21/12/2003

AEROSMITH--PARTY OF FIVE
SPIN
May 1997
by CHRIS NORRIS

Amid a frenzied backdrop of rehab rumors and intra-organizational turmoil, America's longest-running rock'n'roll soap opera is back. Chris Norris gets in the saddle.

Steven Tyler is getting blown onstage. He's also getting buffed, dabbed, brushed, and fluffed. A Dutch hairstylist blasts his bleached auburn mane with 2,000 watts of hot air, while a woman powders his nose and blots his cheeks. Finally, Tyler--in leather vest, floor-length Gaultier waistcoat, and $9,000 leather pants--is, as they say, ready to rock. He puts on a giant black top hat with a white bandanna wrapped around it. He perfects its placement in a circular mirror.

"Ohhhh, yeah," he says in a mock mack-daddy voice, then crumples his lips like an unimpressed Muppet.

We're in the dark, chilly interior of Los Angeles' old Herald Examiner building, a mammoth ink-stained cavern where Citizen Kane model William Randolph Hearst used to storm to the balcony and yell "Stop the presses!" Today, the room is dressed as a sort of postapocalyptic Art Nouveau theater, with torn shreds of clear plastic dangling down from the balustrade. It is here that Steven Tyler is preparing to strut, fret, and boogie his hour upon the stage.

Aerosmith is shooting the video for "Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees)," the horn-driven "Dude (Looks Like a Lady)"-ish single from their long-overdue first release for Sony, Nine Lives. The record is a rawly produced assertion of hard-rock supremacy, an attempt to fuse Aerosmith's '70s ragged glory with its '90s pop craft. And there under the lights are the classic dramatis personae: The colorful rag-draped mike stand. The stack of Marshalls. The 20 guitars. The smoke machine. Four years out of the game, as MTV Buzz Clips a tongue-pierced Brit with a reverse Mohawk, Aerosmith is launching a cock-rock counteroffensive.

Joe Perry leans back on his amp, savoring a cigar. His gray-tinged black hair spills over the lapels of his sash-bound cloak. I ask him if he's having a good time. "Yeah," he says softly. "It's okay." Tomorrow he'll mime his guitar solo suspended in a cage 30 feet above a crowd of fist-pumping extras. "The concept is kind of 12 Monkeys meets Brazil," explains the video's lanky, youthful director Michael Bay, auteur behind Bad Boys, The Rock, and ads for Levi's and milk. "This is maybe making fun of all these grunge videos. You know? Real angry, heavy, evil, with people beating things?" Bay is replacing Aerosmith's longtime collaborator Marty Callner, the man who made Alicia Silverstone and Liv Tyler prized nymphettes of the strip mall. Neither will be on hand today; the band is taking a new direction. "It's different from basic apple-pie Aerosmith," Bay says.

Not, apparently, that different. Before long, the models start to appear.

Dressed in pigtails, with a coat over her orange baby-doll dress, dancer Simony Monteiro, 22, sits up on the balcony, smoking a Marlboro Light and gazing down at the band. "On my callback I had to dance around a stool," she says. "And then I had to imitate homeboy himself on the mike. Do some kicks and stuff." She is a Tyler fan. "I fell in love with him actually," she says. "It was the 'Angel' video. That was the shit." She was 12.

Monteiro is among the first arrivals of a pulchritude squad that will include supermodels Angie Everhart, Isabelle Aubin, and several others dressed as nurses, dominatrices, princesses. "We're doing every male fantasy," costume designer Kelle Kutsugeras enthuses. "Yesterday we did the bride, whose dress gets ripped away. We also did the rubber sex nurse." Total babe count: 25. "We didn't do the teacher, because Van Halen already did that," Kutsugeras explains.

We're ready for a take. "With someone like Steven," Bay marvels, "you put the camera on him and you just say, 'Wow.' "

The smoke starts, the music blasts, and indeed "Wow"--or perhaps "Yikes"--is the unspoken sentiment as Tyler goes to work. He's hilarious. He does high kicks, he swings the mike stand, he grabs his crotch. He leapfrogs down the platform, straddles the mike stand, gives it a tango dip, humps it. Singing the lyric "My fantasize / It must be out of luck," he swings his head out and puts hand to forehead in a woe-is-me gesture. He 360s not once but twice, between lines.

