Dream On

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on "Dream On," the song that opens the door on Aerosmith's first album, simply titled Aerosmith, and the whole room goes quiet for a second the way it always does. You can hear the piano sitting under the guitars, that little classical turn Steven Tyler has been carrying around since he was a kid lying under his father's Steinway. If you are just tuning in with the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO, settle in. This one has a story longer than the record itself.

Steven Tyler has told the tale more than once, and it never gets less strange. The music was written on an upright Steinway in the living room of Trow-Rico Lodge in Sunapee, New Hampshire, the summer resort his family ran, maybe four years before there was a band called Aerosmith. He was seventeen or eighteen. He had been stuck in the key of C and one day he slid over to F, and out came this little sonnet he never figured would become a real song. The chord shapes, he has said, came from lying under the piano as a three-year-old while his father, Victor Tallarico, a Juilliard-trained pianist, played Chopin, Bach, and Beethoven. "That's where I got that Dream On chordage," Tyler wrote later. He finished the first verse up in Sunapee and the second verse on a balcony at a motel near Logan Airport in Boston, right before the band went into Intermedia Studios in October 1972 to cut the debut. He has also said he worked the thing out on an Estey pump organ outside the room where his dad gave Sunday recitals, and the stops he pulled made the thing nearly write itself.

When the band finally tried to play it, Tyler sat at the piano and split the parts between the guitars. Joe Perry took what the right hand was doing. Brad Whitford took the left. Tyler has said he got a little melodramatic sitting there working it out, and the song was so good it brought a tear to his eye. He was crying with relief because he was sure this one could take them where they wanted to go. The rest of the band was not sold at first. They were a bar band that liked to lean on the riffs, and a slow piano song felt like a strange fit. Tyler is the sole credited writer, and he has said he used a primitive rhythm box to find the groove because the band could not quite grab it. On the record he sang in his real voice, the high natural tenor, instead of the tougher bark he thought people wanted. He has admitted he was afraid folks would not like that real voice. The scream at the end is the payoff he had been building toward the whole way.

The lyric is plain once you hear him explain it. In the band memoir Walk This Way he put it this way: it is about dreaming until your dreams come true. It is about the hunger and the ambition Aerosmith felt in those early days, the lines on the face getting clearer, the good lord maybe taking you away tomorrow, so sing it today. Columbia put the debut out in January 1973 and barely pushed it. Bruce Springsteen's first album had landed a week earlier and the label was busy with that. "Dream On" came out as a single in June 1973 and stalled at number 59 on the national chart, but Boston radio, especially WRKO, played it like it was already a classic. The band talked Columbia into a reissue of the full album version late in 1975, and in the spring of 1976 it climbed to number 6. That second life is what kept the first record from disappearing. Tyler has said most of the critics called them Stones copycats, and the song was his answer. It went into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2018. The band still plays it with an orchestra when the night calls for it, the way they did with Michael Kamen for MTV's tenth anniversary.

None of that happens if five guys do not find each other in the lake country of New Hampshire. Steven Tallarico, as he was then, was already a working drummer and singer in a band called Chain Reaction, opening for the Yardbirds and sharing bills with the Beach Boys and the Byrds. Joe Perry and Tom Hamilton were up in Sunapee in a loose blues jam outfit. Perry has told the story of the first meeting in the summer of 1966, when he was working a hamburger joint on the harbor and Chain Reaction came in loud, had a food fight, and left him to clean the table. They crossed paths again around 1969 and 1970 at a Sunapee club called The Barn. Perry's band played "Rattlesnake Shake" and Tyler decided he wanted in. The deal was simple. Tyler would be the frontman, not the drummer. Joey Kramer, an old school friend of Tyler's, came in on drums and brought the name Aerosmith with him from a high-school notebook. Ray Tabano held the second guitar chair until Brad Whitford took it in 1971. They piled into a roach-ridden apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, gear stacked in the hallway so you had to walk sideways to the bathroom, and played every club that would have them around Boston University and down into New York. Clive Davis caught them at Max's Kansas City in 1972 and signed them to Columbia. The first show under the name had been at Nipmuc Regional High School in Mendon, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1970. By the time they cut Aerosmith they were still broke, still hungry, and sitting on a piano song Tyler had been carrying since before any of them had met.

You can follow the band where they keep the lights on. The official site is aerosmith.com, and right now it is talking about the Legendary Edition of that self-titled debut and a pair of Hollywood Bowl nights billed California, Dream On. Their Facebook page is Aerosmith on Facebook, posting the same Dream On shows. Instagram is @aerosmith. On X they are @Aerosmith. The Blue Army still gathers in public groups, including Aero Force One and Aerosmith's Blue Army, where fans trade photos, set lists, and the old stories. The old Aero Force One club site has gone dark, so we are leaving that one off the board. Spin it again if you want. The piano is still under there, and the scream still lands.