#steven tyler

[rpirquet]

🎶 STEVEN TYLER at the Oakland Coliseum, 1978

📷 Baron Wolman

[euereumeleuterleugen]

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[nostalgia-eh52]

Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler cooling off under a fant at RFK Stadium in Washington D.C., May 30th, 1976

[twiceinawhile]

will we get female Steven x joe smut or Yuri soon

fughhckkk you're right. i forgot about them

yes soon i prommy

[zimtrim]

Aerosmith - Steven Tyler

[paraisosingular]

[glamandillusionz]

Steven Tyler and Joe Perry onstage, 1977

Photo by Koh Hasebe

[singemall-stayallnight]

The Yardbirds, Staples High School Auditorium, Westport, Connecticut, 22 October 1966.

Henry Smith got us a gig opening for the Yardbirds at Staples High in Westport [on October 22, 1966]. We drove up in my mother's station wagon and arrived at the same time as the Yardbirds arrived in their van. I got out and and carried an amp into the gym. I don't even know whose it was. Then I go out again and see Jimmy Page carrying my mike stand. That's how it was in those days.

I had seen the Yardbirds play somewhere the previous summer with both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page in the band. In fact, I got them to autograph a piece of cardboard. In Westport we found out that Jeff had left the band and Jimmy was playing lead guitar by himself. I watched him from the edge of the stage and all I can say is that he knocked my tits off. They did "Train Kept A-Rollin' " and it was just so heavy. They were just an un-fuckin'-believable band.

—Steven Tyler, Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith, 1997

Jeff is on the far right in the second photo. It's one of the few shots of Jimmy and Jeff performing together in the Yardbirds. This part of Steven's recollection is off, but he later recalled Jeff's presence at the gig in an essay he wrote for the Rolling Stone feature 100 Greatest Artists, which was published on 3 December 2010:

Listen to "Somebody," a song I wrote for Aerosmith's first album: It's all from the Yardbirds. They were the shit to us, out of all the British bands in the Sixties. The Yardbirds were a bit of a mystery. They had an eclecticism — the Gregorian chant-ness of the vocals, the melodic diversity, the way they used guitar feedback. I loved that weirdness.

In the Sixties, I was in a band called Chain Reaction. We got to know the Yardbirds because they played at Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut, in 1966. We had a friend, Henry Smith, who had been our manager for a while, and he had gone to school there. He called me and said, "Steven, the Yardbirds are playing here, and you can open up." It was the lineup with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, who was playing bass on that tour [Jimmy and Jeff were sharing lead guitar duties by this point]. We waited all day for them to arrive. I grabbed their amps, they grabbed ours. We carried each other's gear in, because back then, that's what you did. Hence began the rumor that I was a roadie for the Yardbirds.

Jimmy and Jeff preparing for the show at Staples High School. | By Linda Eastman

They did "Shapes of Things," "Beck's Boogie," among other songs. I was in such awe. They played like no other band. They weren't concerned with clothes or looks or hit singles. Their thing was "What do we do with these sounds?" They did things with harmonics — minor thirds and fifths — that created this ethereal, monstrous sound.

You hear it in every song — the way they could take the blues and turn it into a pop song like "For Your Love," then something psychedelic like "Shapes of Things," which has that weird middle. You can hear the click when Beck hits his fuzz box. Page, in the end, was the one who took those ideas all the way with Led Zeppelin. The two shows I remember where I just sat with my mouth open was that Yardbirds show, and Led Zeppelin at the Boston Tea Party in 1969.

As a singer, the thing I got out of the Yardbirds was that you don't have to have a great voice. It's all about attitude. He was a white boy who pushed it to the max. And he was a great harmonica player. You never heard Jagger hanging out on a single note the way Keith Relf could.

The shame is, I know how great the Yardbirds were. But I don't think everyone else knows it. The Yardbirds' music is a gold mine waiting to be stumbled upon. Aerosmith did, because we grew up in that era. The riff in "Walk This Way" is just us trying to explore the blues in the Yardbirds model. What the Yardbirds did is something you don't hear in today's blue-plate-special, cookie-cutter music. Everything is so canned and sliced up now. This was back when a band was a band. You had all those personalities, and they were all truly playing together. And I don't hear that today. The day of those bands, that wild stepping out, is gone.