I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing

The Zoo Crew has got a big one spinning for the Zoo Freaks right now, and it is the kind of record that still fills a room the way a good power ballad is supposed to. “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” is Aerosmith, pulled off the Armageddon movie soundtrack, and it is the only song that ever put the Bad Boys from Boston at number one on the American singles chart. Four weeks up there in September 1998, a fifty-two-piece orchestra behind Steven Tyler’s voice, and a movie that was already the biggest box-office picture in the world that year. If you are listening on THE ZOO, you already know we do not rush a cut like this off the turntable.

The title did not come out of a studio session or a love letter. Songwriter Diane Warren heard about a Barbara Walters interview with James Brolin and Barbra Streisand. Brolin said he missed his wife even when he was asleep, because he did not want to lose a minute of her. Warren wrote the phrase down before there was a melody. She has said she loves a good title and keeps them in a pocket until the right picture shows up. When Michael Bay needed a song that could carry both a love story and the end of the world, she pulled that line back out. She has also admitted, with a laugh, that some of the lines would make her nervous in real life. Stay awake just to hear somebody breathing? She has said she would tell a partner to go do something else. The song still works because it sounds like devotion with the volume turned all the way up.

Warren figured the singer would be somebody in the Celine Dion lane. The picture people first asked U2. The idea of Aerosmith only landed after Liv Tyler, Steven’s daughter, was cast opposite Ben Affleck. That made the whole thing a family job. Warren sat at a grand piano in a room at the Sunset Marquis and taught the song to Tyler herself. She has called it one of the best moments of her writing life, sitting next to him while the melody came alive in that voice. Drummer Joey Kramer heard the demo as nothing but piano and a vocal and had a hard time picturing the Aerosmith touch. Once the band played it, he said, it became theirs in a minute. Columbia had planned it as a radio-only cut from Armageddon: The Album. Demand pushed a commercial single out in August 1998, after an airplay premiere in May and a first release in Japan late in July. The film itself had its premiere at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, with Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, and Liv Tyler on the poster. Aerosmith also cut “What Kind of Love Are You On,” a version of “Come Together,” and “Sweet Emotion” for the same soundtrack. The ballad took the Oscar nomination for Best Original Song, Warren’s fourth of nine, and it still sits in the band’s own history notes as the biggest single they ever had.

None of that number-one run happens if a couple of New Hampshire summers do not go sideways. Steven Tyler was still Steven Tallarico in the summer of 1966, fronting a band called Chain Reaction that had already opened for the Beach Boys, the Byrds, and the Yardbirds. Joe Perry was working part-time at a hamburger joint on the harbor in Sunapee. Tallarico and the boys came in loud, started a food fight, and left a mess. Perry had to clean it up. He has described them as big fish in a small pond, playing the part before they were stars. They crossed paths again around the lake a few years later. By 1970 Tyler was at the end of his rope in New York, still drumming, and he got into a fistfight with his guitar player, jumped the kit, packed a suitcase, and headed up to where Perry was playing. Perry and bassist Tom Hamilton had a band of their own. Tyler had one condition before he would join: he was going to be the singer, not the drummer. Everybody agreed. Drummer Joey Kramer and guitarist Ray Tabano came along. Brad Whitford would replace Tabano a little later. They piled into a roach-ridden apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, amps stacked in the hall so you had to walk sideways to reach the bathroom, and every room turned into a party room.

They did not even have a name that stuck. For a while they were billed as Joe’s new band or Steven’s new band. Somebody floated Spike Jones, after the novelty bandleader, which tells you how loose the whole thing still was. The first time they walked on a stage as Aerosmith was November 6, 1970, at Nipmuc Regional High School in Mendon, Massachusetts, a gig a history teacher helped them land. Perry had grown up in nearby Hopedale. They had already been playing the Hopedale Town Hall and the Lakeview Ballroom. The self-titled debut album did not arrive until January 1973, cut at Intermedia Studios in Boston. From that high-school gym to a number-one ballad written for a movie starring the singer’s daughter is a long stretch of road, with the usual bust-ups, the 1979 split when Perry walked, the lean years, and the later return that put them back in arenas. The Blue Army never really left.

If you want the band’s own trail, the official site is Aerosmith, and the history page there still marks the day the Armageddon single went out. Their official Facebook page is Aerosmith on Facebook, the Instagram account is Aerosmith on Instagram, and the X account is Aerosmith on X. Fans who want a room full of set lists, old photos, and arguments about which ballad belongs next to “Dream On” keep a public Facebook group called Aerosmith’s Blue Army, and another long-running hangout is Aero Force One. The official fan-club name goes back to the mid-1970s, when Ray Tabano printed a hundred wings-logo shirts and they vanished in minutes at a show. That is the same crowd that still treats this soundtrack cut like a band song, not a rental. Joey Kramer was right. Once the five of them got hold of it, the piano demo was gone and the record belonged to Aerosmith. Leave it on. The Zoo Freaks are not missing a thing.