As Ultimate Classic Rock reports, as hard as they tried, the band wouldn't score a number one single until 1998 with the decidedly un-rock and roll "Don't Wanna Miss A Thing" (which was actually written by songwriter Diane Warren, the pro hitmaker behind hits by Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, LeAnn Rimes, and other pop stars). That's how Aerosmith still manages to come up with music that's relevant to kids younger than his own kids.On stage, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry - frontmen of the legendary classic rock band Aerosmith – worked so well over the years that the band produced dozens of chart-topping singles like "Dream On," "Sweet Emotion," "Walk This Way," "Love In An Elevator," "Janie's Got a Gun," and more. Tyler has successfully adhered to his "Mama Kin" concept right into middle-age, keeping in touch with the youthful spirit that got him rocking in the first place. You look over to the guy you were angry at sitting next to you, and you go, 'Hey, how ya doin.' Now, suddenly, there's this veneer of love and yeee-haww! And you get in your car, and you run home." "It's that feeling you had Friday afternoon at school, when you knew school was gonna be out in 20 minutes.
So I got a tattoo made up, and I was all full of myself. It was the first song I ever wrote myself, and I thought it was gonna be a single. I got a tattoo 30 years ago that says 'Mama Kin'. Tyler says the glue is "the joy of getting up there and making music and playing it, and the audience loving it. Tyler, Perry, Whitford, bassist Tom Hamilton and Joey Kramer are probably one of the happiest dysfunctional families in the business.
Their longevity is second only to the band they're so often likened to - the Rolling Stones - but even the Stones can't brag on keeping their original lineup alive and well and together. 1 hit with "Jaded." No other inductee can claim such a distinction, and most are well past their chart-topping days when the Hall of Fame comes knocking. Now more than three decades into their flight, Aerosmith went into a power-climb in 2001, blowing wet-noses such as 'N Sync and Britney Spears out of the stadium in a spectacular Super Bowl halftime show, releasing a self-produced smash album, "Just Push Play," and getting inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the same month they scored a No. Raunchy funk-rocker and power-ballad hits such as "Dude (Looks Like a Lady)," "Rag Doll" "Love in an Elevator" and "Crazy" just kept on coming, joining a live play list that still includes such classics as "Sweet Emotion," "Dream On," "Big Ten Inch Record" and their mandatory Yardbirds cover, "Train Kept A-Rollin.'" That kind of sums it up, doesn't it?"įar from dying, Aerosmith's original, newly detoxed lineup regrouped in 1984 and - boosted by the success of Run DMC's rap remake of "Walk This Way" - proceeded to exceed the success of their initial go-round. Tyler likes to quote what Hunter Thompson wrote: "'The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench.' Right? 'A long, plastic highway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. Quite a feat considering this Boston-based band has climbed to the top and fallen to the bottom of the corporate rock heap - where they sank deep into that well-known music-biz mire of drugs and depravity - only to sober up and ascend again.Īnd considering how low Aerosmith had flown by 1981, with bitter infighting, bad management and plummeting record sales resulting in the departures of guitarists Joe Perry and Brad Whitford, theirs has got to be one of the most remarkable comeback stories on the books. In fact, at 53, he still looks at least 15 years his junior. He's still strutting his stuff upon the rock 'n' roll stages of the world with all the rubber agility and rebel attitude of a man 30 years his junior.
I've turned into 'Farm Boy.'"īut Tyler isn't ready for rural retirement just yet. I haven't hunted since I was really young. I don't know whether I would have shot one. "We were hunting deer that day, and I was up in the stand with my son. "I go down to my wife's father's farm, and we go shootin'," the New Hampshire native said in a telephone interview last week.