(Credits: Gage Skidmore)
Sat 17 January 2026 20:53, UK
When talking about rock and roll survivors, Steven Tyler is one of the few who could claim to have done everything that a rock star was capable of.
The amount of cocaine that he snorted back in the day could have been enough to fill a small country, and yet he still stands as one of the shining examples of what can happen when someone never gives up on their dreams of being a rock star. He chased after that natural high like an Olympic sprinter, but some of the greatest moments came from him staying strong where his friends fell.
Because it’s not like the age of excess didn’t come with a few casualties. Before Aerosmith even reached the top of the world, there were people like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin who passed away years before, and it wasn’t like Tyler was exactly a choirboy behind the scenes. He and Joe Perry weren’t called ‘The Toxic Twins’ by accident, and the best moments came from them working through all of their troubles to create the magic that turned up on records like Rocks.
But Aerosmith’s start happened at a pretty strange time for rock’s evolution. Since they were coming out right at the dawn of the 1970s, their music wasn’t the most original when looking at what Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones were doing at the same time. If anything, they could have been rip-offs, but they were the unintentional prototype band for what glam rock would become a few years later.
It’s easy to say that the genre got started the minute that David Bowie crashlanded on Earth, but the likes of Marc Bolan weren’t all that different from how Tyler dressed. He was used to wearing a bit of glitter in his act every now and again, and while it might have been an ode to Mick Jagger’s more glamorous looks back in the day, the band fit right in next to bands like The New York Dolls at the time.
But The Dolls weren’t the most technical proficient masters of the instruments. They were the precursor to punk if there ever was one, and while bands like Ramones and The Clash weren’t particularly interested in wearing lipstick, hearing Johnny Thunders play his guitar with reckless abandon had the same kind of crazy attitude that Aerosmith had whenever they kicked into their heavier tracks like ‘Rats in the Cellar’.
Tyler was certainly friendly with the band, but he was heartbroken when he saw them fall off so quickly, saying, “The Dolls had more advantages than Aerosmith in that they were darlings of the New York press and all that. Most bands struggled to get one-tenth of the recognition they got, and they just pissed it all away. They were the first band that I loved that I watched self-destruct. What I learnt from that is that it’s not enough to get your foot in the door.”
Even then, Tyler did find himself dangerously close to following in the band’s footsteps after losing Perry in the late 1970s. They were still performing as well as they could, but the fact that he could never bring that same sense of charisma pretty much meant they were dead in the water until they reunited with their old guitar slinger and teamed up with Run-DMC for ‘Walk This Way’.
So while The Dolls did stick around for a while before self-destructing, Aerosmith was the epitome of what a phoenix from the ashes was supposed to look like. Not everything they did afterwards was perfect, but no one could deny the songs that they had in their back pocket after they survived themselves.
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