Steven Tyler: The Biography (11 page)

According to Cyrinda, this marriage was doomed from the start. Instead, she spent a great deal of time with the Perrys and had a ringside view of the tense triangle that Steven, Joe and Elyssa made up. Attraction ricocheted all over the place, mingled with rife jealousies, rampant insecurities and drug-induced paranoia. Amid these crazy head-games, however, she continued to be drawn to Steven, and in autumn 1977 she and David Johansen split up.

To Steven, Cyrinda was not only ravishingly lovely, he adored her independence and, perhaps significantly, her continued resistance to his approaches. It drove him mad, and the chase was on. Flattered by Tyler’s persistence and unable to resist his roguishness, Foxe eventually succumbed and they finally became an item towards the end of 1977. One upshot of Cyrinda switching her allegiance between frontmen was that she and Elyssa Perry fell out. Rightly or wrongly, Elyssa felt that Cyrinda had struck up a friendship with her simply as a device to get close to Steven. Tyler must have felt that he had been here before. Bebe Buell had felt unwelcome among the band members’ wives - now Cyrinda and Elyssa were at odds. It went rather deeper than the two women simply not talking, however, for those close to Aerosmith could see the tension between Elyssa and Cyrinda becoming absolutely unbearable. Joey Kramer once declared that it felt like they were caught up in a real life soap opera.

There is no doubt that Steven was aware of the discord his having this very beautiful lady at his side was causing. Cyrinda
was
stunning, had a vibrant personality that drew the eye of all those around and so, by extension, this made her and Tyler the ‘it’ couple, snatching attention away from Joe and Elyssa. Tyler also knew that this only widened the chasm between himself and Joe.

For Cyrinda, on a personal footing, things did not get off to the start she had imagined. Her vision of life with Aerosmith’s famous frontman was very different from reality. When she went with Steven to Boston she had anticipated moving into a beautiful, well-staffed luxury home. In truth, his home in the Brookline suburb dismayed her, and at all hours of the day drug dealers and other unsavoury types came visiting. While Steven could be extremely tender and loving, other times their relationship was volatile. Cyrinda called herself ‘high maintenance’ and she was not able or willing to become a domestic goddess. There were occasions when she would come home and find Steven passed out on the floor. Unsurprisingly, there were moments quite early on when she wondered if she had made the right decision in getting involved with him. Nevertheless, in spring 1978, the couple moved to Lake Sunapee, where Steven’s dream house was still under construction.

Steven could not stay long at the lake, for a mini-tour of America loomed, plus appearances at several major festivals throughout the year. The first of these was on 18 March, when Aerosmith headlined at the California Jam II Festival, held at the Ontario Motor Speedway in California in front of an estimated 350,000 people. Other acts included Ted Nugent, Santana, Heart and Jean Michel Jarre. By the time Aerosmith took to the stage, Steven was so stoned on cocaine that he had to have the lyrics to his own songs written out on pieces of paper scattered around the stage. This performance would become infamous in Aerosmith’s history, but worryingly for Steven his health was so badly compromised by his drug use that he was having difficulty breathing. In a bad physical and emotional state, Steven again ruined the backstage buffet for everyone, picking up plates and bowls of food and violently smashing them against walls.

From sinking to hideous nadirs, Tyler’s seesaw world bounced up again weeks later when Cyrinda discovered that she was pregnant. Steven must have known that he was in no condition to contemplate fatherhood, but this news so excited him that he proposed to his girlfriend - the whole routine, going romantically down on one knee - and this new state of affairs had a calming effect on him for a while.

In April, ‘Kings and Queens’ became the second single released from the new album but it quickly stalled at number seventy. As summer approached, Aerosmith was swinging between extremes - playing in massive arenas, then performing in small intimate clubs, sometimes under assumed names. There was no hiding place, however, at either size of venue. On stage, Aerosmith had become shambolic. One of the worst examples of this was on 4 July, when the band took part in the Texxas World Music Festival, held at the Cottonbowl in Dallas. The mercury that day had hit well over one hundred degrees in the shade, and dehydrating music lovers were on the verge of hallucinating, though very few of them missed the disastrous state that Aerosmith was in.

