"Dream On"

"Dream On" is a lot of things. Perhaps the first hard rock "power ballad." Perhaps a meditation on the passage of time and the pursuit of one's dreams. Perhaps an oddity on the heavily guitar-boogie-based Aerosmith self-titled album.

But the thing I like best about it was that it was written so that Steven Tyler could sit down.

From reading about Steven Tyler, you learn exactly what type of insane he is. As a performer, he throws his body into his performance 100%, running around stage, convulsing like a maniac, swinging his penis microphone at everything. When he was writing material for this album, he sat down at a piano pecking out the opening chords to "Dream On" so that, during their shows, he would be forced to briefly take a seat and settle his ass down. Over three decades, Joe Perry has been forced to stifle his initial reservations about playing songs like it, because they've become a staple of Aerosmith's repertoire.

The song is actually nearly perfect. The opening chords crawl along, seeming huge while being modest, hinting at the rest of the song, which is a constant escalation. While the lyrics sing about personal growth, the songs gets bigger with each lap, until Tyler is unleashing his fabled howl for the first time. It's not sappy or sentimental: reflective, but not sweet, singing about how there are bad times to go with the good, about how time can pass you by, about how sometimes all you have are your dreams.

And here is the crux of the album. It's tight, but doesn't suffer for it, because it's not based in that a shuffling bar boogie, but in a staggering, rapturous rock and roll throwdown. This is the first song they wrote that was bigger than a bar. This is where it becomes most apparent that Aerosmith is doing a thing. That as much as they have their influences, they are very much moving forward. If they haven't found it yet, they are driven by a need to chase after it, and "Dream On" was the first indication that they could get there. You couldn't write a song like "Dream On" by accident. This is the distillation of everything that was already great about their sound, everything that was going to be great about their later work, and how desperate Steven Tyler is to bring the heavens down to Earth.

And they had hardly even started.