Steven Tyler: The Biography (14 page)

Rock in a Hard Place
was released in October 1982; Steven was proud of its unashamedly hard rock content. He refused to agree that the three-year gap since
Night in the Ruts
had left Aerosmith out of touch with the record-buying public, and he was not shy of condemning the middle-of-the-road music that was monopolising both the charts and the airwaves. Steven was not alone. Xavier Russell for
Sounds
magazine declared of
Rock in a Hard Place
: ‘As soon as the needle hit the wax, it melted and the speaker covers blew across the living room floor!’ Despite this and other five-star reviews, Aerosmith’s new work climbed no higher in the US chart than number thirty-seven; ‘Lightning Strikes’ failed to chart. It was when they went out on the road to support this new release, though, that it became inescapably obvious that the band was on the skids.

Reduced to playing in small arenas and clubs, they hit some dives along America’s east coast, coming on stage in the early hours of the morning when most of the punters were too drunk to give a toss. They played one-thousand-seater clubs that, in their early days, they had been guaranteed to pack to the rafters; now they could only muster up a couple of hundred people. Tyler had maintained that he could not wait to get back into live performance, touring for the first time with Aerosmith’s new line-up, and he spoke of how he had overheard fans leaving one venue saying that they had closed their eyes and had been unable to tell that it was not Joe Perry up there. The truth is, the yells from the crowds to bring Perry back were hard
not
to hear.

Jimmy Crespo and Rick Dufay tried to inject fresh verve into Aerosmith, and something like the old excitement was there at times. Steven dearly wanted to prove that the band had been missed, and he believed it best to deliver kick-ass music, but for others the writing was too clearly on the wall. Jimmy Crespo could see how passionately the diehard Aerosmith fans wanted to love the shows, painfully aware that Steven and the others were capable of delivering far better, but unable to because of the personal problems in the band. To Crespo, it was a lost opportunity. ‘I was so willing to work,’ he said, ‘but the spirit was not there. Steven missed Joe.’

Very quickly, Steven’s demons returned - forgetting the lyrics and passing out mid-performance. One November night, Steven went on stage in Massachusetts so stoned that he simply could not function. He collapsed, disappearing from the audience’s sight and ending up like a limp rag on the stage floor behind one of the sound monitors. Again, it was show over.

It could very well have been game over for Steven. It seemed to some of his closest acquaintances that he had gone beyond the point of caring whether he lived or died. He was certainly in denial about how bad he had become. When worried, well-meaning friends tried to tell him that he had been behaving bizarrely the night before at a backstage party, he would flatly refuse to take them seriously. Steven was not eating properly. Ever a lean man, he was now almost literally skin and bone. When anyone warned him of others who had ended up down and out, he found any number of ways to justify his behaviour. Later he said: ‘A line of blow would put you in a place you’re familiar with. You experience a lot of memory loss. It’s like spending all your time on the dark side of the moon - you get used to it.’

At the core of this chaos, however, Steven had faith in one safety net - a voice in his head that he believed always prevented him from accidentally overdosing. Though he was grateful for this higher power, when he was dope-sick there were times he fleetingly wished that he was dead. Some days he shook so violently that he was unable to get out of bed. In such a frightening and fragmenting condition, Steven’s rein on his volatile temper could be slack, to say the least, and he threw terrible tantrums at times. It was not unknown during this period for Steven to throw things at people. He has confessed: ‘I was so arrogant. I should have had the shit kicked out of me!’ Intrinsically a charismatic livewire, he was pushing people who cared about him away. One of the most supple movers and electrifying frontmen in the business was being reduced to a catatonic wreck.

CHAPTER 8

Brothers By Choice

STEVEN’S SAVIOUR
was Teresa Barrick, a clothes designer almost ten years his junior, whom he met in 1983. Their paths had first crossed some time earlier when the slender blonde from America’s Midwest was hanging out with a crowd of teenagers at clubs in Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui. In this heaving social whirl, Teresa had been just another pretty face to Tyler, but she did not forget him over the ensuing few years as she moved in the same circles; in time a friend of her sister, Lisa, turned out to be also friends with the frontman. Teresa was at Record Plant Studios in New York with her sister and the friend when Tyler walked into the reception area. There had been a fair few foxy ladies around Aerosmith in their time but Teresa Barrick blew Tyler away. After gawping at the beauty he managed to ask her to stay a while. She did, and before long they were getting hot and heavy with each other. Separated from Cyrinda, Steven invited Teresa to his apartment.

