The 1974 Mel Brooks scene that revolutionised the music industry: “We were all in hysterics”
Not content with revolutionising Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s, Mel Brooks had much the same effect on the music industry in the 1980s, even if he technically didn’t have anything to do with it.
Mainstream comedy had never seen anything like the actor, comedian, and filmmaker’s anarchic, boundary-pushing, and taboo-shattering movies before The Producers, the first all-out comedy flick to turn the Nazis into figures of fun and a relentless source of mockery.
Striking while the iron was hot, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein cemented him as an era-defining, generational force to be reckoned with behind the camera, which was quite the achievement, considering so much of it was built on scattershot humour, sight gags, and fart jokes.
However, despite being one of the most award-laden veterans around, the centenarian helped usher in a brand new, bold, and ultimately transformative period for recording artists everywhere by doing nothing. Well, not nothing, since he wrote and directed Young Frankenstein, but in the strictest sense, still nothing.
In December 1974, Aerosmith’s Joe Perry was tinkering with a riff before a gig in Honolulu, and little did he know, history was in the making. His strumming eventually snowballed into the band’s original 1975 version of ‘Walk This Way’, but while the music was falling into place, it still needed lyrics and a title.
“When we needed lyrics, we would go out for walks,” Jack Douglas, who produced the group’s third album, Toys in the Attic, recalled. “Being Sunday afternoon, there was absolutely no one on the street. When we got to 42nd Street, Young Frankenstein was playing in one of those theatres.”
Nobody could have guessed at the time, but it was a seminal moment. “The whole band went in to see the movie, and when that line came up, ‘Walk this way’, we were all in hysterics,” Douglas added. “And when we got back to the studio, I started walking around like Marty Feldman.”
Suddenly, ‘Walk This Way’ had a title, and when Run-DMC got involved in 1986, things were taken to another level.
In addition to relaunching Aerosmith’s stagnating career, after reaching number four on the Billboard charts, it became Run-DMC’s biggest hit and the highest-charting hip-hop single of all time. Beyond that, the crossover between guitar-crunching rock and rap music introduced each genre to audiences who wouldn’t otherwise have been listening to one or the other, enhancing hip-hop’s mainstream visibility.
For better or worse, if there wasn’t ’86’s ‘Walk This Way’, then there may not have been Rage Against the Machine, Faith No More, Anthrax and Public Enemy’s ‘Bring the Noise’, or the entire nu-metal era, which is why we said for better or worse. It all began when Aerosmith decided to watch Young Frankenstein when in need of inspiration, and if they’d chosen something else to see in December of ’74, they might have ended up taking a line from The Towering Inferno, The Godfather Part II, or The Man with the Golden Gun instead.
