Come Together

Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on Aerosmith's take of "Come Together," the one that rode out on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie soundtrack in 1978. This is not the Abbey Road original. This is Steven Tyler snarling over Joe Perry's guitar while the Boston boys play the villains in a picture most folks still treat like a fever dream. The single landed in July of that year, climbed to number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100, and hung around the chart for about twelve weeks. Earth, Wind and Fire's "Got to Get You into My Life" was the other cut from that soundtrack that radio actually wanted. The rest of the album got the cold shoulder. If you are riding with the Zoo Crew over at THE ZOO, you already know we would rather spin the version that still sounds mean than the one that just sounds polite.

The movie was Robert Stigwood's big Beatles jukebox after Grease and Saturday Night Fever had filled the bank. He had paid for the rights to the songs, Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees were the good guys, and Aerosmith got cast as the Future Villain Band, billed as the evil force that would poison young minds, pollute the environment, and subvert the democratic process. The band's own site still carries that line in an old AeroHistory note. The Rolling Stones had been offered the part and turned it down. Joey Kramer later said that once they saw the finished picture, they understood why. Alice Cooper was in the villain camp too. Kramer called the whole thing a debacle and a pretty silly movie, then admitted the upside: everybody else looked so ridiculous that the bad guys looked cool.

Steven Tyler has told the story more than once, including in the band's book Walk This Way. There was a Beatles revival in the air. Steve Leber had put together Beatlemania, and Aerosmith were investors in that show. When the movie offer came, the original script had Frampton's character killing Tyler's. The band pushed back. They did not figure Frampton's lighter pop style ought to finish them off, so the script got flipped and the Future Villain Band survived the battle. Tyler has said he does not even remember every reason they signed on, except that it gave them a shot at working with George Martin when they cut "Come Together" for the soundtrack.

Joe Perry has been just as plain about it. In his book Rocks, and again in later interviews, he said they knew the movie could look cheesy. They were a little contemptuous of the camp at first. The real hook was Martin. Perry has described the session with their own producer, Jack Douglas, already in the room. Martin came down, they ran the song, and they sat there waiting for the man who had made the Beatles records to tell them what to change. What they got was closer to "it sounds good, boys, please proceed" and "just keep playing what you guys are playing." They were stunned. Perry still says people light up when they play it live.

Ray Tabano, who had been in the early lineup and later worked on the band's side of the business, told a sharper version of that day. Martin knew two things about Aerosmith: they took forever in the studio, and they loved Jeff Beck. Martin had produced Beck's Blow by Blow and Wired, and Beck was supposed to be in town. So Martin mentioned that Beck was playing at Trax that night, and that they could all go once the track was done. The band cut "Come Together" in two takes. Martin left with the tape. They got to the club. No Jeff Beck. Tabano called it a hoax. Whether every detail of that night is gospel or road lore, it fits the band that was already famous for burning studio time.

There is a rougher paper trail on the song too. Before the movie version, they had been knocking around a live "Come Together" for Live! Bootleg at the rehearsal space, with Tyler checking in on Douglas and Douglas answering that they were rolling. Later takes got tense. Tyler can be heard losing patience and demanding some highs in the mix. Those cellar tapes are the sort of thing the collectors still pass around. The movie cut is the one that made the radio, produced with Douglas and Martin in the picture, and it is the one that outlived the film.

None of that happens if five guys in Boston do not decide to be a band in the first place. Steven Tyler was still Steven Tallarico then, drumming and singing in a Yonkers outfit called Chain Reaction, earlier the Strangeurs, a band that had opened for the Yardbirds, the Byrds, and the Beach Boys. Summers took him up to the family place around Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire. Joe Perry was working a hamburger stand on the harbor there in the summer of 1966 when Tyler's crowd came through, made a mess, and left him to clean it up. They crossed paths again in August 1969 at a club called The Barn. Perry and Tom Hamilton were in a covers trio called the Jam Band. Tyler was at the end of his rope in New York, fighting with his guitar player, and he hitchhiked north.

What Perry remembers is simple. Tyler had something he did not have, and he had something Tyler did not have. The deal was that Tyler would be the frontman, not the drummer. Hamilton came along. So did Ray Tabano on second guitar, and Tyler's old school friend Joey Kramer, who had been at Berklee and showed up to an audition in a Captain America shirt. They piled into a roach-ridden apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, amps in the hallway, parties in every room, Three Stooges on the television, and rehearsals that ran until the songs started to sound like theirs. Kramer handed them the name. He liked the word aero from Harry Nilsson's Aerial Ballet, and an earlier Yonkers band of his had already used Aerosmith. On November 6, 1970, they played their first gig under that name in the gym at Nipmuc Regional High School in Mendon, mostly covers, a few originals that later turned up on the records. Brad Whitford replaced Tabano not long after. Clive Davis caught the bar band in 1972 and signed them to Columbia. The rest is the long, loud argument that became the band you are hearing right now.

The movie is still a strange detour. The single is not. Tyler, Perry, Hamilton, Whitford, and Kramer took a Beatles song, played it like a bar band that had something to prove, and walked out of a flop with the track people still request. That is the cut on the turntable. If you want the band's own word on the picture, the official site still keeps the Future Villain Band note, and the fan pages never stopped arguing about the session.

You can find the band at the Aerosmith official website, on Facebook, on Instagram, and on X. Fans still gather in the Aero Force One Facebook group, and the collectors' site Aerosmith Back-Burner keeps the "Come Together" session notes and outtakes. The old Aero Force One dot-com address no longer answers, so the group is the room that is still open.