Post by AeroCooper on Mar 2, 2024 14:46:01 GMT -5
The frontman who taught Steven Tyler how to sing
Tim Coffman
Sat 2 March 2024 17:30, UK
What Steven Tyler does onstage with Aerosmith night after night doesn’t feel like it should be humanly possible. Considering how much wear and tear he has done to his body and especially his voice throughout the years, the fact that Tyler can raise his voice past a gentle croak at this point is admirable, let alone the mile-high screams that he reaches in songs like ‘Dream On’ and ‘Crazy’. While a lot of talent has to be honed over years of practice, Tyler admitted that he figured he could sing as soon as he heard The Yardbirds.
If it weren’t for the British invasion, though, there’s a good chance that Tyler would still be slogging it out in local bands for the rest of his life. Despite having a passing interest in music, thanks to his father’s background in the classical genre, Tyler began to get the itch to play when he heard bands like The Beatles for the first time.
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Then again, anyone who has ever seen Aerosmith perform and saw how Tyler acts onstage knows that he worships at the altar of The Rolling Stones. Despite infusing a healthy dose of classic blues into Aerosmith’s sound, Tyler got critiqued more than a few times by the music press for being a bit too reminiscent of Mick Jagger.
It’s not like Tyler didn’t lean into it a little. Before he even had a record deal, Tyler used his physical similarities to The Rolling Stones frontman to get himself into parties, often putting on a fake Cockney accent and claiming that he was secretly Jagger’s half-brother who was visiting the US.
As Tyler started playing the backyard and high school circuit up in New Hampshire, he became more in tune with the heavier side of British rock. For him, the blues became one of the biggest things in the world, and The Yardbirds had it down to a science, playing the kind of rock and roll that did justice to artists like Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon.
Even though The Yardbirds are known far more these days for being a breeding ground for some of the biggest guitar players in the world, Tyler was looking at the big picture. Outside of the big hits like ‘For Your Love’, Tyler knew that he could get up and sing in front of a crowd from the minute that he heard Keith Relf.
While not having a Beatles-quality voice, Relf made up for his delivery with mountains of attitude, turning songs like ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ into massive rock anthems. For Tyler, this was the blueprint for his sound, telling Rolling Stone, “As a singer, the thing I got out of the Yardbirds was that you don’t have to have a great voice. It’s all about attitude. He was a white boy who pushed it to the max. And he was a great harmonica player. You never heard Jagger hanging out on a single note the way Keith Relf could”.
Tyler would take more than just the attitude, readapting the band’s version of ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ and using it as a prime part of Aerosmith’s setlist for years. Everyone might wax poetic about what Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck blossomed into after leaving The Yardbirds, but in Relf, the band had the perfect frontman with a bad attitude.