Aerosmith

"Aerosmith"

the history



Aerosmith is one of the most successful and long-lived rock bands of all time. From thier humble roots as a garage band in a rural New Hampshire town, Aerosmith rose to conquer arenas and stadiums around the world. After many trials and tribulations and after nearly three decades of making great music, they have more than earned their status as rock and roll legends. The road to rock-legend status hasn't been an easy one for Aerosmith, a band that's had to fight incredibly hard just to stay together, let alone stay relevant and contemporary as one of the world's most elite hard rock acts. But through it all, they've survived. It's really quite a story...



We weren't too ambitious when we started out. We just wanted to be the biggest thing that ever walked the planet, the greatest rock band there ever was. We just wanted everything. We wanted it all. ( Steven Tyler)

The Aerosmith saga has its beginnings in Sunapee, New Hampshire in the summer of 1969 with two talented teenagers named Joe Perry and Tom Hamilton. Bass player Hamilton and guitarist Perry played together in a local outfit known as the Jam Band, while Perry held down a summer job at a local restaurant called the Anchorage, an establishment frequented by a drummer and vocalist from Yonkers, New York named Steven Tallarico. Tallarico, a New York native, had summered at Lake Sunapee since childhood. Perry and Tallarico met over french fries: Tallarico was so impressed by the french fries that he headed back to the kitchen to say hello to the guy who'd made them. The two got talking and Joe invited Steven to see his band perform at a local venue known as The Barn. Steven had nothing better to do, so he decided to head over and check the band out. He was unimpressed until the band performed a cover version of Fleetwood Mac's "Rattlesnake Shake."



Joe literally couldn't tune his guitar at that point, but the band hit that slow-dragging Fleetwood Mac riff and I saw Steven's mouth open. He went pale. He couldn't take his eyes off Joe. The Jam band was a little talent and a lotta magic and Steven felt it the minute he saw it... I looked at Steven and he looked back at me. There was this moment. Something clicked. This little thing happened in an old barn in a remote corner of the United States on a summer night between Woodstock and Altamont in 1969 when the Great American band got together. That's what was happening. As they started their next song, Steven leaned over and said "Zunky, that's gonna be my next band." (longtime friend Zunk Buker)

At the end of the summer, Steven, who wanted desperately to be a rock star, returned to New York and to his full time job trying to make it in the music business. But by the summer of 1970, he was so fed up and frustrated with the scene in New York that he took off, hitchiked to Sunapee and tried to find Joe Perry again. He found Joe back working at the Anchorage and learned that Joe and Tom Hamilton had plans to move to Boston in the fall in order to pursue music careers. Steven decided to go with them. In September of 1970, Steven, Tom and Joe moved into an apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Ave. near the Boston University Campus and set about getting a band together. Steven's longtime friend from back home in Yonkers, Ray Tabano,was recruited to play second guitar. Steven wanted his friend Don Solomon to be the bass player, but Joe insisted that Tom be in the band. Finally, Berklee drop-out Joey Kramer came aboard as the band's drummer. It was Kramer who christened the new band with its name. The band considered other names like "The Hookers" and "Spike Jones," but Joey remembered a word that he'd thought up in high school and scribbled all over his notebooks: Aerosmith.



In the fall of 1970, Aerosmith began rehearsing in the basement of a Boston University dormitory. "I was very raw when we started the band, not very experienced," says Tom. "And Steven was fuckin' Stravinsky...it was like rock'n' roll boot camp directed by a sadistic drum major." The band suffered through long, greuling and often very painful practice sessions as they learned to play together as a cohesive unit. All the hard work paid off and by late fall, Aerosmith was ready for their first public performance at Nipmuc Regional High School outside Boston.



Aerosmith spent late 1970 and early 1971 performing endlessly at high school dances, college mixers, ski lodges, town halls, teen centers — wherever they were welcome. Most days they set up and played outside of the Boston University student union at noontime. These lunchtime concerts came to be known as Aerosmith's "noontime jams."



"We were never a Boston band in the sense that you could see us in any given week in a club in Boston. We saw too many bands trapped in the $800-a-week, four-set-a-night syndrome," says Joe Perry. Aerosmith had a clear picture of where they wanted to go. They didn't want to be a bar band; they wanted to conquer arenas and stadiums. So, they avoided the clubs and the bars and went out of town to Connecticut, New Hampshire and Western Massachusetts, performing at suburban high schools and winning over the masses. "They were this full blown rock band and the high school kids ate it up. It was like the Exile era Rolling Stones playing in the gym," said Edgar Winter's former road manager George Paige.



By early 1971, guitarist Ray Tabano had become a problem within the band. His playing wasn't up to par and he had trouble getting along with the rest of the band, so he was replaced by Boston native Brad Whitford, who, at just 19 years old was already a highly accomplished and skilled guitarist. With Brad in the band, the puzzle was complete. The lineup that would someday fill the largest stadiums in the world was now in place.



