Cryin’

The Zoo Crew has got "Cryin'" rolling out of the speakers right now, off Aerosmith's 1993 album Get a Grip, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO you already know this one does not ask permission. Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, and outside writer Taylor Rhodes put it together after Geffen and the band's A&R man John Kalodner sent a pile of early Get a Grip tunes back and told them to try again. Tyler later shrugged it off in the simplest way a rock singer can: it was country, and they just Aerosmith'd it. They knocked out most of the song in a day, walking that thin line between a love gone sideways and the kind of pleading that sounds like it was written at three in the morning with the lights still on. On the charts it landed at number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, went to number one in Norway, and picked up a gold record in the States. The band's own site still marks the June 1993 single release and puts the sales past 600,000.

The record is sturdy, but the video is what stuck the song to a whole generation. Director Marty Callner, who had already steered a stack of Aerosmith clips, did not want another leather-and-lipstick clip. He wanted a real kid with some fire in her. He found Alicia Silverstone in The Crush, pinky-swore they would be friends, and put her in the middle of the story. She has said she was about sixteen and did not really know who Aerosmith was when the call came, which is either the best excuse in rock or the funniest. In the clip she catches Stephen Dorff stepping out, punches him, steals the car, dumps it when it overheats, and mouths a word MTV was never going to leave alone. She gets a tattoo, she gets her navel pierced on the set, and that one shot gets a lot of the credit for turning belly rings into a mid-nineties uniform. The purse-snatcher she karate-kicks in the coffee shop is a young Josh Holloway, years before anybody knew him from Lost. For the finish she stages a fake leap off a highway bridge, bungees down, and flips Dorff off while she hangs there. MTV blurred the finger. Silverstone later told Rolling Stone the band made a pile of money off that clip and that their sales tripled or something, and that they would have been crazy not to ask her back. They did, for "Amazing" and "Crazy," the rest of the Get a Grip video run.

She has also said the flannel and baggy jeans on the overpass were not a costume department invention. They belonged to a boyfriend, a French hairdresser in Beverly Hills, and she just wore what she had. Years afterward she laughed about people calling her the Aerosmith chick when she was seventeen and trying to be a serious actress. At the time she hated the nickname. Now she thinks it is hilarious. Director Amy Heckerling has said she was on a treadmill watching MTV when "Cryin'" came on, went a little sideways, and decided she had found Cher for Clueless. No overpass, no bungee cord, and that movie looks different. The band's own AeroHistory note on the official site still points at the same clip: most-requested on MTV in 1993, a stack of Video Music Awards, and a generation of belly-button piercings that started on a soundstage.

Before any of that, Aerosmith was a bunch of guys in New Hampshire and Boston who wanted to sound like the Yardbirds and had not figured out the rent. Steven Tyler was still Steven Tallarico then, out of Yonkers, drumming and singing in a band called Chain Reaction that had opened for the Beach Boys, the Byrds, and the Yardbirds. Joe Perry was washing dishes and flipping burgers at a place on the harbor in Sunapee, New Hampshire, the summer of 1966, when Tallarico and his crew came through, got loud, and left a mess. Perry has said they were big fish in a small pond, playing the part before they had the part, and he was the one who cleaned up after the food fight. They crossed paths again around 1969 and 1970. Perry and bassist Tom Hamilton had a covers outfit called the Jam Band. Tyler, fed up with his own group and fresh off a fistfight with a guitar player, went up to see them at a club called The Barn. He has said they could not even tune, and then they hit Fleetwood Mac's "Rattlesnake Shake" with a groove better than anything he had been getting. He knew if he could hand them a little of what he knew, and keep the looseness they already had, they would have a band.

The deal was simple and non-negotiable. Tyler was going to be the singer, not the drummer, or he was out. Perry, Hamilton, Tyler's old school friend Joey Kramer, and guitarist Ray Tabano agreed. They piled into a roach-ridden apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, the hallway so full of amps you had to walk sideways to reach the bathroom, and every room turned into a party room. Tabano eventually gave way to Brad Whitford. Perry has said they were not plotting a career. They wanted to play like the bands they idolized, and the money and the trouble came later. Hamilton remembers Tyler and Perry arguing about volume the first night, which became a band tradition that never really retired. Columbia's Clive Davis caught them as an unknown bar band in 1972 and signed them, and the first album followed in 1973. The Toxic Twins mythology, the split, the comeback, all of that is down the road. "Cryin'" sits on the far side of it, a power ballad with a country bone and a video that dragged the band back in front of kids who had not bought Rocks.

If you want the band's own word on the record, the clips, and whatever they are up to now, the front door is the official site at aerosmith.com, where the Cryin' single note and the Get a Grip years still live. They keep a verified page on Facebook, post the road photos and the old clips on Instagram, and talk to the faithful on X. The longtime fan club name is Aero Force One, the Blue Army, and the die-hards still gather in the Aero Force One Facebook group to trade pictures, set lists, and the occasional argument about which Get a Grip single hits hardest. Around here the argument is already settled. The Crew is spinning "Cryin'," the bridge is still in the rearview, and the Zoo Freaks know the words.