The wall between the two studio rooms was never meant to survive the afternoon.
On one side of it, three young men from Queens were rehearsing in sneakers and black hats.
On the other side stood two rock stars the music business had quietly written off.
It was the summer of 1986, and a music video shoot in New York had brought them together.
The song drifting through that wall was already eleven years old.
It had been a flop, a footnote, and an album track that radio mostly ignored.
Steven Tyler pressed his ear to the plaster and listened to strangers remake it.
Then he picked up his microphone stand and swung it at the wall.
The plaster cracked, then crumbled, then gave way entirely.
Tyler stepped through the hole, scarves flying, into a room full of turntables.
The cameras caught the moment that would restart his band’s career.
They also caught the moment rap music walked into the American mainstream.
The song on both sides of that wall was called “Walk This Way.”
It had begun as a joke in a movie theater and a riff nobody wanted.
This is the story of a song that failed, vanished, and came back to change music twice.
A Band With Something to Prove
By the end of 1974, Aerosmith had two albums behind them and a reputation still under construction.
Critics in New York and London kept comparing them, usually unkindly, to the Rolling Stones.
Their second album, Get Your Wings, had sold respectably but produced no real hit single.
Columbia Records expected the third album to settle the question of who they were.
The band arrived in New York in January 1975 with only a handful of finished songs.
The rest of the album would have to be written inside the studio, against the clock.
Producer Jack Douglas, who had shaped Get Your Wings, returned to the control room.
The Record Plant studios became their workshop, their dormitory, and occasionally their battleground.
Nobody in the building suspected the album’s most durable song was still unwritten.
Part of it was already waiting in Hawaii, in a guitarist’s hands.
A Riff at a Honolulu Soundcheck
A month earlier, in December 1974, the band had flown to Honolulu to open for the Guess Who.
Soundchecks on that tour were long, hot, and mostly played to empty seats.
Guitarist Joe Perry spent them the way he spent most spare minutes, hunting for riffs.
Lately he had been studying the Meters, the New Orleans masters of lean, riffing funk.
He loved how their songs were built from short guitar figures instead of long chord changes.
That afternoon he asked drummer Joey Kramer for something flat, steady, and deeply funky.
Kramer had played in funk bands, and he settled into a simple, stubborn groove.
Perry’s hands answered almost before he had decided anything at all.
A clipped, swaggering figure fell out of the guitar, all elbows and attitude.
He shifted the figure upward for a bridge, refusing the usual blues progression.
By the end of the soundcheck, he later recalled, the skeleton of a song stood finished.
It had no words, no title, and no obvious place on a rock album.
It was also, though nobody said so, the funkiest thing the band had ever touched.
The Singer Behind the Drum Kit
When Steven Tyler first heard the riff back in rehearsal, he did something unexpected.
He walked straight past the microphone and sat down behind the drum kit.
Before he was a singer, Tyler had been a drummer in his teenage bands.
He climbed in beside the groove and began scatting nonsense syllables over it.
The syllables were not words; they were placeholders, pure rhythm wearing a costume.
Tyler often worked that way, finding a melody’s shape before finding its language.
The speed of the riff demanded a voice that could chatter like an auctioneer’s.
His rapid, tongue-twisting delivery would later remind listeners of something not yet invented.
Tyler himself eventually admitted that the groove kind of lent itself to rap.
For the moment, though, the band simply had a groove in search of a song.
In New York, the groove sat unfinished while other songs took shape around it.
Douglas kept asking the obvious question: where were the words?
A Movie Break in Times Square
Halfway through the sessions, progress on the album stalled badly.
The band had recorded only three or four songs and was running low on material.
Someone suggested a break, and most of the group walked down toward Times Square.
A new Mel Brooks comedy called Young Frankenstein was playing there.
Accounts differ on exactly who went and who stayed behind at the studio.
What nobody disputes is the scene that greeted them on the screen.
In the film, a hunchbacked assistant meets a train and offers to guide his new master.
He tells the doctor to “walk this way,” meaning only: follow me.
The doctor, taking him literally, copies the man’s limping, cane-assisted shuffle.