In the fall of 1971, Aerosmith got to play their first big show in New York city, opening for Edgar Winter and Humble Pie at New York's Academy of Music. It was the biggest gig they'd ever had, quite a step up from the usual high school dances. It was their first big break. The second big break came a few months later when the band lost thier rehersal space in the basement at Boston University and were about to get evicted from 1325 Commonwealth Ave. because they couldn't keep up with the rent payments. Then, by sheer luck, they got hooked up with a new rehearsal space at Boston's Old Fenway Theater. Out of the goodness of his heart, theater manager John O'Toole let Aerosmith rehearse on the stage during the day for free. Of course it was the middle of winter and there was no heat, so the band had to rehearse in their winter coats, but it was better than nothing.



Fenway theater manager John O'Toole was very impressed with the young band. He was friends with Frank Connelly, a well-known Boston music promoter, and one afternoon in the winter of early 1972, O'Toole brought Connelly by to listen to the band in rehearsal. Connelly was the first person with some real clout in the music industry to recognize Aerosmith's potential to become a world-class rock band.



"Father" Frank Connelly, as he came to be known, took the fledgling band under his wing. He was so interested in Aerosmith that he offered to manage the band. He offered to pay them enough money that they didn't have to worry about food or rent, that they could quit their day jobs and focus full-time on their music. He put them on a salary so that they didn't have to worry about getting gigs and could therefore channel their energy into developing their musicianship and their original material. "We sat down at the kitchen table with the [management] contract in one hand and the eviction notice in the other. We just looked at each other and shook our heads in disbelief. That's how close it was," says Joe Perry.



In early spring of 1972, "Father" Frank told the band that he was looking for a partner in New York to help them land a record deal. He got Aerosmith a contract with the high-powered New York management team of Steve Leber and David Krebs, who would manage the band for the next 12 years. Leber and Krebs set up an exhibition for the record companies at a New York rock club called Max's Kansas City. After the band finished their 40-minute set, most of the big record labels passed on the band, saying that Aerosmith wasn't quite ready to be signed yet. All except Columbia Records president Clive Davis, who thought the band has enormous potential. Davis offered the band a $125,000 record deal.



Many things changed for Aerosmith after they got their first record deal in 1972. That summer, the lease was up at 1325 Commonwealth Ave, so the band members moved out of their communal living arrangement and into their own apartments. Many of them paired off with girlfriends, some of whom would become their wives. They moved into a new rehearsal space in Boston Garden. Steven decided to drop his last name, "Tallarico" and adopt a stage name. He considered "Tyler Britt," but settled on " Steven Tyler" instead.



In October of that year, they started working on their first record at Intermedia Sound Studios on Newbury St. in Boston. The band was very tense and nervous because it was their first time in a recording studio, but they got through it. When the record was ready to be released, they realized that they'd have a rough time getting attention from their record label. Columbia was too excited about a first record from another newcomer named Bruce Springsteen to pay much attention to Aerosmith's album. Columbia didn't release a single, nor did they promote the record. "For every dollar [Columbia] put into Aerosmith, they put a hundred into Springsteen because he fit into the folksier CBS essence," says David Krebs, who admits that Aerosmith wasn't exactly being groomed for global rock superstardom. "Our strategy was: 'If you're hometown hero and you can also do it somewhere else --wow! Not every band can do that."



Aerosmith realized that if Columbia wasn't going to promote the album, they'd have to take matters into their own hands by taking the album to the road. They began touring the northeastern United States in their station wagon, performing at clubs and colleges, and winning fans city by city. Sure enough, little by little, they began to hear bits of their album on the radio.



For their first "real" tour, Aerosmith opened for the jazz- rock fusion band the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which was quite an odd pairing. The new age hippy crowd hated Aerosmith. But "later, we realized that it was good for us because we had to play that much better to win [Mahavishnu's] audience," says Joe. It wasn't very much fun to get booed, but the band stuck the tour out. After that, they toured the Midwest as the Kinks' opening act.



Aerosmith got little attention, but when they did get press, they were usually accused of copying the Rolling Stones. When the album bombed, Columbia almost dropped the band because they hadn't lived up to expectation. The record label didn't have a lot of faith in Aerosmith because Columbia was a company built on folksy musicians like Paul Simon, wheras Aerosmith was a rock band-- the antithesis of what the label was all about. However, Steve Leber and David Krebs pulled some strings to convince Columbia to not drop Aerosmith and to release "Dream On" as a single.



The band's first single, "Dream On" was released in the summer of 1973 and was the biggest song in Boston that summer. As a result, Aerosmith was able to get booked into several major local music festivals. Columbia still didn't care about Aerosmith, but some promoters in Boston who worked for the label began to really push Aerosmith locally. They started selling out clubs and small music halls in and around Boston as "Dream On" began to gain momentum elsewhere in the country.



