“Every time I look in the mirror,” sings a 24-year-old Tyler, “All these lines on my face getting clearer …” He’s oddly morose for one so young, but the crux of the song is about dreaming until your dreams come true. You could say it’s their Stairway to Heaven, but it’s better than that.
The left hand and right hand on the piano – taken up by bassist Tom Hamilton and guitarist Joe Perry respectively – weave a hauntingly baroque and instantly recognisable musical tapestry, even if you’ve never heard the song before. One song stuck out, however, and still stands out as maybe their finest moment. Aerosmith’s first album, with deep southern-influenced barroom boogie standards such as Mama Kin, gave little hint of the unit-shifting, power-balladeering behemoth the Boston quintet would become in the 1990s. Initially the band had to pay their dues not just with the public, but with their record company CBS competition was strong from contemporaries the New York Dolls, who were critically adored and deemed much cooler by almost everyone, and from within their own label – there was a young songwriter called Bruce Springsteen who seemed to release an album every time they did and took up most of CBS’s promotional resources. Steven Tallarico wrote Dream on during stolen moments on a hotel Steinway piano, four years before Aerosmith came to be, and longer still before he assumed the stage name Steven Tyler.