Every young aspiring rock star can trace the creative fire within them to a single spark thrown by an older band or artist who first inspired them. For Ozzy Osbourne (and so many others), it was The Beatles. For Iggy Pop, it was Jim Morrison. And for Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler, it was a woman he described as “a cross between a stately old woman and a loud, brassy New Orleans bordello w****.”
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Based on that description alone, you likely already know the woman who lit the fuse in a young Steven Tyler.
Steven Tyler on Seeing Janis Joplin for the First Time
Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler was born in 1948, meaning he was a young adult during one of the most prolific and revolutionary periods of modern music to date. He watched early rock ‘n’ rollers like Chuck Berry give way to full-fledged bands like The Beatles. But for Tyler, the performer who stuck with him the most—so much so that he told his mother he wanted to be just like her—was none other than Janis Joplin, the cross between a “stately old woman” and a Creole lady of the evening.
“That was really my world,” Tyler wrote of seeing Joplin for the first time, per his memoir, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? “Pure emotion. Onstage, she played the role of that gin-soaked barroom queen. With her gravelly Delta voice and street smarts she could have only gotten by going through all these experiences herself, she transcended all those who came before her.”
“The way she sang a song, it seemed like she’d been down that road one too many times, and it wasn’t going to happen again,” he continued. “She had a brand-new kind of kick-a** confidence laced with a “superhippie,” smart-a**, kinky-kinda-sassafrassy strut to her vocals, the likes of which you’d never heard before.”
Tyler then likened watching Joplin to a Pentecostal Holy Roller gathering. “It was that kind of mind-altering sound,” he wrote. “It was like, ‘Oh, my God!’ There was such a raunchy matter-of-factness, a drug-induced-sexy-animal rush to the way she belted out ‘Piece of My Heart’. I mean, that was the s***. That was the end of the sixties. That’s what Janis was to me—a revolutionary spirit, someone who changed the emotional weather.”
You Can Hear That Inspiration in Aerosmith
One could reasonably trace a straight line between Aerosmith and bands like Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, who found their footing shortly before Aerosmith burst on the scene with their 1973 hit, “Dream On”. But within the context of Steven Tyler’s earliest inspirations, his adoration for Janis Joplin seems almost painstakingly obvious. The raspy howls, the scarves, the “raunchy matter-of-factness” and “drug-induced-sexy-animal rush”: Tyler embodied all of these elements in his own performances. Indeed, the homage was right there the whole time.
As Aerosmith’s own star rose in the early 1970s, Tyler knew he had captured at least some semblance of the same X factor he saw in Janis Joplin all those years ago. “It’s not something you learn, it’s something you are,” he wrote in his memoir. “You play what you got. I’m thinking, with me make-believing rock star (which I could do so well), and Joe [Perry] channeling [Jeff] Beck-Keith [Richards]-[Jimmy] Page, who could stop us?”
Photo by Ron Pownall/Getty Images
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