That summer, the band members moved back in together and began working on their follow-up, "Get Your Wings." In the fall, they went on tour opening for David Bowie's band Mott the Hoople, who had a national hit with "All the Young Dudes." During the sessions for "Get Your Wings," Aerosmith worked for the first time with producer Jack Douglas at The Record Plant in New York City. The album was released in March of 1974. The band had been given a second chance to prove themselves and this was a "make-it-or-break-it" album. If this album bombed, it would be over.



Columbia released "Same Old Song and Dance" as the first single, which didn't chart, but the album did. "Get Your Wings" peaked at #100 and stayed on the charts for a year because the band was touring constantly throughout 1974. They opened for bands like Santana, Proco Harum, The Guess Who, Blue Oyster Cult, REO Speedwagon, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. They began headlining shows in New England and Detroit where they were already fairly well-known. The record didn't get much airplay, but the constant touring worked wonders. By the end of 1974, "Get Your Wings" had sold half a million copies and was a gold record! "We literally fought our way into the business that year," says Joey Kramer.



In January of 1975, the band went back into the studio to work on their third album, "Toys in the Attic." They'd been touring nonstop for a year and their playing had gotten a lot better because of it. They were becoming the polished, world-class rock band they'd always dreamed of being. The signature " Aerosmith sound" had finally begun to really take shape and the band's confidence was running high now that they had a gold record. "I had become a different person and Aerosmith had become a different band. We knew this album would launch the band like a missile," says Tom Hamilton.



"Toys in the Attic" was released in 1975 and started selling millions of copies. The album spawned hit singles like "Walk This Way" and "Sweet Emotion." Suddenly, Aerosmith was one of the hottest rock groups in the country.



There's a point when you're a baby band when people start coming to your show and you feel like you're on a ride. It's bigger than you, it's out of your control, but it's cool because you're going with it. First it's friends, then friends of friends, then the real word gets out and suddenly there's something magic about the band and you hear that people are lining up for tickets, fighting for tickets, scalping tickets. Then you start playing places that are never big enough. This is when all that shifted...we started to get the feeling that we were America's hometown band. We weren't pushing it anymore. It was pushing us." ( Joe Perry)

Aerosmith went on the road for the rest of the year, opening for Rod Stewart and the Faces in the spring. The band suddenly found themselves performing in 80,000 seat football stadiums. Aerosmith had been launched into the major leagues alongside the likes of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. They traded in their station wagon for posh tour busses and private jets. They sold out the Boston Garden. "After the gig, Joe Perry and I were in the back of the limo going along the elevated part of Storrow Drive and we were looking back at Boston Garden the same way we used to when we were kids hitching into town," says Tom Hamilton. " Joe says 'Hey! We just played that place.' It was a tingly feeling, I'll tell ya."



Aerosmith toured mercilessly throughout 1975, promoting the album that had launched them into the upper echelons of rockstardom. They headlined sold-out shows at Cobo Hall in Detriot and the Los Angeles Forum. Suddenly, they were selling out huge arenas and stadiums all around the country. Led Zeppelin was sidelined with injury and the Rolling Stones were on hiatus for most of 1975, which gave Aerosmith an opportunity to move into that top level. By the end of the year, they were one of the top rock and roll bands in the world. They'd finally made it all the way.



In early 1976, the band got to work on their fourth album, "Rocks," at an old corrugated steel warehouse in Waltham Massachusetts. The band comandeered building as their base of operations, renaming it "The Wherehouse." Now, the band had to follow the enormous success of "Toys in the Attic." The album was released in May of 1976 and by the end of the month, it was a multiplatinum hit and the #3 record in the country. The album spawned classic rock anthems like "Last Child," " Back in the Saddle" and "Home Tonight." Steven Tyler was featured on the cover of Rolling Stone, a publication that had completely ignored the band a few years earlier. "...I was living my dream. I felt so content. How could I ever ask for anything more? But that's what I did, and that's what I got- more!," says Joey Kramer.



In May, Aerosmith performed at Madison Square Garden for the first time and in June, they headlined their first stadium show at the 80,000 seat Pontiac Stadium in Michigan. They spent the summer performing at some of the largest stadiums and outdoor venues in the country and that fall, they embarked upon their first international outing: a 17 city tour of Europe, followed by a trip to Japan.



By the end of 1976, Aerosmith had two platinum records and many hit singles under their belts. They had mansions, fast cars, private planes, millions of fans. They were one of the most successful rock bands in the world. They'd reached the top and there was nowhere to go but down.



The band had always dabbled in drugs, but now that they were raking in millions of dollars, they could afford their vices. As a result, they began to get into heavier drugs like cocaine and heroin. They cultivated the "bad boy" image: trashing hotels, tearing apart dressing rooms, throwing temper tantrums in public, getting drunk onstage, smashing their instruments. The heavy drug use was a big part of that, but eventually, it took its toll.



