Seasons of Wither

The Zoo Crew has got "Seasons of Wither" spinning for the Zoo Freaks, and if you have been riding with THE ZOO for any length of time you already know this one sits in a different room than the party tracks. Aerosmith cut it for Get Your Wings, the second album, released in 1974, and Steven Tyler is the only writer credited on it. He also played the acoustic guitar. It runs a little over five and a half minutes, slow and smoky, the kind of cut freeform rock radio was built to hold onto instead of racing past. Joe Perry, who spent the early years grumbling that a rock band had no business doing ballads and who never much cared for "Dream On," later said that of all the ballads Aerosmith ever cut, "Wither" was the one he liked best. That is high praise from a man who would rather hear a riff than a sigh.

Tyler has told the story more than once, in the band book Walk This Way and again in his own memoir. He and drummer Joey Kramer were living in a house near an old chicken farm in Needham, Massachusetts, through the winter of 1973. He used to lie in bed at dawn and listen to the wind in the bare trees, and he said it sounded lonely and melancholy. He was also steamed about his taxes, and getting mad has always helped him write. One night he went down to the basement, where the furniture was a rug on the floor and a couple of boxes, lit some incense, and picked up a guitar Joey had fished out of a dumpster on Beacon Street. The neck was so bowed it would only hold four strings. Tyler said you could shoot arrows with it. He tuned it to a tuning he thought he had invented, chased the sounds already rattling around in his head, and came out with "Seasons of Wither." The title is the winter landscape itself, the withered trees and the cold, more than any tidy love story, though the lyric does circle a relationship that feels half haunted.

On the record the track does not just start. A crowd cheer fades down into a howl of wind, then that warped acoustic comes in and Tyler's voice follows it, low and a little frayed. That opening is one reason the die-hards treat the song like a secret handshake. It was never a proper single the way "Dream On" was, and FM rock radio carried it by hand for years. The band let it sit for long stretches. It turned up on the MTV Unplugged set in 1990, landed on the Ultimate Hits package in 2002, and showed up live on Rockin' the Joint in 2005. Through the 2000s it came back as a stage staple. On the Just Push Play run, Tyler and Perry opened it from the top of a dual staircase. On the Route of All Evil tour and the world tour that followed, they started it sitting in chairs at the end of the catwalk, which fits a song that was born on a basement floor. When the Peace Out dates opened in Philadelphia in September 2023, "Wither" was the only Get Your Wings song in an eighteen-song set. A former Massachusetts governor who grew up in Needham has called it his favorite song, period. That is a long way from a rug and a dumpster guitar.

Get Your Wings is the album where the Bad Boys from Boston stopped sounding like a band still looking for its own throat. Producer Jack Douglas came in after the debut and pushed Tyler to sing in his real voice instead of the put-on English accent he had tried on the first record. Douglas also brought in session guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner for some of the leads, because Perry and Brad Whitford were still chasing Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton in their heads and did not yet have the chops they wanted. They were not thrilled about it. Tyler was. "Seasons of Wither" and "Woman of the World" were already written before the Record Plant sessions. "Lord of the Thighs" and "Spaced" got finished in the room. Perry has said the Get Your Wings material was what they had been hammering on at the Beacon Street apartment in the summer of 1973, the same dump of a place where Joey found that guitar. Tyler named the album. In biker circles, getting your wings is an old patch story, and the title stuck. Creem later called the music primordial punk and tagged Tyler the new Lizard King. Perry's line on the sudden noise around the band was simpler. There is no substitute for arrogance.

The road to that basement in Needham starts up in Sunapee, New Hampshire. Tyler's people ran a resort there called Trow-Rico Lodge, and he had already been through a Yonkers band called the Strangeurs, later Chain Reaction, playing the clubs and the barns. Joe Perry and Tom Hamilton were knocking around as the Jam Band, loud and a little rough, heavy on Fleetwood Mac's "Rattlesnake Shake" and whatever Alvin Lee licks Perry could steal. Tyler caught them at a place called the Barn. He thought they were horrible, and he also thought the groove was something he could write on. The meeting that stuck happened on the front lawn at Trow-Rico. Perry rolled up in a little MG while Tyler was mowing. They talked, they played, and the idea of a band that could write its own songs instead of living on covers took hold.

By 1970 the pieces were in Boston. Perry and Hamilton were in a roach-ridden apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue, later famous as the Aerosmith apartment, with amps stacked so deep you had to walk sideways to reach the bathroom. Every room turned into a party room. Joey Kramer came in on drums. Ray Tabano was on the other guitar until Brad Whitford replaced him in 1971. Kramer had been doodling the name Aerosmith in his high school books since about 1968, after he and some friends got lost in Harry Nilsson's Aerial Ballet and started riffing on the word aerial until somebody landed on smith. He told his classmates that when he left school he was going to have a rock and roll band called that, and they were going to be big. The first gig was November 6, 1970, in the gym at Miscoe Hill School in Mendon, Massachusetts, a show Perry's mother helped line up. Tickets were about a dollar. Somebody in the room said they already sounded like they had been together forever. Tyler, being Tyler, grabbed a school shirt out of the locker room and wore it onstage.

The debut album, Aerosmith, came out in 1973, with "Dream On" already years old, written on an upright piano in the living room at Trow-Rico before the band even existed. Get Your Wings followed in 1974 and is the record where the songwriting, the attitude, and the live reputation finally lined up. "Seasons of Wither" is the quiet proof of that. It is Tyler's song alone, played on a junk guitar, about a Massachusetts winter and a mood he did not try to pretty up. Perry kept it. The Zoo Freaks have kept it. If you want the rest of the trail, the band keeps house at the official Aerosmith website, and the official store still carries Get Your Wings and a Seasons of Wither pocket shirt for the faithful. You can also find them on Facebook, Instagram, and X. The Blue Army has been answering that call since the wings logo first hit a T-shirt. Pull up a chair. The wind is still in the trees.