"How old is he?" Bay asks Aerosmith's A&R man John Kalodner.

"49 in March."

"Jesus."

As the song builds to a climax, Tyler drops to his knees and leans back dramatically, singing--at full voice, not lip-synching--the final lines. He looks up to the heavens, holds his arms high overhead, and then, as the song crashes to a halt, falls back to the floor, completely spent--until the next take.

"Ladies and gentlemen," announces Bay, "that's a rock star."

Aerosmith is as close to Hollywood as rock'n'roll gets. There are the stars, the big budgets, the power meetings, the teams of writers, and the grand spectacle pumped up and aimed straight for the Heartland. In their 25 years, the Boston crew of Tyler, Perry, guitarist Brad Whitford, bassist Tom Hamilton, and drummer Joey Kramer have gone from being the definitive '70s hard-rock band--a textbook on economy, surliness, and soul--to the ultimate comeback band--brought back almost literally from the dead in the mid-'80s--to the most bankable act in popular music.

Today they are something different from just a rock band. They are the recording industry's fossil fuel, its Classic Coke. When Sony signed Aerosmith away from Geffen five years ago, it invested a rumored $30 million dollars in a band whose members would be nearly 50 when their contract finally kicked in. Still, it appeared a blue-chip investment. Not only did Sony's subset Columbia already own Aerosmith's back catalog, but the band had become an impeccably smooth hit-making operation, a hard-rock Boyz II Men, supplying junior proms, pickup trucks, and MTV with a steady stream of sexy power ballads, a form they minted with their 1973 FM staple "Dream On." Aerosmith's top-of-the-line operations team--videomaker Callner, producer Bruce Fairbairn, manager Tim Collins, and A&R great John Kalodner--were the best in the business, working tirelessly to make sure Aerosmith remained superstars. So dedicated is Team Aerosmith to releasing hit-filled albums that their pool of outside songwriters has ballooned to double digits. "As far as who writes the songs, man, it's like a football team," Hamilton explains. "It's not so important who passes the ball or who runs it in, it's that you get the touchdown." And, at $30 million, Sony would very much like to see Aerosmith get that touchdown.

But even before halftime, Nine Lives ran into trouble. During its making, rock's preeminent recovery heroes saw very public allegations of drug relapse. They temporarily lost their drummer when he succumbed to depression. They replaced Alanis Morissette producer Glen Ballard seven months into recording and began anew with producer Kevin (Silverchair, Journey) Shirley. Finally - and most significantly to the rumor mill--Aerosmith terminated, unamicably, a 12-year relationship with their manager and close friend Tim Collins. It was Collins who had taken a band ravaged by drug addiction, whose guitarists had both quit, who were quickly becoming record-industry pariahs, and helped turn them from belly-up junkies into well-toned millionaires.

Aerosmith's comeback is extraordinary, but even more remarkable is that the band has remained relevant. Current hard-rockers from Marilyn Manson to Pearl Jam grew up smoking their first joints and copping their first feels to a soundtrack of 1975's Toys in the Attic and 1976's Rocks. "I was just listening to Toys in the Attic the other day, in fact," says Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready. "And it was still like, 'Fuck.' And Rocks, man, that record. All that soul and emotion, and how they could transfer that to record--they were just a great band." Perry remembers another Seattleite's endorsement. "Kurt and Courtney dropped by after one of our shows and they were really nice," he says. "Mostly Courtney would do the talking. She'd go, 'Kurt really likes you guys, and he doesn't like anybody.'"

Cobain's endorsement bespeaks another aspect to Aerosmith's continued renaissance, one that has less to do with music. While rock's musical landscape has changed since the '70s, its drug landscape--with casualties that include the Smashing Pumpkins, Sublime, Depeche Mode, Stone Temple Pilots, Blind Melon, and Alice In Chains--has not. No rock artists were ever more publicly associated with substance abuse than "Toxic Twins" Tyler and Perry, and today Aerosmith stands as a bold experiment in music-business survival: the only artists in the world to have gone into recovery as a band.

