UNIONDALE, N.Y. — That improbable species, the 1970s rock star, was alive and high-kicking as Aerosmith headlined Nassau Coliseum on Sunday night, sharing a bill with Cheap Trick. Those creatures are studly men — according to their songs — who wear sequined clothes and clearly devote a lot of time to hair care. They caper around a stage like overgrown teenagers, tracked by spotlights while smoke billows on cue, regularly hugging and backslapping one another even though they’ve made their quarrels public.


For the singer Steven Tyler, a microphone stand is a maypole, a hobbyhorse, a dance partner, a weapon and an all-purpose Freudian symbol; his outfit also included a studded codpiece. For the guitarist Joe Perry, his longtime partner in Aerosmith’s production and songwriting, a mere trill or squiggle in a solo can set off arenawide squeals of joy, especially when he delivers it rearing back as if he were aiming at the balconies, with a fan blowing through his white-streaked hair.


Aerosmith’s band members are in their 60s now, so seeing them as boyish involves some suspension of disbelief — particularly with the grizzled guitarist Brad Whitford, who was costumed like a member of some other band, wearing a cowboy hat and denim, while the rest of Aerosmith glittered. But the band can still carry off the enterprise of being Aerosmith — the music as much as the shtick — with muscle and panache.


In the eight years since Aerosmith released a new album, Mr. Tyler has picked up a new job as a judge on “American Idol,” a show that often rewards vocal athleticism and over-the-top stage presence. He’s thoroughly qualified: an unstoppable vocalist who was belting, howling, letting loose falsetto whoops or barking rhymes at proto-hip-hop speed.


He sang as if he were playing around, casually tossing in profane rewrites of familiar lyrics. But amid the cartoonish exaggeration that made Aerosmith arena rockers nearly four decades ago, Mr. Tyler could also reach back — in songs like “Cryin’ ” and “What It Takes” — to the soul and blues that are part of Aerosmith’s foundation, along with Rolling Stones guitar licks and the occasional Beatles chord change. All the while he was strutting and clowning along a catwalk that jutted into the audience, getting him closer to the crowd while giving him more ground to cover, easily playing to both a close-up video camera and the most distant seats.


The concert included two songs from the Aerosmith album that’s due in August, “Music From Another Dimension.” They weren’t immediately impressive. “Oh Yeah” was a plea for love set to the band’s fallback, a Rolling Stones-style guitar riff, while “Legendary Child,” which Aerosmith had performed on “American Idol,” tried awkwardly to merge “Sweet Emotion” and “Walk This Way,” with lyrics invoking Aerosmith’s 40-year career.


The rest of the set mixed the leering, wisecracking, perpetually adolescent Aerosmith — “Love in an Elevator,” “Big Ten Inch Record,” “Walk This Way” — with more unexpected songs, like “No More No More” and “Combination” (with Mr. Perry singing lead), stomping along while delivering moodier thoughts. Aerosmith was already thinking about aging and mortality in “Dream On,” the career-making 1973 power ballad it saved for an encore: “All these lines on my face getting clearer,” Mr. Tyler sang, seated at a rock star’s white piano, plumes of smoke framing him and Mr. Perry during the song’s peak. Well aware of passing time, Aerosmith can also, somehow, ignore it.


That was less so with Cheap Trick. Its singer, Robin Zander, has maintained his vocal power, and its lead guitarist, Rick Nielsen, stays as busy as ever, simultaneously forging each song’s power-pop riffs and constantly flinging guitar picks into the audience, sometimes dozens at once. But the songs often came out as an undifferentiated blare, the output of a barnstorming arena-rock machine.