How the story of Aerosmith is told tends to vary depending on the storyteller, but it typically takes on one of two narrative arcs: (1) Aerosmith is a down-and-dirty arena-rock band whose prodigious drug abuse takes on mythical proportions as it records a series of seminal albums that starts with 1974’s Get Your Wings, peaks with 1976’s Rocks, and peters out with 1977’s Draw the Line. This period is followed by a long, irrelevant epilogue during which Aerosmith later reinvents itself as a cleaned-up MTV favorite and power-ballad machine. (2) Aerosmith is one of the most popular rock bands of the late ’80s and early ’90s, and continues to release hit albums and popular singles at the height of alt-rock. This period is preceded by a long, irrelevant prologue during which it was a druggy boogie-metal band responsible for songs like “Walk This Way” and “Sweet Emotion,” of which teenaged fans are vaguely aware.
Aerosmith was the most popular rock band among American high school kids. This was due largely to Aerosmith’s reputation as a party band; Aerosmith fans were nicknamed “The Blue Army” because of their monochromatic blue-jeaned attire, but “blue” also described the skin color of many audience members after downing too many ludes in the parking lot before the show.6 The patina of mindless drug use surrounding Aerosmith hardly endeared the band to the music press: “They gobbled reds and chug-a-lugged beer,” Rolling Stone forlornly tsk-tsked at The Blue Army in a 1976 Aerosmith profile. “Some fell on their faces and tumbled down the hill. The oldest among them could not have been much more than 18 years old … You had to get close enough to see the red of their eyes to realize that this was a generation whose rock & roll rituals had been raised up out of the ashes of Altamont rather than the bright muck of Woodstock.”
With Rocks, self-inflicted brain damage became an accepted byproduct of Aerosmith’s artistic process. “There’s no doubt that we were doing a lot of drugs by then,” Joe Perry says in Walk This Way, “but you can hear that whatever we were doing, it was still working for us.” Perry claims that he wrote the riff to Rocks‘ barnstorming opener, “Back in the Saddle,” while he was high on heroin, which Steven Tyler was also abusing throughout the Rocks sessions, along with cocaine and booze.
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Aerosmith backed out of Woodstock ’99 because of a scheduling conflict, but it never really belonged on that stage to begin with. The band had surrendered any semblance of danger in its genetic makeup many years earlier. Did Aerosmith sever itself from the band’s former greatness by diluting its essence down to a milquetoast consistency? Or did Aerosmith understand that, in pop music, you go where the audience goes, which means sticking with what sells and chucking the rest — even when “the rest” eventually includes rock and roll?
My heart says the former. But my head knows better. Aerosmith was a drug-fueled rock band when drug-fueled rock bands were big business, it was a non-drug-fueled rock band when non-drug-fueled rock bands were big business, and now it’s barely a rock band when rock is barely in business at all. Aerosmith has stuck around because it’s not married to a fixed idea of what Aerosmith is supposed to be.