Constant touring and recording with no time off was also taking a toll on the band. By the end of 1976, Aerosmith had been on the road for nearly three years nonstop and they were exhausted. But they couldn't take a break. They had to get to work on another album.



In early 1977, they began working on their fifth album, "Draw the Line," at an old nunnery called the Cenacle in Armonk, NY. While working on "Draw the Line," the band slowed to a halt, the result of a combination of serious drug addiction, fatigue, ego clashes and the overwhelming pressure to produce another record like "Toys in the Attic" and "Rocks." The pressure to come up with another big hit and to maintain their position at the top had to have been suffocating. Aerosmith spent the first half of 1977 living at the Cenacle in a drug-induced haze and doing everything they could to avoid working on the album. Joey Perry and Steven Tyler would go upstairs, fall asleep and not be seen or heard for days at a time. Brad, Tom and Joey would play hide and seek or drive their cars around, but little actual work was done.



If a band is like a river, an album is like a bucket of water you take out of it, a moment in a band's life. "Draw the Line" was untogether because we weren't a cohesive unit anymore. You could tell we weren't in the same room when the tracks were done. The only thing linking it together were headphones. We were drug addicts dabbling in music, rather than musicians dabbling in drugs ( Joe Perry)

By the summer of 1977, the album still wasn't done, but the band went back on the road, touring the stadiums in the US and then travelling to Europe to play the big summer festivals like Belgiums' Blitzen Festival and the Lorelei Festival in Germany. The tour was absolutely miserable. There were endless fights among the band members, Steven kept getting drunk and passing out onstage. The lifestyle of rock'n'roll excess was beginning to wear the band down and throw a damper on the fire that fueled Aerosmith's rise to the top. "I began to think seriously about what I was doing. I wanted to go home," said Joey Kramer. Aerosmith's 1977 tour was cut short at the Philadelphia Spectrum when someone threw an M-80 onstage, rupturing an artery in Joe's hand and burning Steven's cornea.



Since Steven and Joe were too injured to tour, the band went back into the studio at the Record Plant in Manhattan to finish the album. When "Draw the Line" was released, it was the fastest-selling record Columbia Records had ever had. It sold 1.5 million copies right away, but the album ultimately only reached #11 on the charts.



All of the mind-altering substances, all the exhaustive touring, and all the pressure to hold onto their top spot was causing enormous tension and strife within the band. All the band members' wives and girlfriends hated one another and fought constantly, which drove the band members further apart.



We started hearing rumors that we were breaking up when word got out how crazy things were. The press started referring to Joe and Steven as the "Toxic Twins." It's hard to keep this stuff secret. We'd gotten to a very dangerous point where we could afford all the vices we wanted. We had our mansions, our Ferraris, the bottomless stashes. Where do you go from there? (Tom Hamilton)



By 1978, the excesses of Aerosmith's rock and roll lifestyle had begun to turn ugly. But they were still one of the top rock bands in the world. The band spent the summer of 1978 touring exhaustively. They headlined one of the biggest music festivals of the decade, the Cal Jam 2, at the Ontario Motor Speedway near Los Angeles with Ted Nugent. Their next gig was another massive rock festival at the Cotton Bowl called the Texxas Jam. Aerosmith was first on the bill there, too. The band also appeared in their first movie role, as the Future Villain band in Robert Stigwood's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The recorded a single for the movie soundtrack, a cover of the Beatles hit "Come Together." The song became hit for Aerosmith, as well.



That fall, they released a live album called "Live Bootleg" and toured in support of the new album through December, when while onstage at the Phildelphia Spectrum, someone threw a beer bottle at Steven and it shattered in his face. The band was in rough shape during the tour. They were consuming such astonishing amounts of drugs that Steven literally had to be scraped off the floor and carried to the stage so that he could perform. No one else in the band was in very great shape either. "In 1978, Aerosmith represented the living spirit of American rock 'n' roll," says David Krebs. "To see them destroy themselves through immense disregard for anything but self-indulgence was a tragedy." Personal tensions were mounting within the band as well. Joe and Steven had nearly stopped speaking to one another. "It hurt really bad," says Steven. "The band I had with this guy was...gone."



In the spring of 1979, Aerosmith began work on "Night in the Ruts," but everyone was so drugged up, animosity and tension were running so high, and Joe Perry had drifted so far away from the band that Aerosmith became completely nonfunctional. Months went by and little was accomplished. The band was very excited about playing with Led Zeppelin in England that summer, but the tour got pulled because the album wasn't finished, which left everyone feeling more frustrated and angry than before. During the making of the new album, Aerosmith's management informed Joe that he was in debt to the band to the tune of $80,000. Joe asked waht he could to to repay the debt and his managers suggested that he make a solo record. Joe thought it was a good idea, so he went about putting together his own band, the Joe Perry Project.



