Steven Tyler: The Biography (29 page)

From late November to mid-December, Aerosmith rolled through seven US states, then Steven packed away his microphone after a show at the Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It could not hope to be the same holiday period for Steven without Teresa to come home to, and perhaps it was as well that the ticker tape and streamers had barely been brushed away after the celebrations in New York’s Times Square that rang in 2006, when the
Rockin’ the Joint
tour resumed on 5 January in Orlando, Florida, again backed by Lenny Kravitz.

A handful of gigs later, having returned to Florida for a show in Tampa, at one point Tyler was joined at the microphone by Robin Zander, lead vocalist of Cheap Trick; days later came an announcement that Aerosmith planned to extend their tour by adding a third leg, starting in early March, and to be opened by the 1980s band. In the meantime, Lenny Kravitz continued to hold down the warm-up duties.

While Steven dedicated his energies to whipping up a frenzy of excitement, on a personal note, his and Teresa’s divorce became official in January 2006. The powerhouse band behind Steven ensured that Aerosmith fans left each venue soaked in delirium, and despite the fact that the band members were each well into their fifties, they still attracted the new teenage generation into the arenas. Aerosmith had specifically set out to reaffirm its standing as a premier hard rock band. Their success in recent years with romantic power ballads had, for some, diluted that, and there was a keener edge than ever to each performance.

The band was also talking about beginning work later in the year on the follow-up to
Honkin’ on Bobo
, and they had a clear direction in mind. Tyler told
Rolling Stone
: ‘It’s going to be just like what White Stripes are doing, like a couple of songs on Sheryl Crow’s new album. You’ll listen to it and be like: “I’ve heard that before,” but you never did.’

Behind the high-energy stage performances and plans for a new studio album, however, Steven was in trouble. His zest in live performance means that during any gig he literally loses several pounds from his already skeletal frame, and he comes off stage drenched in sweat and almost dehydrated. Getting sufficient rest while on tour is virtually impossible, and because he takes a relentless interest in every aspect of Aerosmith’s business and performances he is practically never off duty. Giving each song the full throttle treatment had also been stacking up problems. He managed to conceal them until the second leg of the
Rockin’ the Joint
tour ended at Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim, California - but that was about to change.

With Cheap Trick taking over from Lenny Kravitz, just six days later, on 2 March, leg three kicked off at the Seminole Hard Rock Live venue in Hollywood, Florida. Eighteen gigs were planned to take Aerosmith through to a performance on 9 April at the General Motors Place in Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada, but after the first gig Steven’s throat problems forced cancellations to kick in. Eight gigs from Pensacola in Florida, to London, Ontario, were called off to see if the rest would be enough to help him, but his condition showed no sign of improvement and after another examination by doctors it became patently obvious that the remainder of the tour would have to be axed. Steven needed surgery.

A band press release on 22 March 2006 stated: ‘Despite Aerosmith’s desire to keep the tour going as long as possible, Steven’s doctors advised him not to continue performing to give his voice time to recover.’ News that Tyler would undergo surgery for ‘an undisclosed medical condition’ quickly gave rise to rumours that he was battling throat cancer. Publicist Marcee Rondan moved swiftly to scotch these. She told MTV News that rumours claiming that Steven had throat cancer were ‘completely untrue’. When pressed, she was not prepared to elaborate on what the problem actually was. It was then said by some that Steven required surgery to correct a popped blood vessel in his throat.

At the time, Steven and his representatives preferred not to detail why he was going under the knife, but eighteen months later the procedure he underwent to repair his right vocal cord featured in the television programme
Incredible Human Machine
, which aired in the US on the National Geographic channel. The leading laryngologist who had operated on Steven was Dr Steven Zeitels, a director at Massachusetts General Hospital, who had dealt with opera stars and other celebrity singers. Dr Zeitels said: ‘Singers are the athletes of the performing arts but the stress on the vocal cords eventually creates problems like nodules, polyps and, in Steven Tyler’s case, haemorrhaging from a blood vessel that was abnormal from years of singing.’