The theater erupted, and the musicians in the audience laughed as hard as anyone.
Back at the Record Plant, the line kept circulating as an in-joke among the band.
Producer Jack Douglas reportedly heard it and pointed at the unfinished funk track.
That, he suggested, was the title they had been missing all along.
Hamilton later recalled that the band told Tyler the song had found its name.
Tyler, never fond of instructions, resisted on principle before giving in.
The joke had done its work: the groove finally had an identity.
The Lyrics That Took a Taxi
A title, however, was not the same thing as a finished lyric.
That night at the hotel, Tyler sat down and wrote the words in a rush.
He wrote them fast, packing the verses with quick, playful double meanings.
The next morning he climbed into a taxi bound for the studio, words in hand.
By his own later account, he left the only copy behind in that cab.
He arrived at the Record Plant holding a title and no lyric at all.
Angry at himself, he rewrote the song from memory and momentum in the studio.
Tyler has said he scrawled the replacement lines on a hallway wall.
The band then recorded the track with the groove exactly as Perry had found it.
Kramer’s drums opened the song alone, two bare bars of funk before the riff.
Perry and Brad Whitford locked their guitars together over Tom Hamilton’s bass.
Tyler sang the way he had scatted, all speed and grin and swagger.
Engineer Jay Messina captured the performance, with Douglas producing, at the Record Plant.
The finished track lasted a little over three and a half minutes.
It sounded like nothing else on the album, or on American rock radio.
The Single Nobody Heard
Toys in the Attic reached the shops on April 8, 1975.
Its first single, “Sweet Emotion,” gave the band its first Top 40 success that summer.
“Walk This Way” followed as the album’s second single on August 28, 1975.
And then, almost nothing happened at all.
The record failed to reach the Billboard Hot 100 on its first release.
Radio programmers who loved the album’s swagger seemed unsure about its funkiest track.
The song settled into life as a concert number and a well-liked album cut.
Fans at the band’s shows learned the riff quickly enough.
On paper, though, “Walk This Way” was a commercial failure.
Plenty of good songs die exactly there, and this one nearly did.
What saved it was the album around it, which refused to stop selling.
Number Ten, a Year Late
Through 1976, Toys in the Attic kept climbing, becoming the band’s American breakthrough.
The harder follow-up album, Rocks, turned Aerosmith into full-scale arena headliners.
Columbia began reissuing the band’s earlier singles to feed the new audience.
On November 5, 1976, “Walk This Way” was released as a single for the second time.
This time, the country was ready for it.
Week by week, the little funk record climbed the Billboard Hot 100.
In January 1977, it reached number ten, becoming the band’s second Top 10 single.
Toys in the Attic went on to become Aerosmith’s best-selling studio album in America.
The song took its place in the live show, usually waiting near the encore.
Yet even at number ten, its strangest chapter had not yet begun.
The riff was about to be discovered by musicians who had never bought a rock record.
The Breakbeat Years
During the late seventies, hip-hop was being invented at block parties in the Bronx.
DJs stretched the funkiest seconds of old records into long, looping breaks for dancers.
Aerosmith’s opening drum bars, it turned out, made a perfect break.
By several accounts, a young Queens DJ named Jam Master Jay built routines around it.
Joseph “Run” Simmons and Darryl “D.M.C.” McDaniels grew up hearing such breaks at parties.
They formed Run-DMC in Hollis, Queens, in 1983, with Jay behind the turntables.
Their records stripped rap down to drum machines, scratches, and commanding voices.
They dressed like their own audience, in sneakers and hats rather than costumes.
In 1985, a young producer named Rick Rubin co-founded the label Def Jam.
Rubin loved rap’s minimalism and rock’s volume in roughly equal measure.
He began producing Run-DMC’s third album, Raising Hell, in early 1986.
Near the end of those sessions, Rubin decided the album still needed one more thing.
It needed a bridge to the rock audience that still dismissed rap as a fad.
He knew exactly which eleven-year-old record might build it.
Rick Rubin’s Wager
Rubin proposed that Run-DMC remake “Walk This Way” as a full recording, not a sample.