It has to be said that no one could accuse Teresa Barrick of having an eye on the main chance. Right then, Steven Tyler was not a catch - he was loaded with drugs, not money, and though one time front cover material, he was generally feared to be heading fast for skid row. Their mutual attraction was powerful and immediate. Tyler later confessed to having read raw compassion in Teresa’s eyes in that studio waiting room, and Teresa did once label herself as a good caretaker. Had Teresa been seeking a lost soul to succour, she could not have found a more worthy candidate. Tyler was broke, and Columbia Records were not going to renew Aerosmith’s contract. As for his health, his condition had reached the point where there were days when he was barely able to dress himself. He was on heroin and crack. ‘I must have snorted up all of Peru,’ he later quipped, but people close to him, already anxious, dreaded him sinking any lower. For these friends, Teresa Barrick quickly became the one spark of hope they could see on the singer’s horizon.

Steven fell head over heels in love with Teresa, although he was not an easy man to be with. Drugs distorted many aspects of life, but it did not take Teresa long to identify Tyler’s Achilles heel - his lost bond with Joe Perry. It is not something that Tyler has hidden. He recognised Jimmy Crespo as a fine lead guitarist and he had successfully collaborated on creating songs with him, but said Steven: ‘I used to look across the stage at Jimmy and somehow it just didn’t feel right.’ Joe Perry felt the same way. ‘I just couldn’t find a singer with whom I hit it off the way Steven and I always did,’ he said. Since leaving Aerosmith in 1979, life had not been kind to Joe.

Addictions had devoured him, too. Every dollar he could scrape together went to feed his drug habit, and when he could no longer afford his usual class of drugs, he turned to copious amounts of alcohol to numb him into the required oblivion. He was such a wreck that sometimes his limbs shook, and he continued to experience frightening seizures. Clearly, he was in desperate need of professional help. His rocky marriage to Elyssa had run irretrievably aground - they were separated and heading for divorce. Broke and buried under a rising mountain of debt, Joe was reduced to living in a spartan Boston boarding house with the tax man hot on his trail.

By this time, Perry had acquired a manager named Tim Collins, whom he has credited with being of invaluable help when he was at one of his lowest ever ebbs. After his recording contract with Columbia Records expired he had secured a deal to produce an album for MCA. The Joe Perry Project’s third offering,
Once a Rocker, Always a Rocker
, was released in late 1983 and failed to chart, spelling the death knell for this solo venture. The truth is, Joe had gained very little from breaking away from Aerosmith. There was nothing like the pleasure in it that he had envisaged, and personnel were hard to hold on to in an outfit that was scarcely commercially viable. It had meant a lot to him when his ex-Aerosmith friend, rhythm guitarist Brad Whitford, had joined him on stage to play at some live shows, but it was not enough.

After his split from Elyssa, in the early 1980s, for a time Joe played the role of the classic reckless rock star, partying with a succession of girls. Briefly it gave him a hitherto unknown sense of exhilarating freedom, but meaningless liaisons were not Perry’s style. Interestingly, just like Steven, Joe met the woman who, to him, is responsible for saving his life - Billie Paulette Montgomery. The blonde model had auditioned for a part in the video shoot for ‘Black Velvet Pants’, a track from Perry’s upcoming third solo album, and at the shoot Joe had been mesmerised by her. They instantly clicked, moved in together and soon became devoted to one another. Learning all about Joe’s colourful life, it seemed obvious to Billie that he should reconnect with Steven Tyler and reform Aerosmith. Having no history with the band, Billie’s view was not obscured by old simmering rivalries, jealousy or any mixed emotions. Initially resistant, Joe gradually began to respond to his new girlfriend’s nudging to reach out to his former partner and friend.

At the same time, the new woman in Tyler’s life, Teresa Barrick, was gently encouraging Steven to let go of past resentments - maybe set aside a dose of male pride - and think about extending an olive branch to Joe. Who contacted whom first is a matter of debate but, in any event, in summer 1983 the two men began talking to one another on the telephone. They then met face to face to chew over the tentative possibility of Aerosmith reforming. Tyler came away from that meeting on cloud nine. The Joe Perry Project still gigged, and Steven and Joe began turning up at each other’s shows, but that itself could throw up bumps in the road to reconciliation.

