One of Aerosmith’s Biggest Hits From 1975 Had a Comedic Mel Brooks Reference Hiding in Plain Sight

While Aerosmith most certainly flaunts the same kind of over-the-top, flamboyant bravado that made movies like Spinal Tap so hilarious, most of us wouldn’t readily associate the Boston rock ‘n’ rollers with comedy. However, one of the band’s biggest hits from their breakthrough album, Toys In The Attic, had a Mel Brooks reference hiding in plain sight.

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Of course, one could hardly blame someone for not catching it the first (or third or three hundredth) time. After all, Steven Tyler howling the titular phrase in his signature high rasp sounds worlds apart from when Marty Feldman was saying the exact same thing to Gene Wilder.

How a Classic Mel Brooks Comedy Helped Inspire “Walk This Way”

Aerosmith was undergoing a brand new challenge in the winter of 1975: write an entire album, complete with chart-topping hits, in a matter of a few months. Toys In The Attic would be their third full-length album. Prior to that, the songs in their repertoire were ones they had honed over years of cutting their teeth in barrooms across New England. Under this kind of pressure, the songwriting process was a bit slow.

During one particularly unproductive session at the Record Plant in New York City, most of Aerosmith and their producer, Jack Douglas, decided to take a break from the studio and go see a movie. Joe Perry, the guitarist, stayed behind and continued woodshedding new guitar licks. (He had already seen it anyway.) The rest of the group, meanwhile, went down to Times Square to catch a screening of the then-recently released Mel Brooks’ comedy, Young Frankenstein.

“When the guys returned, they were throwing lines back and forth from the film,” Perry later told the Wall Street Journal. “They were laughing about Marty Feldman greeting Gene Wilder at the door of the castle and telling him to follow him. ‘Walk this way,’ he says, limping, giving his stick to Wilder so he can walk that way, too. While all this was going on, Jack stopped and said, ‘Hey, ‘walk this way’ might be a great title for the song.’ We agreed. But we still needed lyrics.”

Those Lyrics Were Almost Lost Forever, Thanks to a Forgetful Mind

With a song title and a guitar riff in hand, frontman Steven Tyler set off to write lyrics that would be appropriate for a track called “Walk This Way”. He wrote his lyrics down overnight and—so he thought—put them in his shoulder bag before catching a cab to the studio. When Tyler arrived, he realized he had lost the lyrics. “All the blood drained out of my face,” Tyler recalled in the same Wall Street Journal interview. “But no one believed me. They thought I never got around to writing them.”

So, Tyler grabbed a couple of No. 2 pencils and headed into the Record Plant stairwell. Realizing he had no paper, he scribbled what would become the lyrics to “Walk This Way” on the walls. He later transcribed the lyrics onto a legal pad, and the rest is rock ‘n’ roll history.

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