(Credit: Entertainment Tonight)
Thu 5 June 2025 19:02, UK
Every musician spends their formative years daydreaming of what it would be like to be one of their musical heroes. As much as rockstars like to play it cool whenever they talk about their upbringing, none of them haven’t stood in front of a mirror trying their best poses in the mirror, even if it meant using a tennis racket as a makeshift air guitar. While Steven Tyler always felt much more comfortable in front of a microphone than with a guitar slung across his back, he knew that he was bound to follow in the footsteps of the biggest names in 1960s rock before he had even formed Aerosmith.
Looking back at his first band, Chain Reaction, Tyler was willing to do everything he could to push his band over the line on the Boston club scene. He had the drive to make any rock and roll band work, but whereas his first outing was mainly pop, hooking up with Joe Perry was the first time he was able to channel his influences from bands like Led Zeppelin and The Yardbirds on vinyl.
There are certainly pieces of The Yardbirds in songs like ‘Somebody’ from Aerosmith’s debut album, but saying that they followed in their footsteps would be ignoring the big, bluesy elephant in the room. Sure, the band loved their British blues rock, but it was no big secret that The Rolling Stones were their biggest influence, to the point where you had to rub your eyes to make sure that Tyler and Perry didn’t develop their rapport by copying Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’s homework.
Even for the biggest names in rock, though, what The Beatles had done felt almost unattainable. It would be easy for a guitarist to add something to one of The Stones’s jams, but if you were to put those same people on the Apple rooftop during the Fab Four’s final live performance, it’s hard to think of them contributing anything that the band and Billy Preston hadn’t thought of first.
But despite getting a seal of approval from Paul McCartney when crossing paths with him in a bathroom on the road, Tyler was shellshocked that Aerosmith had been chosen to cover a Beatles song for the movie version of Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. George Martin would oversee the production of everything, but as soon as Tyler stepped behind the microphone to sing ‘Come Together’, he felt like his musical heroes were shining down on him.
After working for years to become one of the best live acts in the country, Tyler felt that he had the aura of John Lennon thrust upon him when making the tune, saying, “We did a badass version of the song. I would have believed anything George Martin said. However, he wasn’t just charming, he was brilliant and beautiful. And I must admit that when I was singing the first verse of ‘Come Together’ and I looked through the glass, it was like for that one nanosecond in time … I was John.”
Anyone with half-decent taste in music would have been honoured to be in Aerosmith’s position, but it also left out one crucial detail: the movie was terrible. Despite being one long love letter to the band, the Sgt Peppers movie took everything adventurous about the Fab Four and distilled it into muzak. For every great song like Aerosmith’s ‘Come Together’ and Earth, Wind and Fire’s ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’, there’s Alice Cooper’s take on ‘Because’ and The Bee Gees’ version of ‘Oh Darling!’ that sounds like a cheap knock-off of the original.
Still, that shouldn’t stop anyone from enjoying what Aerosmith put together for this tune. ‘Come Together’ has always been one of those mainstays for anyone wanting to cover classic rock, but despite everyone from Michael Jackson to Soundgarden taking a stab at the tune, Tyler did manage to churn out one of the better vocal performances ever to offset that iconic bassline.
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