The heavy metal band that Aerosmith couldn’t stand touring with: “Not cool”
Aerosmith always made their best impact on the road rather than on record.
Sure, they could still make great music in the studio in the 1970s and beyond, but the whole reason why they got to the top in the first place was getting in touch with their fans organically, eventually going around the US to drum up hype before their album Get Your Wings even came out. The ‘Bad Boys from Boston’ were the ultimate road dogs, but they did have some reservations when they brought thrash metal icons Megadeth out on tour for the first time.
Because when you think about it, both bands have a significant difference in sound the more you analyse them. Aerosmith had been one of the biggest bands in the 1970s known for rock music that was rough around the edges, and yet Dave Mustaine created Megadeth as one of the most airtight rock outfits of all time out of the ashes of his expulsion from Metallica.
That difference in approach extended beyond just the music itself and into how each band carried their identity. Aerosmith thrived on looseness, a sense that anything could happen once they stepped on stage, even if it occasionally veered into chaos. Megadeth, on the other hand, operated with a precision that bordered on militant, every riff and rhythm locked into place with almost mechanical accuracy. It made for a fascinating contrast, one that was bound to create friction when the two worlds collided.
At the same time, both bands were fiercely protective of their reputations. Aerosmith had spent years building themselves back up from the brink, reclaiming their status through hard work and reinvention, while Megadeth had carved out their own lane through sheer technical dominance. Neither was willing to concede ground, and that underlying tension added an edge to the tour before a single note had even been played.
But both groups had at least one common thread: their need to stay sober. When working on their early 1990s material like Countdown to Extinction and Youthanasia, Mustaine had been trying to cut back on his habits, so working with a group who had been sober for almost half a decade could have been a great older-brother-type mentor for him on the road.
Once they got on the road, Mustaine couldn’t shut his mouth, and half the time, he had something to say about how the group was treating them. Since Megadeth had gotten to the point where they were headlining, Mustaine later said that the real reason why they were on the tour was to see off Aerosmith as a live entity, thinking they were on their last legs as a group.
Even though the 1970s icons had a few years on Megadeth, Joe Perry wasn’t going to take any of that on the chin, recalling in his book Rocks, “Although for the most part, we enjoyed an easy and respectful relationship with other rock bands, at the start of the Get a Grip tour, when Megadeth was opening for us, there was a nasty moment. Dave Mustaine was onstage and bad-mouthed us for being over-the-hill. Not cool. We dropped them from that tour.”
For an “over-the-hill” rock group, Aerosmith were about to have some of the biggest hits of their career in the 1990s. Despite being in the age of grunge rock, songs like ‘Crazy’ and ‘Cryin’ would become staples of MTV once they premiered, which included Alicia Silverstone getting her first big break in each video from that promotional cycle.
Aerosmith would even get their first number one out of the deal with the soundtrack juggernaut ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’, but their credentials as a rock band slowly started to diminish after this. Mustaine did talk a big game about his higher-ups not fitting in with rock anymore, but he may have had a small point once tracks like ‘Jaded’ and ‘Girls of Summer’ took over the radio in the early 2000s.
At the same time, Mustaine’s attempt to match what Metallica did in the early 1990s on Risk is still one of the most ill-advised decisions in rock history, with ‘Crush ‘Em’ sounding like if a cartoon villain from a kid’s show tried to write ‘We Will Rock You’. Mustaine could talk a big game, but seeing where both artists went afterwards, this is one of the biggest instances of the pot calling the kettle black.