While one might quibble with the Byzantine superstructure that maintains Aerosmith's pop life, the group itself remains an amazing organism. Perry is one of rock's great guitarists, more muscular than Keith Richards, less showboaty than Eddie Van Halen, and cooler-looking than either of them. Aerosmith is funky: Their honest and natural feel for black music is unparalleled in today's white rock bands. And, in terms of rhyming vulgarity, Tyler is practically protogangsta: "Walk This Way" lines like "that cheerleader was a real young bleeder" have not exactly aged into respectability.

Mercilessly chided in the early years as a grotesque exaggeration of the Rolling Stones, today's Aerosmith is, in a perverse way, much hipper--because they're an exaggeration. They're trashier, funnier, with no pretensions of aristocratic elegance. Indeed, Aerosmith is our Stones, and as such they're very nearly perfect: huge, loud, embarrassing, excellent--the ideal rock band to represent America.

Contrary to one filmic assertion by Spinal Tap's manager, Boston is a college town. But outside its relatively small circle of university enlightenment, it's also a town of vindictive politics, busing, and white-ethnic townies with unspectacularly progressive attitudes about race. Aerosmith are dignitaries here. They own the rock club Mama Kin (ominous drink name: the "Permanent Vacation"). They funded a controversial exhibition at a local museum when the N.E.A. cut support. They have their kids in local schools, and they shop at the mall. We drive down the Southeast Expressway to Aerosmith country--the bucolic South Shore neighborhood shared by Tyler, Perry, Kramer, and Whitford--the day after 7,000 New England Patriots football fans seeking playoff tickets got into an alcohol-fueled melee outside Foxboro Stadium, throwing punches at each other and bottles at the police.

After cruising past wintry brown forests and cranberry bogs, Perry and I pull up to the Tyler compound. The security gate to the walled enclave bears the imposing message PRIVATE PROPERTY: ALL TRESPASSING, FISHING, HUNTING FORBIDDEN. But the crackly voice that comes out of the intercom speaker sounds like a teenager's: "Hey! C'mon in." Inside, the grounds are a woodsy wonderland, with oversized animals--winged bears, eagles - carved out of massive blocks of oak, a small cave, a weeping pine tree, and a brook filled with goldfish. The door handles are two huge metal eagle's talons.

When we enter, Tyler, in sports jacket, blue jeans with black flames sewn up the legs, and rose-tinted glasses, is still buzzing from having seen Prince at Boston's Roxy the night before. The phone rings and he picks it up. "Oh, that's him," he jokes. "Yo, Formerly Known As!"

Steven Tyler was born Steven Tallarico, son of a second-generation Italian classical musician who played and taught music in Yonkers, New York. The Tallarico family also ran a resort in the gentile Catskills of Sunapee, New Hampshire, which is where Tyler and Perry--whose family had a summer house there--met. Both remain dedicated woodsmen, heading up to their Sunapee cottages whenever possible.

Pointing out the front window, Tyler shows me a sprawling cave-and-brook topiary garden, which he had seen at a horticulture exposition and purchased en masse. "When I look at that I think, 'Man, what a little bit of money will do,' " Tyler says appreciatively, turning to Perry. "He saw your house, right?"

"He was just outside," answers Perry. "You know, most of mine's on the inside."

Tyler laughs. "Well, you know, keeping with my personality."

Tyler's house is a rambling colonial affair, all smooth oak surfaces, rustic fixtures, and a home entertainment system with a subwoofer the size of a Volkswagen. Tyler shares this alpine palace with his second wife, Teresa, their kids Chelsea, 7, and Taj, 5, and some live-in friends. "There's Knuckles and Speedy," Tyler says, pointing to a birdcage as we walk into the pet room. "And that's Rosie," he says toward a rabbit cage. We walk past a large aquarium. "There's our shark," he says, pointing at a small, unmenacing fish. "And that's Dottie. Hi, Dottie," he says, waving to a brightly colored fish. "And we got an eel in there from hell."

We wander into the kitchen. "You going to make coffee or what?" asks Perry in his Boston twang as he jumps up to sit on the dishwasher. Tyler opens a drawer for his high-grade stash. "Got a little bit of Starbucks and, ah, Jamaican Blue Hills. Oooh. $30 an ounce. It's so druggish." He pours the beans into the grinder. "And speaking of Tim Collins," he non sequiturs, "the thing I really hate about him is...." Joking, he drowns himself out with the grinder's whine. We start to talk about the last two years' drama.

