AEROSMITH: THE BAND THAT BECAME YOUNG TWICE
How “Walk This Way” Turned a Classic Rock Giant Into a Gen X Band
You know the sound.
Before anybody sings a word, you know what's coming.
That beat starts, and somewhere inside the Gen X brain, a switch flips.
Walk this way.
Except there was something wonderfully strange about our relationship with that song.
It wasn't new.
Our older siblings knew it. Our parents knew it. Anybody who had been paying attention to rock music in the 1970s knew it.
Aerosmith had originally released “Walk This Way” on Toys in the Attic in 1975. The single became a hit in its own right. And by then, Aerosmith wasn't some little band waiting to be discovered. They had already built a rock-and-roll life.
They had the albums.
They had the tours.
They had the anthems.
They had “Dream On,” “Sweet Emotion,” “Walk This Way,” and the kind of success that turns musicians into rock stars.
Image: Aerosmith. Source: Rolling Stone
And, unfortunately, they had acquired some of the other things that came with being rock stars in the 1970s.
Drugs.
Excess.
Fractured relationships.
Joe Perry left the band in 1979. Brad Whitford followed in 1981. By the early 1980s, Aerosmith had gone from one of America's biggest rock bands to a band whose best days appeared to be behind them.
That's usually where this kind of story ends.
The records remain.
Classic-rock radio keeps playing the hits.
Eventually somebody makes a documentary.
Everybody remembers how great the band used to be.
Except Aerosmith apparently didn't get that memo.
A Wall Comes Down
In 1986, something happened that I don't think I had ever seen before.
Run-D.M.C. took “Walk This Way,” an already successful Aerosmith song, and rebuilt it for a completely different musical world.
Image: Aerosmith and Run DMC. Source: The Hollywood Reporter
And Aerosmith came with them.
It was brilliant.
Not because Aerosmith suddenly tried to become a hip-hop group. They didn't.
And Run-D.M.C. certainly didn't turn into a rock band.
Both remained themselves.
That's what made it work.
Here was Run-D.M.C., a group with the attention and love of young people, taking a song from an established classic-rock band and bringing it directly into the musical language of our generation.
Image: Run DMC. Source: NBC.com
Then MTV gave us the visual metaphor nobody could possibly miss.
A wall.
Run-D.M.C. on one side.
Aerosmith on the other.
Steven Tyler eventually smashes through it.
Subtle?
Absolutely not.
Perfect?
Oh, hell yes.
Rock and hip-hop were suddenly standing in the same room.
And an Aerosmith song that had already belonged to one generation became a hit all over again with another.
But here's what makes this story remarkable to me.
That could have been it.
“Walk This Way” could have become the cool crossover record everybody remembered from 1986.
Instead, Aerosmith walked through that wall and apparently decided they weren't going back.
Most Bands Get One Generation
I listened to classic rock as Young Angel. Aerosmith wasn't foreign territory to me.
But after “Walk This Way,” something changed.
They weren't simply a classic-rock band anymore.
They were on our MTV.
They were making new music during our youth.
They were touring.
They were in movies.
They were in commercials.
They were everywhere.
Permanent Vacation arrived in 1987.
Image: Aerosmith album, Permanent Vacation. Source: Spotify
Then Pump in 1989.
Image: Aerosmith album Pump. Source: Spotify
Then Get a Grip in 1993.
Image: Aerosmith album Get a Grip. Source: Spotify.
And good grief, the songs.
“Dude (Looks Like a Lady).”
“Rag Doll.”
“Love in an Elevator.”
“Janie's Got a Gun.”
“What It Takes.”
“Livin' on the Edge.”
“Cryin'.”
“Amazing.”
“Crazy.”
This wasn't a nostalgia tour.
Aerosmith had built an entire second career.
And MTV became one of the places where that second life exploded.
Those Aerosmith videos weren't background noise. They were little events. They had stories. Characters. Humor. Sex. Chaos. Alicia Silverstone became practically inseparable from that run of videos in the early '90s.
And then songs escaped MTV and appeared elsewhere in our culture.
I remember “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” showing up in Mrs. Doubtfire, during that wonderfully chaotic transformation sequence.
There they were again.
More ears.
More visibility.
More people discovering Aerosmith.
They seemed to understand something incredibly important about surviving in popular culture:
Don't stand outside the next generation and wait for them to come looking for you.
Go meet them.
The Cool Uncle Nobody Talks About
And then there was Steven Tyler.
Image: Steven Tyler. Source: Wikipedia
Oh, Lord.
Steven Tyler was like that cool uncle who was Mom or Dad's older brother and nobody talked about too much because his life involved entirely too much sex, drugs and rock-and-roll.
The adults knew things.
There were probably stories.
Questions were discouraged.
Meanwhile, you were peeking around the corner thinking:
Man...he is SO cool.
In retrospect, the adults may have had a point.
Young Angel wasn't interested in the case against him.
She heard that voice.
And as a singer, I heard Steven Tyler differently.
I sang rock and blues, and you learn to recognize a singer who is completely comfortable with his instrument.
Tyler could scat.
He could growl.
