The song that gave Steven Tyler “the greatest thrill on the planet”
The dizzying pace that Aerosmith was thrust back into rock’s spotlight can’t have surprised anyone more than their frontman, Steven Tyler.
The 1980s started bleakly. Only a few years previously, Aerosmith enjoyed a pedigree as America’s premier hard rock band, nearly standing shoulder to shoulder with the UK heavyweight arena fillers of Led Zeppelin or even The Rolling Stones. The Boston outfit was big, yet, like a tale as old as time in rock lore, such success soon gave way to drugs, infighting, and a rocky uncertainty whether the Aerosmith juggernaut was going to survive any length of time.
The smack addiction got worse, the venues were shrinking, and even founding guitarist Joe Perry called it a day and left after a backstage fight in 1979. After Aerosmith’s nadir, a tentative reformation of the classic line-up and a curious hip-hop rework of 1975’s ‘Walk This Way’ with Run-DMC suddenly brought a whole new level of fame and unlikely stars of the MTV age.
They were back. Embracing a wider, pop accessibility in a loose orbit with the decade’s glam metal heyday, 1987’s Permanent Vacation would see Aerosmith back to enjoying multiple platinum sales, but surpassing themselves commercially with 1989’s Pump. The band were now bigger than ever, even their 1970s peak, ending the 1980s in a different universe of rock and pop stature and back to playing stadiums.
Much of their explosive rebirth was down to one of their comeback era’s biggest hits. While counting some of hard rock’s much-loved numbers, the new strata of fame meant that Tyler would come across Aerosmith’s soundtrack to a greater degree of ubiquity than had ever been experienced before.
“I’m putting air in my tyres and watching a car go by with a roof down, and people are going [singing] ‘love in an elevator…’,” Tyler reflected on The Henry Rollins Show in 2007. “They’re all singing that, and I’m going ‘oh my God’…it’s the greatest thrill on the planet, you know?”
It’s probably the song that most defer to when thinking of Aerosmith. Leading Pump, ‘Love in an Elevator’ was spawned largely from Tyler’s ever-horny wandering mind, supposing the strange moment when no one talks to each other as the elevator is in transit, by attempting to get into each other’s knickers. Whether simply a passing reverie or potentially on a real scenario is unclear, but Tyler penned just the ludicrous fodder for the new, ever-so-slightly silly phase of Aerosmith’s great return.
‘Love in an Elevator’ is a pop-rock animal which could only have come from the late 1980s, more than happy to sit among the likes of Mötley Crüe while happy to ease into their vintage rock laurels. Complete with a bevvy of models and cartoonish prop spectacle in its flashy promo, Tyler and the lads were far away from the Boston streets of their rawer youth.
But they didn’t care. Aerosmith were now an unstoppable Billboard whirlwind, hurtling into the next decade with the even bigger success of 1993’s Get a Grip and the mega ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ five years later.