When Aerosmith began laying down basic tracks for Nine Lives in Miami--site of their drug-addled 1982 career nadir Rock in a Hard Place (the one with Stonehenge on its cover)--they did it without their trusty A&R man John Kalodner. Kaldonder had been with the band throughout the Geffen years, and his self-described "Wal-Mart ears" were largely the ones responsible for Aerosmith's chart rebirth. "If we're going to talk about the three most important A&R people in the last 30 years," says Columbia Records President Donnie Ienner, "John Kalodner's certainly one of them. He'll go down in history."

According to Collins, however, Tyler had expressed his increasing displeasure with the intrusive style of Kalodner, an old-school A&R guy who dresses daily like John Lennon on the cover of Abbey Road: beard, white suit, white sneakers, gold-rimmed specs. At Tyler's behest, Collins--reluctantly, he says--had Kalodner benched.

Glen Ballard, who had initially been brought on as a songwriter, was drafted as producer and, without Kalodner's stern hand, proved more indulgent of Tyler's obsessive tinkering and creative whimsy than their usual producer Fairbairn. Trouble proceeded apace when Joey Kramer, an essential element to the groove-based band, had to leave the sessions due to depression. His father having recently passed away, Kramer says he "fell into what I now refer to as my deep blue funk." He was replaced by studio drummer Steve Ferrone.

Soon, it started to get back to the band that Sony was not liking what it was hearing, that the rough mixes--due to either Kramer's absence or Ballard's aesthetic--did not sound like Aerosmith. "I think they were right," says Brad Whitford. "The other day I was listening to them and I just thought, 'Huey Lewis.' " Pressure began to wend its circuitous way from Sony through Collins to Ballard and the band.

In the midst of this corporate anxiety, Tyler's nightlife--hanging with the likes of Sly Stallone and Jack Nicholson--began to concern Collins, one of the industry's most outspoken antidrug crusaders and an ex-addict himself. To him, Tyler was not exhibiting the outward signs of an industrious and sober worker. "We went down to Florida and I never had such a good time in my life," says Tyler. "I was out on the beach Rollerblading with all these girls with no tops. In fact, I'm sure Tim Collins saw People. There were some pictures in there with girls feeding me grapes." The band was pulled back to Boston, and Collins began to voice his suspicions of a relapse.

With this mounting pressure, Aerosmith's creative team found itself suffering from the heavy-metal phenomenon known as communication breakdown. "I was hearing Tim saying, 'Steven's using drugs, he's using drugs,'" recounts Perry. "Meanwhile, I'd drive to the studio every day with him and we'd spend the day talking and working. I think I know what a drug addict looks like."

The powerful ideology of 12-step recovery--whose first step is admitting one is helpless--had been a major control mechanism in the Aerosmith system for ten years. Members of the crew on the clean-and-sober Pump tour speak of undercover "Aerocops"--they might be lighting guys, chefs, accountants--whose covert assignment was to patrol for drug or alcohol use. It's possible that, as one of Collins's managerial tools, recovery think had turned Orwellian.

"We'd gotten into this really sick mode where if somebody was showing behavior that wasn't 'recovery behavior,' then they needed to go someplace and get recalibrated," says Hamilton.

Tyler's co-songwriter and friend Mark Hudson, of the '70s TV variety series The Hudson Brothers Show, attests that recovery culture often mandates a preternaturally calm and passionless way of being. "No one thinks about the stress factor," says Hudson, clean-and-sober himself. "You're supposed to be super-relaxed all the time."

"People expect us to go to mass every Sunday," says Perry. "They're like, 'So, are you guys vegetarians now?'"

Let's just say that Tyler is not naturally inclined in those directions. Throughout Aerosmith's history, the band's flamboyant singer has been given to rather picturesque states of upset. The most scandalous episodes are recounted in his ex-wife Cyrinda Foxe-Tyler's tell-all Dream On--with its allegations of wife beating, child neglect, and poor housekeeping--but even the less personally aggrieved will attest that Tyler often exhibits behavior that bears more than a passing resemblance to that of a certain fictional rock band. One that also made use of Stonehenge imagery.