Tyler recalled: ‘It starts off, you have a great gig and you go out and buy a gram and you get fucking shit-faced that night. You go out next day and play. Then we started getting shit-faced
before
we played. Then we were shit-faced
all
the time.’ That particular day at the Cottonbowl, Steven was so drugged that he had to be physically carried to the wings and propelled out on stage, where he was barely able to move a muscle of his own accord. He was in a frighteningly desperate condition. Because of the cocaine consumed by the others, the music was played far too fast, making it an even more surreal experience for a frontman who was barely holding it together enough to stay standing upright.

Twenty years later, when the band had cleaned up, viewing footage of this 1978 event proved painful. Tom Hamilton recalled: ‘Our music was the battered neglected child of that behaviour, and it’s pretty sickening.’ Tyler was losing his grip all round and he could not see it. He had arrived at the point of believing he could not function personally or professionally without drugs. He would get high and drunk to go out to a club or the cinema and the next day he would have absolutely no recollection of what he had been up to. It left him very vulnerable and it took him to new places. Years earlier, he had shoplifted food to keep himself and his bandmates from starving to death. Now, as a drug addict, he started thieving again. He has confessed: ‘After a while, I started stealing and stuff. You take drugs initially to be with the devil and to be creative and it works, for a while but then he [the devil] goes: “Now, I’m going to steal your soul.” And he does!’ He added: ‘Drugs raped my spirituality in the early days and I didn’t see that it was hurting me.’ In so many ways it was extremely sad for fans to see this unique frontman reducing himself to a shuffling wreck.

At one concert on America’s west coast, the show had hardly warmed up when Steven decided that he had had enough of singing and promptly hunkered down on stage and began to tell rambling, unfunny jokes, for which he forgot the punch-lines. As the audience grew angry, Tyler’s bandmates tried to shunt him back on track by blasting into a song intro but Tyler would not be motivated. He ordered the music to stop, as he wanted to keep on telling jokes. It became quite mad. Lines of cocaine would be laid chopped out on top of amps at the back of the stage for people to have a swift snort between numbers. The tempo of Aerosmith shows often became either too fast or too slow, and the audiences really would have had to be as seriously stoned as their heroes to have a hope in hell of enjoying these spectacles.

There were exceptions, nights when Steven and the band’s performance proved inspirational to future rock stars, among them British-born teenager Saul Hudson, who later became famous as lead guitarist Slash, in Guns N’ Roses. Said Slash: ‘My first Aerosmith concert was in 1978. They were playing at a festival. They were incredibly loud and I barely recognised a note but it was still the most bitchin’ thing I had ever seen. Anyone who sings needs to be exposed to Steven Tyler.’

Drugs rightly take the blame for almost every aspect of Steven’s bizarre or excessive behaviour, but his natural impish-ness also played a part in a prank he pulled off that year when Aerosmith flew for the first time on a 747 jumbo passenger jet. Someone bet him that he would not have the guts to strip naked during the flight and run upstairs into the lounge deck. The money on offer was a few paltry dollars - it was a test of whether he would have the barefaced cheek to do it. And he did. The way Tyler tells it, he also did it almost without being nabbed, for after streaking along the lower deck and hiking upstairs into the lounge, he was on his way back to base before a startled stewardess had the dubious task of tackling him.

It was the sort of daft antic more associated with one of the Beatles’ 1960s screwball comedies and, funnily enough, earlier that year Aerosmith had accepted the offer to play a small part in the Michael Schultz-directed film,
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. Produced by Robert Stigwood for Universal Films and written by Henry Edwards, the movie, based on the Beatles album and set against small-town America, starred Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees, Alice Cooper and Earth, Wind and Fire, alongside actors Donald Pleasence, Frankie Howerd and Steve Martin. Aerosmith’s role was as the Future Villain Band, and they shot their scenes over three days in California. The film’s daily rushes showed up to an embarrassing degree that everyone in Aerosmith was drugged to the eyeballs on set, but Tyler maintained: ‘We liked making the movie. I guess it was in line with our image.’ When the movie was released that summer it was comprehensively slaughtered by the film critics and bombed at the box office.