The suggestion did not land gently in the studio that day.
Run and D.M.C. had barely heard of Aerosmith, by their own cheerful admission.
Tyler’s rapid-fire verses sounded to them like cheerful gibberish they could not decode.
They worried that covering a rock song might cost them credibility back home.
Rubin and Jam Master Jay argued the opposite case with growing enthusiasm.
Jay knew the record’s power personally; its break had been his playground for years.
The rappers relented, and Rubin put in a telephone call to Aerosmith’s camp.
His request went further than a cover version usually dares to go.
He wanted Tyler and Perry themselves, in the studio, on the record.
Aerosmith in 1986 were a reunited band whose comeback album had sold disappointingly.
They had little to lose, and both men agreed to come to New York.
What happened in that room took, by most accounts, about a single day.
Through the Wall
The remake kept the original’s spine: that drum break, that riff, that chanting chorus.
Run and D.M.C. traded Tyler’s verses between them, turning a solo sprint into a tag team.
Tyler sang alongside them, sounding delighted rather than territorial about his own song.
Perry’s guitar arrived like an old friend who had been waiting outside the door.
For the video, director Jon Small placed the two acts in adjoining studio rooms.
Between them stood the wall that gives this story its opening scene.
In the finished clip, Tyler smashes through it with his microphone stand.
The two groups finish the song in one room, on one stage, as one band.
Released as a single in July 1986, the remake climbed to number four that September.
It outran the original’s peak by six places, a rare feat for any remake.
It became the first rap single to reach the top five of the Billboard Hot 100.
Raising Hell, carried by the single, reached number three on the album chart.
It became the first rap album ever to sell in the multi-platinum range.
MTV, long hesitant about rap, put the video into heavy rotation.
Two audiences that radio kept in separate boxes suddenly shared a favorite song.
The Song That Keeps Coming Back
In 2018, the Library of Congress added Raising Hell to the National Recording Registry.
In 2014, the Run-DMC version of “Walk This Way” entered the Grammy Hall of Fame.
In January 2001, Aerosmith performed the song during the Super Bowl halftime show.
They were joined there by *NSYNC, Britney Spears, Mary J. Blige, and Nelly.
Aerosmith even titled their 1999 band autobiography after the song.
In January 2020, Aerosmith and Run-DMC performed it together at the Grammy Awards.
That reunion carried a shadow: Jam Master Jay died in 2002, and Run-DMC retired rather than replace him.
Guitar students still learn Perry’s riff among their very first exercises.
Producers across hip-hop have sampled and replayed those opening drum bars ever since.
Few album tracks have lived two complete lives in two different genres.
Fewer still have changed the careers of everyone who ever touched them.
Aerosmith: America’s Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band
The Guitarist From Hopedale
Joseph Anthony Pereira was born on September 10, 1950, in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
He grew up in the small mill town of Hopedale, where his father worked as an accountant.
A shy, left-handed kid, he taught himself to play guitar right-handed.
The British invasion bands rewired him, especially the Yardbirds and the early Fleetwood Mac.
He spent his teens drifting through bar bands around Massachusetts and Vermont.
In 1969, he and bassist Tom Hamilton formed a group called the Jam Band.
Hamilton shared Perry’s devotion to British blues-rock and his hunger for volume.
The Jam Band worked the college and resort circuit around New England.
Its members could not know their future singer was playing the same circuit against them.
A Showman Who Started on Drums
Steven Tyler, born Steven Tallarico in 1948, was fronting a band called Chain Reaction.
He was a drummer by training and a showman by pure instinct.
In the summer of 1970, his band and the Jam Band crossed paths in New Hampshire.
Tyler proposed merging the two groups instead of competing with them.
He had one condition: in the new band, he would sing, not drum.
The front of the stage was where he had always intended to live.
His scarves, screams, and mic-stand acrobatics soon became the band’s visual signature.
The mic stand, as 1986 would prove, could also serve as a demolition tool.
The Engine Room
Drummer Joey Kramer, born in the Bronx, brought the band its backbeat and its name.
Guitarist Brad Whitford arrived in 1971, trained at the Berklee College of Music.
