Credit: Far Out / Aerosmith
October 21st, 2026 · 11:00pm BST
Every great rock and roll band usually thrives off the tension between its two leaders.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Glenn Frey and Don Henley. All of them were meant to be together from the minute that they started playing, but not all of them came together as they should. In fact, sometimes people like Steven Tyler and Joe Perry start off their careers in two separate places before they realise the magic that they have when working together as a whole.
When Tyler first started working up the idea of being a rock and roll star, he began in a much different place: behind the drum kit. It’s insane to think that one of the biggest rock and roll frontmen of all time somehow started life at the very back of the stage, but his attention to rhythm is what gave him such a great knack for finding the right percussive words whenever he sang tunes like ‘Walk This Way’ later in life.
He thought that he had it made when working in a band like Chain Reaction, but in reality, the whole thing was a work in progress. They did get some big breaks in the late 1960s, opening up for The Yardbirds, and Perry in particular admitted to being a fan of them, but it wasn’t quite ready yet. Tyler needed that one perfect person to work off of, but Perry already had his group, The Jam Band, with Tom Hamilton, who was already making their own stab at being a rock and roll star.
They were much more in the vein of people like Fleetwood Mac, but Perry already had that special swagger that was midway between Jimmy Page’s mystique and Keith Richards’s swagger all rolled into one. And all it took to win Tyler over was his meeting Perry after a long day of cutting the grass. And yes, we are talking about the chore that every father has their kids do at least once.
Tyler was still living at his parents’ place at the time, but from the minute that Perry pulled up and asked if he’d catch their show later that day, the frontman knew that they could be something so much more together, saying, “I’m mowing the lawn; in my driveway pulls in, in an MG sports car, Joe Perry – hair down to here, glasses broken with white tape. The nerd that you saw in all those nerd movies in the ’80s? Joe Perry. I had no more band, and then I saw him, and I thought, ‘If I can take my ear that my father gave me and add it to his jam band, then I can have what magic I know The Stones had, The Who had, The Kinks had, The Beatles had.”
But getting to that point wasn’t something that any of them could have done right when they started. Aerosmith still needed to work out the bugs, and getting people like Joey Kramer and Brad Whitford in the band was their real shot in the arm. They made everything groove how it was supposed to, and when Tyler and Perry first created ‘Movin’ Out’, they had the germ of what the band would become.
Further reading: From The Vault
A lot of that first album consisted of Yardbirds rip-offs and Tyler telling the band what to play half the time, but ‘Movin’ Out’ is ground zero for their sound. Aside from having one of the sleaziest blues licks known to man, their approach to boogie is something that was not going to be replicated by anyone else, no matter how many times people claimed that they were nothing but a Rolling Stones ripoff.
They were here to stay, and after millions of records sold and over 50 years of playing together, it’s not like the critics were going to slow them down. Aerosmith had become an unstoppable force, and it all came down to Tyler and Perry working together that one fateful day with a half-cut lawn.
