Aerosmith's Quotes

"When you start a rock n' roll band, you've gotta fake it before you make it. You begin doin' what you love-and what you love is usually what some other people have already done. It just depends on how much of a fool you make of yourself along the way to finding your own sound, assuming you find it." -Steven Tyler

"I remember reading in a newspaper, in like 1976, and there's this article in there about how disgusting rock lyrics are, and they used 'Walk This Way' as an example of how lyrics should be nice and wholesome. I couldn't believe it. Obviously, they didn't get the meaning of 'you ain't seen nothin' till you're down on the muffin'." -Steven Tyler, on "Walk This Way"

"For me this song sums up the shit you put up with when you're a new band. Only one in fifty people who write about you pick up on the music. Most of the critics panned our first album, and said we were ripping off the Stones. And I think Dream on is a great song, but it was two or three years before people really got a chance to hear it. That's a good barometer of my anger at the press, which I still have. Dream on came of me playing the piano when I was about seventeen or eighteen, and I didn't know anything about writing a song. It was just this little...sonnet that I started playing one day. I never thought then it would end up being a real song or anything." -Steven Tyler, on "Dream on"

"I was listening to a tape of Dr. Demento given me by an old friend of ours called Zonk, and I heard this song, which is originally from like 1936. The big rumor is that I say, 'Suck on my big 10 inch' on the record. I don't. I'm saying 'cept' - as in except - not 'suck.' But no one in the whole world believes me." -Steven Tyler, on "Big Ten Inch Record"

"A Coney Island White Fish is a scumbag. When you lived by the Hudson river like I did, you always saw these things floating by on their way to the sea. They were rubbers-guys would tie 'em up and they'd just keep floating. And that, boys and girls, is a Coney Island White Fish." -Steven Tyler, on "Bone To Bone (Coney Island White Fish Boy)"

"I think what we wanted to do, without ever really saying it, was to be the American equivalent of all the great British bands like Cream, the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin, says Hamilton. "They were all so classy and powerful sounding. We couldn't think of an American band like that. We wanted to be the first one." Adds Tyler, "Right from the beginning there was magic in this goddamn band."

"Steven and Joe had an argument the first night about Joe's playing too loud...and so began an Aerosmith tradition." -Tom Hamilton, on Aerosmith's first gig

"We were America's band. We were the garage band that made it really big - the ultimate party band. We were the guys who you could actually see. Back then in the Seventies, it wasn't like Led Zeppelin was out there on the road in America all the time. The Stones weren't always coming to your town. We were. You could count on us to come by. -Joe Perry

"We were never the hip band. And that was fine with us. But all the bad press did get to be a burr in our saddles. But the truth is that 15,000 kids screaming for you at the Boston Garden goes a long way to making a bad review look like the piece of shit that it is." -Joe Perry

"Both Jimmy and I recorded solos for this song. Steven liked Jimmy's solo better and his is the one that you hear on the record, and I'm still pissed about it." -Brad Whitford, on "Three Mile Smile"

"That's the sound of Joey, Tom, and I, entertaining ourselves during the DRAW THE LINE sessions while we were waiting for Steven and Joe to wake up and get their shit together." -Brad Whitford, on "Krawhitham"

"This is one of the songs that I really liked where Steven does his little storytelling bit about life within the band. It's him talking honestly about an interesting slice of the Aerosmith history. -Brad Whitford, on "No More No More"

"Steven is really funny. Like, he's got three or four grand tied up in a stereo system with four track recorders in his living room and he sleeps on the floor on a pillow. He doesn't have a bed!" -Joey Kramer on Why Joey Gave Steven The Gift of a Bed

"I can remember Tom and me drillin' on the one way street shuffle' until we drove the old lady downstairs crazy. Tom on his bass and me on a kitchen chair and a pedal on a cardboard box." -Joey Kramer, on "One Way Street"