Meanwhile, Aerosmith was stagnating. They just couldn't finish the album. They had to go on tour without any new songs to play, which frustrated Joe to no end. There was a lot of fighting going on, not much work being done, and Joe just couldn't stand it anymore.



Backstage at a show in Cleveland in the summer of 1979, all the pressure and all the tension finally came to a head — over spilled milk. Tom's wife, Terry, said something bitchy to Joe's wife, Elissa, prompting Elissa to dump a glass of milk on Terry. The incident led to a knock-down, drag-out fight among the band members. Joe stormed off in disgust and returned home to Boston. He swore he'd never play with Aerosmith again as long as he lived.



Without Joe, Aerosmith had to cancel the tour they'd had planned for later that fall and started looking for a new guitarist. They auditioned Germany's Michael Schenker but instead settled on a studio musician named Jimmy Crespo.



Joe struck out on his own with a new band: singer Ralph Mormon, bassist David Hull and drummer Ronnie Stewart. The new band, the Joe Perry Project, played its first gig at the Rathskellar on the campus of Boston College. Joe signed a new record deal with Columbia and released his first solo album, "Let the Music Do the Talking," in spring of 1980. The album didn't get much airplay or do very well on the charts, unfortunately.



When Joe left Aerosmith, everything really fell apart for Joe and for the rest of the band. Joe couldn't produce the commercial success that Aerosmith had enjoyed on his own, and many Aerosmith fans abandoned both Joe and the rest of the group, because "without Joe Perry, it's not really Aerosmith." Everything changed. No more limos, no more luxury hotels. It was back to touring in station wagons and staying in cheap dives like the Holiday Inn. But Joe was thrilled to be independent and on his own and his former bandmates were relieved that the constant tension and fighting between Steven and Joe was finally over.



Aerosmith went on tour in early 1980 after finally releasing "Night in the Ruts," with Joe's replacement Jimmy Crespo and longtime friend of the band Richie Supa playing the guitar parts that Joe never finished. The tour was cut short, however, when in the fall of 1980, Steven crashed his motorcycle in Sunapee and nearly died. He spent two months in the hospital and a year recovering at home, barely able to walk. Aerosmith was paralyzed. They couldn't tour, they couldn't record, nothing. With Aerosmith sidelined, new bands like Motley Crue and Van Halen began to move into their vacated position at the top. When the band was finally able to get itself back up and running, their audience had found a bunch of new bands to rock out with. It was over; their expiration date had finally come up. They were officially "has beens."



Joe Perry wasn't having much luck with his solo project either. According to Joe, the record label and management refused to help him as far as promoting the album, because they wanted to starve him out in order to get him back into Aerosmith. Joe went through many lineups, firing and hiring musicians right and left and spending every spare cent he had on drugs. Joe released "I've Got The Rock and Rolls Again" in 1981, but Columbia did nothing to promote it, so the album died.



A few months later, in 1981, Brad left Aerosmith too. He'd gotten bored during Steven's convalesence and started working with Ted Nugent lead singer Derek St. Holmes. They did a record together, but it didn't make the charts. The Whitford/St.Holmes band did a little six-week tour, but St. Holmes went back to singing with Ted Nugent after the tour. Brad was bored and frustrated with Aerosmith and found it very hard to work with Jimmy Crespo. Jimmy was nice and all, but he was nitpicky; a stickler for perfection. Brad had always had an intuitive chemistry with Joe, but he didn't have that chemistry with Crespo. Brad was also growing weary of the endless amounts of drugs and insanity that Aerosmith was seeped in. "I went back up to Boston and just started to enjoy the early summer weather for a few days before I had to go back to New York to work on the record. Whenever I thought about this, my shoulders would knot up and I'd be miserable," says Brad. Brad went to the airport to go back to New York, but he couldn't make himself get on the plane. For the next two and a half years, Brad worked on a series of small projects but never settled in with a new band.



Aerosmith was mostly finished with the album, " Rock in a Hard Place," when Brad left the band. The album was released in 1982, but they couldn't go out on the road in support of the album minus one guitarist, so they hired a replacement, Rick Dufay. " Rock in a Hard Place" reached #32 on the charts, but the single, "Lighting Strikes" didn't make the charts at all.



