Remember When Aerosmith Got a Crucial Songwriting Assist From None Other Than Mel Brooks in 1975?

Is a title all that important to a song’s success? Aerosmith would likely answer in the affirmative. The Boston band came up with one of their most iconic hits only after having the title for the track in place.

Oddly enough, that title came from one of the unlikeliest sources you could imagine. An impromptu studio break to go see a silly comedy paved the way to inspiration.

An Inspirational ‘Attic’

No. 21 and No. 74. Those were the peak American album chart positions for the first two studio LPs released by hard rockers Aerosmith. Not exactly what you would expect from a band that would eventually go on to become one of the biggest in the world. They needed a catalyst to help them reach that level. Their 1975 LP Toys In The Attic filled that role.

Toys In The Attic included “Sweet Emotion”, which was their first-ever pop Top 40 hit. It also helped spur interest in the group’s back catalog. That led to the rediscovery of the ballad “Dream On”, which became a belated Top 10 smash in 1976.

Meanwhile, the Toys In The Attic song “Walk This Way” failed to do much upon its initial release as a single in ’75. Like “Dream On”, however, a reissue in 1976 sent it to the Top 10. It returned to the Top 10 all over again a decade later in a rap-rock version where Aerosmith supported Run D.M.C. None of that might have happened were it not for a throwaway joke in a Mel Brooks film.

Learning How to “Walk”

Aerosmith’s first two albums featured many songs that they’d been playing live for years. They’d mostly exhausted that supply by the time the sessions for Toys In The Attic rolled around. That forced them to dig deeper into the songwriting process than they’d done before.

“Walk This Way” emanated from a lick and a groove that guitarist Joe Perry concocted with the help of lead singer Steven Tyler a few years before the album was made. Deciding that the musical foundation had promise, the band decided to work on it. As Perry explained in the book Anatomy Of A Song, a band field trip to the movies with album producer Jack Douglas to see Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein gave them the head start they needed:

“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.”

Writing on the Wall

The lyric-writing process for “Walk This Way” proved to be its own kind of drama. Tyler had penned what he thought were satisfactory words for the song. But he put them in a bag that he intended to bring to the studio, a bag that he then proceeded to leave in a cab.

Forced to improvise, he took a tape of the music with him on a portable player, hiding out in a stairwell so he could concentrate. Once the lyrics started to come to him, he wrote them on a wall in pencil because he’d forgotten to bring paper.

As you can surmise, nothing about the making of “Walk This Way” went all that smoothly. Luckily, Aerosmith stuck with it. And it’s equally fortunate that they went to see that particular film on that particular day, or else the song might never have made its way into rock history.

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