The one lyric Steven Tyler threatened to quit Aerosmith over: “One of my favourite lines of all time”
For Steven Tyler, the lyrics of a song are about more than just what rolls off the tongue. It’s a journey into his warped mind, and while much of it has to do with sex, there’s a lot more in his tunes that show what makes him tick beyond just the existential crisis going on in ‘Sweet Emotion’. Once Tyler was completely off drugs, he had a new lease on his life as a frontman, but Aerosmith’s disapproval of the song ‘Fever’ was enough for him to consider taking a break from the group.
Then again, it’s impossible to convincingly replace anyone in the group. There was that one wilderness period when they decided to hit the road without Joe Perry, but even that was the equivalent of The Rolling Stones thinking it would be a good idea if Keith Richards stayed home and Mick Jagger took the rest of the group out.
They had been the epitome of a street gang, and that meant if one of them got sober, they would all have to follow suit. Once they reassembled and started gaining momentum again off of records like Permanent Vacation and Pump, Get a Grip was the comeback that shouldn’t have even made sense. Because if you look at MTV circa 1993, there was the final waves of Guns N’ Roses, Nirvana and Pearl Jam tearing rock inside and out, and somehow Aerosmith stood in front of them with tracks like ‘Crazy’ and ‘Amazing’.
Those tunes aren’t really what Aerosmith are known for. They could pull off ballads like nobody’s business, but ‘Fever’ was closer to what their classic sound was all about. Complete with Perry’s signature funky guitar lines and Tyler’s soaring vocals, this could have easily been one of the leadoff singles from the project if not for its lyric sheet.
While not filthy, the line revolving around leaving the drug-fuelled lifestyle behind and OD’ing on the crack of someone’s ass was bound to raise a few eyebrows. It was just another day at the notebook for Tyler, but once he showed it to the rest of the band, bassist Tom Hamilton was the first one to speak up in protest.
In his book Does the Noise In My Head Bother You, Tyler remembered that he was willing to put his career on the line to make sure the lyric stayed completely intact, recalling, “[I said], ‘That’s one of my favourite lines of all time Tom. I wrote the song, not you’. If I could have bottled the anger I felt in that moment I would have quit the band and bought Madrid, and hung out with lemurs for the rest of my life.”
Luckily, the Spanish people were spared Tyler’s antics when Hamilton rolled over for the line. That’s not to say that Tyler didn’t know how to share the adulation whenever he could, including giving Joe Perry his own solo track to sing on the deep cut ‘Walk on Down’, which fits somewhere between Zeppelin-style rocker with a Keef-style vocal delivery.
Still, listening to the lyric in context, it’s easy to see what ‘The Demon of Screamin’ was going for. It’s far from Bob Dylan-levels of poetic or anything, but not even an AI-trained Aerosmith lyric generator could have come up with a line that insane.
