By the end of 1994, Tyler was entitled to feel satisfied and was unwilling to be drawn on the secret of Aerosmith’s success. It is difficult to think of any other hard rock outfit whose recording career had commenced in the early 1970s and was still at the top of its game, still with all its original members. Although Steven Tyler is the central focus, Aerosmith remains a democracy with every member integral to its success - five men with differing personalities that somehow gel. In the mid-nineties, Tyler’s bond with Perry was stronger than ever. The pair were consistently photographed together in rock magazines, sometimes choosing to highlight hilariously the contrasts in their personalities. Joe is the epitome of cool and style, Steven an unpredictable vagabond prince. To accusations that Perry can often come across as sour-faced, the lead guitarist once retorted: ‘Next to Steven,
anybody
looks moody!’ During their recent world tour, Steven did whatever he could to avoid the shows becoming stale. He never wanted to feel that he was doing anything by rote. He had long ago honed his stage act to a T, but he did not lack ambition. He was not content simply to soak in thunderous applause, or to raise stadium girders with howling cheers and whistles. He claimed that one of his next goals in performance was for the audience to achieve ‘multiple orgasms’!
CHAPTER 12
A Cat With Nine Lives
IN JANUARY
1995, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry inducted Led Zeppelin into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during a ceremony held at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, later jamming on stage with Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and the late John Bonham’s son, Jason, on drums. After this, Steven went on holiday with Teresa and their children. In spring his thoughts turned to songs for Aerosmith’s first album under their new contract with Sony. Progress was steady, and once summer arrived Steven rewarded himself with a hunting holiday, reverting to a boyhood passion.
At the back of Steven’s mind were concerns about the band’s manager, Tim Collins, whose behaviour had become puzzling. The days when Aerosmith had needed an external hand on the tiller were gone. Like the others, Steven was clean of drugs, sober, focused and in command, so it was perplexing when their manager would tell them that he felt they were in danger of breaking up. It is said that Collins seemed to be in favour of the band undertaking further therapy, but Steven and the others could not see the need for it.
Sidelining this anomaly, as the year progressed Steven concentrated on coming up with fresh material. In addition to working with Joe, to help inspire him he collaborated with lyricists Marti Frederiksen, Taylor Rhodes and Glen Ballard, producing ‘Something’s Gotta Give’, ‘Full Circle’ and ‘Taste of India’. Because it had been a while since the band had played live, they road-tested the new material and re-oiled the wheels in early November, performing as the G-Spots at the Middle East club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the new year they flew to Miami to bite the bullet and create their next album with Glen Ballard as producer. Steven toiled at a hotel in the city’s sophisticated South Beach district. He was joined by his friend, songwriter Richie Supa, and two other former collaborators, Mark Hudson and Desmond Child. As they knocked ideas around, one song quickly emerged, called ‘Kiss Your Past Goodbye’.
As the jewel in Miami’s crown, South Beach is a hot spot for film and music stars, and boasts a vibrant nightlife scene amid the bars and clubs along Ocean Drive. Sometimes, to unwind after intensive songwriting sessions, the band gravitated to this bustling environment, where Tyler was often hit on by buxom young beauties eager to drape themselves around a guy whose stock-in-trade was oozing flagrant sexuality. With a grin that almost split his mobile face in half, he would happily pose for photos. That was as far as he went, but rumours soon circulated that he was living it up with women. Talk also surfaced that he was doing drugs again, which was also untrue, but since trying to deny these rumours would give them more oxygen, he chose to ignore them and keep focused on the song collection that had built up enough for the band to start work at Miami’s Criteria Studios.
In several ways, however, the situation was not good. Joey Kramer’s father had recently died; thrown into emotional turmoil, the drummer needed time away from work. The unease over manager Tim Collins was deepening. Aerosmith had not recorded before with Glen Ballard, and so band and producer were unfamiliar with each other’s ways, and by now Steven had been sitting with songs for so long that there was a real danger of him losing impetus with the material. All this was against the irritating backdrop of ugly rumours continuing to circulate.
