pretends you already are. “I said make it, don’t break it,” Tyler repeated, like a silk-shirted shaman trying to blag his way into a record deal.
Of course, ‘Make It’ would eventually see the light of day as the opening track on Aerosmith’s 1973 debut album. Look at us, it suggested, we’re already legends. Not bad for a band with zero hits to their name and a frontman writing lyrics on a tissue box. “My motto has always been: FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT,” Tyler wrote later, which is pretty much the entire Aerosmith ethos condensed into a cartoonish aphorism.
That’s what makes the track weirdly perfect. It’s not clever, and it is definitely not subtle, but it is totally sincere. A band so desperate to make it, pretending they already had, and somehow pulling it off through sheer willpower and self-belief; manifestation, if you will.
There’s something strangely endearing about that level of delusion. But it also set a tone Aerosmith never quite shook off. The band always sounded like The Stones’ American cousins who got kicked out of the house for making a din in the garage and hotboxing the family Pontiac. They had the attitude down pat, but arguably none of the mystique. Tyler’s whole frontman persona was essentially Mick Jagger in flea market garbs—all hips, hollers and well-rehearsed pouting in the mirror.
Looking back, Aerosmith weren’t particularly cool, were they? Jagger had all the lasciviousness of a bohemian dandy ready to Don Juan all the groupies, but Tyler was more like a possessed marionette hobbling around in a feather boa. But they didn’t need to be cool. They didn’t invent the rock god trope; they just believed in it harder than anyone else. If The Rolling Stones were the blueprint, Aerosmith were the fevered fan fiction.
And yet, it worked! ‘Make It’ didn’t just forecast Aerosmith’s ambition, it locked in their whole identity: loud, cocky, unapologetically derivative, but completely committed to the fantasy. So yes, the song did predict their future. Their sound, their attitude, their vainglorious aversion to even considering failure—it’s all there, right from track one.
Written in a car. On a box of Kleenex. As you do.
