Martin Huxley - Aerosmith: The Fall and the Rise of Rocks Greatest Band

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The author would like to thank the following individuals, without whose advice, encouragement and/or support this project would have been an even bigger ordeal than it was: Jill Christiansen, Drew and Meryl Wheeler, Madeleine Morel, Jim Fitzgerald, Evie Greenbaum, Dave Dunton and Regina Dunton, Holly George-Warren, Ira Robbins, Maria Castello, Liane Hentscher, Jim Bessman, Keith Moerer, Kathy Gillis, Matt Sweeney, Jeremy Tepper, Cindy Toth, Michelle Freedman, Eric Ambel, Bruce Bennett, The Hound, Phast Phreddie Patterson, Bill Flanagan, Ted Mico, Jason Cohen, and Michael Krugman.

On August 16, 1991, Columbia Recordsthe flagship label of Sony Music, the worlds largest music-entertainment conglomerateput the brakes on several months worth of heated music-industry speculation by announcing the re-signing of Aerosmith. The deal, which would return the band to the label that was the scene of its groundbreaking commercial triumphs during the 1970s, immediately set entertainment-biz tongues fluttering. And with good reason.

Even in a business built on extravagance and overkill, one in which superstar record deals have scaled increasingly outlandish heights of financial excess, the new Aerosmith-Sony arrangement was a remarkable one. Although no financial specifics were officially disclosed, the six-album deal is worth a reported $30 millionimposing figures even by inflated nineties standards. Even more impressive was the fact that the contract wouldnt even take effect for several more years, since the band still owed at least two more studio albums to Geffen Records, the company that had helped engineer the bands multiplatinum late-eighties comeback.

In other words, Sony was paying megabucks, up front, for the privilege of releasing new Aerosmith product beginning in 1998 or so. By that time, Steven Tyler, the bands oldest member, would be fifty years old, and Brad Whitford, the youngest, would be forty-six.

Not bad for a band whose career had, just a few years earlier, been written off by most of the music industry as a hopelessly drug-devastated disaster area. In the space of two decades, Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, Brad Whitford, Tom Hamilton, and Joey Kramer had, against all conventional logic, succumbed to and survived virtually every imaginable rock-star pitfall, squandered untold millions on drugs, alcohol, and all manner of personal and professional indulgences, and somehow emerged from the ordeal miraculously intact.

The first decade of Aerosmiths recording career had seen the group spectacularly claw its way to the top of the rock world and fall from grace in equally epic fashion, collapsing in a bitter, drug-clouded haze that eventually left frontman Tyler and guitarist Perry, the bands visual and musical core, creatively bankrupt and financially strapped. Yet, with the original Aerosmith lineups re-formation in the mid-eighties, the group miraculously pulled itself together to reemerge not only clean and sober, but bigger andin the eyes and ears of manybetter than ever.

Our story was basically that we had it all, and we pissed it all away, Joe Perry said, looking back at the bands exploits from a nineties perspective. An all-too-common story in the temptation-filled rock world. The difference in Aerosmiths case is that they lost everything and somehow won it back.

We believed that anything worth doing was worth overdoing, Steven Tyler has said, and indeed, Aerosmiths personal and professional excesses effectively torpedoed the bands career. Now, they were reaping the bounty of a comeback that was equally over-the-top.

Under the circumstances, the line Youve got to lose to know how to win, from the bands immortal anthem Dream On, had a distinctly resonant ring.

In my mind I was always a rock star, Steven Tyler has said more than once, and that observation helps put his success into perspective. Indeed, if theres one consistent theme in Tylers career, its that relentless self-belief thats always driven him, even when his other vices left him at rock bottom.

It was only natural that music would be the vehicle for Stevens natural drive. Born Steven Tallarico in New York City on March 26, 1948 (though hes sometimes given his year of birth as 1952), he grew up in a middle-class family headed by his father, Victor Tallarico, a Juilliard-trained classical pianist whod performed at Carnegie Hall and who earned his living teaching music in New York Citys public school system. A generation earlier, Victors grandfather Giovanni was a cellist whod performed in chamber ensembles in some of Manhattans ritziest hotel ballrooms during the 1920s.

I grew up under the piano, Tyler recalled in a 1990 interview with Musician magazine. My father talked to me with his fingers, playing Debussy and Beethoven. He didnt talk to me much one-to-one as a human being, but Im glad he didnt. Thats where my emotion comes from.

Emotion was something that young Steven possessed plenty of. During a less-than-stellar academic career at Roosevelt High School in Yonkers, New York, the budding drummer and singerwho was frequently beaten up by bigger kids who called him Nigger Lips in honor of his already prominent mouthdisplayed the same curious combination of intelligence, imagination, and lack of discipline thats sent many an educational career down the rock n roll road.

With a distinct aversion to authority and a pronounced penchant for mischief, Steven was well on his way to low-level juvenile delinquency, joining a local gang called the Green Mountain Boys. (We were the Robin Hoods of Yonkers, he later recalled.) By his early teens, hed discovered marijuana and a variety of other forbidden substancesstill novel pursuits for a suburban high-school student during the first half of the sixties.

It was just that sort of extracurricular activity that eventually got Steven thrown out of Roosevelt High. They put a narcotics agent in our ceramics class, see, he told Rock magazine. He had the best weed around. He used to turn us on during lunchtime. Steven and his friends didnt learn that their new classmate was an undercover Putnam County deputy sheriff until a squad car showed up in the Tallarico familys driveway and the cops handcuffed the budding pothead right in front of his parents.

The bust landed Steven in court, wherewith the sort of persuasive panache that would serve him well later in lifehe sweet-talked the judge into reducing the charges and letting him off with a misdemeanor. The whole sordid affair got Steven expelled from Roosevelt High, and he ended his formal education at Quintanos, a private school for creative but unruly kids.

In a 1975 interview with Circus magazine, Tyler described Quintanos as a school for young artists, the kind of school you pay an awful lot of money to go but where you dont have to show up. I went to school three days out of five and wound up most of the time in the park with the chickie-doos. So I passed that with flying colors. That was the extent of my schooling.

As a teen, Steven spent his summers in the rural environs of Sunapee, New Hampshire, where his parents owned and operated Trow-Rico Lodge, a 360-acre summer resort. It was in Sunapee that he began channeling his creative impulses into performing in comic skits during Saturday-night talent shows at Trow-Rico and, more significantly, as drummer in his dads Lester Laninstyle swing band, with whom Steven played at a more upstate local hotel, the Sunapee Lodge.