He could bend a phrase until it almost broke.
He could turn syllables into rhythm.
And he could scream.
There is a difference between a singer who can scream and a singer who knows how to scream.
A scream can still have pitch. Placement. Intention. Musicality.
Tyler could take his voice into those rough, nasty places and somehow remain in command of it. Then he'd turn around and hit one of those challenging notes that made Singer Angel sit up and think:
Man.
He didn't just have a voice.
He knew what to do with it.
Image: Steven Tyler. Source: Entertainment Weekly.
And perhaps that was another reason Aerosmith's second life worked.
They adapted without sanding off everything that made Aerosmith, Aerosmith.
Steven Tyler didn't suddenly show up in khakis announcing that he had matured.
Thank God.
The scarves stayed.
The swagger stayed.
The innuendo stayed.
The scream stayed.
The weird stayed.
Livin' on the Edge
Of all those songs from Aerosmith's second run, though, one stands out to me.
“Livin' on the Edge.”
The song.
The video.
The entire experience of it.
By the time it arrived in 1993, Aerosmith no longer felt like an older band visiting Gen X culture.
They belonged there.
And “Livin' on the Edge” demonstrated something to me that I didn't fully understand when “Walk This Way” first hit.
An older band could genuinely connect with a younger audience without pretending to be young.
There is a difference between saying:
We figured out how to sell records to these kids.
And saying:
We see something happening in the world you're living in, too.
“Livin' on the Edge” felt like the second one.
The video was huge and cinematic and strange and provocative, exactly the kind of thing that could make you stop whatever you were doing when it came onto MTV.
But underneath the spectacle was unease.
Something was wrong.
Something about the world wasn't adding up.
And Aerosmith wasn't standing above us wagging a finger and complaining about kids today.
They seemed to be standing beside us looking at the same world.
That's when I understood.
These weren't our parents' rock stars that Gen X had temporarily borrowed.
They had become our rock stars, too.
They Didn't Just Come Back
That distinction matters.
Because we use the word comeback too easily.
A singer disappears for a few years, releases another hit, and we call it a comeback.
What Aerosmith did was something else.
They had already lived the rock-star story once.
Success.
Albums.
Tours.
Fame.
Excess.
Addiction.
Fracture.
Decline.
They survived themselves.
Then they reunited, confronted the addictions that had helped tear them apart, and began again.
But they didn't come back as a legacy act playing the old hits.
They made new ones.
Lots of them.
They didn't survive MTV.
They conquered MTV.
They didn't ask Gen X to discover their old records.
They gave us our own Aerosmith records.
They didn't merely remind us who they had been.
They became contemporary again.
Years later, they were still everywhere: enormous tours, movies, commercials, awards shows and eventually the Super Bowl halftime stage, surrounded by artists from another generation entirely.
And somehow Aerosmith still looked like Aerosmith.
Most rock bands are lucky to belong to one generation.
Aerosmith found a way to belong to two.
Maybe more.
The Road Eventually Changes
Of course, there is another part of this story that Young Angel couldn't have understood.
Eventually the body gets a vote.
In 2024, Aerosmith announced that they were retiring from touring after Steven Tyler suffered a serious vocal injury and could not fully recover his voice to the level necessary for touring.
As a singer, that lands differently with me.
And as someone who has experienced illness changing the direction of my own career, I understand something about that decision that I couldn't possibly have understood when I was watching Steven Tyler tear across my television screen.
I know what it is like to have your body suddenly enter a conversation about your future.
Of course, when illness changed the direction of my career, I didn't have to consider whether it was time to retire from being a rock star.
So Steven and I had slightly different paperwork.
But there is something I've learned.
Survival doesn't always mean continuing to do the same thing.
Sometimes the road changes.
Sometimes the industry changes.
Sometimes the audience changes.
Sometimes your body changes.
Sometimes you change.
And maybe that's why resilience doesn't feel like a strong enough word for Aerosmith.
They collapsed.
They recovered.
They reunited.
They crossed genres.
They crossed generations.
They found new audiences.
They made new hits.
They became MTV stars after already having been classic-rock stars.
And somehow they survived long enough to become young twice.
Walk This Way
Maybe that's what Aerosmith ultimately showed me.
There isn't only one road.
Aerosmith could have remained safely on one side of that wall in 1986.
Classic rock on one side.
Hip-hop on the other.
One generation over here.
Another generation over there.
Instead, the wall came down.
And Aerosmith walked through it.
They didn't know exactly where that road would lead. None of us ever do.
But sometimes the road you thought you were traveling ends.
Sometimes something changes everything.
Sometimes you have to find another way forward.
And every once in a while, if you're incredibly lucky, incredibly stubborn, or maybe just rock-and-roll enough...
you get to become young twice.
Thanks for taking this trip back with me.
What do you remember? Were you there too, or did this story bring back a memory of your own? I’d love to hear it. Share your stories in the comments, and if this made you smile, laugh, cringe, or turn up an old favorite song, share it with someone who remembers too.
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Until next time...
Keep the memories alive. Keep the stories coming. And whatever you do... turn it up.
— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)
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