Requiem for a Scream

On Friday, August 2, Aerosmith announced their retirement from live performance. The Boston rockers had started and delayed a farewell tour in 2023 due to a vocal cord injury sustained by frontman Steven Tyler; in their statement, the band concluded "that a full recovery from his vocal injury is not possible."

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I gave up a ticket to Aerosmith's 50th anniversary show at Fenway Park - planned for 2020 but finally done two years later - to minimize my chances of contracting COVID-19 so close to my wedding party. I had tickets for this tour at the Prudential Center in Newark a few days after Christmas - delayed from the same time last year - but now I will not have a chance to see who I would handily pick as the greatest American rock band.

To be clear, I have little loyalty to the vaunted tradition of white guys with guitars making loud music. Non-American equivalents like Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin or AC/DC have my respect more than my obsession. Aerosmith is different. The dual-guitar attack of Joe Perry and Brad Whitford, the ace rhythm section of Tom Hamilton and Joey Kramer, and that distinctive honeyed rasp of Steven Tyler is a powerful concoction for me. Those classic '70s tracks the group cut for Columbia Records are just sensational.

Of course, you can't accurately gauge Aerosmith from those albums alone. Not unlike Queen - who started their career in the '70s printing "no synthesizers were used on this record" in their liner notes before making a dramatic turn to pop in the '80s - the bad boys from Boston enjoyed an improbable comeback after falling apart in a haze of drugs in the early '80s, starting with Tyler and Perry's team-up with Run-DMC on a cover of "Walk This Way" and continuing into the '90s with a string of slick arena rock albums and stylized MTV videos. While their recent years were marred by health issues and infighting (or sometimes a combination of the two: Kramer was largely off the drum kit due to injury since 2019 and later sued the band for barring him from coming back), a string of chart hits that begins in the mid-'70s and ends just before 9/11 is pretty impressive.

A career like Aerosmith's is bound to have fans supporting certain eras over others. I am not one of those fans. I own it all! (Even Honkin' on Bobo!) I love most of it! (Even I have my limits!) The largesse of their '80s - aided by studio pros like songwriter Desmond Child and producer Bruce Fairbairn - still retains a lot of what makes them exciting. (Compare that to the work of Bon Jovi from the same era, which utilized the same ringers but not as much identity.) The swings are big and stupid enough to swing around toward brilliant. So what if Diane Warren wrote their only No. 1 hit? I'll still emote to it at a wedding if someone plays it. I mean, they have their own roller coaster, for Christ's sake!

If you're someone who takes music seriously, your brain has, at one point or another, been fried by poptimism or canon-building or assessing what's in the zeitgeist or not. To me, Aerosmith, in all their forms - the competent, drugged-up sorta-blues for guys who wear denim jackets and jeans, and the larger-than-life, ultra-horned up prom jams with impossibly large drum tones - represents an island safely insulated from all of that, where sweet emotions, surprisingly beautiful vocal harmonies and impossibly catchy rock and pop songs are the only things worth an addiction. Come and save me tonight.