Flushed with the success of their single, 'Love in an Elevator' and new album 'Pump', the seminal stadia rockers arrive in Britain for the first time in over a decade. Matt Smith talks to Steve Tyler and Joe Perry about their days before the rehabilitation clinic, when their cociane and heroin addictions led to band bust-ups, punch-ups and running up a hotel room service bill of over $80,000.
"0H MAN, YOU WANNA KNOW HOW BAD IT got? You want the worst example? I can't remember the worst example! That's the thing that sticks in my mind. It wasn't that it happened once and we all decided to quit--it happened tons of times. I can remember being cleared to go down the runway in a private plane, having a hit of drugs and suffering a huge convulsion and having to pull off the runway and get carried away by the police.
"Or one time when Steven passed out over a loaded shotgun in the woods or at the wheel of his jeep."
"Yeah, I'd been up for a few days and I was going off on another grand adventure with a gram in my pocket and I had a seizure. My foot snapped down hard on the gas and I drove off the road and into a tree. Then there was the time that Joe shot a shot a ... what are those little pills that make you itch? Codeine! He shot codeine and woke up in a doorway with the needle still sticking out of his arm. It didn't happen once, it happened over and over again. We've got plenty of near death experiences to tell you about."
By rights, Steve Tyler and Joe Perry shouldn't really be here. Certainly they've no real right to be as spry and entertainingly chatty. The text books say you kill off a few more brain cells every time you have a drink or a drug. The text books are obviously wrong, otherwise Joe and Steve would be something less thcn an amoeba by now, or, at the very least, working with Stock, Aitken & Waterman.
Keith Richards said that turning blue in someone else's bathroom was the height of bad manners. For most of the last two decades, turning blue, for Joe and Steve, has been a viable alternative to a suntan.
The name Aerosmith--which literally defined means one who plies his or her trade by air--couldn't have been a more apt choice. Aerosmith spent the whole of the Seventies up in the clouds with each of their names getting ever closer to the top of the guest list for heaven's gate.
Born out of the era of the last great rock festivals, when the Sixties' bands were consolidating their position and making it nigh impossible for new groups to break, they smashed through the barriers in a way that no group had done before and quickly set about cultivating an attitude that had previously been the sole prerogative of the biggest Hollywood film stars.
AEROSMITH were the first band to own mansions they'd never even seen, spend small fortunes on sports cars they were banned from driving, turn tour buses into mini-bordellos and have hotel extras--bills bigger than most people's mortgages. To pay for it all, they invented and pioneered a much-maligned concept--stadia-rock.
Ironically, the biggest-band in the States, the band that inspired every American group from Run to R.E.M. couldn't enjoy or even understand any of it--couldn't even recall recording the albums they were being given gold discs for. Basically, they were fucked out of their brains.
If Penelope Spheeris' "Decline Of Western Civilization" had been made just 10 years earlier, Joe knows that Aerosmith would have been the gross slobs polluting the pool with the bottle of vodka.
"I think we all had to go through all that. All that time I thought paying our dues meant living in our apartment together and eating brown rice. But that's like going to high school. It's paying your dues, but big deal, everybody does that. Paying our dues meant going through what we did in the seventies, and I wouldn't give that up for anything. The fact that we made it through that and we're doing this blows my mind.
NEITHER of them show many signs of the abuse. Joe has the finely chiselled features of a Greek god, while Tyler's face that melted a thousand hips is, in reality, not much bigger than a child's ball. It's still dominated by those Carly Simon lips that curl into a wicked grin every few seconds. Tyler has the wit of an adolescent kid and the ever-so-rude chuckle of an old uncle.
The day before, he'd wandered up to a fat old dame in the lobby of the Munich Hilton and whispered, "Tickle your ass with a feather!" As she slowly turned round fluffing up her feathers into a pique of upper-class fury, he repeated, "Particularly nasty weather!" and waltzed off grinninq ear to ear. Certainly the pair of them look far more human than the back cover photo of their 1975 album "Toys In The Attic", where their collective complexion looks like a week-old pizza that's been left in the ash can for two weeks while everyone stubs their cigs out on it.
