The one artist Steven Tyler claimed he could never write like: “That ain’t it”
It’s impossible to ignore the influences Steven Tyler had whenever he got up onstage in the 1970s.
Aerosmith were their own unique entity half the time, but what Tyler was doing took all the showmanship of Mick Jagger and combined it with the visceral scream of Robert Plant whenever he got onstage. That might have seemed like the exact recipe for a classic rock and roll singer at the time, but Tyler did have a lot more range than the vocal demon he had living inside of him.
I mean, it only takes one look at Aerosmith’s later catalogue to see that he isn’t tied to the blues all the time. Honkin’ on Bobo was a great way for the band to get back in touch with their roots, but even if they have had more than a few “sell-out” moments in their career, it’s not like later albums like Just Push Play and Music From Another Dimension didn’t have their fair share of highlights throughout their run time as well.
But aside from their reputation as blues rock mainstays, Tyler didn’t exactly fit that mould in his prime, either. Even if the rest of the group worshipped at the altar of everyone from The Rolling Stones to the first iteration of Fleetwood Mac, how the hell are you supposed to explain the advanced harmony that was coming out of tunes like ‘Dream On’ or the sophisticated piano work throughout ‘You See Me Crying’?
That’s not something anyone thinks up for the hell of it, and given how much Tyler listened to his father play classical music as a kid, a lot of that was bound to rub off on him at some point. There was a lot of room for him to make more sophisticated music, but it wasn’t like he was going to be the lyrical scholar with tunes like ‘Walk This Way’ and ‘Mama Kin’ under his belt, either.
Throughout every classic Aerosmith album, Tyler likes to talk about a bit of smut every now and again, but he also had an itch to sing more meaningful songs. His heroes may have been old bluesmen that talked about women that did them wrong, but he did have a healthy respect for what Bob Dylan had been doing ever since he started strumming away back in the early 1960s.
Every member of the band could respect what Dylan brought to the table, but no matter how hard Tyler tried, there was no way that he could ever match the lyrical master, saying, “Part of me says, ‘Yeah, I’d like to take the Dylan approach and be profound’, but that ain’t it. Joe Perry throws me a lick. It’s a language to me, and I sing about what I hear his lick saying. I jam, I scat, and then I fill in the blanks. If I was to think too much about everything, what came out of me would be real thin, real affected.”
But that doesn’t mean a few meaningful tunes haven’t squeaked by in the meantime, either. There are a million opportunities for Tyler to branch out, and even if the brokenhearted songs like ‘Cryin” were more than a little bit divisive, the fact that he made ‘Janie’s Got A Gun’, one of the most intense songs that the band ever wrote, is one of those rare moments where everything clicks in the studio.
While those serious moments may be few and far between, that’s hardly a bad thing when it comes to Aerosmith. Their fans know what they come to them for, and even if they weren’t going to be leaving every concert with the most thoughtful lyrics by any stretch, there’s certainly a place for songs that are fun, sleazy and more than a little bit dangerous in rock and roll every now and again.
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