Aerosmith – Walk This Way

Toys in the Attic, 1975: Perry riff, then Rubin’s second life

On Aerosmith’s 1975 album Toys in the Attic (Columbia), Walk This Way opens with Joe Perry’s guitar riff, a hard-rock figure that leans toward funk, which Steven Tyler answers in rapid-fire verses. Joey Kramer, Tom Hamilton, and Brad Whitford fill out the Boston band’s classic line-up. The track was never meant to be the album’s only radio face; Sweet Emotion carried much of that expectation. Walk This Way had something dirtier: a chorus built for shout-along rooms and a verse rhythm that sat between rock and funk without picking a single lane for the programmer.

The band cut the album with producer Jack Douglas at the Record Plant in New York. Boston basements and soon arena PAs both claimed the song. Tyler’s lyric plays as street swagger and comic timing more than as a love ballad. The syllables sit tight against Perry’s figure. Billboard heard a hard-rocking, funky single with catchy riffs and energetic delivery; that 1975 framing still maps what you hear first: riff, then a fast vocal, then a room answering the title phrase.

On the original you hear a mid-1970s hard-rock band leaving space for the riff: dry enough in the verses for Tyler’s syllables to land, loud enough in the chorus for a crowd to answer. The arrangement does not bury the drums under a smooth mix. That clarity is why hip-hop producers could lift the figure later without rebuilding it from scratch. Aerosmith’s early catalog was already deep enough to spare that riff for a later crossover, while the band still packed arenas on the rock circuit.

A decade later, producer Rick Rubin paired Aerosmith with Run-DMC for a 1986 remake on Raising Hell that returned the riff to the Hot 100 and put the rock and rap pairing on MTV. That video and single are often the first meeting for younger listeners. The 1975 Columbia cut remains the source document: a Toys-era Aerosmith song before the second career as a remake in another style and a sample source.