Aerosmith Still Rocks and We’re Still Not Worthy

Aerosmith Still Rocks and We’re Still Not Worthy by Roxanne McDonald

If you are an Aerosmith fan, you understand why everyone from Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar to your mother are driven so mental they come near to stalking the best American Rock band of all time.

In fact, your mother is maybe even more likely to be turned the stalker type, as she was just coming of age as Aerosmith was coming onto the rock and roll scene.

She was walking on her belled pantleg hems, wearing peace signs and paisley, and she was likely letting her grow long and letting it all hang out and all that good wild and rebellious stuff of the seventies. And she was playing over and over and over the 33LP with the now infamous now classic “Dream On,” savoring every intro lick, singing along to the lines about lines—in the mirror, on [her] face.

When she read the liner notes and pulled the pictures, she fell in love. Because they were rockers, because they were from her home turf, because they struck her teenage soul with savage heart sounds that spun ballads into breakout ballsy bravado, that turned notes into epic movements, that took singing into scream.

Friends were hooked, too, on “Walkin’ the Dog,” then on “Train Kept a Rollin’,” on “Toys in the Attic,” and “Back in the Saddle [Again].” They were bonging and head-banging and falling in love, too.

We were devotees. Followers if not by concert at least by records and radio, flipping from WBCN to WLLH and WCOZ, as Aerosmith was taking their perfect sound from Boston-based studios to the fifty states and the world. Joe Perry was taking lead with his original riffs; Whitman was taking Tabano’s place on rhythm; Kramer was taking the beat to greater heights; and Tyler was taking the kerchiefs off dogs and the scarves off old ladies and attaching them to necks (his and his mic’s) that would issue raw, throaty, reaching and ranging sounds we fell for and follow to this day.

In our collections now are the recovery songs turned love tunes about letting go; double entendres on elevators and missed opportunities; and pieces of polished rocking blues.

And in our memories and hearts is the band that let us know it was okay to “Dream On”, okay to cry out loud, and even okay to be definitively obsessed with quality, beauty, and perfect rock and roll.

Even if we still quiver at the possibility of actually meeting the band we stalk in our wishes, a band for whom, as Wayne and Garth so aptly expressed, we’re not nearly worthy.

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