To help keep a sense of perspective, Tyler touched base often with his family. Liv had left school by now, while seventeen-year-old Mia had recently moved with her mother from New York’s Madison Avenue to an apartment on East 68th Street. Come spring 1996, Teresa, Chelsea and Taj joined Steven in Miami. The presence of his wife in town helped to douse the rumours, but the working atmosphere remained strained. A stand-in drummer was found to hold up the absent Joey Kramer’s end, but there was not always the sense that they were working as a cohesive unit. Despite this, unique songs were evolving from Tyler’s chaotic creativity. Along with Richie Supa and Glen Ballard, Steven had come up with a number called ‘Pink’; with Joe Perry and Desmond Child he had created ‘Hole in My Soul’ and ‘Ain’t That a Bitch’.
The satisfaction of knowing that a sound song collection was taking shape could not cancel out the fact that matters were coming to a head with Tim Collins. Years later, it was revealed just how difficult Aerosmith felt the situation had become. According to the band members, the manager would tell them to their faces that they were no longer in recovery; presumably Tim Collins believed the rumours flying around Miami. The way Tom Hamilton and Joey Kramer remember it, the manager also told them that Steven was considering their respective positions in the band, which was not the case. And to further muddy the waters, with the boot on the other foot, Steven’s frazzled bandmates were apparently strongly urged by Tim Collins to write a letter to their frontman complaining about his behaviour. Joe Perry has described the letter as confrontational. All five in Aerosmith acknowledged that Tim Collins had been of enormous assistance to them at a given time, but they felt that the manager was now seeking to have too much control over their lives. They have since said that at times they felt manipulated and under an oppressive degree of scrutiny. For whatever reason, Tim Collins seems to have believed that Steven was spiralling out of control, but Joe Perry was adamant: ‘I know what Steven looks like when he’s fucked up. Even though there were times I might have been thinking, he’s acting strangely today, I knew that he was not getting high.’
Troublesome and worrying as all this was, Collins finally crossed the line with Tyler when he telephoned Teresa and told her that Steven was being unfaithful to her with girls he encountered on South Beach. Teresa has recounted publicly how shocked she was to receive this telephone call at home. Tyler went ballistic. His temper snapped and he was so angry he quit Miami, along with the rest of the band. Two months later, at the end of July, Tim Collins was fired.
The ex-manager immediately went to the press, and at least two major US publications ran the story that Steven Tyler was suspected of using heroin and needed detox again. Once more, Steven was livid. This kind of coverage he could do well without and, considering that he was innocent of these charges, he also felt deeply aggrieved. In a calmer frame of mind, he did later try to figure out specifically how Tim Collins could have believed that he had begun to take heroin again. He eventually pinpointed one day in Criteria Studios in Miami when he and Joe had been arguing heatedly over a point - not an unusual occurrence. Nor was it strange that Steven had been ranting, as was his wont when passionately fired up about something. Steven believed that someone at the studio, new to his volatile ways, had rung round a few people claiming that he was acting like someone who was high on dope.
In any event, incensed by these newspaper and magazine stories, Tyler categorically denied having relapsed. He declared how proud he was to have stayed sober for ten years. ‘I don’t drink or do drugs because I don’t want to and I like the me I am now,’ he stated. ‘I like being able to write songs and to be able to be with my kids.’ Steven gave a lengthy interview to
Rolling Stone
in which he reiterated that he had not fallen off the wagon at any time in the past decade. Steven was, of course, conscious that Sony would not have much cared for this hugely negative publicity, and he was also acutely aware that such accusations rebounded on more than himself. He was particularly raw that it impacted on his youngest daughter, Chelsea. He revealed: ‘She had a sleepover and one of the girls’ mothers would not let her sleep over because: “Daddy was back on drugs.” When your seven-year-old daughter says that to you . . .’ To press queries as to whether he considered himself to be a drug addict, he replied that someone in recovery is
always
a drug addict, you just do not do drugs. It all made for a very difficult and distressing time when Tyler admitted that he found it incredibly hard-going trying to keep everything together and to remain creative. It became so bad while recording their new album that it could have threatened Aerosmith’s existence. Recently reflecting on what he termed the ‘nasty press’ coverage at this time, Tom Hamilton said: ‘It was really hard on the band emotionally. We probably came pretty close to saying: “Fuck it!”’
Time would be a healer regarding some aspects. As far as Tim Collins was concerned and the unfortunate manner in which their working relationship unravelled, Steven is still able to separate his anger over the endgame from his genuine gratitude to the manager for the vital role he had played in helping Aerosmith to get sober and back in the saddle as a successful, working band. That said, it was unquestionably true for Steven that after Tim Collins was fired, certain Aerosmith attitudes had the opportunity to resurface and for those and other reasons, he felt rejuvenated.
