(Credits: Far Out / daigooliva)
Sun 8 March 2026 0:00, UK
For the first few decades of his career, Steven Tyler seemed to be putting up the biggest facade in rock and roll.
He was one of the greatest frontmen of all time that didn’t seem to have the slightest care in the world whenever he started strutting up and down the stage, but when it came time to make an Aerosmith record, he was always the perfectionist looking to capture that subtle piece of magic that they had whenever he and Joe Perry locked in on the right riff for a song. Those magic moments were all that mattered to him, but it’s a lot harder when you know all of the greats that have had those transcendent moments before you.
But first of all, Tyler wasn’t exactly shy about his influences by any stretch. Even though he was clearly cribbing more than a few notes from Mick Jagger’s playbook when it comes to his dance moves, a lot of the greatest tunes in his first band, Chain Reaction, were practically carbon copies of what The Yardbirds had done. You couldn’t find a bigger Yardbirds fan than him, but that was hardly a bad thing.
If anything, Aerosmith’s version of ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ actually outstrips their idols’ version in many respects. The British blues boom had no shortage of bands that wanted to live their live as bluesmen, but whereas they had the locomotive energy that they needed to steer themselves forward, Aerosmith were the ones putting a healthy dose of old school boogie back into their sound, especially by the time they started working on the funky groves that made up ‘Walk This Way’ and ‘Uncle Salty’.
The beat was carrying a lot of the weight, but none of it mattered as long as it didn’t have a melody to go with it. Tyler was one of the masters of scat singing when he started writing songs like ‘Movin’ Out’ and ‘Adam’s Apple’, but even if he wasn’t a guitarist in the traditional sense when he started working with Perry, there was a lot more going on in his head that fit somewhere between the stomp of Led Zeppelin and the classical compositions he heard his father play.
When Tyler was a kid, though, the Beatles were the ones bridging the gap between rock and roll and beautiful melodies. Paul McCartney was responsible for some of the finest tunes that the band ever recorded, but even if he had more than his fair share of silly love songs in his backlog, there are hardly any musicians or even people who could have claimed to have the same kind of impact that John Lennon did.
Lennon had been trying to downplay his massive star power all his life, but by the time he passed away, Tyler started to realise that the world had been infected with what he had done for so many years, saying, “All songwriters ever want to do is crawl inside other people’s souls and psyches, and somehow change everything. Jesus, what part of John or the Beatles did not get inside every one of us?”
And that goes far beyond anything that the blues ever could. The Fab Four weren’t snobs about any of their tastes, and when looking at Lennon’s later years, his best songs taught everyone about the human that lived inside that celebrity skin, whether that was him crying out in pain about his innermost feelings on Plastic Ono Band or grappling with the idea of never seeing his other half again on Walls and Bridges.
The Beatles were the starting point for most people to start paying attention to rock and roll, but if they made it a sophisticated art form, Lennon was the one giving everyone something more to chew on. His lyrics took down all the veils that rock and roll built up for itself, and in doing so, some of his best songs feel more like a part of the cultural language than proper pop songs these days.