The 50 Best Aerosmith Songs

Aerosmith kicked off their debut with “Make It,” one of Seventies rock’s most iconic “Good evening, people, welcome to the show” anthems. It was a mission statement. They’d just made the fateful decision to move to Boston together, get an apartment, and seek their fortune. “Make It” is the song Tyler composed in the back seat when the band drove down. “I wrote ‘Make It’ in a car driving from New Hampshire to Boston,” he said. “There’s that hill you come to and see the skyline of Boston.” He wrote the lyrics on a Kleenex box, looking out at the city, ready to chase the dream. The whole Aerosmith saga begins here. —R.S.

This metallic bruiser from Get Your Wings feels like Aerosmith at their snarling best. Tyler prowls with a feral intensity. Kramer is holding his drumsticks backward, hitting with the thick ends just to get as loud as humanly possible. But it’s Perry who steals the show, with a guitar solo sharpened on a rusty razor blade. Fast and jagged, Perry’s guitar playing drips with proto-metal menace, matching the manic pace set by stoic bass god Hamilton. The year 1974 was a do-or-die moment for the Boston band, which was constantly on the label’s chopping block. “S.O.S.” is a declaration of intent from a band that knew they had something to prove — and proved it with sheer force. —S.G. 

Who cares if Tyler’s lyrics conflate Viking voyages and French revolutionary implements of execution? “Kings and Queens” contains one of Aerosmith’s boldest, most dramatic melodies, and the dusky bridge nods to Pink Floyd as much as it does to the band’s past ballads like “Dream On.” Although the song seemed like a downer compared to everything on the Rocks album before it, with hindsight, it’s a testament to how the right musical choices (like the way Tyler moans “Screams of no reply”) can elevate a band to a higher throne. —K.G.

Get a Grip is the sound of Aerosmith tearing down the middle-aged rocker highway: hungry for hits, but happy to be here at all. The slick production is a far cry from the band’s garage-rock growl from the Seventies. But even haters would have a hard time resisting the gravitational pull of “Fever,” with its delirious energy and those horned-up harmonies on the bridge. Never one to shy away from a delightfully crass metaphor, Tyler sings, “The buzz that you’re getting from the crack don’t last, I’d rather be OD’ing in the crack of her ass.” It’s classic Tyler, reveling in the sleaze and absurdity of it all, which is all we can ask for. —S.G.  

Aerosmith opened up 1979’s Night in the Ruts looking back on their heyday with “No Surprise.” The poorly performing album’s lone single was another nostalgic gesture, a cover of the Shangri-Las’ operatic 1964 girl-group masterpiece, “Remember (Walking in the Sand),” reworked as a big arena metal ballad. It might’ve seemed like an odd choice to Aerosmith fans, but it connected to Tyler’s New York rock & roll roots. He’d seen the Shangri-Las perform live back in the day, and Shangri-Las singer Mary Weiss provided (uncredited) background vocals on Aerosmith’s version.–J.D.

Perry left Aerosmith in 1979 and quickly formed the Joe Perry Project, arguing that the band’s vocalist Ralph Mormon was a better singer than Tyler, including on the Aerosmith tunes that Perry stubbornly kept in his new band’s set. Mormon left after the band’s surprisingly pretty-good 1980 debut, Let the Music Do the Talking, to be replaced by local singer and songwriter Charlie Farren, who brought along the sublime pop-metal gem “East Coast, West Coast” for the Project’s second LP, I’ve Got the Rock and Rolls Again. It was in the band’s set when they hit the road in 2023, this time with Gary Cherone of Extreme on vocals. —J.D.

“The reason a dog has so many friends? He wags his tail instead of his tongue.” Very kind of Tyler to offer etiquette tips on keeping your mouth shut, but obviously, he’s never tried taking his own advice. “The Reason a Dog” is a lean-and-mean shuffle from Done With Mirrors, the album where they reunited with Perry and Whitford, learning all over again how to write Aerosmith songs. “I don’t want fans to think we’re clean, upstanding American boys,” Perry said in Rolling Stone. “But we are Americans, and we do stand up.” Two years before Permanent Vacation, this is where the real Aerosmith comeback begins. —R.S.