"That was the stress of the road," Tyler says, laughing "We never knew enough just to stop touring. I'm telling you, when you're onstage in some of those holes and you're trying to climb out, it gets crazy. And if you think for a moment that you can go off somewhere or walk through a stream or do anything to change the picture, then you come back refreshed. But we never did that back then, we just stayed on the road and our vacation was in a little gram bottle.
"For example," Joe interrupts, "when we toured here last time all I can remember is hangovers and cleaning out that mini-bar over there and having another one sent up. Just drinking 'em down in one day and spending the days off in the hotel rather than going out and walking round."
Perry was once presented with a room service bill for $80,000--an achievement even our own wee Clerkie couldn't hope to better. Touring must be considerably cheaper these days, Joe?
"Well it isn't, cos we tend to qo shopping a lot more, spend all day walking up and down the high street."
"It used to get real crazy out there," Steven laughs, picking up the reminiscences. "When you consider that any given day starts at about 11, then you have to drive from the hotel to the airport, wait for the plane, sit on the plane for a couple of hours, drive to the gig, soundcheck, do the gig, drive back to the airport, sit on the plane, drive back from the airport to the hotel, go to bed at around 4 then get up and do it all over again. You do that every day and you go crazy."
Or hit drugs?
"Right. I mean I don't remember half of those Stateside tours, just little bits, like pulling into Allentown, Pennsylvannia, when you had no dope and you sure as hell weren't gonna find any."
What do you do in a situation like that?
"You call up Joe, but Joe would never give me anything he had."
"Oh bullshit," snorts Perry. "You didn't give any away either. In situations like that you get sick so you drink and you drink hard. You order bottle after bottle of jack."
"I had a motorcycle accident around 1980," Tyler continues, "and I used that as an excuse. Or limping into the surgery and saying, 'Doc it feels like the bone's coming through, can I have some Percadans'. That worked, but imagined, here I am, skipping across America hitting doctors' offices pretending to be a cripple. What goes on in your head? How can you go home and write records? You're full of shit."
"We began shooting cocaine as early as 1970," Joe says. "We didn't have the money to do it that much, but once a week we'd split a half a gram or something. I mean, we grew up in the Sixties."
BANDS like Aerosmith underwent a drug apprenticeship. They had to learn a drug etiquette for financial reasons, if no other. These days however, the changing nature of the business, where bands like NWA or Guns N'Roses can form one week and have a triple-platinum-selling album the next, means that they also have the financial resources to take them to within inches of an overdose every night.
"Yeah, but Slash was gettina high way before the band. But it is a scary thing," Steven concedes. "It can happen so quickly and easily."
"But you can kill yourself with drink if the desire is there," Joe explains. "With us it went hand in hand. The music business was so different in the Sixties and Seventies to what it's like now. Cocaine was a cool thing to do. It was okay to walk onstage and fall down. It was all part of the image. If this was the seventies, you'd have walked in with a gram of coke and we'd blow it before we started the interview. It's just so different now, which is good because everyone got it to excess."
THE new look Aerosmith only allow coke with a capital "C" at the interview table now and aren't particularly partial to alcohol being in the vicinity either. The word was that no beers were to be consumed during the interview and even the support bands on their UK dates have had official requests to keep any drinking to the privacy of their own dressing rooms. It may seem a tad hypocritical, but for Steve at least, it's a matter of life and death.
"When you shoot heroin, it goes in your brain and the synapses up there say, 'What the fuck is this?' It's like a club door and they open the door and say, 'Who are you?' 'I'm heroin'. 'l don't know who you are.' Then they change the card and it says it's morphine and the club doorman says, 'Okay, I know who you are, come in.' But after a while the body wears down and it won't let the drug in. So if I was to have a glass of Jack right now, my face would get red and I'd feel f***ed up and start shaking, cos I've worn out those transmitters that used to go YEE HA! They don't do that anymore. They close in and they go, 'Fuck you man' and you shut down, your heart stops and you turn blue like Joplin, Morrison and all the rest."