Steven was on the operating table for less than thirty minutes and Dr Zeitels described him as an exemplary patient. Impressed by the star’s determination to understand exactly what had been happening to the blood vessels in his throat, Dr Zeitels said of Steven: ‘He’s an algorithmic thinker, amazingly bright.’ The upshot of the surgery and subsequent post-op vocal therapy was that Steven would not be able to sing for some months to come.

His situation that spring was pretty bleak. He had had surgery twice (for his knee, now his throat), Aerosmith was thrown into an indefinite limbo because of his temporary inability to sing for prolonged periods, and his second marriage had been dissolved. All of these problems were public knowledge. But what only a very select few people knew was that Steven - who had already survived so much in his life - had for a couple of years already been waging a secret battle.

CHAPTER 16

The Vagabond Prince

NOT YET
ready to publicly divulge the secret he harboured, with remarkable resilience Steven decided in late spring 2006 that he was sufficiently recovered from the throat surgery to join the rest of Aerosmith in knuckling down to work on the follow-up studio album to
Honkin’ on Bobo
. Tyler was happy to consider once again collaborating with outside songwriters but, always stimulated by earthy hard rock, his leanings were strongly towards revisiting a sound more redolent of the 1970s. Kicking about with material in the studio, of course, meant testing his vocal cords. As throat surgery can alter a singer’s voice, Steven was a shade apprehensive, but a swift glance in his lead guitarist’s direction put his mind at rest. Said Joe Perry that summer: ‘Steven is sounding better than ever. Even just listening to him talk, his voice has this timbre that I haven’t heard for years.’

Proof that Tyler was truly back in harness came in June when Aerosmith announced that they were to hit the road again in just over two months’ time. Aerosmith and Motley Crue would co-headline on the so-called Route of All Evil tour. In the old days of drink, drugs and debauchery, these two bad lad bands touring together would have provided an incendiary mix. Even in 2006, it was a pairing that sparked the music media’s imagination. Rehearsals got under way for the tour, but Steven’s first major public appearance since his throat surgery came when he and Joe Perry performed with the Boston Pops Orchestra at a Fourth of July spectacular concert staged on the city’s Charles River Esplanade. During this event, which was broadcast live nationally on
CBS
television, Steven sang ‘I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing’, ‘Walk This Way’ and ‘Dream On’ - the audience rewarding the star with cheers and resounding applause when he nailed his famous scream towards the end of this power ballad. Tyler’s other appearance that summer was a cameo role in the US television sitcom
Two and a Half Men
. During the episode titled ‘Who’s Vod Kanockers?’ Steven played himself as an obnoxious neighbour from hell.

In late August the focus, health-wise, switched from Steven to bass player Tom Hamilton, when it was announced that he would be unable to take part in most of the upcoming Route of All Evil tour because of having to undergo treatment for throat cancer. Anxious for their bandmate to make a full recovery, Aerosmith enlisted David Hull, a bassist who had played with the Joe Perry Project, to fill Tom’s shoes. News then emerged that their plans to release a new studio album in 2007 had had to be pushed back. Perry stated: ‘We just could not do it. There wasn’t enough time.’ Instead, it was decided to release a compilation album. Comprising hits from throughout the band’s career, this work also featured two new songs - a hard rock number, ‘Devil’s Got a New Disguise’, and by contrast a mellow country rock song called ‘Sedona Sunrise’. As work on this tide-over release began, the tour loomed large, and although Steven had been on song performing live in Boston and in the recording studio, there was concern that the strain of singing night after night in concert for over three months could take its toll.

The Aerosmith and Motley Crue Route of All Evil tour of north America and Canada kicked off on 5 September 2006 with a performance at the Germain Amphitheatre in Columbus, Ohio, and quickly into this trek such fears evaporated. The hard rock spectacle went down a storm with fans and critics alike.
Kerrang
magazine enthusiastically weighed in with its opinion of one of the early shows: ‘Aerosmith proved why many deem them America’s greatest rock band whether it was born in the 1970s, ’80s or ’90s. Aerosmith seamlessly create a scrapbook of everything good rock was and, God willing, will always be.’

