Credit: Far Out / Aerosmith
The entire Aerosmith ship wouldn’t have worked without Steven Tyler working off of Joe Perry.
Any classic band normally falls into the trap when they realise that one musician is more important than everyone else, but when you look at the kind of tunes that Tyler was singing, it’s not exactly a surprise when the band started to flounder a little bit more the minute that Perry decided to leave. It was all about the chemistry between all of them whenever they played, but there were more people that could get Tyler to turn his head and wonder about leaving the band behind.
That said, Tyler has practically turned his back on the rest of the group more than a few times. It’s no big secret that he was chasing after the next smash hit when the band cooked up Just Push Play, and even if the rest of the band weren’t in love with the idea of him becoming a judge on American Idiot, Tyler wasn’t about to apologise for making one of the more lucrative decisions of his career. It was all about finding the right step in stardom, but he did have more than a few times where something called him back to his roots.
Perry had already been talking about doing a blues album for the longest time when they eventually cut Honkin’ On Bobo, and while a lot of what he was figuring out on that record was the furthest thing from commercial, Tyler jumped in with both feet. He had grown up singing a lot of those songs, but even if the biggest Delta blues singers started everything, a lot of what he heard came from when he heard the other side of the pond, grabbing a hold of this kind of music years later.
The British invasion may have given the world The Beatles, but The Rolling Stones were a lot more indicative of what rock and roll was doing. It was about taking the blues format and turning it on its head ever so slightly, and while everyone was trying to dismiss Aerosmith as a rip-off version of The Stones, The Yardbirds were much more in line with where Tyler’s head was at when he fell in love with that kind of music.
The Yardbirds weren’t afraid to be a little bit rough around the edges, and while Keith Relf wasn’t always the most captivating singer of all time, he had the right attitude that Tyler needed to convince himself that he was cut for stardom. It didn’t hurt to have everyone from Eric Clapton to Jimmy Page to Jeff Beck in the group, but when it came to singing, Tyler was convinced that he was cut out to be a member of the band if he was ever asked about an opening.
The band may have been history by the time all their superstar guitarists left, but Tyler remembered having the idea of jamming with some of them when he got a call about them potentially reuniting, saying, “Henry Smith of the Living Myth called me and said, ‘The Yardbirds are getting back together and they’re wondering if you might want to be the lead singer.’ Hell Yeah! I would. I’d always had that dream that someday the old Yardbirds would reform, and I would somehow be part of it. [They] had been Aerosmith’s greatest inspiration, and, outside of Aerosmith, that would have been the group I would most want to be in.”
Further reading: From The Vault
And while it didn’t hurt to get the same type of call from Zeppelin’s people about jamming with John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page, it wasn’t like Tyler was going to take over for Robert Plant. He had too much respect for what ‘The Golden God’ did, and if Page wanted to get a real band together, Tyler wasn’t going to be able to live with himself if he ended up doing his own version of tunes like ‘Black Dog’.
But when it comes to The Yardbirds, any kid who had a bit more of an edge about them would have seen them as heroes back in the day. The Rolling Stones may have been the perfect antithesis of The Beatles, but if the Fabs were the boys next door, The Yardbirds were the grizzled hardasses that didn’t take shit from anybody whenever they threw down onstage.
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