Lightning Strikes

The Zoo Crew has been spinning “Lightning Strikes” off Aerosmith’s 1982 album Rock in a Hard Place, and the Zoo Freaks on the other end of the dial know this one is a different kind of animal. It is the only charting Aerosmith single cut without Joe Perry, the record that almost did not get finished, and the track a lot of the old heads still call the best thing to come out of those lost years. Written by Richie Supa, a longtime friend and collaborator who had already handed the band songs they could lean on, it was produced by Jack Douglas and Steven Tyler and released as a single in late summer of 1982. It climbed to number 21 on the Mainstream Rock chart, which is no small thing for a band that was barely holding a lineup together.

Perry had walked in 1979 after the World Series of Rock blowup in Cleveland and the slow collapse that followed on Night in the Ruts. Jimmy Crespo stepped in on lead guitar. Brad Whitford stayed long enough to cut his parts on “Lightning Strikes,” then left in 1981, fed up with sessions that would not move. Rick Dufay came aboard to finish the album. Whitford is credited as an additional musician on this one song, which makes it the last place you can still hear both of the original guitar chairs before the Toxic Twins era cracked wide open. Tom Hamilton held the bass, Joey Kramer the drums, and Tyler the microphone and the keyboards. The cover art says the rest: a stone monolith in a dead landscape getting hit by a jagged bolt. Classic Rock later called the whole record an unlikely triumph and named “Lightning Strikes” among the tracks that saved it.

The story behind the sessions is rough even by Aerosmith standards. Dufay told an interviewer in 2008 that they had been trying to make the album for two years, that Tyler could not finish things, and that the original producer situation had fallen apart. Once Jack Douglas and Dufay were on board they pushed. Down in Florida, Tyler was in no shape to work. Dufay said he was nodding off while trying to write lyrics, and that it took two or three months of sun, laughs, and plain old caretaking to get him off the hard stuff and back in the room. He did not soften it. He said Tyler was pretty sick and that he even had to look after him in ways a bandmate should not have to. The album is said to have cost around a million and a half in 1982 money, a wild sum for a record missing half the original front line. Out of that mess came a song that still hits like a street fight set to a riff.

The lyric is pure combat-zone storytelling. Boys and dukes ready to rumble, blades flashing, zip-gun Johnny with an itchy finger, chains crashing like thunder, draw first blood or they read your funeral rights. The chorus hangs on the same idea the cover art sells: when the lightning strikes, the weak ones retreat. It is dog-eat-dog language, Hell’s Kitchen and the parking lot and the cops bringing the heat. Tyler has talked in later years about the band barely functioning in that stretch, and the song reads like a report from the middle of it. Supa built the frame. Tyler and the band put the sweat on it. Max Cavalera of Sepultura later singled out the guitars on Rock in a Hard Place, and “Lightning Strikes” in particular, as a favorite. He remembered running into the band in an airport on the way to Brazil in 1994, shooting the breeze, and ending up on the same flight to Rio. That is the kind of long tail a deep cut earns when the players who came after still hear the fire in it.

They also cut one of their earliest real music videos for the song, directed by Arnold Levine, back when MTV was still a new machine. The clip jumps between the band in a small room and the band out on the street, mean looks, baseball bats, chains, knives, the suggestion that a fight is about to start. Fake lightning bolts cut the scenes. Bats smash melons in the air. It is early-eighties grit, not the scarf-and-leather stadium show the band would own a few years later. Martin Popoff, writing about the album, called the record a bit patchy and still said they never made a bad one, with “Lightning Strikes,” “Jailbait,” and “Joanie’s Butterfly” as the highlights. An outtake called “Riff and Roll” sat in the can until the Pandora’s Box box set in 1991. The official band history still lists the album as the seventh studio record, the only one without Perry, with Whitford gone midway through, and “Lightning Strikes” sitting right there at track two.

None of that chaos makes sense unless you go back to how these cats got started. Steven Tyler, still Steven Tallarico in those days, and Joe Perry first crossed paths in the summer of 1966 up at Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, while Perry was working a hamburger stand on the harbor. Tyler had already been through The Strangeurs and Chain Reaction, a New York kid who drummed and sang and once jumped the kit to fight his own guitar player. Perry and Tom Hamilton were holding down the Jam Band, playing clubs, docks, and ice cream joints. Tyler caught them on something like “I’m a King Bee” and the attitude stuck. By 1970 he had packed a suitcase, headed for Boston, and moved into a roach-ridden apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue with Perry and Hamilton. Amps clogged the hallway. People walked sideways to reach the bathroom. Every room turned into a party room. They wrote, rehearsed, and watched Three Stooges reruns between gigs.

Joey Kramer, a Berklee student and an old schoolmate of Tyler’s from Yonkers, took the drum stool so Steven could stand out front for good. Ray Tabano handled second guitar until Brad Whitford replaced him around 1971. They could not settle on a name. Spike Jones got tossed around. The Hookers got tossed around. For a while they were just billed as Joe’s new band or Steven’s new band. Kramer had been scrawling the word Aerosmith in his high school notebooks, a sound he liked from the “Aero” in Harry Nilsson’s Aerial Ballet, and an old Yonkers outfit had already used it and split. He offered it up. It stuck. The first show under that name landed on November 6, 1970, at Nipmuc Regional High School in Mendon, Massachusetts, a gym gig set up through a history teacher who advised the sophomore class. None of them were really from Boston. Tyler was Yonkers. Perry was Hopedale. They picked the city because the clubs were there, and they spent the next couple of years playing every dive, frat party, and high school that would have them.

That is the same crew that, a decade later, was trying to keep a record alive without the guitarist who had helped build the name. “Lightning Strikes” is the scar and the spark from that stretch. The Zoo Crew will keep it in the rotation for the Zoo Freaks who like the deep cuts as much as the big ones, the way THE ZOO has always done it, commercial-free and in it for the long ride. The band’s own house is over at aerosmith.com, where the Rock in a Hard Place page still carries the lyric and the track list. You can also find them on Facebook, Instagram, and X. The Blue Army still gathers in the Aero Force One group, the old fan-club name that has been riding with the band since the Toys in the Attic years. Spin it loud. When the lightning strikes, you will know it.