The Back-Burner: Aerosmith Outtakes & Demos

In the fall of 2003, Aerosmith unexpectedly became part of one of the most recognisable traditions in American sports broadcasting: the opening of Monday Night Football. For more than a decade the show had begun with country legend Hank Williams Jr. performing his signature anthem. The song had a long lineage — Williams had written “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight” as the second single from his 1984 album Major Moves, where it peaked at number ten on the country charts. ABC approached him to rework it for football, and the resulting “All My Rowdy Friends Are Here on Monday Night” had been the programme’s musical identity since 1989, earning Williams four Emmy Awards between 1991 and 1994.

Before any MNF broadcast, Aerosmith’s 2003 NFL season began with a more spectacular entrance. On September 4, the league staged the NFL Kickoff Live from the National Mall, a free concert held between the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., broadcast live on ABC. The event was integrated into the Pentagon’s Operation Tribute to Freedom initiative, with 25,000 service members and their families given reserved access and a total crowd expected to reach 300,000. Aerosmith shared the bill with Britney Spears, Mary J. Blige and Good Charlotte, with Aretha Franklin closing the evening by singing the national anthem ahead of the Washington Redskins vs. New York Jets season opener at FedEx Field.

Later that year, ABC invited Steven Tyler and Joe Perry to join Hank Williams Jr. in the weekly MNF opening. The segment was filmed separately and edited into the standard broadcast sequence. Reports from the time place the shoot in Nashville, where Aerosmith also spent time with members of the Tennessee Titans during a broader NFL promotional production, with portions of the crowd at the band’s Nashville concert pulled in as extras. In the finished clip, Williams delivered the core anthem while Tyler sang in his trademark style, that unmistakable rasp punctuated by harmonica, and Perry added slide guitar over the familiar theme.

The first confirmed broadcast aired on October 20, 2003, during ABC’s telecast of the Kansas City Chiefs vs. Oakland Raiders game. Contemporary fan documentation described “multi-Grammy Award-winning rock superstars Aerosmith” joining Williams for that week’s version of “Are You Ready for Some Football?” The segment was reused across the rest of the season, with confirmed airings on November 3, December 1 and December 15. It even made it into the band’s stage banter: at a show later that year, Joe Perry introduced Steven Tyler as “the star of the new Monday Night Football commercials.”

The connection between Aerosmith and Hank Williams Jr. resurfaced four years later. On October 25, 2007, CMT taped CMT Giants: Hank Williams, Jr. at the Gibson Amphitheatre at Universal Studios Hollywood, with the two-hour special premiering on CMT on November 17. The lineup was a cross-genre gathering: Tim McGraw, Brad Paisley, Kid Rock, Alan Jackson, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Toby Keith, Gretchen Wilson and Buddy Guy all performed, with Jimmy Kimmel and Terry Bradshaw presenting, and video tributes arriving from Kenny Chesney, John Madden, Al Michaels and the Monday Night Football commentary team. Williams’s daughter Holly performed “The Conversation” alongside Shooter Jennings, recreating a song her father had originally recorded with Shooter’s father, Waylon. Johnny Knoxville closed the evening by presenting Williams with a jug of moonshine. Steven Tyler performed “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight” alongside Buddy Guy, the very anthem at the root of the MNF tradition he and Perry had shared four years earlier.

Taken together, these moments form a small but genuinely interesting thread in Aerosmith’s history. Their 2003 NFL involvement stretched from a massive open-air concert on the National Mall to a recurring slot inside one of the most iconic musical traditions in American sports television, and then Tyler stepped onto a stage in Los Angeles four years later to honour the man whose voice had defined those Monday nights. It lives mostly in short broadcast clips, old fan archives and backstage photographs, but it is a real and well-documented story about two musical worlds that rarely overlap so directly.