Aerosmith took its name from a word Joey Kramer doodled on his school notebooks
When the young band sharing a house at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston needed a name, drummer Joey Kramer offered a word he had scrawled across his school notebooks. His bandmates assumed he meant the novel Arrowsmith until he spelled it out, A-E-R-O. Steven Tyler became its screaming frontman.
Tyler was born Steven Victor Tallarico in Manhattan on 26 March 1948; his father, Victor, was a classical pianist who taught music at a Bronx high school. The family moved to Yonkers in 1957. A genealogist later established that his maternal grandfather, Felix Czarnyszewicz, was born in 1892 in what is now Belarus and became Blancha after emigrating in 1914. At 17 Tyler hung around Greenwich Village and caught a Rolling Stones show, and people kept telling him he looked like Mick Jagger.
He had already written Dream On before the band existed. At a 1969 rock show in Sunapee, New Hampshire, he watched Joe Perry and Tom Hamilton playing in the Jam Band, and around 1970 the three joined forces, with Tyler, who had drummed in earlier groups, insisting on singing out front. Kramer came from New York to play drums. He said the name had come to him while listening to Harry Nilsson's Aerial Ballet, whose cover shows a circus performer leaping from a biplane. The first gig was at a high school in Mendon, Massachusetts, on 6 November 1970, and Brad Whitford joined the next year.
Columbia signed them in mid-1972 for a reported $125,000. The debut peaked at number 166 and critics sneered at them as Rolling Stones copies, but Toys in the Attic in 1975 changed minds: Sweet Emotion became their first Top 40 hit, a reissued Dream On climbed to number 6, and Walk This Way reached the Top 10 early in 1977. Then excess took hold. Tyler and Perry earned the nickname the Toxic Twins, and in 1980 Tyler collapsed on stage in Portland, Maine.
The turnaround came in 1986, when Tyler finished rehab and he and Perry joined Run-DMC to remake Walk This Way, which went Top 5. Permanent Vacation, Pump, Get a Grip and Nine Lives followed, yielding thirteen Top 40 singles between them. Aerosmith were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during 2001, and in 2016 Tyler released a country rock solo album, We're All Somebody from Somewhere.
Source: Steven Tyler
