As the promotional single for Aerosmith’s 1975 album Toys in the Attic, “Walk This Way” quickly became one of the legendary rock group’s most successful tracks ever. Peaking at No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977, with its iconic When she told me to walk this way hook, the song was part of a years-long run of overwhelming success in the ’70s for Aerosmith. However, about a decade later, the group found themselves in need of a second wind.
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Aerosmith’s first two albums in the 1980s, Rock in a Hard Place (1982) and Done with Mirrors (1985), both fell flat, as neither would even crack the top 30 of the Billboard 200. At the same time, though, hip-hop was emerging from the underground, seeking a way to break through into the mainstream. One of the pioneers of the New York-bred genre’s growing appeal was Queens-based Run-DMC. Gearing up for their third studio album Raising Hell, which would eventually release in 1986, Run-DMC’s producer at the time Rick Rubin, who founded Def Jam and was a trusted consultant of many esteemed musicians, knew in his heart that his rap group needed some assistance in order to ascend to new heights.
“We had finished the album… and I listened to it and felt like there was something missing,” Rubin told Washington Post during a 2016 interview about “Walk This Way.” “That idea worked simultaneously with this conversation about how hip-hop and rap music was not music. To people who were not already fans of it, the gap was so far that not only did they not understand it, but they did not understand it to be music. I was looking for a way to bridge that gap in the story of finding a piece of music that was familiar and already hip-hop-friendly so that on the hip-hop side it would make sense and on the non-hip-hop side you’d see it wasn’t so far away.”
Rubin figured the perfect song to bridge the gap between the young hip-hop community and the stubborn mainstream, rock-loving population was “Walk This Way,” as Rubin noted that Aerosmith, at a time, was “the biggest band in the world.” However, Tim Sommer, a musician, songwriter, and journalist who roomed with Rubin in college at NYU, recalled a conversation where Rubin felt an Aerosmith-Run-DMC collaboration was too far-fetched.
“Rick tells me, ‘I need a white rock song that can be turned into a rap song,'” Sommer told WaPo. “And we spent about 10 or 15 minutes on the phone, shooting around ideas. We kept on coming back to ‘Back in Black’ by AC/DC, but the Beastie Boys had just recorded a version. Then Rick goes, ‘How about ‘Walk This Way’?’ And he begins to sing it on the phone, with imitation scratches. At this point, I go, ‘Rick, that’s a fantastic idea.’ But I said, ‘You know you have to get Steve Tyler and Joe Perry to play on it.’ And Rick says: ‘They’ll never do it. Old white guys don’t get this rap thing.'”
Turns out, though, Rubin was wrong. Steven Tyler, Aerosmith’s beloved lead singer, happened to be a fan of the up-and-coming hip-hop wave ever since he was introduced to it during time spent in New York.
“I loved rap.” Tyler said to WaPo. “I used to go looking for drugs on Ninth Avenue and I would go over to midtown or downtown and there would be guys on the corner selling cassettes of their music. I’d give them a buck, two bucks, and that was the beginning of me noticing what was going on in New York at the time.”
Aerosmith’s lead guitarist Joe Perry had some second thoughts about the “Walk This Way” remix though, as he felt the band’s core fans may be sour towards it. But, at their core, Perry knew Aerosmith was keen on taking risks, and that hip-hop and rock could go together.
“We had a few reservations about it. Maybe our fans might not like it,” Perry said. “But our love for music and trying new things far surpassed that… I heard a direct connection between what they were doing and the blues. All you had to do was have a boombox and some wit and some talent. And a way to express yourself, which is what they were doing on the street corner. Which is what blues was. They’d be on the street in the day or in the juke joint at night. They were singing about living wherever they were living, and to me it was like a direct connection. The only thing that was missing was my guitar.”
However, while Tyler and Perry were both relatively convinced that this could be a success, Run-DMC was sternly against the proposition at the beginning. “I remember them not being enthusiastic,” their manager Russell Simmons told WaPo.
In fact, after Darryl “DMC” McDaniels heard the first line of “Walk This Way,” he felt strongly that he was not going to sync up his musical approach to Aerosmith’s.
“Rick gives us this yellow notebook pad,” DMC recalled to WaPo. “He tells us, ‘Go down to D’s basement, put the needle on the record.’ We go down to my basement and put on the record and then you hear ‘Backstroke lover always hidin’ ’neath the covers’ and immediately me and Joe get on the phone and say: ‘Hell no, this ain’t going to happen. This is hillbilly gibberish, country-bumpkin bullshit.’”
Run-DMC’s Joseph “Run” Simmons agreed. “I’m running around, acting like I don’t care because I don’t know what I’m doing and why I’m singing this hillbilly stuff,” he said. “‘Backstroke lover always hidin’ ’neath the covers.’ What are we talking about? That’s not poetry from Hollis (a neighborhood in Queens). We don’t know why we’re using somebody else’s lyrics. We never do.”
Even Rubin, who orchestrated the two parties’ rendezvous, knew that the song was getting off to a rough start.
“The main thing I remember from the session was Joe playing guitar and how impressive it was and Run and D doing the calls in front of Steven and Steven doing the ad-libs and the chorus,” he said. “And I remember just thinking how Run and D didn’t like the lyrics and here’s the guy who wrote the song. I felt like I knew a lot of information that a lot of other people in the room didn’t know and it was making me uncomfortable.”
But, to eventually help them feel more at home on the record, now-deceased Run-DMC DJ Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell told DMC and Run to put their own twist on the original lyrics from Aerosmith.
“So Jay’s is like: ‘Switch it up. Do your heart into it, man. Switch up like you all do,'” Run recalled. “That’s how I got ‘Back-seat lover that’s always undercover.'”
Once they finally came around to executing the “Walk This Way” remix, over a decade removed from its initial release, Run-DMC could finally appreciate how impressive Aerosmith and its members were.
“Joe Perry was brilliant,” DMC said. “He just didn’t say one word during the session. You would ask, ‘Joe, are you okay?’ He would just nod his head up and down. But when it was time to go in there, he walked in there, cigarette hanging from his mouth, winked his eye, they pushed record and history was made.”
Upon release, included on Run-DMC’s 1986 album Raising Hell, the version of “Walk This Way” would peak at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, the rap posse’s highest charting song ever. Proving Rubin right, “Walk This Way” would help Raising Hell reach No. 3 on the Billboard 200, a year after they peaked at No. 52 with their sophomore album King of Rock (1985).
As for Aerosmith, the song would see a surge back to the spotlight for the group. In the decade following their collaboration with Run-DMC, the band would earn two No. 1 albums and three others inside the top 15 on the Billboard 200.
“It’s too much to say it saved the band, but it gave it a shot in the arm that nothing else would have,” Tyler told WaPo.
Photo by Oliver Morris/Getty Images