“Woman of the World” is a curious entry in the Aero-oeuvrev—vone of the few blues-rock tracks that celebrates a wealthy, childless cat lady with a knack for hosting. Tyler croons, “She’s got big-eyed cats, she’s got coats of sable.” Then adds, “She seats 44 at her dinner table,” over a bluesy rhythm that’s hypnotic and expansive. Tyler’s vocal has an aloof, cool edge, even as he’s clearly still working to emulate his hero, James Brown. “Woman of the World” captures Aerosmith at a moment of becoming, where Perry and Tyler were just beginning to figure out their dynamic, yet already capable of crafting something that transcended their influences. —S.G.

Aerosmith’s confidence was peaking so high in 1976, they decided to wrap up Rocks by outdoing Elton John. (It’s only fair, since Elton’s 1975 Rock of the Westies was basically his version of an Aerosmith album.) “Home Tonight” is a grandiose piano ballad, coming as a surprise finale on Rocks after a whole album of their toughest guitars. Tyler bids the audience farewell, with harmonies polished until they gleam. Whitford locks it down with his uncompromisingly fierce guitar solos — a beautiful combination. —R.S.

These were the band’s lost years in the wasteland, without Perry or Whitford. But “Bolivian Ragamuffin” is a delightfully bizarre left-field oddity from Side One of Rock in a Hard Place. It’s the only time Aerosmith ever tried to rip off Rush, with Tyler ranting over a beat straight from “The Spirit of Radio” — an unlikely influence, but a surprisingly nifty crossroads between Megadon and “Mama Kin.” “Bolivian Ragamuffin” proves that even the shoddiest Aerosmith albums usually have at least a couple of buried treasures — if you’ve got the stomach to hunt for them. (And if you’re searching through this album, don’t sleep on “Joanie’s Butterfly.”) —R.S.

The 1978 movie musical Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was such an epic catastrophe that it almost destroyed the careers of Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees near the absolute pinnacle of their fame. The only good thing to come out of it was Aerosmith’s cover of “Come Together,” which they play during a typically incomprehensible moment in the movie where Frampton and the Bee Gees attempt to rescue a woman gagged and tied to a neon sign. It ends with a Frampton and Tyler fighting onstage, but it doesn’t matter. The song was their final hit before Run-D.M.C. brought them back from oblivion nearly a decade later. —A.G.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who view “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” as a syrupy cheeseball power ballad Aerosmith didn’t even write, and those who think it’s one of their best songs of the Nineties — a gorgeous, epic sister ballad to “Angel.” While it’s true that Diane Warren penned the 1998 Armageddon theme, she admitted the band and producer Matt Serletic were responsible for the juggernaut it became. “That was Steven being Steven, doing the cool shit only he can do,” Warren said, praising the string arrangement and dramatic octaves. “I remember the first time hearing it and being literally knocked off my chair of how great that was.” —A.M.

Nobody can “mmm-mmm-mmm” quite like Tyler. Paired with Kramer’s kick drum, Tyler’s onomatopoeia announced the arrival of what is arguably Pump’s catchiest track. It’s as simple as late Eighties rock got, between bassist Hamilton’s no-nonsense low end, simple and bright horns, and clichés doubling as lyrics (“Between the devil in the deep blue sea!”). No matter, “The Other Side” is irresistible — maybe too much so. The writers of the Four Tops’ “Standing in the Shadow of Love” threatened legal action over Aerosmith’s overly similar melody, resulting in a Holland/Dozier/Holland credit next to Tyler and his co-writer Jim Vallance. —J.H.

No song in rock & roll embodies the idea of being “elegantly wasted” quite like this Perry contribution to Rocks. The lyric “Walking on Gucci, wearing Yves St. Laurent/barely staying on cause I’m so goddamn gaunt” laid bare rock-star chic. Perry actually does more than just harmonize with Tyler on the song: He sings lead, almost. In his memoir, the guitarist noted the jealousy he’d experience from his bandmates any time he inched toward the spotlight. “After a while, though, the band came around and supported me, as long as I sang the song as a semi-duet with Steven,” Perry wrote of “Combination.” “To this day, [I] remain surprised how often I’m asked to play it live.” —J.H.

Nobody expected a thing from Aerosmith’s reunion album, Done With Mirrors. Least of all them. “I know everybody’s gonna ask if we got back together for the money,” Perry told Rolling Stone in 1984. “And of course we did.” Yet it had surprising signs of life, like this ace barroom-brawl vignette. “My Fist Your Face” was punk enough for the Replacements to play on their Tim tour, fully aware that none of their fans would know it. “The Quiet Riots and all those guys with the leathers and studs and the stacks of Marshall amps that aren’t turned on better watch out,” Perry boasted. “We are the band your mother warned you about.” —R.S.

