The first Aerosmith song Steven Tyler wrote with Joe Perry
Some of the best bands in the world usually have a duo at the centre of it. The Beatles always had John Lennon and Paul McCartney leading the charge, and would Led Zeppelin have become as big as they were had Jimmy Page not had the ‘Golden God’ Robert Plant working with him on the lyrics? It’s that tension that breeds creativity, and Aerosmith was already on the verge of brilliance when Steven Tyler and Joe Perry wrote their first song, ‘Movin’ Out’.
For the first few years of the band’s career, it’s easy to mistake them as a passable Rolling Stones cover band that happened to play original material. From how they dressed to how they presented themselves onstage, these guys worshipped at the altar of bands like The Yardbirds and The Stones, and Tyler had no problem inhabiting that bluesman onstage.
Before he got to the front of the stage, Tyler was at the back of his band Chain Reaction, sitting behind the drumkit and singing the occasional song. Then again, having someone like Tyler at the back of the stage is like hiring Freddie Mercury to be your pianist; technically, you may have gotten what you’re looking for, but you’re drastically undervaluing who you’re working with.
After Tyler’s first band broke up, he knew that he wanted to have a different group after seeing Led Zeppelin for the first time. Going out to a venue called The Barn, Tyler came across a group calling themselves The Jam Band, with a young Joe Perry and Tom Hamilton at the centre of the stage.
Liking what he heard, Tyler convinced Perry and Hamilton to ditch their band for his group. While everything seemed to fall into place once Joey Kramer joined behind the drums, the songwriting was all on Tyler since he had the most experience. Although many of the songs on the band’s debut felt like a retread of what The Yardbirds had done, like ‘Somebody’ and ‘Write Me a Letter’, one chance jam session on a waterbed led to Tyler developing his musical partnership.
For Tyler, this was what he had always dreamed of making, recalling in Does The Noise In My Head Bother You, “One day at the very beginning of 1971, I wrote the basic track and lyrics for ‘Movin’ Out’ with Joe Perry in our living room. I leapt up and shouted, ‘Guys, do you realise what we just did? It’s our firstborn’”.
Since most of the band’s debut tends to be forgotten outside of a handful of songs like ‘Dream On’, ‘Movin’ Out’ was the start of better things to come. Taking the basis of a Stonesy riff from Perry, Tyler’s lyrics about moving out of his nowhere town in search of somewhere better is the kind of message that any rocker has dreamed of at some point, practically being a bluesier version of ‘Born to Run’ years before Springsteen got to it.
The band had a long way to go before the public started taking notice, with their label wanting to push other artists on their roster, forcing the band to break their backs on tour before people finally started to take notice. The filler songs on albums like Toys in the Attic may be far more intricate than ‘Movin’ Out’, but no artist ever forgets their first love.