A brisk September night in 2015 found Moscow’s Arbat promenade alive with noise—vendors yelling, tourists meandering, and a busker tearing into Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” on his guitar. His voice scraped the air, rough but spot-on, hooking a loose cluster of listeners. Then a figure broke from the crowd’s rim: Steven Tyler, Aerosmith’s feral captain, set to flip a street jam into a gut-punch moment.
Tyler was in Moscow for the city’s 868th birthday bash, slated to front a free concert for 100,000 at Lubyanskaya Ploshchad. Before that roar, he stalked the streets, restless and hunting. That’s when he heard it—the 1998 song from the Armageddon soundtrack—blasting out from a busker named Alexander Anisimov. What rolled out next was quick and untamed.
He lingered near the back at first, decked in a studded jacket and hat, fading into the pack. Anisimov, buried in his rhythm, didn’t catch on until Tyler chucked the hat and lunged forward. He nabbed the mic mid-phrase, his jagged wail crashing against the strings, and the crowd flipped—silence shattered by yells. “Some dude joined in, and I figured he was decent,” Anisimov later told Komsomolskaya Pravda. “Then I clocked it was Tyler, and my mind blanked.” He stuck it out, syncing with the icon, who fumbled a lyric but charged on with a laugh.
Their sounds slammed together—Tyler’s battered roar meeting the busker’s shaken-but-steady groove. Phones sparked, grabbing the chaos as the pavement turned electric. They nailed the end with bite, Tyler tossing his hat onto Anisimov’s head like a prize, snagging a swift photo, and ducking out while the energy crackled.
Tyler’s done this before—singing in Lithuanian lanes, jacking store speakers—but Moscow carved its own mark. That track, shaped by Diane Warren and Aerosmith’s first U.S. chart-topper, tethered a rock behemoth to a kid who’d breathed its fumes. For Anisimov, probably a ‘90s-born twentysomething, it was his idol bursting free from memory.
A sharp-eyed bystander caught it on film, and the clip torched the internet, piling up millions of views and a rush of chatter. “Steven Tyler, you’re unreal!” one YouTube shout rang out. “He dropped that busker a gift—and proved his songs still hit hard.” Fans online praised Tyler’s grit—a star who’d just faced a flood of fans but paused for a curbside clash.
For Tyler, it was another surge of raw spark. Aerosmith ripped Moscow’s City Day show apart soon after, but this Arbat flare lingers. It’s Anisimov’s treasure—how a rock titan stormed his gig and left a hat as a token. For the rest, it’s a roar: music doesn’t care about stages; it just lands where it wants.
