Walk This Way

Joe Perry came up with the guitar riff during a December 1974 sound check in Honolulu, where Aerosmith were opening for the Guess Who. He had been "fooling around with riffs and thinking about the Meters," a group Jeff Beck had turned him on to, and asked the drummer to lay down a flat groove. The riff "just came off [his] hands." He shifted from C to E and back to C for the verse and chorus rather than use a typical chord progression, and by the end of the sound check he had the basics of what became "Walk This Way."

When Steven Tyler heard the riff, he ran out and sat behind the drums to jam, scatting nonsense syllables to feel where lyrics should go. The band was stuck for material halfway through recording Toys in the Attic at the Record Plant in New York City in early 1975, so they gave Perry's Hawaii song a try. It had no title or words. After a break spent seeing Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein in Times Square, producer Jack Douglas suggested the title, taken from Marty Feldman's limping line in the film.

Tyler wrote lyrics at the hotel that night, then left them in a cab. Upset and disbelieved, he took the instrumental tape into the studio stairwell with a few No. 2 pencils and no paper, writing the words on the wall before copying them onto a legal pad. The lyrics tell of a high school boy losing his virginity, and Tyler sang them fast, using words as a percussion element. Released as the second single from the album, it reached number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1977.