This power gem showed the band experimenting with how to make vulnerability hit as hard as their heaviest guitar lick — a skill that would serve them well when they later stormed the pop charts. Tyler pushed the band to splurge on a 100-piece orchestra and took charge of the arrangements. It’s a deceptively complex piano piece, with shifting time signatures and dynamic swings that perfectly match Tyler’s supernatural vocal range. Yet, for all its intricacies, “You See Me Crying” nearly got lost in the haze of the band’s notorious excesses. As the story goes, Tyler — deep in an altered stat — once heard the song on the radio and suggested they cover it, only for Perry to quip, “It’s us, fuckhead.” —S.G. 

Aerosmith were totally out of step with the trends of 1982, when they made Rock in a Hard Place—that’s right, the album where they thought it was a cool idea to put Stonehenge on the cover. This Is Spinal Tap came two years later, and yes, Steven Tyler took it personally. But even without Joe Perry, the album had mean guitar from stalwart replacement dudes Rick Dufay (Minka Kelly’s dad!) and Jimmy Crespo. “Lightning Strikes” has that old whiplash riff power and Tyler’s wordplay, as he threatens to “read your funeral rights.”–R.S.

There was a time, not that long ago, when you could call a song “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” and it was totally socially acceptable. In fact, this was the big single off the album that reestablished Aerosmith as Eighties hitmakers after their Run-D.M.C. reboot of “Walk This Way” helped introduce them to the MTV generation. To get the pop savvy they needed, the band hooked up with Desmond Child, fresh off his mega-platinum work with Bon Jovi. The lyrics were inspired by real life events — namely, a drunken Tyler seeing a hot blonde from behind and then being shocked when she/he turned out to be Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil. —J.D.

Aerosmith had done an album a year for four years by the time they got to 1977’s Draw the Line, and their exhaustion and drug intake gave their fifth album a unique sense of damaged desperation. With its thuggy riff and murky, who-cares production, the title cut sounds meaner than a lot of the punk-rock breaking out the same year. Tyler explained the lyric  “Carrie…was a wet-nap winner” thusly: “Well, a wet nap is something that you wipe babies’ asses with. Back in the day, if you were lucky enough to grab a stewardess on a plane and you came out of the bathroom, all you had to clean up with was a wet nap.” —J.D.

Leave it to Aerosmith to take the saga of Adam and Eve and make it even saucier on this Toys in the Attic deep cut. Over bludgeoning guitar sleaze, Tyler lays out his own theory of possible alien intervention (the “mothership” that comes “out from the sky”), but what follows could make an extraterrestrial blush. Adam revels in Eve’s “sweet and bitter fruit,” and she herself “ate it — Lordy, it was love at first bite.” Still, what’s most fascinating about “Adam’s Apple” is the solemnity with which Tyler takes it, even ruing the way “evil came like rain” after they’re kicked out of the Garden of Eden. All it took was the end of man’s innocence to scare Tyler straight. —D.B. 

In the years when Aerosmith was feuding with Perry, it was the guitar man who really kept the flame alive. All three of his Joe Perry Project albums still stand as keepers. (Can we get an amen for “Black Velvet Pants”? “South Station Blues”? How about “I’ve Got the Rock & Rolls Again”?) But the peak was his pile-driving title tune from 1980’s Let the Music Do the Talking. So when Perry rejoined Aerosmith, they wisely revived it as the single and leadoff track for 1985’s Done With Mirrors. A rare case of this band making a sensible career decision. —R.S.

The great lost Aerosmith hit, a cult fave prized by hardcore connoisseurs. “Chip Away the Stone” is Skynyrd-style shit-kicking country-honk badassery, written by longtime friend and collaborator Richie Supa. As a live single, it fizzled out at Number 77, breaking their string of Top 40 hits. But the far-superior studio version got buried on the B side, and didn’t even appear on an album until a decade later, on the compilation Gems. A saner band would have picked the studio “Chip Away the Stone” as the single — it could have been the career-saving radio hit they desperately needed. But in 1978, Aerosmith and sanity weren’t even on speaking terms. —R.S.