By 1983, Joe Perry had hooked up with a new manager, Tim Collins. who would be integral to the fate of Aerosmith's future. By this point, Joe was so broke that he couldn't even pay his bills. He didn't have a home or a car. Joe was in danger of being dropped by his record label and his third solo record, "Once a Rocker, Always a Rocker," didn't sell at all. Joe's life and career were going down the toilet. Joe had divorced his wife Elissa, he was having drug-induced convulsions, was hospitalized with malnutrition, was sent to psychiatric hospital to dry out, and was burdened with financial and legal problems. Brad was pretty much unemployed and was so broke that he and his wife had to borrow money from Brad's parents-in-law just to buy a crib for thier newborn son. Aerosmith wasn't doing much better. Just a few years earlier, the band had sold out the largest stadiums in the country. Now, they couldn't even fill clubs. The band was on its last legs. Steven was living in the seedy Gorham Hotel in midtown Manhattan and spent all his time walking the streets trying to cop cheap heroin. Many people around the band could see that Joe and Brad were miserable on their own and that their estranged bandmates missed them. Various parties, including replacement guitarists Rick Dufay and Jimmy Crespo, tried to persuade Aerosmith's original lineup to reunite, but the band wouldn't hear anything of it. Until one night in early 1984 when Joe broke down and decided to give Steven a call.



Something occured to me. Elissa wasn't around anymore. What was it I had against Steven? What was it I had against Tom? And it dawned on me. I love the guys in the band. What happened to my band? ( Joe Perry)

Steven and Joe buried the hatchet and vowed to try and put the band back together. That Valentine's day, Joe and Brad went to see Aerosmith perform at the Boston Orpheum. It was the first time in nearly 5 years that the band's original lineup had been together. After the show, they had a meeting at Tom's house and agreed to reunite. It was official. Joe Perry and Brad Whitford were back in Aerosmith!



The newly reunited band had a lot of housecleaning to do. They fired Steve Leber and David Krebs and agreed to be managed by Tim Collins with Joe's insistence. They cut all old ties; virtually anyone connected with the old Aerosmith was gone. They started over from scratch with a clean slate. They were like a new band again.



Because they'd been gone from the top level for so long, they couldn't just waltz back into arenas and stadiums and automatically sell multiplatinum records again. They'd have to prove themselves all over again and climb back to the top. It wouldn't be easy. The first task at hand was to make some money and announce the reunion with a tour. The band was in dire financial straits. Their costly drug habits had wiped out their entire fortunes, Steve Leber and David Krebs had cheated the band out of thousands of dollars, the band was deeply in debt and owed back taxes that were through the roof. Earning some money was imperative.



As was letting the world know that Aerosmith was back and better than ever. The band began rehearsing in Boston, but everyone was extremely tense and nervous. "I had to wash down six Valiums the size of man hole covers with a six back of beer just to calm down after rehearsal," says Joe Perry. No one in the band was sure that they still had it. They were all in their 30s now, and there were a lot of newer younger bands out there to compete against. What if they couldn't pull it off? What if they couldn't play the songs? There was a lot of uncertainty and trepidation when the band reunited.



Everything went fairly well during Aerosmith's 1984 " Back in the Saddle" tour, but the band became embroiled in a legal battle with the Leber-Krebs management team, who kept trying to take the money the band earned from concert ticket sales because they still had a contractual hold over the band and its name. Tim Collins managed to use some clever tactics to fend Leber-Krebs off until they got sick of trying to take Aerosmith's money. Aerosmith also had a problem with promoters. They'd earned such a bad reputation over the last few years: obnoxious rock star behavior, heavy drug addiction, passing out onstage or showing up at concerts three hours late. Many promoters were very skeptical about the band, and with good reason. Aerosmith had to prove that they could be reliable. They had to work hard not only to win back their fan base but also to win back the confidence of those who worked in the music industry.



The band stayed on tour for a year and eventually managed to repay thier debts and become pretty financially secure. Now, they had to focus on getting a record deal. It was difficult to focus on the record deal because Aerosmith was still embroiled in a legal battle with Leber-Krebs. The trouble was compounded by the fact that few record companies were interested in some aging, drug-addled burnouts leftover from the 70's. Most of the major labels figured that Aerosmith had already run its course. The band would have to find a label that believed they still had a lot of rock and roll left in them!



John Kalodner, an A&R guy from Geffen Records, was charmed by the band and decided to sign them. But there was a problem. Aerosmith still legally worked for Columbia Records! Tim Collins finally got the band free from their old management and their old record label by telling them that it was a pointless waste of time to be so concerned about a bunch of aging drug addicts. Columbia agreed and let Aerosmith go so that they could be free to sign with Geffen Records.



John Kalodner was charged with the task of rehabilitating Aerosmith and getting them competitive for the 1980's. Music had changed a lot since Aerosmith's heyday in the 70's. While the band had been down and out, a new cable channel that would change the music industry forever had come along: MTV. By 1984, if you weren't on MTV, in Steven's words, you "hardly officially existed." MTV had catapulted young bands like Van Halen, Bon Jovi and Ratt all the way to the top, but Aerosmith wasn't part of it. They'd have to conquer this new medium in order to win back their fans... A lot of things were going to be different for Aerosmith in the 80's. For the first time, they worked with A&R people like Kalodner who coached them on making songs radio-friendly. They worked with outside songwriters. In the 70's, the only outside person they worked with was their producer, Jack Douglas, who was just like one of the band. Now they had outside people coming in, coaching them and critiquing their work.



