The one band that made Steven Tyler want to quit music
The entire story of Aerosmith was a constant uphill battle for Steven Tyler.
Although most people would be happy to sing half as well as he could throughout their career, it’s not like the beginnings of ‘The Bad Boys from Boston’ started off strong right out of the gate. Every single person has their moments of doubt, but not many people realised how close we were to not hearing Tyler reinvent the concept of the rock and roll frontman at all.
Because looking through all of Aerosmith’s records, it’s not like all of them were exactly the highest-selling albums of the year by any stretch. They certainly had a growing fanbase by the time that they had made Toys in the Attic and Rocks, but for the longest time, songs like ‘Dream On’ were practically unknown outside of their local area before their managers decided to give the tune a second chance. But even when they were at the top, there was always tension between how the band worked.
Every band needs their dynamic duo to help see things through, and Joe Perry was the John Lennon to Tyler’s Paul McCartney a lot of the time. Perry was the last one to care about making everything sound clean and precise, but when that was matched up with the attention to detail that Tyler had on every single song, they had the spark that made each of them work together a lot better. It was a matter of trust half the time, but when they met in the Northeast, Tyler was never exactly interested in what Perry had done.
He had his own band, Chain Reaction, and one of their songs had even become a minor hit in their area and was given a slot on the jukeboxes across town. The frontman had already seen a version of The Yardbirds with Jimmy Page playing while he was still behind the drumkit in that group, so when the band eventually fell out, Tyler was convinced that there was no reason for him to carry on.
When Perry first met up with Tyler after inviting him to watch his band play, the guitarist remembered how Tyler was considering walking away from a life of rock and roll, saying, “Steven was a singer and a drummer, and he was really good. [Bassist] Tom [Hamilton] and I had plans to go up to Boston to put a new band together. So I talked to Steven. By that point, he was thinking of quitting the business. I wanted him to play drums, but he said, ‘I want to be the singer.’ I said, ‘Okay, that’s great.’”
If you ask Tyler, though, the songs that they had needed a bit of work. Perry’s outfit was a cover band at that point with nothing really special about them, but when they kicked into Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rattlesnake Shake’, Tyler was transfixed, saying, “It wasn’t [shit] anymore. It was all about making it right, you know, now we’re talking.” But that didn’t mean Tyler was going to give up his percussionist role, either.
Everyone knows him for using those maracas every time he went onstage, but there was also a lot more behind what Joey Kramer was doing behind the kit as well. Tyler was the one who came up with the drum groove that would turn into ‘Walk This Way’, and Kramer had said multiple times that the frontman’s determination to get everything right is the reason why his eye twitches to this day.
So while a life of working dead-end jobs seemed like a better idea than going solo, Tyler knew all he needed was the right musical family to call his own. And once he started working with Perry’s riffs, he knew that his sense of musical theory was going to send them into the stratosphere no matter what anyone else said.
