Aerosmith began recording their third studio album, Toys in the Attic, in early 1975. Midway through the process, the band found themselves struggling to come up with new material. They started building on a guitar riff that Joe Perry played earlier, but the song didn’t have any lyrics yet, let alone a title. After a while, the other members decided to take a break and went to the movies.
According to Perry, they went to see Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, which he’d already seen. “When the guys returned, they were throwing lines back and forth from the film,” Perry told The Wall Street Journal in 2014. “They were laughing about Marty Feldman greeting Gene Wilder at the door of the castle and telling him to follow him. ‘Walk this way,’ he says, limping, giving his stick to Wilder so he can walk that way, too.”
Producer Jack Douglas then reportedly suggested that “Walk This Way” was a good title for the song they were having trouble with, and singer Steven Tyler got to work writing the lyrics. The result was their top-10 hit of the same name, released as the second single from Toys in the Attic later that year:
Although Tyler backed up the Young Frankenstein story in his 2004 autobiography, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?, he had a slightly different explanation for how “Walk This Way” came about in a 1984 interview with Bruce Pollock. “The song title evolved from watching The Three Stooges on TV. They walked this way and that,” Tyler said. What’s particularly interesting about this alternate version of things is that the Stooges also used the “Walk This Way” gag in their 1951 short Don’t Throw That Knife:
In fact, the joke is probably older than we’ll ever know. Feldman and Brooks were well aware of that when they shot the iconic scene in Young Frankenstein. Feldman only threw the gag in to make the crew laugh, but Brooks insisted on using it. “Mel, you can’t, it’s an old joke!” Feldman told him. Wilder wasn’t happy with it, either, and neither of them were convinced that it belonged in the movie until the preview audiences gave it their stamp of approval.
But whether it was Feldman or the Stooges who were the true inspiration, the consensus seems to be that the recycled gag they share was responsible for the song’s turn. Where Feldman or Brooks first saw it is anyone’s guess; however, the joke is said to have originated in music halls and appears in a number of films that predate even the Stooges. The Ritz Brothers did it in Never a Dull Moment in 1943, and Abbott and Costello used it in the following year’s In Society. One of the earliest examples of it on film appeared in the 1936 William Powell mystery-comedy After the Thin Man, but it also appeared in a Betty Boop short three years earlier. Check it out below.
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