Walk This Way - Davis

I arrived late to the Blue Army, in fact I didn't see Aerosmith live until October 1998 at the Nissan Pavilion midway through their "Nine Lives Tour".  Now, over eleven years after that gig I've read their biography, "Walk this Way" told through the mouths of the Band and fashioned together by the talented rock & roll biographer Stephen Davis.  I was not expecting a five-star read.  First, this is not literature in any sense of the word. It is not a written story. It is the transcribed oral history of an extended interview with the insiders of the band taken from the memories of their lives together over their first three decades. Second, as I write this, their story continues.  Aerosmith is finishing their fourth decade of hard rock and at 61 years of age Steven Tyler took a tumble off the stage during a performance in South Dakota busting his shoulder and splitting open his head.  Aerosmith has subsequently cancelled a few tour dates to, "get healthy".  These guys never quit.  In the late sixties they dreamed of becoming rock & rollers.  Though hard work in the seventies they did it and provided an American response to the British invasion.  But then they fell, hitting rock bottom in the eighties.  Their music lived on through the influence it provided to several generations and genres as they, Aerosmith, continued to destroy themselves from within.  They fought with each other, they fought against the darkness of drug addiction, and they fought against the industry and agents they had trusted and relied on. But they recovered, all of them, and arose from the ashes alive, like no other band has ever done.  And now at the end of this book, during the "Nine Lives Tour" they had climbed back to the top,  with clear heads and a sober outlook on life to arguably become the greatest rock & roll band of all time.   

Are they American hero's and role models who overcame the vices of their industry or are they villains and the representatives of all that is wrong with the glorification of excess in a culture of sex, drugs, and rock & roll?  Joe Perry is quoted as saying, 'I don't want fans to think we're clean, upstanding American boys, but we are American, and we do stand up."  We can argue all day about the influence and glorification a rock & roll culture might have on our children and we can provide our children a wholesome family life attempting to shelter them from the tyranny of drugs and sex and the violent energy of hard rock.  We can, in essence, shelter them from Aerosmith.  But then they will never hear the simplest and perhaps greatest lyrics of all time.  And personally I cannot find a thing wrong with this message.

"Sing with me, sing for the years

Sing for the laughter, sing for the tears

Sing with me, if its just for today

Maybe tomorrow the good lord will take you away

Dream on, dream on

Dream until your dreams come true..."

"Walk this Way",  is a candid look into the lives of not just Aerosmith but the life of American rock & roll.  If you are an American and can stand up, up-standing or other wise, and have ever listened to rock & roll and been alive during the 70's, 80's, and 90's, this book is your biography as well.  Where were you in 1975 when "Toys in the Attic" was release?  Where were you in 1980 when Joe Perry left Aerosmith?  Where were you in 1985 when he returned?  And where were you, in 1989, when you first heard about love in an Elevator?  Aerosmith is American rock & roll and we are all, wittingly or not, all members of the Blue Army.