The rock band Steven Tyler knew he would outlast: “We really do take ourselves seriously”
Steven Tyler understood the dog-eat-dog nature of rock and roll better than most.
Even though Aerosmith had their own brand of rock and roll down to a science, Tyler knew that it was only a matter of time before someone started moving on to whatever new flavour of the day happened to be coming up behind them at every turn. But if you stick around long enough in everyone’s consciousness, it almost doesn’t matter what trends come and go around you as long as the songs last longer than you thought.
But it’s not like Tyler hasn’t tried his hand at doing some truly deplorable things to get his music to sound current. There are more than a few times where he overstepped his bounds in terms of what Aerosmith wanted to be on records like Just Push Play, and even when looking at some of his own solo projects, the less said about his strange country-style solo album, the better off we’ll all be.
Because, really, no one would have expected someone like Tyler to suddenly fall in love with the idea of being a pop superstar. His favourite bands out at the time when Aerosmith first started were people like The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin, and none of them remotely cared about having a hit single. They were interested in taking people on a ride, but that’s not how the rest of the world thought about music at the time.
The Summer of Love had come and gone, but there were some people still convinced that rock was meant to be a teenybopper genre half the time. You have to remember that around the same time that bands like Pink Floyd and The Doors were coming out, fans also had to deal with listening to bands like The Archies, and that kind of disposable rock and roll didn’t ever really go out of style.
There were just as many teenybopper acts crawling up the charts as there were legends, and Tyler felt that Kiss certainly belonged in that category. Even though they did have more of a sinister look than what the rest of the music world was doing, Gene Simmons was nothing if not a savvy businessman, and he wanted the chance to market his brand of rock and roll to anyone and everyone.
As far as Tyler could tell, it was all about the look and the fashion for them, and he knew that Aerosmith would be able to last far longer than Kiss ever could, saying, “I, sometimes, depending on the time of day, get offended [by them]. I hear that and go, ‘It’s all right. But do they really mean it?’ And, ‘What’s this all about?’ And that’s why I think Aerosmith has been around forever. We really do take ourselves seriously.”
And if we’re being fair, Tyler was at least kind of right when talking about their studio output. Simmons seemed to immediately stop the idea of making albums with Kiss because he realised that there wasn’t any money in it anymore, but when you look at the way that Tyler has been changing up his style and even working with people like Yungblud, he’s at least still trying to tap into new territory for the band that they might have been scared to do before.
Not everything that he played worked out for the best, and there are a lot of times when Tyler has to admit when he screwed up, but he knew that he could rest easy at night without having to put on the makeup every time he performed. There was much more substance to what he was doing, and while there was a bit more nuance to what Kiss did than most people realised, no one could deny that they had become more of a brand than anything else by the time they reached the 2000s.
