The first album that truly inspired Joey Kramer: “Which might surprise most people”
During his 50 years behind the kit, Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer has happily taken a literal backseat to the more flamboyant, household names in his group, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry.
Without Kramer’s band-naming skills way back in 1970, though, Tyler and Perry might have made their fortunes as members of The Hookers, Fox Chase, or Spike Jones, which are just a few examples of terrible ideas they’d had for band names before landing on the good one.
Kramer had actually been carrying around the word ‘Aerosmith’ with him for two years, jotting it down on notepads in stylised script, as if he knew it might end up on a bass drum head someday. The name was not actually inspired by the famous Sinclair Lewis novel, Arrowsmith, as many assumed, but by a very different piece of work that had grabbed Kramer’s attention in 1968.
Based on Aerosmith’s sound, you might presume that Kramer was listening primarily to up-tempo blues rock in his youth: the Stones, Cream, Zeppelin, The Who, and more, but as a teen in the late ‘60s, he was spending just as much time absorbing the thoughtful melodies of Simon & Garfunkel, Nazz, and Harry Nilsson. The latter artist’s 1968 album, called Aerial Ballet, was a particular standout, as Kramer recalled to Goldmine magazine last year.
“A friend of mine who I went to school with and who I’ve known for all my life, Patty Borden, the two of us together listened to this Harry Nilsson record over and over and over again,” Kramer said, “I still listen to it today. It’s one of my all-time favourite records, which would probably surprise people because most of what I like is soul, hard rock, and all that kind of stuff.”
Nilsson’s brand of almost Vaudevillian chamber-pop was very British, a tad quirky, and not wildly successful with American audiences at first. Aerial Ballet, which he’d named after his grandparents’ circus act in Sweden, only started to make waves in the US a year after its release, when the single ‘Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me’, a cover of a Fred Neil song, was prominently featured in the soundtrack of the hit film Midnight Cowboy.
By that point, though, Joey Kramer had already become obsessed with the Nilsson album, including its unusual title.
“When Patty and I came up with the name Aerosmith, we zeroed in on the word ‘Aerial’,” he said, “The word ‘Aerial’ is where ‘Aero’ came from. We took it off that album and kept kicking it around. Finally, Patty pretty much came up with it. I have to give her credit. I’d automatically get credit because it was my band, but Patty played a very, very large part in helping me come up with the name Aerosmith.”
Over time, the mythical origin story of Aerosmith’s name has rarely included Patty Borden’s influence, but Kramer seems to want to right that wrong now, with the realistic prospect that Aerosmith may have played its final gig due to Steven Tyler’s vocal cord concerns.
