The Aerosmith riff Steven Tyler credited to cocaine
No one in Aerosmith could claim to have been a choirboy during their time in the spotlight. You don’t get the nickname ‘Bad Boys from Boston’ by accident, and every band member was known to push their excesses to the limit whenever they went onstage. Even though the riffs could roll out of them with no problem in the early days, Steven Tyler credited the song ‘Sweet Emotion’ to a night when the band was coked out of their minds.
Then again, any time in the 1970s when the band weren’t at least a little bit buzzed was getting to be more few and far between. Compared to the greatest excess stories from artists like Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith was in another class altogether, with even guitarist and noted drug enthusiast Jerry Garcia marvelling at how much they indulged in the sex, drugs, and rock and roll creed.
By the time the band had hit their debut album, though, hits were still alluding them. Even though any radio station would be happy to play songs like ‘Dream On’ today, the track sank like a stone on the group’s first album, leading to them going out on the road to promote themselves as much as possible.
While that elbow grease got the band’s sophomore effort, Get Your Wings, on the charts, Toys in the Attic is where they started to expand their craft. Embracing the bluesy boogie that they had started on their first albums, songs like ‘Walk This Way’ and ‘Toys in the Attic’ brought a new sense of swagger into their sound that no one had heard before. The record seemed like it would be perfect…it was just missing one song.
During the band’s various jam sessions, producer Jack Douglas had said that they were short of one song for the album and told everyone to come back to the studio with any ideas that they had lying around. Once everyone heard the hypnotic bassline Hamilton was working on, the band knew that they were going to need some chemical assistance to help him flesh out the rest of it.
When talking about getting everything down on paper, Tyler wasn’t shy about his reliance on weed to get him through the song, telling Classic Rock Stories, “We didn’t know how to end it…we got into a big fight. [We] blew cocaine all over the place. I said, ‘Just fuckin play a drum fill, and we’ll go into [sings outro riff]’. And we did it. It was such a magic moment”.
Since the entire song had been in the key of A for most of its runtime, transposing the song to the key of E may have been accidental genius on their part. Whereas the rest of the song had a bit of a psychedelic edge to it, bringing the heavy riff back into the picture turns it into something that would have been pulled out of Jimmy Page’s lick library, only with Joe Perry’s wild approach to soloing on top instead.
While the band came through with a classic, it was only a matter of time before drugs ended up taking them downhill, culminating in the harsh sessions going into the making of their album Draw the Line. It may not have been the healthiest of dealing with problems in the studio, but Tyler’s coke-fuelled frustration may have been just what the band needed at the moment.