Room service arrives and, as it's closerto 15 Deutsche marks than $80,000. I offer to sign. In a clatter of bangles, Steve jumps up and scrawls 'Why not?" in the space for the signature and escorts the waitress out the room.
'What tipped it for me," Joe continues, laughing, "was dong a session with Rick Rubin and I was so jammed that I had to come back the next day and do it again. But it wasn't getting any better. It was insanity. Insanity is putting in the same information and expecting a different result."
THE rehab tour became the hardest Joe and Steven ever undertook, with more and more dates being added, as each successive clinic failed to cure them of their addiction.
"It took a hell of a lot of goes to get straight," Steven confides. "The first clinic I went to, I ran into the some problem that everyone has when they try to get straight. They know they should clean up cos then shit happens, but it's so hard to give it up cos when you're doing it, you find nothing wrong with it. And you think if you clean up they'll take away your genius.
"You make up all these excuses about how they're gonna brainwash you and how you're not gonna be the same guy. And you start to rely on all your emotions, but really it's the drug talking, cos you can't imagine living one day without heroin. I mean, seriously, I came to the conclusion that I wanted heroin every fucking day of my life."
Steve and Joe lost count of the number of musicians they ran into in the rehab clinics--Megadeth's Dave Mustaine was just one of them.
"Dave was in one of them in LA," Tyler confirms, but you meet people all the time. See, the beauty of the programme is that it's anonymous. You meet people who've 60 more clean days than you and you can see that it can be done. If I fell tomorrow, I'd go right back there and collect my Day One chip apain. But you go there and you talk about it instead of putting it all in a bottle and drinking it.
"I mean, I go to a meeting and it gets to my turn to talk and I scream,'Fuck. I can't cope. I can't go to clubs anymore, I can't fuck women, yet I wake up every morning and my dick is so long it's hanging off the bed'. You talk about it and you get home and if you really think about it, there's a song in there!
"The reason these quick cures don't usually work is cos the addiction is not in the longing for the drug, it's in the mentality. Joe Perry and I would go out and spend seven hours copping just a hit to get straight cos we're fucking Jonesing from heroin - seven fucking hours Godamnit! We turn round now and we put four hours into pre-production. We come out of there with two songs, one of which may be fucking great and be on the next album.
"So when you think about the energy you waste copping drugs and bullshitting people and sitting and talking with people you'd never have fuck all to do with--all that time you waste. And these are the little things you get glimpses of when counselors talk to you an they say, 'Man, if you just had a camera following you around you wouldn't do this'. But your mentality is such that it's etched into your card and you have to re-program it."
"I tell you," Joe interrupts. "I've always wanted to learn to fly and now I'm doing it. But there's no way I could have done that when I was drinking."
"Oh boy!" Tyler laughs. "You're talking to the first man, on the moon. When that guy was up there going, 'One small step for man' on the moon, Joe Perry's boot prints were all overthe fucking place!"
"AAAAW! Shit!" A nuclear-sized flash temporarily blinds the occupants of the Munich Olympia Hall and suddenly Joe Perry's boots are arching and backtracking round a stage 10 times bigger than my entire flat. To his right, Tyler is almost dressed in black catsuit slashed to the waist and shaking his ass like a $10 hooker. Even perched what seems like eight stories above the stage, the sound is fearsomely loud.
Down below, Aerosmith bear scant relation to the band that used to be so out of it, they'd play the same song twice. Tyler's fantastically lewd, cradling the mike stand like a love sick teenager during "Heart's Done Time" or fornicating with it ildly during "Magic Touch". Rehabbed and reconditioned, Aerosmith have also rediscovered the secret of their success--sleaze!