The
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
film soundtrack reached number five in America’s album chart and it included Aerosmith’s version of ‘Come Together’. Tyler was excited at recording with producer George Martin, and at the Wherehouse facility in Waltham, Massachussets, it took several takes to complete the session. In their fledgling days, Aerosmith had belted out the odd Beatles hit at gigs, so recording this song came naturally to them. Steven purposely did not dig out a copy of
Abbey Road
to study the Fab Four version of the 1969 number, preferring to perform the song for George Martin as he remembered it. According to Tyler, the man famously dubbed the fifth Beatle remarked upon the finished take: ‘Fucking great!’ Aerosmith released ‘Come Together’ which peaked in summer at number twenty-three.

Gigs continued to be haphazard affairs. In early August, Aerosmith performed at Giants Stadium in New Jersey. By now, Steven’s extreme exhaustion had hollowed out features that were already accentuated by dark-ringed eyes. Tens of thousands of fans in this impressive arena gazed dismayed at revealing close-ups of the ravaged frontman shown on huge stage-mounted screens. Whether or not they were trying to tell him something, the missiles aimed at Tyler’s emaciated frame this time included unravelling toilet rolls.

When Aerosmith staggered off tour, on 1 September 1978, Steven and Cyrinda got married in Sunapee, New Hampshire. For the non-denominational ceremony, held outdoors on a mountainside, Steven wore a cream suit, while his five-months pregnant bride chose patterned silk chiffon. They were surrounded by their families and friends and Steven’s bandmates, and the sun shone bakingly down. Tyler once flashed that he married Cyrinda because she and Elyssa Perry hated each other, but if that had been meant tongue-in-cheek, he did admit that he went into marriage with only half a mind to make it work. He knew, with his drug and drink addictions, that he was not ideal husband material. Steven was, though, excitedly anticipating the birth of what he believed to be his first child, although Liv by Bebe Buell was at that stage a fourteen-month-old toddler. Asked about his and Cyrinda’s expected child, Tyler said: ‘I guess I would like it to be a boy, but most important, I want it to be a healthy baby.’

Within a month, the newly married Tyler was back out on the live circuit. Aerosmith quickly ran into controversy at a gig at a sports arena in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in early October, when dozens of fans were arrested for defying no-drinking and smoking rules. Aerosmith stepped in and paid bail money to release the teenagers from custody - a sum which ran into several thousand dollars.

Tyler’s lack of sobriety continued to be a curse. More often now the singer had to be assisted not just to the wings, but right on stage. They tried to make it look like people were just messing about for a laugh, but on these occasions Tyler was literally unable to walk on his own two feet to the microphone. Nor was it unheard of for him to be discovered dead to the world in his dressing room very close to show time. It was a nerve-racking business for those charged with the task of having frantically to find ways of stirring Steven awake and getting him compos mentis enough to at least try to get through a performance. Amazingly, if he did remain upright, some performances came off not too badly. Once Steven had rifled through the pockets stitched into the scarves tied to his mike stand for cocaine, one hit and he was off.

It could have been cocaine-induced paranoia, but there were nights on stage when Steven would launch into ‘Dream On’ - a special song to him - and he would catch sight of Joe seemingly exchanging a look with Elyssa standing in the wings before bursting out laughing. Sensitively, Steven took this to mean that they were laughing at him; true or not, it hurt him very much.

In late November, Aerosmith played Madison Square Garden, then returned to the stage at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, where last time an explosive device had injured Steven’s eye. At first it seemed that lightning would not strike twice, but the show had hardly warmed up when someone hurled a bottle from the crowd. It hit one of the sound monitors at the front of the stage and shattered, throwing splintered glass up like shrapnel. Brad Whitford recalled: ‘Pieces of glass literally went through Steven’s cheeks and into his mouth.’ Steven was bleeding profusely and once again the show had to be abandoned.

That month, the last single from
Draw the Line
was released, but ‘Get It Up’ failed to measure up and did not chart. By now a double live set,
Live! Bootleg
, had been released, comprising sixteen songs recorded at Aerosmith concerts during 1977 and 1978. Steven knew full well that some fans were surreptitiously taping their performances and that several bootleg recordings were already in circulation. The title
Live! Bootleg
was meant to be ironic. The double album charted on Billboard at number thirteen, and
Creem
magazine reviewer Billy Altman declared: ‘What
Live! Bootleg
makes clear, as it highlights the best of their past work, is that Aerosmith really is one of the best hard rock bands the US has ever produced. I don’t think they set out to be an important group, had no great message to get across, no big causes to champion. They just want to be one hot rock band.’