By the early 1980s, Aerosmith was, by most reasonable industry assessments, finished. Joe Perry and Brad Whitford had both left the band, driven out by a toxic combination of drug addiction, internal resentment, and the specific exhaustion of a band that had achieved enormous success in the 1970s and then nearly destroyed itself trying to sustain it. Steven Tyler’s addiction during this period was severe enough that bandmates, producers, and people in his personal orbit have described, across multiple interviews and Tyler’s own memoir, a period in which his survival seemed genuinely uncertain on a fairly regular basis.
1. Same Old Song and Dance (1974)
From the era before the collapse — a song that demonstrates the raw blues-rock chemistry that made the original lineup so formidable before addiction eroded it. Tyler has said listening back to the band’s 1970s output produces a complicated nostalgia, hearing the talent that was operating before the damage became severe enough to threaten everything.
2. Dream On (1973)
Written when Tyler was just 17, years before the band’s success or its subsequent collapse, the song’s lyric about mortality and the passage of time has taken on additional weight in retrospect, given how close Tyler came in the years that followed to not surviving to see the dreams the song describes realized. He has said he wrote it as a teenager without any sense of how literally relevant the sentiment would become.
3. Walk This Way (1975)
The song’s 1986 collaboration with Run-DMC effectively resurrected Aerosmith’s commercial career and introduced the band to a new generation that had no memory of their original 1970s peak. Tyler has described agreeing to the collaboration with some initial confusion about hip hop as a form, and significant gratitude in retrospect for a creative decision that arrived at exactly the moment the band needed it to survive.
4. Janie’s Got a Gun (1989)
Written during Tyler’s early sobriety, addressing childhood sexual abuse and its devastating consequences with a directness uncommon for mainstream rock radio. Tyler has said the song represented the first time he was writing with genuine clarity in years — that getting clean allowed him to address subject matter with a seriousness that addiction had made impossible. The song won a Grammy and represented the band’s full creative and commercial resurrection.
5. Crazy (1993)
Recorded well into the band’s successful comeback, the song and its accompanying video — featuring Tyler’s daughter Liv Tyler — represented a kind of full-circle moment, a band that had nearly destroyed itself now thriving with the next generation literally present in the work. Tyler has spoken about the specific gratitude of having lived long enough to see his daughter grow up and participate in his career, a future that was genuinely uncertain during the worst years of his addiction in the early 1980s.
Joe Perry and Brad Whitford eventually returned to the band. Tyler got sober, relapsed, and got sober again multiple times across subsequent decades, a struggle he has discussed publicly with notable honesty. The band that critics and even some of its own members assumed was finished in 1980 went on to sell over 150 million records. Survival, in this case, was the prerequisite for everything that came after.