Steven Tyler: The Biography (13 page)

A strange period followed when both Perry and Aerosmith talked the talk about moving on and found new recruits to help that process along. Yet Steven and Joe kept casting a glance at, and a line to, each other. The umbilical cord between the ‘twins’ could not seem to snap irretrievably, and the fans clearly did not want that to happen either.

In preparation for recording his first solo album, Joe and his band rehearsed at the Wherehouse in Waltham, jointly owned by the Aerosmith members. Graffiti on the outer walls of this warehouse left Joe in no doubt that Aerosmith fans wanted him back in the fold, pronto. Indoors, knowing that his ex-bandmates would show up on other days, Joe left handwritten messages lying around for them - provocative messages at times, but still a means of keeping some dialogue going between the two camps. And Joe was not prepared to put up the slightest pretence of being pleased that just as he had moved on, so seemingly had Aerosmith by hiring his replacement. Joe secured a solo recording deal with Columbia Records and set to work with producer Jack Douglas on an album at New York’s Hit Factory studio.

By the end of the year, Aerosmith with Jimmy Crespo had returned to live performance, playing dates around the east coast. Tyler was falling apart. On occasions he was too bombed to read the lyric sheets strewn around the stage, and frequently had to seek some physical support even to stay upright. During one performance he dropped like a bag of bones to the floor, was helped off stage only to return soon after, having been given oxygen backstage. The restless, disappointed fans were barely settling into the restarted show when Tyler again lost the plot mid-song. He then crowned this shambolic display by taking a spectacular header right into the crowd, having blacked out. Although he was clearly not in any condition to be performing live, the shows continued, and in January 1980, Steven collapsed in public again - this time during a gig at the Civic Center in Portland, Maine. Tyler was too drunk to perform that night, but not so pie-eyed that he did not realise that he would not get away with just staggering backstage where there were people ready to push him back out on stage. So he pretended to pass out and stayed prone on the floor despite sustained attempts to rouse him. This looked worse than anything Aerosmith fans were sadly becoming used to seeing, and when Tyler was carted off stage that night it was show over and the disappointed, short-changed horde filed quietly out.

When Aerosmith resumed their gigs, Tyler managed to stay on stage for the entire performances, only to be confronted with agitated fans yelling for Joe Perry. Jimmy Crespo, who stayed apart from the substance abuse, was playing fine lead guitar work for a band that was struggling to hold it together. He would have been fully entitled to feel aggrieved at these increasingly voluble cries from the crowds for his predecessor’s return.

That spring, Joe released his debut solo album,
Let the Music Do the Talking
, which peaked at number forty-seven on Billboard just as he launched his first tour with the Joe Perry Project. To all intents and purposes, this looked like living proof that he and Steven had each definitely taken a separate fork in the road. On the promo circuit for Aerosmith, Tyler was frequently quizzed about his feelings on this split. Steven maintained that he could appreciate Joe wanting to explore this solo path, insisting that was okay with him as he had his own thing going. It may have been convincing on radio, but during certain US television interviews Steven’s expressive eyes plainly gave him away. He looked incredibly vulnerable when deflecting questions about Perry, and those close to Steven knew the truth. Jack Douglas once put it that Tyler missed Perry as one would miss a long-lost lover. In truth, all was far from rosy with Joe, too. His foursome was not gelling and personnel changes would soon take place. Plus, Perry was sliding into dire difficulties. He owed money to some serious drug dealers, who did not take kindly to waiting for payment.

Steven’s lifestyle was rapidly disintegrating. He was so financially strapped that he was reduced to living in a sleazy hotel in New York, with his health deteriorating. His wife and daughter had at last moved into Steven’s renovated house up at Lake Sunapee.

These conditions made it tough when the band started work on material for their next album. Brad Whitford confirmed that everyone except Jimmy Crespo was burned out, and that Steven was once more in trouble when it came to conjuring up lyrics. Steven did not have the same chemistry with Joe Perry’s replacement, and his drug intake blurred too much for him, too often. It was obviously doomed to be a long, slow, hard slog and it was further hampered when in late 1980, Steven had a serious road accident in which he could have been killed.

