Little-known fact: When I was in sixth grade and had just discovered rock and roll, I loved Aerosmith. Loved them. I had nearly all their albums on cassette.
I have no idea how I even became familiar with their music, though I suspect it had something to do with Beavis and Butthead or Wayne’s World or just watching tons and tons of MTV in the early 90s.
Anyway, during the next school year — Christmas of 1993, to be exact — I got my first CD player, and Get a Grip was among the first CDs I purchased (the others, which included Nevermind, In Utero and Alapalooza, were far less embarrassing.)
I nearly wore the album out. In seventh grade, I thought Aerosmith was about the coolest group of guys imaginable. They played distorted guitars in blues scales and sung songs with double entendres, and to top it off put Alicia Silverstone in their videos, thrilling seventh-grade boys everywhere.
By the end of calendar year 1994, my entire musical paradigm had shifted. First Kurt Cobain died, then the original Punk-O-Rama came out, then I figured out how much Aerosmith sucked.
Part of it was due to their ubiquity, no doubt, but most of it, I think, was that I realized they were creating music tailor-made for seventh graders.
Not completely terrible, to be honest. Just achingly unoriginal and overloaded with silly rock and roll affectations, from their music to their wardrobes. I’m reasonably certain Joe Perry doesn’t even own a shirt.
By the end of the 90s, after my musical tastes had completely splattered and I was listening to funk and ska and hip-hop and lots and lots of Rage Against the Machine, I began involuntarily emitting a noise whenever Aerosmith songs came on the radio.
My friends call this my “Aerosmith Sound.” It’s a high-pitched and nasal exclamation of panic, an anxious “AAAAH!” unleashed to let whoever is controlling the radio know it’s time to change the station. There’s probably a little bit of shame mixed in there, too, because I always do it knowing that at one point in my life I couldn’t get enough Aerosmith.
Anyway, that’s just a long introduction to the news that apparently Steven Tyler himself has finally had enough of Aerosmith.
The lead singer has pulled out of the band’s upcoming South American tour to focus on solo work and — no joke — promoting “Brand Tyler.”
How “Brand Tyler” will differ from “Brand Aerosmith” remains to be seen, but smart money says it will also suck.
Perhaps even more hilariously, Joe Perry, Brad Whitford, Tom Hamilton and Joey Kramer (I didn’t even have to look their names up, which bothers me) will apparently try to carry on without Tyler as Aerosmith, meaning we could very well be faced with twice as much terrible music in the upcoming years.
Anyway, I’m sorry if you like Aerosmith and are not a seventh grader. Very sorry, actually.
*- The phrase “Culture Jammin'”, as used here, refers to a series in this blog that I’ll occasionally use for my no-more-than-once-per-day non-sports item, and not the practice of culture jamming. While I appreciate large-scale hoaxes and well-intentioned subversion, I recognize how ironic it would be to advocate anti-consumerism on this SNY.tv blog.
Tedquarters 
Everything you’ve said here is completely correct.
I have a buddy that was exactly like you in the early/mid 90’s, and the Aerosmith obsession, only hes now 30 and never grew out of it.
permanent vacation is a great album to own on cassette, as was pump. i think they lost it or me around get a grip. some of their stuff ages well though. toys in the attic is pretty sweet.
Yeah, their early stuff was excellent and still is, it’s the later music that’s crap.
Write about baseball; who cares about Aerosmith anyway although I remember you when…..
Punk O Rama 1 was awesome, so were like 2-7, they kinda suck know tho, just like aerosmith
its so awesome, i remember you quoted a NOFX song on your twitter and I never gave you props for that!
Fun fact: Did you know that Ten Foot Pole, the band responsible for “My Wall” on the original Punk-O-Rama, was fronted by former White Sox reliever (and cancer survivor) Scott Radinsky? I had their album and was, needless to say, a huge baseball fan at the time, but I had no idea it was the same guy until years later.
Whoah. I used to blast Ten Foot Pole in my mom’s basement, and was also a huge baseball fan at the time, and didn’t realize that little fact until you said it 10 seconds ago.
Wow, Punk-O-Rama and hot stove rumors are two of my worlds that I never thought would collide. I was also obsessed with Get a Grip but it’s slightly less embarrassing cause I was 8 in 1993. Punk-O-Rama III was when I became fully engulfed in punk rock. “You’ll Never Eat Fast Food Again” was also a huge comp for me. It occurs to me if you were around Nassau and into ska in the late 90s/early 00s, you mighta been around when stuff like High School Football Heroes and Arrogant Sons of Bitches was happening, but maybe you were gone by then.
Ha, I vaguely know some of the guys from ASOB. They used to hang around my buddy’s house all the time because they were friends with his little brother. I think a couple were also in a band called Premarital Sax, which I always found clever.
That was when I was mostly away at college though. When I moved back to LI afterwards, I played in a weird prog-funk band, but nearly every band we played with was emo. It was always, “hey guys, who else is on the bill tonight?” “Oh, it’s Surviving Tomorrow, Anticipating Yesterday and Destroying Tuesday.” I tried to convince the other guys to rename our band Verbing Sometime, but they wouldn’t bite.
Ha, nice. What was the actual name of it? I played around quite a bit over the years.
Funny about ASOB. In ’01 my high school band played in a battle of the bands with them. They won and got all the chicks. We sucked and drank vodka out of Poland Spring bottles by ourselves.
Ironically, singer from that band is now in a thing called Bomb the Music Industry, who have made some of my favorite records of the past few years. Dunno what you get into now but might be worth checking out.
We were called Protocol, but are not to be confused with the British dance-pop band that got us booted from Myspace. If you remember a bunch of nerds playing songs about zombies in odd meters, that was probably us.
LOL, so much good stuff in this thread.
1. When I got my first CD player for Christmas, along with it came Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy and Aerosmith’s Big Ones, which were the singles from their late 80’s/90’s renaissance.
2. Rancid and The Offspring are the bands that got me into the “punk scene” or what have you. They were both on Epitaph at the time and I was influenced by the catalog that accompanied those CDs. I purchased Punk-O-Rama because I saw the advertisement (and the CD was dirt cheap!) and the rest is history.
3. I used to book shows in NJ and actually booked a few of those Punk-O-Rama /Epitaph bands — Voodoo Glow Skulls, Roger Miret & The Disasters, Matchbook Romance among others.
4. LOL I booked a show with HS Football Heroes and A.S.O.B. I believe it was “Skatanic Saturday”. Good lord.
5. Yeah the later Punk-O-Rama’s sucked, but they had Hot Water Music!