‘Dream On’: The “melodramatic” song that shocked Steven Tyler and Aerosmith
If Aerosmith had never become the biggest band in America, there’s a good chance Steven Tyler would have still become a star.
He needed Joe Perry to help pull inspiration out of him every single time they played, but it would have been a crime if the world was robbed of one of the most electric frontmen of all time whenever he leapt across the stage. He was a relentless ball of energy whenever he performed, but underneath all of those stage moves was a musician who was absolutely clinical about what his music should sound like.
You wouldn’t know it by looking at him, but when you hear a lot of what Aerosmith’s music would become, Tyler was the one really calling the shots. He wasn’t going to be the one coming up with guitar riffs or anything, but when it came to actually arranging every single song, there was no way that any one of their songs was going to get on one of their records if it didn’t sound absolutely perfect.
And no one knew that better than Joey Kramer whenever he got behind the kit. Tyler was a drummer long before going to the front of the stage, and he could be strict about how the drums were supposed to sound on tracks like ‘Walk This Way’. There needed to be a groove running through every single one of their songs, but there was also a lot of musical nuance going on that no one else would have thought of at the time.
You have to remember that Tyler had been listening to classical music ever since his father started playing it when he was a kid, and when you hear some of their songs like ‘You See Me Crying’ or ‘Home Tonight’, they were the ones that were perfecting the power ballad long before the glam metal bands of the 1980s started to make it their calling card on every one of their records. But even by ballad standards, the chords of ‘Dream On’ were a bit strange compared to everything else he came up with.
There are some strange chords that no one would have thought to put in a traditional pop song, but that’s because Tyler wasn’t even looking to make a power ballad when he wrote it. He only wanted to express himself after feeling the melancholy of being alone at the end of the summer, and when the band started to play their own version of the tune, Tyler was stunned by how well the track translated to the guitar.
Perry wasn’t one to study this complicated kind of harmony, but Tyler was flabbergasted when hearing what it could sound like with a bit more distortion behind it, saying, “‘Dream On’ was written four or five years before the group even started. Never in a million years did I think I’d take it to guitar. When I transposed it to guitar Joe played the right fingers and Brad played the left hand on guitar. Sitting there working it out on guitar and piano I got a little melodramatic. The song was so good it brought a tear to my eye.”
But even if it would become one of the most classic ballads in rock and roll, it took a long time for the rest of the world to catch on. The tune didn’t really fit on a record that had songs like ‘Somebody’ and ‘One Way Street’ on it, but after they broke through to the mainstream with records like ‘Sweet Emotion’, it didn’t take long for the rest of the world to dig up ‘Dream On’ and have it reach the Top 10.
It had come a long way from a song played on his father’s piano, but there’s a reason why ‘Dream On’ stands out a lot more than a song like ‘I Don’t Want to Miss A Thing’ in their catalogue. Many artists can try their best to work with the best songwriters to get their biggest hits, but landing on this kind of melody is the kind of magic that most people can only capture once in their careers.