By the standards of today, casting your 16-year-old daughter as a sexy schoolgirl in a video where she skinny-dips, enters a contest at a strip club, and drives around in a bra next to another teenage bad girl, played by Alicia Silverstone, seems pretty messed up. Well, it was messed up back in 1993, but Aerosmith did not give two fucks. The video turned Liv Tyler (who only just learned Steven Tyler was her father) into a star, and turned “Crazy” into yet another giant hit from Get a Grip. —A.G.

Aerosmith had already covered “Train Kept a Rollin’” and “Walkin’ the Dog” on previous albums, but there’s something especially poignant in hearing the band who gave the world “Back in the Saddle” and “Lord of the Thighs” pay homage to the roots of entendre rock with their boogie-woogie cover of Bull Moose Jackson’s phallocentric 1952 jump-blues classic. They knock it out with real affection, hard-rock dudes paying homage to an aesthetic forebear. —J.D.

A year after “Toys in the Attic,” Aerosmith turned the funhouse upside down for the sequel, “Rats in the Cellar.” But it’s a darker, more sinister tale, capturing the moment when all five band members were speeding their way to disaster. “‘Rats’ is more like what was actually going on,” Tyler recalled in his memoir Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? “Things were coming apart, sanity was scurrying south, caution was flung to the winds, and little by little the chaos was permanently moving in.” —R.S.

Aerosmith weren’t a hair-metal band. But they took a page from the hair-metal playbook by following a rock anthem, “Dude (Looks Like a Lady),” with a love ballad, “Angel,” when picking singles from Permanent Vacation. Written by Tyler and Desmond “Livin’ on a Prayer” Child, the song solidified one of the most unlikely comebacks in rock history by shooting to Number Three on the Billboard Hot 100. This may have horrified old-school fans who still clung to their vintage Toys in the Attic and Rocks eight-tracks, but this was Aerosmith for a new generation. —A.G.

“Lord of the Thighs” is a track so steeped in sleaze it practically leaves a stain on your turntable. But beneath the grime, there’s the embryonic beat that would eventually evolve into “Walk This Way.” Kramer’s footwork on the bass drum, perfectly synced with Perry’s slithering guitar lick, lays down a beat that’s as primal as it is precise: just twos and fours on top, with eighth notes on the hi-hats driving the rhythm. Out of the muck came a sound both unsettling and oddly seductive — a gritty groove that would ensnare generations of rock guitarists to come. —S.G. 

Early on, Aerosmith were sometimes dismissed as a Stones knockoff, but this buried Rocks treasure, written by Tyler and Whitford, proves they could tip their hat to Led Zeppelin with genuine panache. Tyler pushes his voice into Plant-like squeals, and the hammer-of-the-gods guitars and drum wallop are pure Page and Bonham. Add in probably the most grimly apocalyptic lyrics the band ever wrote — conjuring earthquakes, collapsed houses, birds flapping away in desperation, and decaying Holy Lands — and you have a veritable houses of the apocalyptic holy-moly. (And was it just coincidence that Zep released “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” the same year?) —D.B.

The lead single from 1974’s Get Your Wings was anything but the same ol’. The Bad Boys from Boston are particularly fierce here, leaning hard into Perry’s chunky riff and Tyler’s scatting rhymes about killing, cocaine, and a judge with “constipation” that goes all the way up to his head. “Get yourself cooler, lay yourself low/coincidental murder with nothing to show,” Tyler yelps to open the track, which appeared often in the band’s set list: They first played it in 1973, and again 50 years later in Pittsburgh — at what would be Aerosmith’s penultimate live performance. —J.H.

A sober(ish) dose of social commentary after the civil unrest in Los Angeles that followed four policemen beating Rodney King in 1992, “Livin’ on the Edge” finds Tyler peering into oblivion without much hope. “We’re livin’ on the edge,” Tyler sings, as the background vocals taunt him, “You can’t help yourself from falling.” It’s a problem without a solution, but Aerosmith made it sound great with Perry’s chiming-bell guitar and some country accents. Plus, the song has one of the most bonkers videos of the Nineties, featuring the boy from Terminator 2 tossing aside a condom wrapper, Perry sidestepping a charging train, and the glory that is a naked Steven Tyler. —K.G.

At the end of the 1970s, with the band falling apart, the Aerosmith boys take a look back at their decade of madness. “No Surprize” is one of the nastiest and funniest “how the band started” songs in all of rockdom, a sardonic tour of their early days: playing dives, reveling in the NYC sleaze of Max’s Kansas City, signing on the dotted line with Clive Davis, scoring drugs from the cops. Tyler snarls about getting ripped off by the industry sharks, asking, “If Japanese can boil teas, then where the fuck’s my royalties?” On guitar, Perry sounds like the king of the world. But by the time this song was released, he was out of the band. —R.S.

