Kansas: the prog-rock band Aerosmith tried to sabotage live
There’s always going to be a healthy sense of competition whenever artists take to the road. It’s never an easy game trying to get millions of people on their feet to sing along to your material, but while Aerosmith could get the job done, they weren’t above leaving a bunch of their fellow musical legends in their dust.
That’s not to say that Aerosmith earned the right to act like musical jackasses or anything. They had slaved away to become one of the biggest names in American music, and despite being ridiculed by both fans and critics alike for sounding too much like The Rolling Stones, every one of them took it in stride. Yes, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry looked like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards a little bit, but who cared when they wrote kickass riffs like ‘Back in the Saddle’ and ‘Walk This Way’?
And even though the band lit up every single studio they entered, some of the best moments of their career were when they came alive onstage. Tyler was a magnetic stage presence every time he pranced around in the spotlight, and even if people like Tom Hamilton and Brad Whitford were a lot more comfortable fading into the background, hearing Perry assault his guitar was always going to be a spectacle.
But progressive rock doesn’t always cater to that kind of audience. Aerosmith’s fans were considered the epitome of blue-collar workers, so if they are all itching to hear their favourite tunes whenever the band hits the stage, having them sit through mile-long solos and songs that told a story was always going to be tough. And if Rush managed everything okay, a band like Kansas didn’t have a prayer.
It’s not like Kansas didn’t have their fair share of highlights, though. ‘Carry On Wayward Son’ has become one of the most classic riffs in all of rock and roll, and even if they pile on the progressive tendencies pretty thick on albums like Miracles out of Nowhere, they could always deliver onstage.
But it turned out that ‘The Bad Boys From Boston’ weren’t even going to entertain the idea of the band blowing them offstage, with drummer Phil Ehart saying, “We were – and still are – huge fans of Aerosmith, so it was a thrill to get to play with those guys. But we were warned to be careful. Steven would often pull the plug if a support act went down too well, and sure enough, that’s what happened.”
While Ehart said that there was no bad blood between them after the fact, it was a little bit of a dirty move for any band to pull at the time. Even if the band killed it before you went on, that should only give the headliner the incentive to go up there and prove to everyone why they had been given the headliner status in the first place.
But even if Kansas did tear the place to pieces and make every single fan walk out with a story to tell, was there anyone really worried about a progressive rock heavyweight displacing Tyler in the world of stage performance? ‘The Demon of Screamin’ is a non-stop fireball of relentless energy even on a bad day, but it’s easy to see why he didn’t want to take any chances when someone was owning the stage.