If Gene Simmons wrote a line like "I'm gonna stick my tongue right between your cheeks/I haven't made love for 25 weeks/But your so tight you're lovin squeaks," he'd very probably think it was art. Tyler concedes that half the stuff he comes up with is never released cos he's too embarrassed to sing it. Yet at a time when both Joe and Steve are at the most monogamous they're likely to get (both have new wives and Tyler has a little baby girl) they've come up with an LP that, from its cover shot of two International Harvester trucks screwing, to the subject matter within, is pure PORN.
"What you mean is how come the boys have cleaned up their act but they're still talking about tits and pussy," Tyler laughs.
Er, well, yeah, that's about the size of it.
'We have nimble wives," Perry offers.
"I've talked to lots of groups," Steve continues, "and the last thing they wanna do is clean up, cos they're frightened they'll sweep the devil out of their soul. But that ain't it at all. All it does is get the cobwebs out the way so you can really see what's going on and it's still tits and pussies! They tell you when you get out of the rehab to be careful about that thing with the other head!"
There's also more of the old grunge and slide to "Pump", something that was missing from the largely FM-oriented "Permanent Vacation". Joe agrees.
'Well we were kinda growing along. After we got ourselves back together we rediscovered what we liked about Aerosmith. We lost touch with that for a while. I was reading some old interviews in 'Circus' magazine and all we talked about was cars. We just got so swept up in all this bullshit."
NEVERTHELESS, most of the bands that lay claim to the Aerosmith crown, only see its glitter, don't really understand what it's forged from. Joe and Steven make no attempt to disguise the contempt in which they hold most of the LA lipstick and leather trousers hairstyle bands.
"It's like panning for gold, when it shines they think they've hit pay dirt and in a sense they have. They see our hair so they do it like that only they make it a little bit brighter and they ruff it up a bit more. But to be a real musician you have to do your homework, or not do it, but carve out a niche of your own."
"Pump" carves out a niche nicely in its use of exotic instruments. During the recordings of the album Joe and Steve met Randy Raine Reusch, a collector of East Asian pipes.
"This guy goes up and lives with these tribes in the mountains and they teach him how to make these weird things" Tyler explains. "Then Joe got this water-phone thing invented by someone called Richard Waters. It's like a metal vase with rods sticking out and you fill it full of water and swill them around a bit and you play it with a violin bow and that's the sound you hear at the beginning of 'Janie's Got A Gun'.
"Now I don't see Poison doing that, but I can see what they ripped off from us. They picked upon a style. I hear groups saying that they got their tuition from Dave Lee Roth and I laugh. You gotta go back further than that."
BY the time Dave Lee Roth's fledgling Van Holen supported Aerosmith at the 1979 California Jam Festival,the band had reached the pinnacle of their career. Over 350,000 paid to get in and another estimated 100,000 entered free of charge when the gates were stormed. By this time, however, heroin had not only eaten away Tyler and Perry's bodies, but their friendship too. Tyler shakes his head in horror.
"Gigs like the Cal Jam were blackouts. I remember arriving in a helicopter, ! was kinda drifting in and out, coming in at a 100 feet up and couldn't see the edges of the crowd and all I knew was that I was in the air, I couldn't make out why and the guys from Van Holen.. ."
"No, no," interrupts Joe. "That was a different show. Thatwas er, let me see now, Oakland."
'See!" says Tyler. "I can't even remember, they all blurred into one. There was a point where we used to see how high we could get and still make it through the show without keeling over."
Towards the end of the Seventies, Aerosmith used to finish the main set of their show with "Lightning Strikes". Deciding to open the show with the song one night, in their drug-addled state they completed the song, thanked a dumbfounded audience and ran off stage thinking they'd finished the gig. The same evening, Tyler fell off the; 18-foot high stage, broke his ankle but didn't feel a thing. However, as the drug intake increased Perry's head began to swell.
"My ego was starting to get way out of control. Everybody's was. It got to the polnt where our manager told me lwas in debt to the band for $100,000. I said, 'Fine, I'll make a solo album'. It was so dumb. I didn't need to make a solo album, plus Steven got offended."
"We never talked. I sat moaning at my old lady about him doing a solo record when I should have confronted him and maybe done a track on it." Steven said. "We were right in the middle of recording 'Night in the Ruts' playing to live in hotels when we had mansions around the cornder. We were all just totally fucked."
