The New York gig that turned Aerosmith into superstars: “We’re big time. We made it”
There’s a good chance that Aerosmith were going to be one of the biggest bands in the world, whether the powers that be wanted them to or not.
It was impossible to ignore everything that Steven Tyler was doing when he strutted up and down the stage, and with Joe Perry’s shuffling riffs driving the whole thing like the funkiest engine ever conceived, the band were practically a funhouse mirror image of what bands like The Rolling Stones had been doing on the other side of the pond. But it only took one gig for everyone to start to realise what they had on their hands with ‘The Bad Boys From Boston’.
But before they even got together, Tyler had already had a record deal with one of his older bands. Chain Reaction was a fairly decent garage rock knockoff of The Yardbirds, but when Perry started coming around his neck of the woods, Tyler knew that he needed to find a way to get that kind of fire in his band. Perry’s group, The Jam Band, already had Tom Hamilton in it, but when they eventually folded, the band drafting in Joey Kramer gave them the most solid rhythm section on the entire East Coast.
They were already on their way when Tyler and Perry wrote their first song when they moved to Boston, but ‘Movin’ Out’ was only the beginning of the journey for them. They had a lot more ground to cover, and even if they were woodshedding a lot of their greatest songs, they were a band that truly needed to be seen to be believed. Tyler was the epitome of charisma every time he was onstage, and when he played off Perry’s lead guitar, there was a certain tension in the air that no one could get enough of.
For a band that got known for being one of the biggest draws in Boston, though, they needed to head down to New York to see if they could get more eyes on them. The summer of love had ended, and even though ‘The Big Apple’ was home to more obscure acts at the time, like Lou Reed, Aerosmith fit like a glove when they started playing their first tunes at Max’s Kansas City one night.
And while the band could kill any crowd that they played to, this one date really was trial by fire. They had been playing clubs for years at this point, but when they caught the attention of Clive Davis in the crowd that night, there was no one else who could touch them. They had started a frenzy, and Davis was the one who would eventually give them their first record contract as soon as the night was over.
The band had already put enough miles under their belt, but Tyler felt that this was the first time he felt that things were paying off, saying, “I remember Clive Davis putting his arm around me and saying, ‘You’re gonna be a big star.’ We’re big time. We made it.” But even if they had one major victory that night, the long road was still ahead of them when they released their first record.
The energy was certainly there, but since the label was also putting a lot of their energy into people like Bruce Springsteen at the time, it was going to be a bit more difficult for Aerosmith to get a foothold playing blues rock. Admittedly, the debut wasn’t their best offering in terms of rock and roll classics, but by the time that they made Get Your Wings, they had built up their following in the only way they knew how: playing night after night to anyone and everyone up and down the East Coast.
Their calling was in being one of the biggest road dogs that the industry had ever seen, but if you take a listen to a song like ‘No Surprize’, you know that Tyler never took that one night in Max’s Kansas City for granted. That entire song was the story of them going from a bunch of kids with a dream to potential superstars, and they were going to spend the rest of their days proving to everyone why they deserved that contract.
