Crazy

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on "Crazy," and if you are a Zoo Freak who still remembers when MTV actually played rock and roll, you already know why the room gets quiet for a second. This is Aerosmith, off Get a Grip, the record that came out in 1993 and turned a band some folks had written off into the biggest American rock act of the decade. Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, and the hit writer Desmond Child put their names on it. It was the fifth single, released in May 1994, and it climbed to number 17 on the Billboard Hot 100, hit number three in Canada, and sat at number one in Iceland for two weeks. Over in Britain it rode out as a double-A side with "Blind Man" and landed at number 23. The Zoo has been spinning deep cuts and the big ones side by side since the old KZEW days, and this one still earns its place on the turntable at THE ZOO.

Here is the part a lot of people miss. "Crazy" is not a song that got written in a rush for Get a Grip. Tyler, Perry, and Child had the bones of it back in the late eighties, around the same time they wrote "Angel." The two songs felt too close, two big slow ones sitting in the same pocket, and the band did not want to become the ballad guys. "Angel" made Permanent Vacation in 1987. "Crazy" got put on the shelf. They spread the slow songs out on purpose so they could keep the hard-rock reputation they had earned the hard way. A piano-and-vocal sketch of the melody was already sitting on a tape from Joe Perry's basement studio, the Boneyard, in 1991, a year and a half before the version you know got finished. Perry later said the early core of the album, cut out in Los Angeles, already included Eat the Rich, Get a Grip, Fever, Amazing, and Crazy.

Then John Kalodner at Geffen listened to that first pass with his eyes closed and told the room he did not hear the hits. Joe Perry remembered the line as "I don't hear a single." That one sentence sent the band back to work, brought in outside writers, and killed what would have been the Los Angeles version of the record. "Crazy" survived the cut. Down in Miami, at Desmond Child's studio, Tyler and Child sat with the first verse and argued over it. Tyler did not want the song to drop the listener into the middle of a fight with no setup. They landed on the picture that opens the verse you know, the girl leaving on a seven-thirty train and heading out to Hollywood. Bruce Fairbairn produced the finished track. David Campbell arranged the strings. The song sits in A major and rolls in 6/8, more of a sway than a stomp, with Tyler's harmonica and Perry's guitar doing the talking between the lines about a love that turns a man into a slave and then walks out the door.

Get a Grip became the band's biggest seller, seven singles deep, and "Crazy" took home the Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. That was the second Grammy off the album, after "Livin' on the Edge" won the same award the year before, and the band's third overall. For a song that almost got left behind because it sounded too much like another hit, that is a pretty good punchline.

The clip is the story most Zoo Freaks still tell. Marty Callner directed it, the same man behind the other two Alicia Silverstone videos from this record, "Cryin'" and "Amazing." Silverstone was about seventeen and has said she did not even know who Aerosmith was when they first asked her to be in a video. By the time they shot "Crazy" she was the cool girl of the moment, and she later posted an old behind-the-scenes look and called herself and Liv Tyler babies. Liv was sixteen, still in high school, and this was her first real time on camera. The casting story has been told a few ways. One version says the video people saw her in a Pantene commercial and hired her without knowing she was Steven Tyler's daughter. Liv has said she understands why some folks had a problem with the schoolgirl bit, and that she and her dad did not. Years later she told MTV she would wake up, put on the countdown, and duck into the shower the second the clip came on because she was embarrassed in front of the kids at school.

The picture itself is a road movie in miniature, Thelma and Louise with a 1993 black Ford Mustang GT convertible, a gas-station clerk who never stood a chance, and an amateur pole-dancing contest when the money ran out. Liv grabs a microphone in one scene and does her old man's high kick, scarf on the stand and all. VH1 later ranked the video number 23 on its list of the top 100 music videos. It was one of the most requested clips on MTV in 1994. Callner shot an extra pass of the chorus that is not on the album or the radio edit, which is why the video always feels a little longer than the record.

None of that happens if a couple of kids in Sunapee, New Hampshire, do not cross paths. Steven Tyler, still Steven Tallarico in those days, was drumming for a British Invasion cover band that went from the Strangeurs to Chain Reaction, opening for the Yardbirds in New York in 1967. Joe Perry was working a hamburger stand on the harbor in the summer of 1966 when Tyler's bunch came in, made a mess, and had a food fight. Perry cleaned up after them. They ran into each other again around The Barn in Sunapee. Perry and Tom Hamilton had a jam band, and Tyler heard them tear into "Rattlesnake Shake" and decided that was the sound he wanted. The deal was simple. Tyler would sing, not sit behind the drums, or he was out. Joey Kramer, who had the name Aerosmith in his pocket from a high school doodle, came in on drums. Ray Tabano played guitar until Brad Whitford took the spot in 1971.

The first gig was a school gym at Nipmuc Regional High School in Mendon, Massachusetts, on November 6, 1970. Perry's mother helped land it. They got paid fifty dollars, which covered the rent on the apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, a roach-ridden place where the hallway was so full of amps you had to walk sideways to reach the bathroom. Tyler swiped a school shirt from the locker room and wore it onstage. He and Perry argued about the volume before the set was over. They rehearsed at Boston University, played the clubs, and in 1972 Clive Davis caught them at Max's Kansas City and signed them to Columbia. The first album came out in 1973 and barely charted. "Dream On" was the slow one that refused to die. By Toys in the Attic they had the Blue Army, the kids in denim who lined up around the building. Then the drugs, the split with Perry in 1979, the wilderness years, and the long climb back that Permanent Vacation started and Get a Grip finished. "Crazy" is a song from that second life, written by men who had already lost the band once and were not about to waste a chorus.

If you want the band in their own words, the official home is Aerosmith, and the shop still carries the Get a Grip double vinyl with "Crazy" sitting on side three, right between "Gotta Love It" and the flip to "Line Up," at the official store. They post on Facebook, Instagram, and X. The old fan club name is still alive in the Blue Army hangout Aero Force One, where the denim army compares set lists and argues about which night on the Get a Grip tour was the one. That is the crew that kept this song on the radio when the fashions changed. We are just keeping the same promise over here.