The last great Aerosmith song, and their final hit, reaching Number Seven in early 2001. Everything about “Jaded” was impeccable, including the timing — it was in the Top Ten the week they got inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Of all the veterans in the Hall, how many can boast they had a brand new smash to play at the ceremony, let alone one this great? (They let Justin Timberlake sing the hook at the Super Bowl — now that was a decision.) “Jaded” is a bittersweet envoi to their first three decades, with Tyler mourning, “My, my baby blue.” Gorgeous, elegiac, yet unsentimental — a graceful way to top off one of rock’s prime songbooks. —R.S.

While this standout from 1989’s Pump is considered a power ballad, it’s got way more in common with a back-porch country song. Credit that to Tyler’s easygoing delivery, the subtle presence of accordion, and the fact that, at its core, it’s an old-fashioned breakup song. The band even performs it in a honky-tonk in the official music video (though we’ll always be partial to the alternate in-the-studio take). Written by Tyler and Perry with Desmond Child, the master of the power ballad, “What It Takes” was a high point every time Aerosmith played it live, with Tyler goading the audience — “No, no, like this” — before screeching the final “toss of the dice.” —J.H.

“Sick as a Dog” is an unsung highlight of Rocks, but it’s Aerosmith at their most musically ferocious and emotionally raw, with haunting harmonies and Hamilton’s Byrds-gone-metal guitar crunch. Tyler sings about two lost kids on the road, far from home, trying to keep each other alive through a long night of drugs and despair. As he pleads, “You’re the only friend I got/You’ll be the last to see me rot.” It ends with girl-group hand claps straight from the Shangri-Las playbook. They cut “Sick as a Dog” live in the studio, with Hamilton on guitar and Perry on bass. For the final minute, Perry handed the bass to Tyler and finished the song on guitar, as the tape kept rolling. —R.S.

There weren’t a lot of rock stars in their 40s on MTV in 1993. That’s why Aerosmith made the brilliant choice to cast 17-year-old Alicia Silverstone as the star of their video for “Crying,” the third single from Get a Grip. The video where she plays a jilted girlfriend who gets revenge on her cheating man played on MTV in a near-constant loop for months, shooting the song to Number One on the Billboard Hot 100, and helping Get a Grip sell an astounding 20 million records worldwide. It was so successful that Silverstone stared in the next two Aerosmith videos, which helped her land the lead role in a little movie called Clueless. —A.G.

In the beginning, the blues chestnut “Train Kept a-Rollin’” was Tiny Bradshaw’s baby, which begat Johnny Burnette’s revved-up rendition, which begat the Yardbirds’ Blowup version, which begat Led Zeppelin’s led-up version, which begat Aerosmith’s showstopper, turning the train into FM radio’s hard-rock New Testament. Although the band debuted a five-and-a-half-minute studio version of the song on Get Your Wings, the song always sounded best onstage, where they’d speed it up and slow it down like the train was alive and out of control and ready to rock, just like Aerosmith. —K.G.

This is how much fun it was to be Aerosmith in the Seventies, until it wasn’t. “Lick and a Promise” is a serial explosion from Rocks, with Whitford and Perry blazing away in their trademark fast-and-heavy mode. The manic pace and chemical chaos were already catching up with them — as Perry said, “We started out as a rock band dabbling in drugs, then we became a drug band dabbling in rock.” But on this breakneck rave-up, they’re still dancing on the edge — one of the most purely joyful tunes Aerosmith ever did. That “na-na-na-na-na” hook was so indelible, they recycled it years later in the chorus of their 2001 hit “Jaded.” —R.S.

Aerosmith reached the zenith of their Nineties power-ballad era with “Amazing,” conquering MTV with their iconic Alicia Silverstone trilogy. “Amazing” came in between “Cryin’” and “Crazy,” but like The Godfather, this is a trilogy that peaks in the middle chapter. The video had a fairly dippy “cyberspace” theme — maybe not the best use of Silverstone’s dramatic skills, so well suited to kicking bad guys on the sidewalk. But it’s a genuinely moving piano meditation on sobriety and the hard work it takes to hang on. “Amazing” soars into the skies for the final minutes, with a long, sweeping, glorious Perry guitar solo. —R.S.