More changes occurred in summer 1996. Kevin Shirley replaced Glen Ballard as producer for the new album, and A & R man John Kalodner was back on the scene. Having spent some time in California after Miami, Aerosmith returned to Boston when, on 12 August, they issued a press statement that Wendy Laister, who had been working alongside Tim Collins, would be on their management team. Soon after that, they went into a New York recording studio to recut their album. Tyler knew it was of paramount importance that they shaped up to meet everyone’s expectations, but he also maintained: ‘I think bands get in trouble when they start over-thinking things - dare we do that, or we’ll get a bad name, sort of thing. So we just did what we did.’
Even so, considering the accusations that had recently ricocheted around, it was a bold move when Steven, in partnership with Joe Perry, Mark Hudson and Steve Dudas, came up with ‘The Farm’, a number containing lyrics about a drug addict with a hypodermic needle sticking out of his arm. But not only was Tyler determined not to be restricted in his craft by false rumours or the pressure that stemmed from that, he was writing about something he knew all about, and was not glorifying drug addiction. Likewise, references to New York in the song were rooted in a fear he privately battled with, for there had been a period whenever he arrived in this city that his first action had been to go in search of a drug dealer.
Of the hard rock song ‘Nine Lives’, by Tyler, Perry and Marti Frederiksen, Joe said: ‘We went to see AC/DC and that was the inspiration for that song. We came straight back and wrote “Nine Lives” and we’ll keep doing that. We absorb stuff. We’re not a band that says: “This is how it’s got to be.”’ Another rock number, ‘Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees)’, saw Steven revert to his penchant for raunchy lyrics. Written in conjunction with Joe Perry and Glen Ballard, the title was inspired by a slogan Steven once saw on a car bumper sticker. Once again challenged on his taste for the near-the-knuckle lyrics of this particular number, he announced unrepentantly that it was like being ‘in search of the perfect blow job’. In October, Aerosmith was named the Act of the Decade at the 1996 Boston Music Awards. A month later, recording ended on the new album, appropriately titled, considering Aerosmith’s history,
Nine Lives
.
Part of Steven’s past life reared its head around the start of the new year when his ex-wife, Cyrinda Foxe Tyler, published
Dream On, Livin’ on the Edge with Steven Tyler and Aerosmith
. In this tell-all memoir, Cyrinda pulled no punches when recounting her version of her years with the frontman. In graphic detail, she laid bare some of the most intimate aspects of their relationship. Not long after the book was released, Cyrinda indicated that in the paperback edition she intended to include some nude photographs of Steven. At that point, Steven stepped in to object to this plan. Apparently, these revealing snaps were to have been passed to Steven when their divorce had been agreed in 1987. Steven initiated legal proceedings in order to prevent publication of these privately taken nude photographs, a lawsuit that dragged on for two years.
In February 1997, putting this personal issue behind him, Steven joined his bandmates to shoot the video for ‘Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees)’ in Los Angeles under the aegis of Michael Bay, who had directed the recently released action thriller,
The Rock
. This video was short of the sassy teenage temptresses previously depicted by the likes of Alicia Silverstone and Liv. Buttonholed as to why Liv did not appear in this video, Tyler joked that his daughter’s professional fee now for such appearances would have outstripped the video’s entire budget. ‘Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees)’, Aerosmith’s first single release of the year, reached number thirty-five in the American chart and number twenty-two in the UK.
Sticking to his stance of never getting on a soapbox to lecture about the perils of drug taking, Tyler felt strongly that there was still an unhelpful resistance among anti-drug campaigners to admitting that drugs like ecstasy did, in the beginning, make a person feel great and that therein lay the seductive danger of hard drugs, leading in turn to devastating addiction. This message was promoted by the hit British movie
Trainspotting
, starring Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Ewen Bremner and Jonny Lee Miller. Steven admitted that he had almost turned off
Trainspotting
midway through, because the sordid life that the fictional heroin addicts led and the dire situations they got into on screen reminded him uncomfortably of real life desperate people he had come into contact with during the depths of his addiction, and the squalid, deadly places he had been forced to go to in order to score a fix. In March 1997, Steven featured in a US TV programme called
Heroin: High School High
that dealt with teenage heroin addiction. There always seemed to be something that, for good or ill, would make Tyler glance back over his shoulder at his past. In the band that spring there was also a general acknowledgement that in a strange sense they had had to melt down in order to have come back as strong as they had.