“Boogie Man” sits in a strange and revealing place in the Get a Grip story. It is the album’s closing track, running 2:08, credited to Steven Tyler, Joe Perry and Jim Vallance, and presented on the record as an instrumental.
The clearest account of how it was created comes from Joe Perry in an EQ magazine interview published during the Get a Grip era. Perry describes Aerosmith’s writing habit of keeping a recorder rolling during rehearsals “just in case”, then rewinding if something sparks. In the case of “Boogie Man”, he says the performance came from a jam captured at a different rehearsal studio (The Boneyard) in 1991, preserved on a DAT machine. The key detail is how little it was “built” after the fact: Perry states that what ended up on the album is essentially “the last two minutes of that jam right off the DAT”, after Tyler sat at the keyboards to play a slap-bass part while Perry played guitar, with the ideas gradually “gel[ling]” into something worth keeping.
In that same account, Perry frames the decision as intentional restraint rather than an unfinished sketch. He notes that the piece was played once “two years” earlier and left alone, and that if it had been taken “one more step” he would have written a melody, but the recording felt complete as it was. That comment matters because it positions “Boogie Man” as a rare Get a Grip track whose definitive version was not a traditional studio re-cut, but a lifted rehearsal moment that the band chose not to “improve” into a conventional song form.
The writing credit is where Jim Vallance enters the picture. Perry describes Vallance as a keyboards-and-guitar player who was early into computer-based rhythm programming, adding that “that was really where he and I locked up.” Against the “Boogie Man” backstory, that context offers a plausible, limited explanation for why Vallance’s name appears on a track Perry describes as a rehearsal-room jam: the credit can reasonably reflect contribution within the album’s writing environment and development process, even if the core performance was captured quickly and preserved almost intact.
Industry recognition followed soon after release. In the lead-up to the 1994 Grammy Awards, Variety’s published nominations list included “Boogie Man” under Rock Instrumental Performance.
On stage, the track took on a second life that helps explain why an instrumental jam could become so memorable to fans. Setlist.fm’s performance statistics currently record “Boogie Man” as having been played 148 times, concentrated heavily in 1994 and returning again in 2011.
Finally, there is the live “lyrics” dimension, which exists even though the studio track is instrumental. Across bootleg recordings, Tyler frequently treats “Boogie Man” as a vehicle for spoken lines, callouts and scat-style vocalising, sometimes shadowing guitar phrases as if to harmonise or “sing” the solo. A recurring line during the chorus is “boogie man is coming, run and hide”. For the 2011 era specifically, the presence of English subtitles on the official Rock for the Rising Sun release provides a mechanism by which those on-mic ad-libs can be captured in text during the filmed performances.
Taken in chronological order, the “Boogie Man” record is unusually direct: a rehearsal-room jam captured on DAT, trimmed to its strongest final minutes, left intentionally without a developed topline, then elevated from an internal tape into an album closer, a Grammy-nominated instrumental, and a recurring live feature that later gained an official filmed document in 2011.
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