But there was worse to come. After a massive backstage punch up at a Cleveland stadium gig during which even the band's wives pitched in, Perry split. Steven still grimaces at the memory.
"It was a row about bullshit. We were so smacked out and drunk we played like shit onstage and didn't realise that the reason we played like shit was cos of the drugs. I was totally lost at the time. I couldn't write lyrics anymore and I was cancelling gigs cos I was doing too much opium and when you do opium you can't sing cos it fucks up your voice-box. All the pressures of the last 10 years, all the violence came out like a pressure hole exploding. I was bent out of shape, so I split to New York, got more drugs and got more f***ed up."
"It had taken us 10 years to get to that point," Joe says, shaking his head. "Ten years from sitting around partying, to that. I read now about good-time bands and these guys that enjoy a drink and that's just the way it started for us. When you first start doing it, you don't get hangovers, you don't puke blood, you don't turn blue and have convulsions, that comes later. It takes a long time to show its ugly head."
WHILE Perry went off to record the first of three solo albums and, in his own words "learn to drink real good" Tyler gave up chasing the dragon, with the result that it turned round and nearly extinguished him once and for all.
"I was living at the Gorham Hotel in New York, doing street bogs for $20 a whack. It was unfucking believable. I lived in that fucking hotel for a year and a half. Everything was fine as long as I had my dope and my sugar donuts."
Meanwhile, Jimmy Crespo was drafted in to replace Joe. The liaison lasted for two years and a surprisingly good album "Rock In A Hard Place", then promptly fell apart. Then one day Tyler got a phone call. The voice on the other end told him that Perry, obviously on his uppers like Tyler, was about to join Alice Cooper's backing band and that if the singer had any wits left about him he should stop such a travesty. At the time Perry was living on his new manager's couch after losing everything in a divorce case. A meeting was arranged and Tyler liked the set-up. The couch, of course, had to go.
"Tim Collins, our new manager, was great. He said we're back to zero again. Let's pretend all this shit is behind us and not look at it. Meanwhile he had 33 law suits sticking out of his back pocket. Most of them were from CBS and our old management. There were a few from ex-wives and the most ludicrous one from a woman claiming that she'd been punched by a stranger after they'd listened to an Aerosmith track, 'My Fist Your Face'."
A visit to the doc brought the surprise news that they were still alive, but only just. The band threw energies into getting straight and recording the "Done With Mirrors" LP.
"Man, we were trying so hard," Tyler drawls. "On the way from the hotel to the studio we'd go to the health food shop and stock up on all the drugs they had that were legal - valerium root and all different kinds of sleepless. But then we'd go home and get shit-faced at the weekends."
BY the turn of 1987, the battle was all over and Aerosmith were certified sane, clean and ready to rejoin rock'n'roll as long as they kept the accompanying lifesye on the shelf. "Permanent Vacation", the follow up to "Mirrors", was their biggest selling album in years and to celebrate their success they took it on the road--with Guns N'Roses. Joe and Steve's wives even had some Toxic Twins tee-shirts made up with a list of their hubbies' rehab clinics dates on the back. Perry tellingly gave his to Slash.
Their British dates this week are their first since 1977. The reason forthe delay is that even Tyler's elaborate system of hiding drugs-sewing them into the hem of tee-shirts, placing them in specially sewn folds of his scarves, or just sticking them under Band Aid plasters--would never have got past customs. For once, they can walk through that green channel without so much as a furtive glance to the side. For once there's nothing to declare save the sins of the past.
"It's a thing man," Tyler drawls in between sips of Perrier. "It brought is together and it ripped us apart. Anything that brings people together, be it cocaine or religion is gonna be used and abused. But cocaine will kill you in the end, cos it's a crock of shit. People reading this will thing, 'Who are Aerosmith to say don't do drugs?' Maybe they're right, but when they hit rock bottom they're gonna think, 'Why did I do that?' That's all."