The harsh tour that saw Steven Tyler booed offstage: “You were a dartboard”
It’s practically a right of passage for every single artist to get booed off the stage at least once. Even if it can be traumatising and leave people with a few bruised egos, the biggest artists are the ones who can take that massive rejection and choose to move on from it rather than hang things up for good. And when that kind of treatment came to Aerosmith, Steven Tyler was never one to roll over and accept his reputation as a lesser performer.
Because ever since he started draping those scarves around his microphone, Tyler was determined to be one of the best frontmen the world had ever seen. He may have taken a few cues from Mick Jagger in the way that he interacted with Joe Perry, but if The Stones were the British equivalent of bluesmen, this was what happened when they got transformed into pure rock and rollers.
After all, the whole point of the British Invasion was doing their own version of rock and roll, so this was simply ‘The Bad Boys From Boston’ returning the favour. It’s a no-brainer to think about things in those terms now, but when looking at it back in the early 1970s, most people saw a bunch of copycats looking to make a quick buck off of listeners.
Every single critic was guilty of dragging Aerosmith through the mud at least once, and even though the band themselves let it roll off of them, it didn’t leave them without a few kinks in their armour. If it wasn’t working all that well when copying the British invasion, things were only about to get worse when they had to open for one of the biggest names of the early 1960s.
While Tyler had followed in the footsteps of acts like The Yardbirds, The Kinks were already on a different level compared to everyone else. Even if some of their songs weren’t hitting the same way they were when Ray Davies wrote ‘Waterloo Sunset’, having Aerosmith open up for them should have given them the respectability they deserved. That is, if they actually managed to draw the right crowd.
Despite going over as well as someone screaming ‘BOMB’ in a movie theatre, Tyler managed to turn the ridicule into a strength, saying, “When Aerosmith first started, we’d go out with bands like the Kinks and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. You were a dartboard. ‘Boo! We want the Kinks!’ I put up with that for the longest time. I would need something to hide behind. The scarves would be my thing. And the way I tied them on to the mike, it kind of dressed it up. In the early days I used to put weights on the bottom of them, whack people in the audience with them and pull ’em back like fishhooks.”
Then again, the real ridicule should go to whatever concert promoter thought that Aerosmith and Mahavishnu Orchestra was a good fit to begin with. Both of them are fantastic at what they do, but hearing intricate licks after sitting through a traditional boogie-woogie rock outfit is like putting a thin layer of nacho cheese on top of a freshly cut salad.
Still, the key to Tyler’s theory is to never let the audience see you struggling. There are many opportunities for musicians to royally screw themselves whenever they play live, but if Tyler was going to go down, he would keep standing with the microphone stand held firmly aloft above his head.
