The genre that made Steven Tyler become a musician: “It takes on a new meaning”
Steven Tyler was a natural-born performer. Not only did he possess one of the most impressive vocal ranges in rock history, but he also had a knack for crafting melodic hooks that could either set someone’s world ablaze or twist a knife in their heart. Long before he emulated the rock music styles of Led Zeppelin or The Yardbirds, Tyler credited his father’s classical music for deeply ingraining a sense of melody within him.
But when you look at any of Aerosmith’s albums, not many of them scream musical sophistication. If anything, an album like Toys in the Attic was probably the closest thing to punk that the genre had to offer before Sex Pistols came in, including chaotic guitar solos from Joe Perry and half of Tyler’s lyric sheet being about the pleasures of sex.
Then again, would you expect anything less from an act that cited groups like The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin as their main influences? These guys weren’t looking to write the next musical masterpiece every time they made a song, but Tyler was still interested in sprinkling a few pieces of classical music into his art.
When talking about his upbringing, Tyler said that half of his musical knowledge came from listening to his father at the piano, telling Behind the Music, “My formative years from one to nine, I would sit at the piano, and my father would play classical music. And when you take life’s emotions and the shit you go through in life, and you lay it over a Bach or Brahms sonata, it takes on a new meaning. Hence, the language of music.”
Although classical music was one part of Tyler’s upbringing, he had another conversion moment when seeing The Yardbirds play for the first time. He had already taken to acts like The Beatles, but hearing the old-school blues of the British rockers with an up-and-coming guitarist named Jimmy Page completely warped his mind.
After meeting up with Joe Perry after hearing his group play in Boston, Tyler believed that there was bound to be magic in joining forces, saying, “He had so much feeling, and I thought if I could take my father’s classical and add my own shit to that, we may have something, and here we are.”
That kind of classical sense of composition didn’t go anywhere once the group got a record deal. Some of their early ballads, like ‘Mia’ from Night in the Ruts, do have a baroque edge to them, and the entire composition of ‘Dream On’ sounds like it’s meant to be played over a classical piano rather than plucked out by two guitars.
But maybe that’s the reason why Tyler’s approach works so well. He never claimed to be a classical composer by any stretch of the imagination, but once he got his bearings, he knew there were no real limits to what he could do when he had a microphone in his hand.