One night, having taken drink and drugs, he climbed aboard his motorbike and took off from a bar. Taking a bend in the road at too steep an angle and too fast, he lost control and came crashing down. As parts of the motorbike flew off, the impact of hitting and being dragged along the ground almost ripped one of Steven’s heels clean off - he had not been wearing protective footwear - and he slammed into a tree. It took several hours of surgery to repair the damage to Steven’s foot, and he spent a long time afterwards laid up in hospital in a leg cast. As he physically recovered, the others carried on rehearsing, creating and sending him audio cassettes to listen to. This did not go down well with patients in the neighbouring beds; in Steven’s words, nurses would order him to ‘turn that shit off!’.

When eventually Steven left care and returned to his crummy hotel room in New York, still being in a leg cast worried him. The dive he was dossing in was not the place to be vulnerable, and as nights felt the dodgiest he would often hardly sleep. When he could make the journey, Steven visited his wife and daughter at Lake Sunapee, but relations between him and Cyrinda had soured. Cyrinda had her own problems, not least that she was battling drug addiction. She later publicly outlined how she was once so far gone on dope that she required resuscitation and that she had almost accidentally overdosed. Tyler heard tales that his wife was seeing someone, which he was unsure whether to believe. It made for a rocky relationship, and Mia was not yet three years old.

Before the end of the year,
Aerosmith’s Greatest Hits
was released. The ten-song compilation album did not set the heather on fire chartwise in America, but it was destined to go multi-platinum, selling over ten million copies and earning the band a diamond award from the RIAA in 2001.

Twenty years earlier, Steven was being fed yet more stories of his wife’s infidelity, and it was still difficult for him to know if he could trust his informants. Certainly, he knew that his marriage to Cyrinda was not thriving. He had moved into an apartment in New York and commuted to New Hampshire. Rows erupting between the couple, some vicious, were widening the gap. For her part, Cyrinda had no way of knowing if Steven was being unfaithful to her, and up at the lakeside property she often felt sad and lonely. When a fit, healthy, young man hoved on to her horizon in 1981, it did not take long to become physically involved with him. It was not a long-lasting relationship but it became messy and it was brought specifically to Steven’s ears. Cyrinda admitted to having had, in time, more extra-marital liaisons after the dalliance with this Adonis. Being together was no longer an option for Steven and Cyrinda, each for their own reasons, and they stopped living as man and wife. Divorce became inevitable.

In the first quarter of 1981, Tyler, Perry and Aerosmith’s fortunes were pretty shaky. When Joe’s second solo album,
I’ve Got the Rock ’n’ Rolls Again,
was released that summer, it failed to chart. With a new line-up, the Joe Perry Project was playing support to various bands but, still financially broke, Perry knew that he was going nowhere fast. Aerosmith fans were delighted to learn, though, that Tyler had telephoned Perry that spring, and industry rumours of a rapprochement circulated. The singer, however, was sinking deeper into drug addiction - Steven being in a stupor in the studio was not a rare occurrence. He could not climb out of the rut he had fallen into and everyone was driven up the wall with frustration at the lack of progress on this album. Tom Hamilton and Joey Kramer, too, were each abusing their bodies with unhelpful amounts of cocaine, and it was about now that Brad Whitford decided to bail out of Aerosmith.

The rhythm guitarist was numb with boredom. He needed to be performing live, and the insane lifestyle Aerosmith was leading was in danger of cracking him up. As the summer rolled on, the pressure built up to intolerable levels. He had not felt especially comfortable since Joe Perry’s departure. He acknowledged Jimmy Crespo’s musicianship but he did not enjoy the same rapport with Jimmy as he had had with Joe; overall he was thoroughly miserable. He would escape from the studio stalemate and head for Boston to unwind and reclaim his sanity. After one such trip, he just couldn’t stand the thought of returning to the mire awaiting him in New York. The crunch came when he was at the airport; instead of boarding the plane, he called the band from the terminal building to say that he had had it, and was not coming back.

Steven was stunned. He thought Brad ought to have realised that he had it good being in Aerosmith - drugs had dulled Steven’s wits in many ways by this time. The upshot was that Aerosmith lost a second original member. That same year, Brad teamed up with drummer Steve Pace, bass player Dave Hewitt and vocalist/guitarist Derek St Holmes to form the band Whitford/St Holmes, which released an eponymous album. It did not chart, nor did the spin-off single, ‘Shy Away’.