At one Aerosmith gig, having come on stage very stoned, Steven stopped the show by collapsing, a familiar occurrence by now, but this time it looked so serious that some onlookers feared that he had actually died before their very eyes. Steven came round, but some were quick to blame that particular debacle on the backstage reunion earlier that night of the Toxic Twins. That resentment caused a wrinkle or two, which added to the difficulty of finding a workable way towards a reunited Aerosmith.

By the end of the year, the situation was desperate. Steven was dossing in the Gorham Hotel in New York, in a state of permanent penury. Money was also virtually non-existent for drummer Joey Kramer and bassist Tom Hamilton. Jimmy Crespo had reluctantly resorted to selling some guitars from his prized collection of vintage instruments in order to keep the wolf from the door. He dulled the pain of having to do this by persuading himself that he could always buy them back when the band’s plight improved. Rhythm guitarist Rick Dufay was as skint as the others and the guy he replaced, ex-Aerosmith member Brad Whitford, had also been forced to liquidise his assets to keep his head above water for a little longer. Brad’s solo venture had not worked out and he had been keeping tabs on these attempts at reconciliation between Steven and Joe. Unquestionably, for all the original members, a great deal hinged on this coming to fruition.

Rock history records that it was at a St Valentine’s Day gig in 1984, when Joe and Brad went to see Aerosmith backstage at the Orpheum Theatre in Boston, that they finally decided to put the original quintet back together. Naturally, panic set in as to whether this would succeed. Would the old volatility and schisms tear them apart again? But, really, there was no question about it - they had to bite the bullet and try.

The adrenalin-driven anticipation around rekindling this flame was tempered by the fact that this decision meant the departure of Perry and Whitford’s replacements. Jimmy Crespo knew how much Tyler had missed Joe, and the way Aerosmith was placed at this point it was not hard to see that he was destined to jump ship. Having no money made life very difficult, and lacking the best showcase for his skills had left him feeling unfulfilled. Overall, Crespo saw it as a sad situation. On leaving Aerosmith, he linked up with a few musicians to form a band called Adam Bomb; later he reverted to session work, among other things. Rick Dufay knew that it was only natural that Brad would return to the fold too, and so this turn of events came as no surprise. He went on to pursue a range of other options.

Aerosmith has always been a brotherhood, and if some members took longer than others to see it that way, it probably came down to their very individual natures. The polarised characters of Steven and Joe can conceal that they each feel matters with the same underlying sensitivity - they just have wildly differing ways of expressing it. Tyler’s passionate character means that he openly throws everything he has into a friendship and hopes to receive overtly the same in return. Recently reflecting on his bond with Joe, he frankly revealed that he carries a grain of sadness that he never feels entirely certain that in Perry he gets what he termed ‘the full-time friend.’

In March 1984, with Joe and Brad Whitford back in the ranks, Steven felt it was a case of déjà vu as he left New York and rented an apartment in Boston to concentrate on getting Aerosmith airborne. The band began to rehearse at clubs and hotels in and around the city. Tyler later fondly recalled: ‘You should have felt the buzz the moment all five of us got together in the same room for the first time again. We all started laughin’. It was like the five years had never passed and we knew we had made the right move.’ There was possibly faint hysteria in the air as everyone was on tenterhooks, but at this first rehearsal they played well together. Back at their separate abodes that night, however, they all harboured anxieties that their old problems would eventually resurface.

With rehearsals under way, Tyler’s temper threatened to snap one day when he heard on the grapevine that Alice Cooper was said to be interested in recruiting Joe Perry to his band, but nothing prevented the official announcement in April that the original Aerosmith had reunited and intended to tour. Prosaically, Perry agreed with journalists that money had been a factor when they had set aside their past problems to attempt the relaunch. No one in the business could deny, however, that it was an enticing prospect to put these explosive elements together again and wait to see the outcome. Before the rot had set in, Aerosmith had a special chemistry, at the core of which was the osmosis between Tyler and Perry; their loyal fans desperately hoped that that would happen once more.