"I'd swear those Spinal Tap guys were at half our meetings," says Whitford. "The funniest thing is, the first time Steven saw it he didn't see any humor in it. That's how close to home it was. He was pissed! He was like, 'That's not funny!'"

One oft-told tale concerns overturned food tables and smashed glass bottles, retaliation for having received processed turkey rolls when the tour rider had specified "on the bone." "You know, you're successful, the places are selling out, and you walk into a room and it's full of sham and scheiss," says Tyler. "It's an insult. I take it personally. I know I'm not supposed to, but I'm working on it."

As volatile a studio presence as the driven, perfectionistic Tyler always was, in this tense and frustrating environment, he was becoming impossible. The band's longtime recovery guru Bob Timmins suggested a course of action. His grand notion? That these four bandmates of Tyler's--who had known him for two decades, who been through hell and back with him, who lived five minutes from his house--should write him a letter. The proposed missive contained 12-step-ish phrases about "changes" and "getting the help you need." It was not exactly well-received. Wounded by the officious, intervention-like tone, Tyler fired a furious memo back. The band was in a civil war.

So at this crucial impasse--five months into recording, their drummer AWOL, the brass grumbling, and a band mutiny imminent--Aerosmith did what any high-powered business would do in a crisis. They went on a corporate retreat.

At Timmins's suggestion, the five band members checked into Steps, a renowned California drug-treatment center. This certainly didn't help quell rehab rumors, but Perry insists it was simply a good place for conflict resolution.

"This sort of thing did in our band in the '70s and we were not going to let that happen again," he says. "And this is what you do instead of breaking up: You get together, find a qualified guy to help mediate, and improve your communication. It's not a lot of voodoo. If Guns N' Roses and Van Halen had done the kind of work that we did, they could still be together making great records."

At Steps, the band decided the problem was that the key man in their million-dollar superstructure had effectively turned against them. A final straw, Tyler says, was that Collins had called Tyler's house and told his wife that he had been screwing around. "After that, I just couldn't sit in the same room with this man." Collins will not comment on this.

In July, the band met with Collins at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston and, they say, didn't fire him, but--the wording is important here - "asked him to honor his previous offer to step down as [their] manager." They replaced Collins with Collins's VP, Wendy Laister, previously a publicist. Shortly after the meeting, Collins leaked his relapse suspicions to a reporter at the Boston Globe in the form of the unsubtle phrase, "There's a certain element in the group that hasn't totally chosen sobriety." Collins then told Rolling Stone that he could tell Tyler was using "by looking into his eyes," and Aerosmith was under siege. "I got at least a hundred letters that said stuff like, 'You sonofabitch! My daughter is back on drugs because of you,' " says Tyler.

Everyone in the Aerosmith camp--Kalodner, Shirley, Hudson, the crew, the lighting guys--considers the relapse allegations absurd. "I was living in his room in Miami, I'm his best friend," says Hudson. "Believe me, I'd know. If you have a personality like Steven Tyler's, you're not going to go out and be casual. If you start using, you're going back, motherfucker."

"Tim had preconceived opinions about controlling the band," says Tyler. "And when you get sober, after a certain amount of time you need to be able to form your own opinions. A lot of the lyrics from this album are directed toward a kind of lid that was on our jar. I don't like that. It's not what I got sober for."

With the band back in Boston, Ienner had Kalodner rejoin the team. Checking the rough mixes, Kalodner decided they sounded "like a really interesting Steven Tyler solo record" and scrapped them. Since Ballard also had looming commitments to Van Halen, Morissette, and his own label, he was released, and the band hired producer Shirley, a rough'n'ready Aussie--pronounced "Ozzy"--whose studio approach was antithetical to Ballard's. "I'd heard the whole Ballard record," says Shirley. "And I thought it was a piece of shit. It just didn't reflect their raw edge." Kramer, recovered, returned to the drum stool. The band reassembled in New York City and, in nine weeks, cut Nine Lives.

