Aerosmith – Crazy

The Director Had No Idea the Girl He’d Cast Was Steven Tyler’s Daughter

When director Marty Callner needed a dark-haired foil for Alicia Silverstone in Aerosmith’s “Crazy” video, he didn’t call in a favour or take a tip from the band’s management. He saw a teenage girl in a Pantene shampoo commercial, thought her look would contrast beautifully with Silverstone’s blonde, and cast her. Her name was Liv Tyler. She was sixteen. It was only after the shoot was locked and the casting confirmed that Callner discovered, apparently to genuine astonishment, that he’d hired the lead singer’s own daughter. Nobody had said a word. As origin stories for career-defining moments go, it’s hard to beat: Liv Tyler’s entry into the public eye came about because a music video director liked her hair in a conditioner ad.

The video arrived in May 1994 as the fifth and final single from Get a Grip, and it was one of the most requested clips on MTV that year. “Crazy” peaked at number 17 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number seven on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, climbing to number three in Canada. In the UK it was released as a double A-side with “Blind Man,” reaching number 23. More significantly, the song won Aerosmith the Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal — the second consecutive Grammy the album had earned in that category, following “Livin’ on the Edge” the year before. On YouTube, it has since surpassed 736 million views — more than double the total for “Amazing,” the other superstar entry in the Silverstone trilogy.

The video’s premise is a deceptively simple road movie. Silverstone and Tyler start the clip as uniformed schoolgirls, steal a convertible, and proceed to tear through a version of Middle America that involves shoplifting, a gas station photo booth, an amateur pole-dancing competition (which Tyler wins, at one point mimicking her father’s stage mannerisms with uncanny precision), skinny dipping, and a farmer whose clothes they steal while he’s in the water. The tractor he abandons continues plowing his field — and traces the word “Crazy” in perfect cursive across the crops. At the very end, the pair drive past Jason London’s character from the “Amazing” video, still in his sky-surfing gear, as if the three videos share a connected universe. Callner ties a bow on three years of work in a single shot.

The song itself had been sitting in the band’s back pocket longer than most fans realized. Tyler, Perry, and Desmond Child — who had previously co-written “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” — wrote it around the same time as “Angel” back in the late 1980s, but the band deliberately held it back, conscious of not clustering their ballads too close together and diluting the impact of each. By the time Bruce Fairbairn recorded it for Get a Grip at Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver, it had matured into something richer: a harmonica-and-mandolin-driven blues ballad with a texture quite unlike the band’s usual power-ballad template. Child himself played mandolin on the track. The falsetto ending, meanwhile, was an explicit homage to The Skyliners’ “Since I Don’t Have You.”

Get a Grip was the commercial apex of Aerosmith’s career — the first of their albums to debut at number one in the United States and their best-selling record worldwide, moving over 20 million copies globally and going seven times platinum in the US alone. The Silverstone video trilogy — “Cryin’,” “Amazing,” and “Crazy” — was the engine of that success on MTV, transforming the channel’s visual language in the process. Where hair-metal videos of the previous decade had given female figures decorative roles, Callner’s Silverstone vehicles centred young women as protagonists with full agency: bungee-jumping off highway overpasses, navigating virtual reality, winning cash in dive bars. VH1 later ranked the “Crazy” video at number 23 on its list of the 100 greatest music videos ever made.

Alicia Silverstone, who has spoken since about her mixed feelings during the shoot, went from these videos directly to Clueless in 1995 and became one of the defining stars of that decade. Liv Tyler parlayed her debut into a modelling career and then a long film career, appearing in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Armageddon — which featured Aerosmith on its soundtrack — and beyond. Curiously, despite the song’s enormous commercial life, Aerosmith almost never played it live for more than a decade after its release, finally adding it to their international setlist on the 2007 World Tour after fans made their demands impossible to ignore any longer.

What makes the “Crazy” video hold up thirty years on is its lightness. There is nothing heavy-handed about it — no message, no moralizing, just two young women having the kind of adventure that teen movies spent decades promising and rarely delivering. Callner gave it the pace of a great short film and the visual grammar of something that knew it would outlast the song cycle it was made to promote. “Crazy” sits not merely as the closer to Aerosmith’s greatest album campaign, but as a small, near-perfect piece of American pop cinema — one that launched two careers, unified a trilogy, and wrote its title in a field of crops just to make sure you remembered it.