In 1985, they got to work on their first album with Geffen, "Done With Mirrors," with producer Ted Templeman, who'd just produced a successful Van Halen album. The band was excited to work with Templeman, but the making of "Done With Mirrors" just turned into another drugfest, with the band snorting cocaine, getting drunk and accomplishing little in the studio. The new record sold only 400,000 copies, far below expectation. Their big come back album was a flop. It was going to take a lot more luck and hard work than they'd imagined to make it back to the top. They needed another big break.



That big break came in the form of a rap group named Run D.M.C. who wanted to rap over the classic Aerosmith hit "Walk This Way." Run D.M.C. invited Steven and Joe to play on the record and to appear in the music video. The single went all the way to #4 on the charts and MTV put the video on heavy rotation. It did wonders for Aerosmith. It made them seem hip rather than like aging, drug addled leftovers from the 70's. It got Aerosmith airplay on contemporary hits radio and, most importantly, it unlocked the door to MTV, the medium that would relaunch the band's career.



The rap version of "Walk This Way" was totally revolutionary at the time. Today it's not uncommon for rappers to have electric guitars on thier records or for rock bands to have a DJ scratching records, but back in 1986, mixing rock with rap was unheard of. "Walk This Way" broke down the walls between rap and rock and paved the way for artists like Kid Rock, Rage Against the Machine, Limp Bizkit and countless others. The song also created a whole bunch of new Aerosmith fans.



The band toured in support of "Done With Mirrors" all summer even though the album had failed. The band was fighting, still getting too drunk to perform, and it became clear that it was going to take a whole lot more than a hit single and a hot video on MTV for the band to make it back to where they used to be. "I realized the drugs really had to go," said manager Tim Collins. " Aerosmith was being killed from within."



If Aerosmith was going to be one of the best bands in the world again, they'd have to give up drugs and alcohol for good. Steven had been in and out of rehab before, but his sobriety had never lasted long. "I never planned on getting straight at all," he says. "When you get high like I did, you don't say to yourself 'Oh, boy, I gotta get straight today.' There was no 'Get off the shitter, I wanna dump my blow down it!' Nah, it was a steady chain of events that left me with no option: it was either the band or the drugs and drink." Finally, at Tim Collin's urging, Steven and the rest of the band went to rehab for the last time. Aerosmith spent the rest of 1986 trying to get sober and preparing to begin work on their next album.



We stopped drinking. We stopped taking drugs. We started to work out and get back in shape until it seemed like we were training for some competition or a war. Lifting weights. Running. Working out. The physical stuff became an outlet for a lot of the agression we used to carry onstage and turn on each other. I learned it could clear my head for what I had to do. It became more important for my mind to be...clear. You know what I mean? ( Joe Perry)

In late 1986, the band emerged newly sober and poised to make their first drug-free record, "Permanent Vacation," with producer Bruce Fairbairn. The band members helped motivate one another to get sober and stay that way. "When we were making 'Permanent Vacation,' I was still smoking a couple of bowls of pot everyday," says Tom Hamilton. "I'd get to rehearsal, barbecued, and Steven would look me in the eyes and make me feel stupid and paranoid about being the only one of us still...out there." Eventually, the whole band gave up drugs and "Permanent Vacation" was released late in the summer of 1987. MTV put the video from the single "Dude (Looks Like a Lady)" into heavy rotation, and the album stayed on the charts for over a year. Within a year, "Permanent Vacation" was Aerosmith's biggest-selling record ever, dwarfing the sales of "Toys in the Attic" and "Rocks" and spawning three hit singles: "Dude (Looks Like a Lady)," "Rag Doll," and "Angel," which made it all the way to #3 on the charts. Aerosmith was back!



Now that Aerosmith was, once again, one of the biggest bands around, they became poster boys for sobriety.



We did interviews and talked about not taking drugs until we almost wanted to take them again. I told them I didn't want to say to kids, 'Don't do drugs,' because when I was a kid, I tried to do exactly what adults told me not to do. What I wanted to do was make a video for kids showing me having a siezure, turning blue, choking on my own tongue with a needle sticking in my arm. A video of me vomiting blood in the dressing room after the last encore. A video showing the reality of drug use. I told them the truth, that I considered myself a walking miracle. I hadn't touched a drug or drank in a year. I was walking on air. Like a blind guy that someone gave a pair of glasses to and suddenly he could see. Everything came into focus. ( Steven Tyler)

In the fall of 1987, Aerosmith began a 160 city world tour that continued through 1988. They sold out some of the biggest arenas and stadiums in the country, just like they did in the 70's. They brought along younger up-and-coming bands like White Lion and Guns'n'Roses. By the end of their tour with Aerosmith, opening act Guns'n'Roses was also one of the world's top rock bands. The two bands performed together at Giants Stadium in the summer of 1988.



