Steven Tyler Wrote This Hit When He Was Still in High School
Instantly identifiable from its distinctive opening minor chords, Aerosmith’s “Dream On” is more than just a classic rock staple. The band’s first hit was proof of all they were capable of, a rock ‘n’ roll reign that lasted over 50 years before drawing to a close this August, when the band cancelled all future tour dates due to a vocal injury suffered by Steven Tyler.
But while the anthemic 1973 tune inspires fans to this day with its message of holding on to your dreams, the song itself was actually part of young Steven Tyler’s dream — he penned the basics of the song as a teenager, before the Toxic Twins (Tyler and Joe Perry) had ever even met.
How did “Dream On” go from a teen’s dream to a Top 10 hit? [Steven Tyler voice] Read on, read on, read onnnnnnn…
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Tyler’s Musical Family Played A Role
Steven Tyler had a music-filled childhood: his paternal grandparents were musicians, and his father, Victor, was a Juilliard-trained pianist who taught music at high schools and performed at resort hotels during the summer, including one owned by his family. In his 2011 autobiography, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?, Tyler recalled lying on the ground listening to his father play classical music when he was 3 years old. Those classical tunes are what inspired the song’s haunting sound. “That’s where I got that ‘Dream On’ chord-age,” he writes.
The Song Came Together At His Family’s Resort
Courtesy of Sunapee Historical Society
In the 1997 authorized Aerosmith biography Walk This Way, Tyler recalls that the music for “Dream On” was written on a Steinway upright piano in the resort hotel Trow-Rico that his family operated in Sunapee, New Hampshire. “Maybe four years before Aerosmith even started. When I was 17 or 18, I used to come home and crash there,” Tyler shared in his book. “One day I realized I’d been playing too much in the key of C, so I went to F. When you’re a kid, F is the greatest. That’s how it started. It was just this little thing I was playing, and I never dreamed it would end up as a real song or anything.”
Tyler reports writing the first verse in Sunapee and “the second verse at the Logan Hilton.”
Not Everyone Was Convinced It Was A Hit
David Klein/Getty Images
When the band began to work together on “Dream On” in 1972, Tyler recalled crying with relief because “I was so sure of this song, so sure that it could really work with us and take us places we wanted to go.” But guitarist Joe Perry wasn’t sold. In his memoir Rocks: My Life In and Out of Aerosmith, he writes, “I wasn’t crazy about the song—mainly because it was slow. My attitude was simple: The only good slow song is a slow blues. “Dream On” was hardly a blues.”
And at first, it looked like listeners might share Perry’s take. Upon original release, the song peaked at 59 on the Hot 100. It wasn’t until the song was re-issued to radio stations in 1975 that it became a hit, reaching No. 6 on the Top 100 in April 1976 — and in the process, lived out its own message of not giving up. As Tyler said in Walk This Way, the song’s about “dreaming until your dreams come true. It’s about the hunger and desire and ambition to be somebody that Aerosmith felt in those days. You can hear it in the grooves because it’s there.”
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