(Credits: Apple Music)
When it comes to the origins of heavy metal, there’s typically only one name in the ring: Ozzy. Everyone else came later – at best a protégé, at worst a mere imitation. It’s clear that Steven Tyler has never been entirely comfortable about his place within that line.
That’s obviously not to be misconstrued as him being in any way disrespectful to the legacy of the likes of Osbourne. Recent events in which Tyler has indeed gone to extreme lengths to honour the life and times of the ‘Prince of Darkness’ prove only too well that he is indebted to all that devilish power. But in terms of his own music, and with Aerosmith, it’s evident that the shoe of heavy metal doesn’t fit quite so well, not least because he never wanted to wear it.
This was something that Tyler went to pains to make sure he expressed, not least in the late 1980s when the band were attempting to reinvent themselves. But equally, there was no denying that over the course of the previous decade, when Aerosmith were on the ascension, they very much made themselves at home in the company of the fellow bands who ruled the scene at the time.
That just so happened to constitute the likes of Bon Jovi, Guns N’ Roses, and, of course, Black Sabbath – none of whom Tyler seemingly liked being compared to. Yet in 1989, one interviewer was bold enough to ask the frontman what he made of this, and what kind of term he would define the scene by.
“You mean heavy metal?” he scoffed. “I don’t even recognise what we do in the bands you just mentioned.” Evidently, this ruffled a few feathers – Aerosmith, the band who supposedly threw caution to the wind, simply cosying in with the crowd? It wasn’t an accusation he took lightly.
But if Tyler was truly pressed to make an ode to a heavy metal act, there were still a few that sprang to mind. “Maybe Guns N’ Roses has a little of the real thing going for them,” he mused. “But to me it was always Led Zeppelin who invented that whole thing. We came along a little bit after that but we had all the same musical roots, going back to The Yardbirds, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck… the Stones and The Beatles.”
As such, with all the rest somewhat elbowed out of the way, it was clearly Led Zeppelin that Tyler used as his guiding star when it came to the comparison with heavy metal, if there was one to be had. Of course, that influence stretches far further than just the basis of the genre itself – between album concepts and stadium rock, there was a lot that Zeppelin laid the foundations for that bands like Aerosmith devoutly worshipped.
It’s one thing to state that, however, and entirely another to catch a man like Tyler admitting to how much it shaped him as a musician. Whether you agree with his assertion that Aerosmith were not necessarily heavy metal is another matter, but it’s clear that, whether he likes it or not, it will always be at the front of rock’s hellish ride.
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