“The door cracks open and I hear, ‘Who the hell are you? Play that again!‘” Steven Tyler gatecrashed Jared James Nichols’ jam and invited him to hang out with Aerosmith – and he kept coming back

Jared James Nichols got the shock of a lifetime when rock royalty gatecrashed his band’s jam session – and ended up with him hanging out with Aerosmith.

The blues rock guitar ace doesn’t specify when this happened exactly, but after one of rock’s most iconic frontmen came to watch his band jam, he found himself welcomed into Aerosmith’s ranks.

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“I was like, ‘Whoa, this is insane.’ Steven goes, ‘Hey, man, you kick ass. We’re making a record in the back. Why don’t you come hang out?’ So I walked back there. Joe Perry’s back there. All these guys are back there. And I’m like, ‘Holy smokes, this is happening.’”

Perhaps buoyed by Tyler’s compliments, Nichols didn’t need a second invitation, and he quickly discovered how the other half live.

“They had a spread of food back there,” he adds, a little flabbergasted. “He’s like, ‘Grab some food, man. Grab a beer.’”

His hosts were more than welcoming, and when Tyler told him, “We’re gonna be here for a while. Come back whenever you want,” he did exactly that.

“The next day, I went back,” Nichols admits. “And then the next day I went back. It got to the point where I was hanging out so much, Steven would be like, ‘JJ, what do you think of this mix? Let’s go listen to it in your car.’

“He would burn a CD, and we’d go into my friend’s Subaru Outback and listen to it, drive around, and he’d be singing along.”

It’s unclear whether this was when Aerosmith were recording their last album, 2012’s Music From Another Dimension!, or their surprise EP with Yungblud. Either way, it paints a fantastic image – and gave Nichols a lasting memory.

Nichols – who is also a GW columnist – recently explained why playing in a trio can improve your guitar solos and how to express yourself with your bends.

A freelance writer with a penchant for music that gets weird, Phil is a regular contributor to Prog, Guitar World, and Total Guitar magazines and is especially keen on shining a light on unknown artists. Outside of the journalism realm, you can find him writing angular riffs in progressive metal band, Prognosis, in which he slings an 8-string Strandberg Boden Original, churning that low string through a variety of tunings. He’s also a published author and is currently penning his debut novel which chucks fantasy, mythology and humanity into a great big melting pot.