Angel

The Zoo Crew has got Aerosmith's "Angel" up on the turntable right now, the slow one off Permanent Vacation, and if you grew up anywhere near a radio in the late eighties you already know the piano figure before Steven Tyler even opens his mouth. Permanent Vacation hit the racks in August 1987, the record that finally put the Boston bad boys back on the map after Done with Mirrors had come and gone without much fuss. "Angel" was the album's biggest single, climbing to number three on the American charts, and it sold a whole lot of seats even if the guys who wrote the riffs were never fully sold on it. Over at THE ZOO we still spin it for the Zoo Freaks because a ballad this honest belongs next to the deep cuts, not locked in a vault.

The song did not come out of a smoky rehearsal room with the whole band arguing over a riff. Desmond Child, the outside writer Geffen A&R man John Kalodner had pushed on the band, has told the story more than once. After they finished knocking "Dude (Looks Like a Lady)" into shape, Joe Perry did not show up the next day. Child has said Perry had probably had enough of him for one stretch. That left Child and Tyler alone in a giant warehouse in the Boston area, parked side by side on a little piano bench at a Wurlitzer sitting at the foot of the stage. No roadies, no nothing. Child asked Tyler what was going on in his life, and Tyler, who never needed much of an invitation to overshare, started talking about getting clean and about the woman who had just walked into the wreckage.

That woman was fashion designer Teresa Barrick. Tyler told Child she had changed his life, that she was his angel. Child has said the word jumped out of those big Mick Jagger lips and reminded him of the Stones singing "Angie," and he knew right then he wanted Tyler to sing "angel" over and over so those lips would do the same thing on camera. They had the song in about forty-five minutes. Child has called it one of the biggest hits he ever spent the least time writing. Tyler even started them off by playing the opening chord from "Dream On," like he was handing Child the old Aerosmith blueprint and saying, build something new on this. The lyrics landed almost as spoken: come and save me tonight, I need your love. It was autobiography with a chorus hook, not a joke about a guy in a club.

Not everybody in the building was cheering. Kalodner later said, in the band biography Walk This Way, that Tyler claimed Kalodner had ruined his career by making him write "Angel" with Desmond. Tyler has never been shy about that mixed feeling. Talking to FHM years afterward, he was asked which Aerosmith song he wished he had never sung, and he answered that one day it was "Angel" and the next it was "Dude (Looks Like a Lady)," because you get tired of a song after the 6,559th time. When Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash called the track too pop, Tyler did not argue the point. He told an interviewer he did not like "Angel" either and did not like playing it live, then added that it made a lot of seats wet, and that was what he was in it for. He was not there to play for Slash. Child has said the band shelved it from the set for a long time because Tyler wanted to rock harder than that and heard it as pop. The upside was real. It was their biggest American hit to that point, and it opened the door for the later ballads "Cryin'," "Crazy," and "What It Takes."

Joe Perry has been clearer about what the whole album meant. Talking about the thirtieth anniversary of Permanent Vacation, he said it was the start of a new way of writing and making records. They had gone into the studio trying to grind it out the old way, and that no longer worked. Outside writers, Child among them along with Jim Vallance and Holly Knight, taught them craft they could carry back into the Tyler and Perry partnership. The album peaked at number eleven and has sold five million copies in the United States alone, with "Dude (Looks Like a Lady)" at number four, "Angel" at number three, and "Rag Doll" at number fourteen. The video, directed by Marty Callner, the same hand who had just put "Dude" into heavy MTV rotation, mixed 1988 tour footage with the usual alley shots and highway guitars. Fans still argue about who played the angel hovering over the crowd. One Zoo-friendly detail from the road: a listener who was at the Worcester Centrum swears that overhead shot was filmed there.

None of that comeback makes sense unless you go back to how these five got in a room together in the first place. Steven Tyler came out of Yonkers, already singing and drumming in a British Invasion-style band called Chain Reaction that had opened for the Beach Boys, the Byrds, and the Yardbirds. Joe Perry and bassist Tom Hamilton were up in the lake country around Sunapee, New Hampshire, playing covers in a trio called the Jam Band. Tyler's family had a place up there, and in the summer of 1970 he caught the Jam Band at a local club called The Barn. Perry has said that once they jammed, each of them had something the other did not. Tyler was at the end of his rope with the drum kit. He has talked about jumping the drums one night to fight the guitar player, then packing a suitcase and heading north. The deal was simple. He would join, but only as the frontman. He was done hiding behind a kit.

They set up in a roach-ridden apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, a place fans still call the Aerosmith apartment. Perry has written that every room turned into a party room and the hallway was so jammed with amps you had to walk sideways to reach the bathroom. Tyler's old school friend Joey Kramer came in on drums after studying at Berklee. Kramer handed them the name. He liked the sound of the word aero from Harry Nilsson's Aerial Ballet, and an earlier Yonkers band of his had already used Aerosmith. Ray Tabano started on second guitar and was replaced by Brad Whitford by 1971. They refused to play "Wooly Bully" and the other club standards, stole food when the money ran out, and wrote the songs that became the 1973 debut after Columbia signed them in 1972. Tyler has put it plain: they started as professional musicians dabbling in drugs and wound up professional drug addicts dabbling in musicianship. Permanent Vacation, and a song like "Angel," was the sound of them trying to walk that back without sanding off the scar tissue.

If you want the band's own paper trail on this record, the official site still keeps the AeroHistory note on Permanent Vacation, track list and all, with "Angel" sitting at number nine: aerosmith.com. The same camp posts on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans still gather in the public Aerosmith Fans group, which is where the Blue Army argues about set lists the way we argue about them in the Zoo Crew booth. Teresa and Steven married in 1988 and split in 2006, but the song outlasted the marriage. That is the funny part about a record the singer sometimes wishes he did not have to sing. The Zoo Freaks keep requesting it anyway, and the Crew keeps dropping the needle.