For the third single from Permanent Vacation, Aerosmith turned to Bryan Adams song doctor Jim Vallance, co-writer of “Run to You,” “Cuts Like a Knife,” and “Summer of ’69.” He helped them craft this propulsive fusion of blues rock and hair metal, complete with slide guitar and a horn section. They originally called it “Ragtime,” but Holly Knight (co-writer of Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield”) suggested they change it to “Rag Doll.” The video takes place in a universe where Tyler is apparently having affairs with every single young woman on a suburban street. —A.G.

Funky, gritty, and unmistakably Aerosmith, “Last Child” is a swaggering, Southern-fried fever dream and the down-home heart of their hard-blues masterpiece Rocks. Whitford co-wrote the song and built it around his scuzzy guitar riff that’s so infectious, it’s basically been a Pavlovian trigger for concert crowds ever since. The rhythm section — Kramer on drums, Hamilton on bass — lays down a funkified foundation that gives Tyler all the space he needs for his batshit back-porch poetry: “Can’t catch no dose of my hot tail poon tang sweetheart sweat hog.” In the world of Aerosmith, where sense and nonsense tend to blur, it all just works. —S.G. 

Throughout rock history, artists have written inscrutable songs where the lyrical meaning is up to the listener. “Love in an Elevator” isn’t one of them. It’s about having Tyler enjoying carnal relations in an elevator. If there was any doubt about this, which would be almost impossible considering the title and every single word in the song, it begins with an elevator operator saying, “Good morning Mr. Tyler, going … down?” (She’s referring to both the movement of the elevator and making a thinly-veiled reference to oral sex.) Released at the height the hair metal movement, the song fit right in with new releases by Poison, Mötley Crüe, and Warrant, and it gave Aerosmith the perfect leadoff single to Pump. —A.G. 

The ultimate Aerosmith existential statement, on the endless insane quest of playing in a rock & roll band. Tyler sounds like a road-weary vampire when he wails, “Ain’t seen the daylight since I started this band.” (A line great enough for the Beastie Boys to steal in “No Sleep ’Til Brooklyn.”) “No More No More” is a whirlwind of Holiday Inns, smoky bars, late nights, druggy strangers, and the drive on to the next town, with a melancholy tinge in the acoustic frills. Perry tells his side of the story, stretching out in the final minutes for his most elegiac guitar soliloquy. —R.S.

Downer, man. This zonked-out chemical ballad reveals the sensitive spirit lurking behind the band’s “Lord of the Thighs” swagger. Tyler wrote it one Halloween when he was shacking up on a Vermont chicken farm with drummer Kramer. “I went down to the basement, burned some incense, and picked up this guitar that Joey had found in a dumpster somewhere,” Tyler recalled in 1991. “It was fretted pretty fucked, and it had a special tone to it. And that tuning forced that song right out.” “Seasons of Wither” had a proto-grunge gravitas way beyond what people assumed this band could achieve. You can practically feel the cold New England winds closing in. —R.S.

With its locomotive-chugging riffs and cobwebby melodies, “Toys in the Attic” rocks so hard it’s easy to miss how deep it is. Lyrics like, “Leaving the things that you love from mind/All of the things that you learned from fears/Nothing is left for the years” are poetic in a way similar to the refrain “Turn off your mind/Relax, and float downstream/It is not dying” in the Beatles’ art-mangled “Tomorrow Never Knows.” But since Aerosmith play it straight with storm-the-gates-of-Hell abandon, and Tyler fashioned the chorus “Toys! Toys! Toys … in the attic” into a bespoke beer raiser at concerts, the hippie-trippiness of it all is easy to digest. “Joe [Perry] was just jamming a riff, and I started yelling, ‘Toys, toys, toys … ,’ ” Tyler recalled in his memoir. “Organic, immediate, infectious … fucking amazing. Once again, the Toxic Twins ride off into the sunset … this time, the sunset of the attic.” —K.G.

“Mama Kin” was the anthem that defined the Aerosmith lifestyle. Tyler wrote it before joining the band, a mystic hippie sage trapped in a rock star’s body. “People always ask, ‘What’s ‘mama kin’?” he told Rolling Stone in 2001. “It’s the mother of everything. It’s the desire to write music, the desire to get laid, to go through the relationship with a girl, or whatever it is. Keeping in touch with mama kin means keeping in touch with the old spirits that got you there to begin with.” Tyler was so devoted to his spiritual message, he got “MA KIN” tattooed on his arm. Skinny bastard that he is, he didn’t have enough arm to fit the whole title. —R.S.