Less than three weeks later, with everyone on a high, having just played in Camden, New Jersey, Aerosmith had their sights set on a gig at the Tweeter Center in Mansfield, Massachusetts, when Steven dropped the bombshell news that he had been keeping under wraps for so long. Interviewed by Nancy O’Dell on the US television show
Access Hollywood
, he revealed that he had been diagnosed three years earlier with hepatitis C. When the show was aired on 25 September, this news went global.

Hepatitis C is a blood-borne viral infection most commonly spread through unprotected sex or sharing needles. It can damage the liver, potentially leading to chronic conditions such as cirrhosis or liver cancer. Being hard to detect, it is labelled the silent killer, because people can have it and not know. Steven had specifically got himself tested for hepatitis C, and although he was diagnosed with the infection in 2003, he discovered that he had had it for a long time, asymptomatic. Steven revealed: ‘The band took a break about three years ago and my doctor said it’s eleven months of chemotherapy. So I went on that and it about killed me.’ He underwent a year-long ordeal of prescription medication and injections of the powerful anti-viral drug interferon to treat the condition and to strengthen his immune system. The result was that hepatitis C was non-detectable in his bloodstream.

With this tough battle fought in such secrecy now out in the open, Steven could tell television audiences and newspaper readers how extremely difficult it had been for him. He spoke movingly of times at home when he had suffered blackouts because of the treatment and had woken up disoriented, with nosebleeds. He also revealed: ‘Your hair falls out, your nails turn yellow, you throw up, you sweat all night.’ As he told the
New
York Daily News
: ‘It really hurt. It was a bad, bad period. I’m in Alcoholics Anonymous and I tried to go three, four, five months with nothing and it, too, about killed me!’ What made his ordeal even more poignantly sad is that he had been struggling with this devastating diagnosis and arduous treatment at the same time as his marriage to Teresa had gone on the rocks. He later said of this testing experience: ‘It was pretty catastrophic. I got through, one day at a time. Anybody who has been through chemotherapy knows, it sucks.’

When news of Steven’s ordeal became public, it was often pointed out that other celebrity sufferers of hepatitis C include
Dallas
star Larry Hagman and
Baywatch
babe Pamela Anderson but, according to the World Health Organisation, there are around six hundred million people around the globe suffering from hepatitis B and C. Now that hepatitis C was non-existent in him, Steven had chosen to reveal his own private battle in order to help raise awareness about this pernicious condition. He wanted to stress that ignorance was not an option - that people potentially at risk would do well to get tested, because hepatitis C is treatable.

Following this revelation, all eyes were fixed on Steven when Aerosmith took to the stage on 26 September in Mansfield, Massachusetts, for the first of two dates there. Perhaps going all out to prove that he had come through the trauma and was back to fighting form, Steven turned on the magic in stunning form. The tour trundled on.

Around this time, Aerosmith released the compilation album titled
Devil’s Got a New Disguise - The Very Best of Aerosmith
, which charted on Billboard at number thirty-three. The title track was released as a single, but did not make that US survey. At the end of October, the album was released in Britain and Europe.

After gigging through Kansas, Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina, and playing to crowds on the west coast of America, Aerosmith headed east through Texas to Florida where on 24 November they played in West Palm Beach at the Sound Advice Amphitheatre. Earlier that day, Tyler was back in helpful mode as, once again, he dished up Thanksgiving dinners, this time to the needy at a restaurant in town. When the band took to the stage in the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, Michigan, at the beginning of December, Steven was thrilled to officially welcome a recovering Tom Hamilton back to the band. The bassist often jests that he, Brad Whitford and Joey Kramer are somehow viewed as less important Aerosmith members than Joe and Steven but there was no disguising the Blue Army’s pleasure at seeing Hamilton back in place.

With a further four gigs around Canada and three US pit stops, the Route of All Evil tour culminated in mid-December 2006 at the ARCO Arena in Sacramento, California. The critical acclaim that greeted the launch of this tour had been sustained throughout, and to Steven’s great relief his voice had held out well. He still had to concentrate on building his health and strength, however, after the battering his system had taken during his treatment for hepatitis C, but there was every reason to feel optimistic. Good news also came on 20 December, when Tom Hamilton officially announced to fans that, following a recent scan, he was now pronounced to be cancer free.