The crooner who gave Aerosmith their biggest hit: “I had chills all over my body”
It’s impossible to gauge how many lives Aerosmith has acquired over the years.
Even though every fan wasn’t in love with every album they made, ‘The Bad Boys From Boston’ were doing everything they could to make sure that no one forgot about them, and even when they were lost in the woods in the early 1980s, all it took was the right song to put them back in everyone’s good graces when Permanent Vacation took over the world all over again. But for all of their strange detours, no one would have guessed that they would have found one of their finest songs through easy listening.
Because, really, is Steven Tyler the first person that you think of when talking about the greatest pop singers in the world? He’s not a poor singer by any stretch of the imagination, but when you look at the time that he has put in as one of the best rock and roll vocalists of all time, it’s not like he was going to be able to sing the same way that Whitney Houston could whenever he opened his mouth or anything.
But in the interest of trying new things, Get A Grip already put them on a new musical level. No one would have considered them to be the kind of ballad that became the kings of soft rock in the days of Toys in the Attic, and yet half of their biggest hits from around this time were the kind of Alicia Silverstone-led videos with the glossiest production that you’ve ever heard on one of their records.
Now, stick with me for a second, but selling out wasn’t always a bad thing when talking about Aerosmith. They did have a lot less grit in their sound by comparison, but when you listen to the tunes off of Get A Grip, they were at least building towards something bigger. And while ‘I Don’t Want to Miss A Thing’ was what gave them their only number-one hit, none of it would have happened were it not for Barbra Streisand.
The crooner might not be the first person that many people think of for the band that made such stunning odes to romance like ‘Walk This Way’ and ‘Lord of the Thighs’, but when Diane Warren was first writing the song, the lyrics came from Warren hearing an interview with James Brolin talking about his relationship with the crooner saying that he would miss her every time they fell asleep. That’s not exactly the kind of romance Aerosmith was known for, but Tyler said he would have been a fool not to jump on the song when he had the chance.
His daughter was already starring in the movie tie-in, and when listening to the final mix, Tyler remembered having a visceral reaction when he first heard it, saying, “[Warren] was teaching me the song and I had chills all over my body as I heard it come to life with my voice. I knew it was going to be something special.” And for someone known for singing classic rock, Tyler’s ad-libs work surprisingly well with the tune.
The rest of the band might have been a little bummed about not being able to bring their own stamp to everything, but when you listen to how Tyler’s singing, nothing has really changed. He might have dialled things back a little bit, but his Janis Joplin-esque screams are what make the song work, even if the song itself is already way too over-the-top than anything else you’d find in the 1990s.
The song itself did end up being a bit of a bad omen when Tyler decided to start chasing after that kind of hit again and again over the course of the next album, but there’s a reason why that kind of high is so enticing. Because when you’ve struck a nerve with that many people, there’s few feelings in the world better than knowing that you’ve made something that was going to outlast you.
