How one 2012 song reunited Aerosmith: “We’re back”
Making rock and roll always seemed to come naturally to Steven Tyler.
Even in the days when he was clearly stealing some moves from members of The Yardbirds, there was nothing about Aerosmith that seemed too contrived whenever they came out onstage. They wore their influences on their sleeves, but when you listened to them actually play, they had a lot more to offer than just a bunch of blues cliches when they went for it. They meant every word they said, and they weren’t afraid to throw down when they needed to.
Sure, there were some songs that seemed a bit too Stonesy every now and again, but not even Mick Jagger could have sung a song with as much swagger as ‘Uncle Salty’ or made the kind of psychedelic atmosphere of ‘Sweet Emotion’. The blues were only one part of their sound, and when Tyler and Perry wanted to, they could get downright nasty when they decided to kick up the tempo a little bit.
‘SOS’ could have been considered a punk song years before the genre even had a name, and when Rocks first came out, the band seemed to flirt with metal for the first time in their career. Every part of that record was about as nasty as it could get, and when you look through a lot of Perry’s riffs on the album, ‘Nobody’s Fault’ and ‘Rats in the Cellar’ are some of the dirtiest tunes that would ever come from his six-string. But you don’t seem to find much of that once you reach their 1980s output.
From the moment that they rebranded, working with outside songwriters could definitely be a mixed bag for them. There’s nothing wrong with getting the right musical doctors in to work your songs back to health every now and again, but when you look at the way that Just Push Play played out, it’s not like they were making the best decisions, either. Tyler had been focused on making pop hits for too long, and Music From Another Dimension was their opportunity to bring the band back to basics
And… they didn’t really do it. The album isn’t terrible by any means, but their massive comeback sounded like the ultimate Aerosmith records in both good and bad ways. You do get some decent tunes where the band are back in full force, but getting the soppy ballads like ‘What Could Have Been Love’ was always going to be hit and miss with people, especially since that song in particular has its verse chord progression lifted directly from Journey’s ‘Open Arms’.
But when looking at the track ‘Legendary Child, Tyler thought that they had hit on something heavy that no one else could have done at the time, saying, “I’ll tell you, when we laid down [the lead track] ‘Legendary Child,’ I looked at Joe and said, ‘Joe, we’re back.’ It was a very epiphanous moment. It was like we stepped out of the Record Plant in 1974 and, instead of stepping onto the street, stepped right into the studio here.”
That might be him trying to hype up the album at the time, but when looking at the rest of the album, there’s one part of those songs that makes them stand out above everything. With a few token contributions from Jim Vallance, this was Tyler and Perry getting back to what they knew best, and when you listen to them play off each other, it feels like Perry is back in gear from the moment that he kicks off the first riff of the song.
The rest of the album wasn’t exactly the same kind of fireworks show that Toys in the Attic was back in the day, but the fact that they could capture that fire for at least a little bit was everything that fans could have asked for. No one else was going to be able to capture that same feeling all over again, so we’re lucky to even have a band like Aerosmith still around to make these kinds of tunes.