In the late fall, the band went back to the studio and began to work on their follow up, "Pump," at Rik Tinory Studios in Massachusetts and Little Mountain Studios in Vancouver, again with producer Bruce Fairbairn. "Pump" was released in September 1989 and shipped platinum.. The first single was "Love in an Elevator." The next two singles, "What It Takes" and "Janie's Got a Gun," peaked at #9 and #2, respectively.



Aerosmith wasn't a band full of out-of-control "bad boys" anymore. They were now the dignified elder statesmen of hard rock and, for the first time in their career, they began to get critical acclaim and all that goes with it including Grammy awards and the like.



In 1990, the band signed a very lucrative $30 million deal with Sony, which had bought out their old label, Columbia. Geffen wanted to hang on to Aerosmith because they'd become such a huge asset, but Sony won the tug-of-war with Geffen by offering Aerosmith an inexhorbitant sum of money, an extremely high 25% royalty rate, and control over their back catalogue. Only the likes of the Rolling Stones and Michael Jackson had ever been offered such lucrative record deals.



In the early 1990s, a bunch of new bands from Seattle steamrollered over most of the '80's rock bands. Aerosmith, however managed to remain afloat in a new world populated by the likes of Nirvana and Soundgarden. Not only was Aerosmith riding high on a tidal wave of 70's revival in the 1990's, but in fact, they fit right in with the grunge bands. 70's arena rock was, along with punk, one of the twin pillars of 90's grunge rock. Many music experts compared Pearl Jam to the Aerosmith of the 70's and the band even ended up performing with and writing with the Stone Temple Pilots.



In the fall of 1991, Aerosmith performed their first-ever single, "Dream On," at MTV's 10th anniversary special with a 57 piece orchestra and they re-released the 1975 hit "Sweet Emotion" with a "phone sex" video that was played on heavy rotation on MTV. Then they got to work on another album, "Get a Grip." "Get a Grip" was a pretty stressful record to make. When they turned the finished product in to the record company, Geffen said "this sucks!" and made them redo most of the songs and record several new tracks. As a result, it took almost three years to complete the record. But it was well worth the extra work, because "Get a Grip" was extremely well-recieved. The album made it to #1 on the charts and the first single, "Livin' On the Edge" was a huge hit. The next single, "Eat the Rich," almost killed the album, but then came three ballads, "Cryin," "Amazing," and "Crazy," and three videos featuring a teenage actress named Alicia Silverstone. The videos were played to death on MTV and they launched Alicia Silverstone to Hollywood superstardom. "Cryin'" made it to #3 on the Billboard charts, and "Get a Grip" was platinum 8 times over by the end of the year.



Aerosmith began a 225-city tour of North and South America, Europe and the far east that summer and in 1994, the band headlined the second incarnation of the Woodstock festival, playing in the pouring rain in the early hours of the morning in front of a crowd of 330,000. Aerosmith got into cyberspace that year: websites, online chats, interactive games. They had a cameo role in the movie "Wayne's World 2." Their song "Dude (Looks Like a Lady)" appeared in the movie "Mrs. Doubtfire," and they opened a music club in Boston named for one of their early songs, Mama Kin- but not before making a clean sweep of the MTV video music awards and taking home a few Grammys.



The band's 12th studio album and its first for Sony, "Nine Lives," was pretty aptly named. The making of "Nine Lives" was a very, very trying time for the band. They fired their manager, Tim Collins because they felt he had overstepped his boundaries in an effort to keep the band sober. The band became outraged when Collins began to invade their personal lives and the decision was made to dismiss him. Collins went to the press with stories about the band being back on drugs. The band temporarily lost Joey Kramer to severe depression and when the album was finally done, Sony said "This doesn't sound like Aerosmith," and made them do it over! Aerosmith almost broke up during the making of "Nine Lives," but fortunately, they pulled themselves back together, released the album in March of 1997 and went on the road through 1998.



In 1998, Aerosmith scored their first-ever #1 single with "I Don't Want to Miss A Thing," recorded for the soundtrack of the movie "Armageddon," starring Steven's daughter, Liv. The song was such a success that it earned the band an Oscar nomination. Aerosmith didn't win the Oscar, but their performance at the 1999 Academy Awards was one of the most-talked about moments of the night.



The band returned to Boston and began working on "Just Push Play." They decided to take matters into their own hands, producing it themselves in Joe's basement. The album spawned the single "Jaded," which Aerosmith performed during halftime at the 2001 Superbowl with N'Sync and Britney Spears. A few months later, Aerosmith was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which they more than deserve, considering all that they've been through and all they've achieved!



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