The 1976 album Steven Tyler called the greatest of all time: “That amazing record”
There aren’t many frontmen who manage to exude the same kind of energy that Steven Tyler was working with.
Even though he was one of the few frontmen who seemed to wear his influences on his sleeve a little too much, it’s not really fair to call him a repeat of whatever Mick Jagger was doing. Not even The Stones could have had as much energy as Tyler did whenever he played, but there was a much more complex musical mind hidden underneath the hair and the scarves.
You have to remember that Tyler spent the first few years of his life listening to some of the biggest names in classical music, and all of those layers of harmony went into him performing a song like ‘Dream On’ later in life. He was a craftsman in every sense of the word whenever he played, but since he grew up as a drummer, he was always listening for whether the groove was locked in perfectly whenever they came up with tunes like ‘Walk This Way’.
And if you were looking for bands that knew their way around a groove, you couldn’t get much better than the titans of R&B. Every member of Aerosmith would have probably said how much they were influenced by people like James Brown whenever they were coming up, but even ‘The Godfather of Soul’ couldn’t have competed with the kind of musical brilliance that Stevie Wonder had inside of him.
Wonder was the kind of musician who could outclass almost everyone in whatever instrument they played, and even when working against members of The Beatles, you would find almost all of the Fab Four struggling to hold their own next to him in a jam session, so for someone who was as impressionable as Tyler was, Songs in the Key of Life was basically his musical blueprint whenever he needed to judge whether his tunes were up to snuff.
The piano legend was already reaching the peak of his classic period on records like Talking Book, but everything on Songs is an amalgamation of what made him so beloved for all those years. ‘Isn’t She Lovely’ is the sweetest tune he ever made, ‘Sir Duke’ is his claim that he could hang with some of the greatest jazz legends of all time, and even when he left songs on the cutting room floor, ‘All Day Sucker’ being included on a bonus EP would have been a travesty on anyone else’s record.
Tyler came from a much different world, but he knew that Wonder had hit on something that he couldn’t have imagined, saying, “You know what one of my favourite records of all time is? Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, mainly because of what drummer Raymond Pounds decided to do, which was, in essence, not live up to his name. There are very few drum fills on that amazing record. You can be just as good just holding down the fort.”
But as most drummers come to find out, sometimes laying down that simple pulse is all that you need. Even though Pounds could have easily played the biggest drum fills that anyone had ever heard on record, it would have been a disaster on these songs. ‘I Wish’ is a song that lives and dies on the other instruments having that pulse, and if you had John Bonham playing the beat, the whole thing wouldn’t have made any sense.
So while Joey Kramer did have his work cut out for him when working with Tyler from the back of the Aerosmith stage, all he needed to worry about was getting the right feeling for every single song – he could play fills if he wanted to, but as long as he abided by the rules of R&B, every song would fall into place exactly how it was supposed to.