The record begins with a bashing drumbeat soundalike of Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll," a fitting battle-cry. Despite the occasional veneer of trendy low-fi sonics, and one song ("Attitude Adjustment") that sounds jarringly like Alice in Chains, Nine Lives vibes heavily on old-school Aerosmith. There's a guitar intro to "Hole in My Soul" right out of "Dream On," some crazy-jazzbo scatting, and patented Tylerisms like "don't give me no lip / I got enough of my own." There are at least three prom-ready slow jams--"Hole," "Full Circle," "Kiss Your Past Goodbye"; one funny rave-up--"Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees)"; a Beatlesque rhapsody ("Pink"), and several flat-out rockers. All this and orchestral arrangements by Beck's dad, David Campbell. It would appear that Aerosmith--and Ballard, Hudson, Desmond Child, Dominic Miller, Marti Frederiksen, Greg Wells, Dean Grakal, Taylor Rhodes, Richie Supa, and Steve Dudas (the full list of songwriters)--came through with the product. Team Aerosmith is operational after all.

But is it a rock band? Some might find it hard to imagine just how these Detox Twins, their clean-and-sober rhythm section, and this elaborate system of checks and balances are still connected to some sort of authentic rock expression. Is the raucous groove band of "Back in the Saddle" truly the same one that croons "Amazing"? Are their hearts really in this pop-rock fluff?

Their answer is, What fluff? All members of Aerosmith take issue with the Whitesnake-ian term "power ballad." "Oooh," winces Hamilton. "Power ballads. I think of that as a Spinal Tap sort of thing, a survival mechanism for '80s hair-bands." Kalodner defends the band's stock-in-trade as simply an honest and craftsmanlike response to the current pop landscape.

"'Cryin'' is not a ballad," he says. "Same with [Nine Lives'] 'Full Circle.' They're big mid-tempo pop-rock singles. Sure, they're not rockers, but I wouldn't call 'Black Hole Sun' a rocker either. What band sells albums with songs like 'Walk This Way' now? Even alternative-rock bands don't do that nowadays."

But don't all these outside song doctors augur a switch from rock band to pop unit? Kalodner says no. "How they make music may be a little different, but we'll see how Soundgarden does after they're around for 20 years."

Indeed, Aerosmith's loud and vital presence in contemporary music is quite anomalous among their '70s peers. Imagine new records from Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, or AC/DC as rival chart presences. Not even Aerosmith's full-lipped English corollary can boast such continued vigor.

"Aerosmith sell ten times as many records as the Rolling Stones," says Kalodner. "The Stones are still one of the great bands in history. But their records aren't great anymore." Although he was furious at Kalodner's initial suggestion to try writing with an outsider, Tyler now defends the practice as fun. "It's a joy to sit down with someone who's good and just, you know, converse," says Tyler. "It's kind of like if you were German, you would seek out people that also spoke German."

According to Perry, Aerosmith's hit jones is a pride thing, not a money thing. "I want to hear my shit on the radio," he says. "Not so much because it's going to make Sony happy, because it makes me happy. We don't want to make a record that three-quarters of the world is going to snub their nose at just so I can jerk off and play guitar solos. The biggest thrill is driving around and hearing your song on the radio between Led Zeppelin and the Stones. That's what we fucking got in this for."

Back at the shoot, Tyler is standing in biker shorts, a blue V-neck stretch shirt, and blue toenail paint. An assistant is lacing him up quite tightly into a pelvic truss. "Wow, Mike, that feels good," he cracks as the Tyler gene line is imperiled. There's a whiff of patchouli and a glimpse of a hairless chest as Tyler takes off his shirt to put on his costume: a straitjacket. I ask if this is a new experience for him.

"That's one of those journalistic questions," he asides to the makeup girl, then busts a Homeric "Doh!"

"No," he says at last. "I never got that bad." He heads over to the padded cell.

In terms of pure black comedy, there's something almost sublime about the arc of self-destruction that Aerosmith took in the late '70s, a long, spiraling fuck-up that went from "Brompton's cocktails"--booze, coke, and morphine in a Southern Comfort bottle--to Tyler snorting blow in the middle of interviews, to Tyler spending most of a recording session stoned in a convent tower picking off local fauna with a shotgun. Among the apocrypha from that era is a concert in which the band decided that, for a little change of pace, they'd open that night with their encore number. After they got through it, Tyler looked out at the crowd, raised his hand, said, "Thank you! Goodnight!" And left the stage.

