(Credits: Gage Skidmore)
Mon 1 December 2025 0:30, UK
There’s no real way to pinpoint where the voice of Steven Tyler came from.
Sure, a lot of Aerosmith songs wore their influences from everyone from Led Zeppelin to The Rolling Stones on their sleeves, but when Tyler opened his mouth, he went into a strange vocal stratosphere that even Robert Plant had to question whether he could reach. And while he has kept up that insane vocal stamina all these years later, the true origin of his rock and roll chops came from looking beyond the traditional frontman role.
Like all great rock and roll legends, Tyler did have a healthy respect for all things that related to the blues. There was no shortage of people circa 1968 that weren’t head over heels in love with everyone from The Yardbirds to Cream, and if they wanted to learn their chops, that would mean going back to the original tunes that they were covering and see what the likes of Memphis Minnie, Tiny Bradshaw, and Willie Dixon were really playing in the age before rock and roll existed.
It’s not like Tyler didn’t try to flex those chops, either. ‘Woman of the World’ is one of the better deep cuts from their early period, but compared to the swaggering vocal that kicks off a song like ‘Same Old Song and Dance’, this is the kind of performance that was made to be played in a sweaty club in the middle of the US where the music seems to be carrying them to some other place.
Aerosmith clearly knew how to translate that kind of blues into hard rock, but in between his regular diet of Mick Jagger and Keith Relf vocal performances, Tyler also had a healthy respect for what was coming out of the hippie movement. Everyone wanted to be Flower Children at the time, but even in an era that was defined by peace, love and understanding, Tyler took one look at what Janis Joplin was doing and immediately wanted to do that for the rest of his life.
Compared to every other blues shouter, what Joplin did in Big Brother and the Holding Company is still one of the most impressive vocal runs of the late 1960s. A lot of what ended up on Cheap Thrills is still some of the most underrated classic rock of all time, but when Joplin actually got onstage to sing everything from ‘Ball and Chain’ to ‘Down on Me’, it was as if she could make the Earth shake with only her voice.
Although Tyler could try his best Plant impression, what Joplin was doing felt a lot more possible, saying, “I went and saw Janis Joplin. That was really my world–pure emotion. She transcended all those who came before her. The way she sang a song it seemed like she’d been down the road one too many times and it wasn’t going to happen again. That was the end of the sixties. That’s what Janis was to me–a revolutionary spirit, someone who changed the emotional weather.”
Many of Tyler’s peers had the same type of reaction when listening to Joplin, but he seemed to be one of the few that had every piece of her sound down to a science. There were plenty of songs that were distinctly original in the band’s catalogue like ‘Walk This Way’, but when you hear that whistle range at the end of ‘Dream On’, that was practically him taking the blues swagger of his early days and channelling it into rock and roll perfection.
Even if Aerosmith would eventually move in various different directions themselves, that kind of free-spirited range has been the one thing that Tyler never took for granted. He was listening to a woman in her element singing her heart out, and if he could match half the passion that she did, he knew he had accomplished something in his life.
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