The Aerosmith lyric Steven Tyler called “the best Joe Perry ever wrote”
By the mid-1970s, Aerosmith had practically created the sure-fire recipe for success as a rock band. Taking the swaggering muscle of Led Zeppelin and pairing it with the bluesy structure of The Rolling Stones, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry were on a roll of classic songs that would take them through the rest of the decade until their dissolution after a fight in 1979. Although Tyler and Perry would part ways, Tyler still thinks the guitar slinger wrote one of the most important songs for the band.
Before they even got any chart success, it didn’t look like Aerosmith would be anyone’s favourite rock band. After their first album met a deaf ear in favour of Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith built their following in the grass-roots sense, going from one city to the next and playing to anyone that would have them.
Once they built up their fanbase of blue-collar teenagers, their second album, Get Your Wings, became their first real shot at success, with soon-to-be staples of their catalogue like ‘Same Old Song and Dance’ and ‘Seasons of Wither’. As fans began to get used to Aerosmith’s trademark brand of boogie, they began getting heavier off the back of the album Toys in the Attic.
Tuning down for most of the project and bringing enhanced darkness to the sessions, Rocks became one of their first masterworks, still regarded as a favourite by Joe Perry for its unusual approach to riffage. Although tracks like ‘Back in the Saddle’ crossed the band’s rock and roll troubadour persona with a Wild West gunslinger, it was further down the record where Perry got to shine.
Sung as a vocal duet with Tyler, ‘Combination’ was a dark look at what was going on just underneath the surface within the band. Compared to their larger-than-life personas, the band were in shambles backstage, getting more strung out on the junk in their veins than focusing on the music.
Although the band has since cleaned up from their past, Tyler still contests that Perry’s lyrics on the album are the strongest he has ever written. When speaking about Aerosmith’s history in his biography Does The Noise In My Head Bother You, Tyler referred to ‘Combination’ as a watershed moment, recalling, “[The line] ‘Living on Gucci wearing Yves St Laurent/Barely stay on cause I’m so goddamn gaunt’. Best lyric Joe Perry ever wrote. It was the truth, it was clever, and it described us to a tee”.
While Aerosmith was still riding high, Perry’s words would become an omen for when everything came crashing down just one album later. Having burnt themselves out on the road, Draw the Line was piecemeal a collection of all the tracks the band could muster together in between their drug binges.
Even though Tyler and Perry would fall out over band tensions, it would take them decades before they could reform and get sober together, having a career renaissance amid the hair metal movement on albums like Permanent Vacation and Pump. Rock will never run out of songs about the hedonistic lifestyle, but ‘Combination’ is a good reminder of how far rockstars can sink if they lose themselves to drugs.