“Janie’s Got a Gun” stands as one of rock’s most improbable triumphs. In 1989, while riding high on a wave of their commercial resurgence, Aerosmith dropped this audacious noir opus — an unflinching tale of revenge, incest, and murder. The track opens with an eerie prelude of wind gong and glass harmonica, before Tyler unleashes his howl from the POV of a traumatized girl. Nothing about this should’ve worked — but against every conceivable odd, it became one of the decade’s biggest hits. It earned Aerosmith a Grammy and, thanks to the MTV-dominating crime-thriller music video directed by a pre-Fight Club David Fincher, renewed cultural relevance. Tyler’s ability to inhabit the psyche of unlikely characters was on full display — a narrative approach he’s deployed on earlier tracks like “Uncle Salty,” where he voiced an abused orphan boy. But with “Janie,” he delves even deeper into her fear and rage, delivering what might be the most powerful vocal performance of his career. —S.G. 

Perry wrote the coiled, rumbling riff to “Back in the Saddle” on his six-string bass, laying flat on his back in his bedroom while high on drugs. “It was one of those songs that really opened things up for us,” he recalled later. “Back in the Saddle” kicks off Aerosmith’s classic 1976 album, Rocks, the best American hard-rock album of the 1970s. Tyler strapped tambourines to his legs so it would sound like jangling spurs when he stomped along with the song’s menacing, deceptively complex groove as he sang his sex-cowboy lyrics, and they even brought a bullwhip into the studio. Those theatrics got them in the mood to attain the Platonic ideal of dirtbag outlaw majesty. —J.D.

Tyler was only 24 when he recorded “Dream On,” but sounded three times that age with the way he wailed about seeing wrinkles in his face and generally moping about with lyrics like, “You got to lose to know how to win.” The song somehow became Aerosmith’s biggest hit of the 1970s. But in the context of the band’s blues-rock career, it’s their least Aerosmithy song since Tyler spends most of it on a bum trip, gumming up the keys of his harpsichord and singing in his natural, lower voice (though he cranks things up to a demon wail by the end). “When I wrote ‘Dream On,’ I went, ‘Where did this come from?’” Tyler told Rolling Stone. “I didn’t question it. When I read the lyrics back now, for a guy who was stoned, stupid, and dribbling, I got something out of there: ‘The past is gone/It went by like dusk to dawn.’” For Aerosmith, it was an improbable beginning. —K.G.

By 1975, Aerosmith had already released two albums and had bequeathed the world with future standards like “Dream On” and “Mama Kin.” But “Sweet Emotion,” the first single released off Toys in the Attic, felt like something else — the start of a sturdier, bolder, and more confident Aerosmith taking shape before our ears. It’s not just the unyielding self-assurance with which the band plays, but the way “Sweet Emotion” seamlessly blends pop savvy (that title phrase) with rock gnarliness (those verses and Perry’s talk-box cameo). It’s a recipe that would sustain them for several more decades. In typically messy Aerosmith style, the tune was partly inspired by a moment of band chaos: Tyler was angry with Perry and Perry’s then-wife for not sharing their drugs with him and spewed out his rage in the lyrics (“You talk about things that nobody cares/Wearing out things that nobody wears”). But as they often did, the band and producer Jack Douglas pulled it together in the studio. With the volcanic “Sweet Emotion,” Aerosmith felt they were truly ready to conquer not just bars and clubs, but the world. —D.B.

“Walk This Way” is Aerosmith at their filthiest, funkiest, and finest — the Bad Boys from Boston at peak badness. Perry struts his stuff in the greasy guitar riff, while Tyler motormouths through his frantic sex poetry. “Walk This Way” began when the band went to see the new Mel Brooks movie Young Frankenstein, laughing their asses off at Marty Feldman and Gene Wilder’s “walk this way” gag. But it became a Top 10 smash, with drummer Kramer bringing the funk. (Before Aerosmith, he played with the R&B legends Tavares.) In the early days of hip-hop, DJs in the South Bronx spun the intro as a breakbeat. Run-D.M.C. revived it for a 1986 novelty hit — arguably the beginning of the end for them, but a career-rescuing duet for Aerosmith. “Walk This Way” remains the foundation for this band’s entire 50-year legend. —R.S.