Brad Whitford’s departure served as a wake-up call to Tyler that he had to try harder to get his act together; in the new year he tried to create some studio magic, concentrating on working with Jimmy Crespo. Tyler stated: ‘Spending such a long time in the studio really gave us a good chance to get to know each other’s ways and I really like Jimmy’s attitude. He is constantly putting things out. He never stops, whether or not the machines are running. The way he slotted into the band was incredible.’

Tyler and Crespo came up with four numbers: ‘Bitch’s Brew’; ‘Bolivian Ragamuffin’; ‘Jig Is Up’, and ‘Jailbait’. The latter particularly excited the band. Joe Perry, keeping track of Aerosmith’s development without him, later admitted that he was rather jealous of the Jimmy Crespo riff on ‘Jailbait’. Tyler and Crespo teamed up with Jack Douglas to create ‘Joannie’s Butterfly’ and ‘Rock in a Hard Place’. Steven’s solo contributions were ‘Push Comes to Shove’ and ‘Prelude to Joannie’, and they recorded a cover version of ‘Cry Me a River’; written by Arthur Hamilton, it had been a 1957 hit for the American singer, Julie London.

From winter into spring 1982, Aerosmith focused on pulling this album together. Initially, they worked with producer Tony Bongiovi (Jon Bon Jovi’s second cousin) at the Power Station studio in downtown Manhattan. Work later switched to Criteria Studios in Miami, Florida, and Bongiovi relinquished the helm to Jack Douglas. Jimmy Crespo opined that Tony’s approach was ‘too structured for Steven’s freeform style’. Tyler explained: ‘It’s not that we weren’t happy with what Tony Bongiovi was doing but we felt it would be real good to have Jack Douglas involved again. We kind of missed the feeling we’d always got with Jack and I felt that he could capture some of those elements on this album.’

Jimmy Crespo took on the extra guitar duties until Brad Whitford’s replacement was found in Rick Dufay. Born Richard Marc Dufay on 19 February 1952 in Paris, France, the rhythm guitarist had been recommended to Steven by Jack Douglas, who had produced Dufay’s album,
Tender Loving Abuse
.

The abuse that was rife within Aerosmith ranks was now painfully evident to both newcomers to the fold, who had their eyes well and truly opened. Rick Dufay called the situation horrendous and was frankly appalled at Steven Tyler’s rapidly deteriorating state. Jimmy Crespo confessed: ‘When I joined, I was full on but after I worked with the group for a while, it just took the fire out of me.’ It was not hard to understand why.

Steven had plumbed even darker depths. The once vibrant, impudent star, with his natural gift of wowing fans at gigs, was now mingling with society’s bottom feeders in the relentless quest for his heroin fix. Even for a streetwise guy from the Bronx, Steven had entered a scary new stratum. One drug dealer he dealt with was found murdered one morning in his seedy den with a screwdriver embedded in his skull. Having resorted to buying dope on New York’s streets, Steven would take heart-stopping risks by accompanying strangers down dark alleys to part with his cash - desperate guys who could in a split second’s madness have killed him. On at least one occasion he was robbed. Speaking of a particularly precious diamond ring he had once worn, Steven revealed: ‘While I was copping heroin on 79th Street, a guy put a gun to my temple and ran off with it.’

Steven had become such a junkie, however, that
any
risk was worth taking to experience the euphoria that heroin gave him, and nothing had the power to dissuade him. He knew that people from all walks of life were falling victim to heroin addiction. He would hear of addicts with collapsing veins desperately trying to find new places to inject themselves. In a few years’ time Thin Lizzy’s frontman, Phil Lynott, who took to injecting drugs between his toes, would die, but the addiction was stronger than any scare stories for Steven, whose hair was now falling out in places.

Worrying tales circulated on the music grapevine about Aerosmith’s frontman, including untrue claims that Steven had developed throat cancer. Later that year, Tyler delivered a few broadsides at the people who had peddled these tales, calling them ‘assholes’. Aerosmith’s new album had been so long in the making that Tyler understood the inevitability of rumours, but that had crossed the line. Scratch the skin of Tyler the addict, however, and the incorrigible Steven was still there. He advised those critics who felt impelled to comment on his health to pick another malady - tell their readers that his dick had dropped off, he joked.