I ask Tyler what he was going through at the time. "Twenty-dollar bag every day," he replies. He was living in New York's Hell's Kitchen, while Rock in a Hard Place was stiffing and Perry was considering whether or not to join Alice Cooper. Rock bottom for Tyler was a drunken motorcycle accident in 1980 that took off his heel and laid him up for six months in a hospital, where he had what alcoholics refer to as a Moment of Clarity. "In the middle of my morphine haze, I was watching TV and I saw Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth jumping around and I thought, 'What the fuck is this?' They're a great band, but coming from an ego place with Aerosmith, I thought, 'We've got to get the fucking band back together.'"

Perry, meanwhile, was calling Collins's couch his main residence. "I was about $300,000 in debt," he says. "I was always going to court for drunk and disorderly, driving to endanger, nonpayment of child support. I would gather up my beer cans and trade them in to get more beer money. And this is after being in Aerosmith. Platinum records on the wall."

Unlike Kiss, Aeromsith do not exactly consider the late '70s a period they'd like to revisit. Under a gray Boston sky, Perry, Tyler, and I climb into the band's Ford Explorer to retrace what Perry dubs "the Freedom Trail according to Aerosmith." We drive by the old Boston Garden, where the early band used to practice, occasionally running into professional wrestlers like the 601-pound Haystacks Calhoun, who shared the space. We pull up next to the Tower Records where Aerosmith have a star in the sidewalk. Currently, though, a black, middle-aged homeless man is standing on it--singing, playing blues harmonica, and panhandling.

We drive off, past Boston University, where Aerosmith used to practice and bum-rush the dining hall. We drive by the old Stop & Shop where Aerosmith used to practive and bum-rush the dining hall. We drive by the old Stop & Shop where they used to steal steaks. I ask Steven what he was doing to make ends meet in those days.

"Nothing," Tyler says. "I just did a whole lot of nada."

"He was a gigalo," says Perry. "He had all these rich girlfriends."

"No, they never had any money," Tyler insists. "But this one girl made me dungarees and tops for the stage. ANother sewed little decals on my pants. Look--I haven't come too far, have I? Now it's leather flames, leather lightning bolts. But back then it was butterflies."

At last, we pull up to an apartment building at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue, the early '70s Aerosmith clubhouse where all five members shared the same room--writing songs, sleeping on the floor, eating brown rice and vegetables--for three lean years.

"Wow! Check it out, Joe!" Tyler exclaims as we look up at the squat building's facade. He zips up his ski jacket and opens the car door. "I'm going to take a pee in the back."

While Boston's most famous resident shares his love for the city, Perry begins musing about the early days, when he dropped out of prep school at the height of the Vietnam War and moved here with Tyler, Hamilton and a mission. The first song of their debut album would be called "Make It."

"Any time you trade your art for money, it's a fucking tightrope walk," says Perry. "You always got to be ready to make compromises. I know some musicians in Boston that never compromised. More power to 'em. I kind of like the way we're doing it."

A month later, in his gold record-lined office in Cambridge, Tim Collins will try to impress on me the significance of this strange band. "I believe that Aerosmith is a national treasure," he'll say. "There's a depth to Aerosmith, there's a meaning to Aerosmith. From their first hit, 'Dream On'--'dream until your dreams come true'--there's a message of hope. From the first time I met them and, before, growing up in Boston...they were gods. I mean, there's great musc, but the message also has so much depth. They cared, you know?"

The orange light of the sun is almost gone. We get back in the car and move off into the Boston night. Like stoned junior high students, Tyler and I sit in the backseat and limn the way-deep lyrics of "Dream On."

"It's like, 'Every time that I look in the mirror,'" he says. "'All the lines in my face getting clearer'..."

In the fading light, the opposite is happening: Tyler resembles nothing so much as a strange, huge-lipped, intense-eyed 18-year-old.

"'...The past is gone,'" he continues. "It went back like dusk to dawn.'"

We sit and ruminate.

"That's not so profound," he says. "Yet it is. Everything in life is, yet it isn't. You ever find that?"

I guess so.

"The older you get, you're going to find out that what is, isn't and what isn't, is. I mean, it just is like that. And tomorrow, it won't be."

Whoa...I think I get it.
Bá :: 1:57 AM
comente ::