When Joey Kramer was asked how he came up with the name “Aerosmith” he recounts that it was a Harry Nilsson album that had inspired him a couple of years before the band came together.
According to an article published in UCR, it revealed that when the drummer was back in high school senior in 1968.
Then he dreamt about having a big future as a drummer but most people regarded his expectant nature as mere fantasy. However as Kramer explains himself: “I was listening to an album at the time, by Harry Nilsson, called Aerial Ballet.”
“We were listening to this record and I started really getting off on the lyrics. We started kicking around this work ‘aerial,’ and ‘aerial’ eventually came into ‘aero’ – I don’t know how that happened.”
He added that this playing around with words gave him more ideas. “And it was like Aeromind, Aerostar, Aero-this, Aero-that; and somebody said ’smith’ – Aerosmith? Wow! And from then on it was all over my high school psychology books and my math books.”
The question was always, ‘What’s Aerosmith?’ And I would tell people, ‘When I leave high school I’m going to go have a rock ’n’ roll band, and that’s what it’s going to be called. And we’re going to be big and famous, and that’s the scoop.’
And they were all like, ‘Oh, that’s very nice, Joey.’” Now history has proved that Kramer was right, launching his career into a world that would end up regarding him as one of the best-selling American bands of all time, with 150 million LPs sold, 25 gold albums, 18 platinum albums, 12 multi-platinum albums and four Grammy wins.
