Kurt Cobain, Slash and James Hetfield all cite this album as being instrumental in getting them into music, but there’s not a YAKKA-KAKKA-KOW-YAKKA-KOW to be heard. However, they had - unsustainably - found a spot where massive drug intake lined up perfectly with big fuckin’ tunes, accompanied by full-on shrieking. Like, imagine loads of drugs: That’s not as many drugs as they were doing. (The album also contains the incredibly juvenile “Big Ten Inch Record,” where Tyler sounds like he’s singing about his dick, but is actually singing about a record, although, no, it’s his dick really: “Last night I tried to tease her / I gave my love a little pinch / She said now stop that jivin’ / Now whip out your big 10-inch / Record.”)īy the time they made Rocks in 1976, they were doing SO MANY DRUGS. Joe Perry told him, “That’s us, fuckhead.” “ You See Me Crying ” is the most complex song on the record, something that didn’t help it stick in Tyler’s drug-addled mind - some years later, he heard the song on the radio and was impressed by it, suggesting to the rest of the band that they record a cover.
This one goes “dun du-du-dun, du du du dun-dun,” while the later one is the vastly more showboaty, confident, “deedle-ee deeedle-eedle-ee-dee,” the vocals just bigger in every way. The original version of “ Walk This Way ” is much more staccato than their later collaboration with Run-DMC.
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“He’s like that now at 80 or however old he is - imagine what he was like in his 20s with a nose full of cocaine.”īut while there is scatting, there is no YAKKA-KAKKA-KOW-YAKKA-KOW. “ Around the time of Toys in the Attic he was just a young lad sticking his dick in anything he could find,” says Kerrang! writer Nick Ruskell. Third album Toys in the Attic (1975) continues the Horny on Main theme. Of the eight tracks on the standard version, six might as well be titled “Why I Like to Do It With Girls.” Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry earned the nickname “the Toxic Twins” around this point, due to their prodigious drug habits. Here he starts adding the flourishes - making “eyes” into “aaaaaaaaaaay-zuh” - as well as presenting himself as Extremely Horny. The swaggering, none-more-confident delivery that would become one of Tyler’s trademarks is present on the second album, 1974’s Get Your Wings.
The kind of places where you might expect to find a YAKKA-KAKKA-KOW-YAKKA-KOW instead feature longer, more sustained notes, like at the end of the chorus of “Dream On” (as famously sampled by Eminem in 2003’s “ Sing for the Moment ”). I changed my voice into the Muppet, Kermit the Frog, to sound more like a blues singer.” We were so nervous that when the red recording light came on we froze. In his autobiography Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?, Tyler recalls, “The band was very uptight.
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The reason for this was nervousness - despite being an established live band, being in a professional studio freaked the band out. Everyone can do Elvis’ “Uh huh-huh,” or the Beatles’ “Yeah, yeah yeah” or James Brown ’s “Yow!” - these moments don’t necessarily come up in every song, but they seem like that artist at their most concentrated.Īerosmith’s is, clearly, Steven Tyler screaming “ YAKKA-KAKKA-KOW-YAKKA-KOW.” But how common is it really? And what can the search for it teach us about showmanship, America and life itself? Early Aerosmith: A YAKKA-KAKKA-KOW-free ZoneĪerosmith’s 1973 debut album features both the shittest cover art conceivable and a completely different-sounding Tyler, doing much more of a Rolling Stones-a-like blues-rock thing. Iconic bands tend to have a signature kind of moment, one you can impersonate in a second. The horny young upstarts of the 1970s aren’t the same as the horny old millionaires of now. That said, if you really think about it, no band has been going for 50 years: They’ve been four or five different bands in that time - mostly the same five dudes in terms of names and instruments, but very different people in terms of drug intake, musical ability and cultural status. They’re celebrating their 50th anniversary this year. Aerosmith formed in 1970 and are still going.