The song that made Steven Tyler fall in love with Aerosmith: “We were on a mission”
Rock and roll was never a one-time fling for Steven Tyler.
By the time he began working with Aerosmith, he wanted to make sure that he had one of the most kickass bands that he had ever seen behind him every single time he got up onstage, and whenever he opened his mouth, he was bound to give every other vocalist a run for their money. But even if Aerosmith churned out classics quicker than most around the mid-1970s, it took a little while before Tyler was completely on board with what everyone was trying to do.
After all, Tyler had seen the pitfalls of rock and roll more than a few times before in his original band, Chain Reaction. He hadn’t even heard about Joe Perry yet when working on his handful of songs, and while a lot of his tunes were a pale imitation of what bands like The Yardbirds were doing, he felt that there was something missing whenever he heard what bands like Led Zeppelin were playing whenever they released a record. He wanted that kind of excitement, and Perry had the kind of swagger he was looking for.
Both of them loved the blues with all their heart, but it was Perry who brought that Keith Richards-style energy to everything. Seeing Perry’s group wasn’t exactly the most impressive thing in the world to Tyler, but when he heard them play tunes like ‘Rattlesnake Shake’, he knew that they could have something if they worked together. But on that first Aerosmith album, a lot of the focus was on Tyler telling the others what to do.
It’s no secret that Tyler is very particular about what he wants any Aerosmith record to sound like, but aside from ‘Dream On’, a lot of the first record is an example of them trying to wear their influences too much on their sleeve. Some of the bluesy textures from Chain Reaction were still lingering on, and while Tyler was still the one everyone answered to, the best parts of their discography were going to come when he worked together with Perry.
Perry was already a riff machine well before joining the band, but aside from Tom Hamilton and Joey Kramer helping lay down the groove in their early days, ‘Movin’ Out’ was the first time Tyler saw the magic that Aerosmith could have. The opening riff to that song was bound to be a classic, and when Tyler started throwing in lyrics over top of Perry’s lick, he realised that he had signed up for something a lot more interesting than traditional rock and roll.
Everything else had been kids’ stuff up until that point, and this was his moment to become a superstar, saying, “We were on a mission. There was no ‘what if the band doesn’t work?’ We were going to do this. And after that first song in Boston when I sat on a waterbed with Joe [and] we wrote that first song, I knew that we had something no one else had. You wouldn’t say that back then.”
But it took the rest of the world a little bit more time to figure out what was going on. Aerosmith wasn’t exactly a smash hit on their first album, but they earned their stripes the way that everyone lese used to back in the day: relentless touring. They would play until they dropped, and by the time that they made records like Toys in the Attic and Rocks, they had shed all of the Stones and Zeppelin comparisons and morphed into their own unique entity whenever they walked into the studio.
It might have only started with Tyler and Perry sitting on that waterbed writing ‘Movin’ Out’, but those humble beginnings were the first steps of the band that would one day turn into a rock and roll institution. There was no turning back after that first song, and Tyler was determined to not rest until Aerosmith became one of the biggest bands that America had ever seen.
