The Aerosmith song Steven Tyler called a ripoff of The Yardbirds: “It’s all from them”
If the British invasion was the first new wave of rock and roll, Aerosmith was the sound of their British counterparts in a fun-house mirror. Compared to artists who tried to push the genre forward, seeing Steven Tyler and Joe Perry live out their rockstar fantasies was always rooted in the sounds of the blues, going back to the stone age when artists like Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf were the biggest names in music. Aerosmith still loved their British favourites, and Tyler knew that he had copied the group wholesale when the band were cutting their first record.
It is difficult not to draw from your influences when you’re just starting out in a band. As much as people may have been comparing Tyler and Perry to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, though, the ‘Toxic Twins’ were just as likely to be going on about what kind of guitars Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page were using on certain Yardbirds classics in their spare time.
It would take a while before the group even tried to touch any original material. All the great blues artists before them made their trade playing covers, so why should they be any different when it came time for them to make their classics? If you have to create originals, though, do the next best thing and get Tyler to write them.
Tyler was by far the most qualified of the group, having already had a hit in their local area with his old band, Chain Reaction. Although their self-titled debut featured the first Tyler/Perry credit on the song ‘Movin’ Out’, ‘Somebody’ was a pastiche of what the greatest Yardbirds song was supposed to sound like.
The frontman wasn’t exactly shy about his influence, either, telling Rolling Stone, “Listen to ’Somebody’, a song I wrote for Aerosmith’s first album: It’s all from the Yardbirds. They were the shit to us, out of all the British bands in the Sixties. The Yardbirds were a bit of a mystery. They had an eclecticism”.
That eclecticism is present throughout every Yardbirds song…not so much with this track. While the initial groove has a decent rhythm behind it, the riff is the same dime-a-dozen blues riff you would hear out of a random dive bar while Tyler sings about his higher power sending down a lover for him from the sky.
The band still had a long way to go, but a track like ‘Dream On’ pointed the way forward. Putting together pieces of classical music to create the first real power ballad, the fact that this comes directly after the passable blues jam is startling when you’re listening to the album in sequence.
Tyler would find out how to get more eclectic, though, keeping the blues when he wanted while also putting more funky rhythms into the band’s next few albums, like Toys in the Attic and Rocks. ‘Somebody’ is far from the most original thing that Aerosmith ever recorded. However, when you listen to the recording, you’re hearing all of those Yardbird singles still trapped somewhere in Tyler’s record collection.