The Aerosmith song Steven Tyler didn’t think would be released

One who didn’t agree with them sounding like the Rolling Stones was Mick Jagger, who called the band “crap – absolute crap”. He complimented Steven Tyler (in a way), but even that ended up with him disparaging the band. “The singer’s a pretty nice guy, mind you. He’s almost too damn sweet… What are you supposed to do with him? Punch him in the face?” he said, before mimicking the punches in question and continuing: “So what are you fucking playing, imitating me?”

Tyler admits that the constant comparisons slowly wore on him. After receiving an award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers for his songwriting, Tyler spoke about how Jagger’s comments wore him down early in his career.

He said: “(The awards) feel really good. But we’ve always just played our music and not given a damn. Still, there was constant criticism that we were a ‘cheap imitation of the Rolling Stones’. And that hurt in the first few years.”

After those first few years, Tyler came to the mindset that they should just play their music and not worry about the criticisms of imitators. Tyler turned away from the music the band was writing and instead devoted himself to a melody he had written when he was 16/17. It was eventually expanded into a full song and became one of the band’s biggest hits: “Dream On”.

“It’s about the hunger to be somebody: dream until your dreams come true,” Tyler said when talking about the track. “This song sums up the crap you have to put up with when you’re in a new band. Most critics panned our first album and said we were ripping off the Stones. That’s a good barometer of the anger I still have at the press.”

Since people didn’t like what he and the band had come up with, he went back to the old tune he had written years ago. “‘Dream On’ came about when I was 17 or 18 playing piano and had no idea about songwriting,” he said. “It was just this little sonnet that I started playing one day. I never thought it would become a real song.”

Related topics