Whitford’s schooling made him the quiet technician between Perry’s rawness and Tyler’s theatre.
Hamilton’s bass lines, melodic and patient, held the whole structure together.
The five-man lineup settled in 1971 became the band’s identity for decades.
Other players came and went over the years, but the famous five kept reassembling.
Their interplay was the sound: blues at the root, funk in the hips, theatre on top.
Boston’s Own
The band’s base was Boston, and Boston adopted them with unusual ferocity.
Their earliest headquarters was a shared apartment on Commonwealth Avenue in the city.
Fans formed a devoted following that came to be known as the Blue Army.
New England radio championed them years before the rest of the country caught up.
To this day, an Aerosmith concert in Boston resembles a family reunion with amplifiers.
To the Summit
Between 1975 and 1978, Aerosmith stood near the very top of American rock.
Toys in the Attic and Rocks sold in the millions and helped define arena rock.
They headlined stadiums and shared festival bills with the biggest acts alive.
Draw the Line and a live album kept the machine running at full speed.
The tours grew longer, the rooms grew larger, and the rest grew scarcer.
Success had become a treadmill that nobody in the band knew how to stop.
The Fracture
In the summer of 1979, following a backstage quarrel in Cleveland, Perry walked out.
The split stunned fans; the Tyler-Perry partnership had written nearly everything.
Guitarist Jimmy Crespo stepped in, and Night in the Ruts appeared that November.
Whitford departed in 1981, replaced by Rick Dufay for Rock in a Hard Place.
That 1982 album was the only one made without the classic guitar partnership.
The arenas shrank, the hits stopped coming, and the obituaries began to circulate.
Tyler kept the famous name on the road through sheer stubbornness.
Five Men Again
In 1984, Perry and Whitford visited their old bandmates backstage in Boston.
The conversation ran long into the night, and the original five decided to try again.
A reunion tour followed, pointedly named Back in the Saddle.
Their Geffen debut, Done with Mirrors, arrived in 1985 to modest sales.
Critics treated the reunion as nostalgia rather than a genuine return.
The band suspected it needed something the old formula could not provide.
It arrived, improbably, from a rap studio in New York, exactly as this story opened.
The Hit Machine Years
Permanent Vacation in 1987 completed the comeback the wall video had started.
Working with outside songwriters, the band filled the album with radio-ready singles.
“Dude (Looks Like a Lady),” “Rag Doll,” and “Angel” carried it to multi-platinum sales.
Pump followed in 1989, tougher and stranger, and reached number five.
Its song “Janie’s Got a Gun” brought Aerosmith the first Grammy Award of their career.
Get a Grip debuted at number one in 1993, twenty years after their debut.
In 1998, “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” gave them their only number-one single.
The band that could not buy a hit in 1982 ended the century bigger than ever.
Honors and the Long Goodbye
Aerosmith entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.
Tyler and Perry joined the Songwriters Hall of Fame together in 2013.
The band’s Las Vegas residency, Deuces Are Wild, opened in 2019 to warm reviews.
MusiCares named the group its Person of the Year in 2020.
More than 150 million records sold make them America’s best-selling hard rock band.
In September 2023, the farewell Peace Out tour opened to warm reviews.
Three shows in, a serious injury to Tyler’s voice stopped everything cold.
In August 2024, the band announced its retirement from touring for good.
The announcement closed a performing career of more than half a century.
Return, one last time, to that studio wall in 1986.
It was, in the end, only a prop built for a music video.
Yet everything the song had ever been passed through that hole in the plaster.
A Hawaii soundcheck, a movie joke, a lyric rewritten in a hurry.
A flop, a slow climb, a decade of waiting inside other people’s breakbeats.
On one side stood a band the industry had finished with entirely.
On the other stood a genre the industry refused to take seriously.
The riff did not care about any of that; it simply kept walking.
Tyler swung, the plaster fell, and both sides turned out to be the same room.
Somewhere tonight, a DJ is looping those opening drum bars again.
Somewhere else, a kid is learning the riff on a first guitar.
And the wall, wherever they rebuild it, never stands for very long.