Rocks: My Life in and Out of Aerosmith

by Joe Perry

  I took a counter-position, arguing that I’d been with Steven practically 24/7 during our months in Miami and hadn’t seen him using or acting out. I agreed that he had been raging uncontrollably. But that was about redoing the record. That was a separate matter. Collins said that rage was rage. No one could communicate with Steven. We needed a plan of action. What should we do? Ideas flew around the room. People were getting up and shouting. People were coming and going. It was chaotic. It was hard to tell who heard what. Basically, we were sick of this meeting stuff. Collins was grasping at straws.

  After a break, Collins said, “Something has to happen. We have to do something concrete. So I’ve written a letter that I want each of you to sign.”

  The letter, addressed to Steven, said that he was out of control; that he was in a constant state of rage; that he was a detriment to the well-being of the band; that his volatility prevented us from getting any work done; and that, unless he addressed these issues and sought immediate help or changed his attitude, we could no longer work with him.

  We were all hesitant to sign. It seemed too confrontational, too harsh. But there was a thread of truth to it. We all were tired of bearing the brunt of Steven flying off the handle. Maybe the letter would help him take another look at himself.

  “It’s the only thing that will work,” said the therapist.

  “Not to send it is to risk losing everything,” yelped Collins.

  In my gut I felt like it was overreaching and wrong, but I signed it anyway. So did Joey, Brad, and Tom.

  Steven had been going off the deep end for a long while. But I also knew that Collins was also an emotional wreck, something that became painfully clear when he dropped another bomb.

  “I just called Teresa,” said Collins. “I felt like I had to tell her.”

  “Tell her what?” I asked.

  “That Steven has been not only been using, but cheating on her.”

  “You what!” I exploded. “You called the man’s wife to say he’s been fucking around without having any fuckin’ proof?”

  “You’ve seen the pictures from South Beach with him and those bimbos.”

  “That’s not proof. You can’t take a picture in South Beach without a fuckin’ bimbo in it.”

  “You and I both know that he’s been acting out.”

  “I don’t know that—and even if I did, I wouldn’t run behind his back and tell his wife. I can’t believe you did this, Tim. You’ve been meddling in our lives ever since we met you, man, but this shit is too much. You’ve gone too far.”

  The others were as aghast as I was. We stormed out of his office and could only imagine the impact on Steven when he was hit with this double whammy—our letter and Teresa’s reaction to Collins’s call.

  I should have called Steven to explain, but we were told that if the letter was to work we shouldn’t contact him. Besides, there was some truth to what we had written. We could no longer reason with Steven or deal with his raging tantrums.

  In a wider sense, this was all part of Collins’s method of dividing and conquering that he’d established long ago. By now, no one in the band ever called each other or addressed issues outside of business meetings. That had long been the Aerosmith style—together on the road, constantly touring and recording; and apart off the road, everyone retreating to his home and family. Our distance from each other—our reluctance to face each other directly with our concerns—was what gave Collins much of his power.

  A month went by with no word from Steven. To give him time to absorb the letter, we decided to leave him alone. This gave us all a chance to look objectively at the state of our band, painful as it was.

  Ironically, for all his bellyaching about my so-called codependent marriage, Tim often called Billie for advice during times of stress. He respected her intelligence and insight.

  After a month of Steven’s silence, Tim panicked. Billie and I saw him in Boston at the Four Seasons Hotel, where he called us to his room. He looked terrible, his eyes filled with fear.

  “I really fucked up by calling Teresa, didn’t I?” asked Collins.

  Billie and I both said, “You did.”

  “I need to call and apologize to him and Teresa, but there’s no getting through to him.”

  Collins was a man falling apart. The master manipulator had manipulated the situation to a point of madness.

  These were difficult weeks. The Nine Lives album, the much-anticipated debut project of our massive new Sony deal, had been rejected by our new label. Artistically, we were at a standstill. We couldn’t tour until the album was complete, and, even if we could, we didn’t have a band. Our lead singer was MIA, and Collins was useless. Steven called a lawyer to talk over his options. He was through with Collins. On that he and I agreed. I wanted to run over to Steven’s house, grab him by the shoulders, and say, “Hey, man, let’s just talk!” but by then the rift was too deep.

  We hit a stalemate. The situation was fucked up from the inside out. Finally, Tom, Brad, Joey, and I got together with Collins in a hotel room on the South Shore of Boston. We said the obvious: We need to have a band meeting with both Steven and Collins present. We need to sort this shit out. We also need to do it in a neutral place with a neutral therapist. Joey suggested the man who helped him out of his depression, Steve Chatoff. We decided to go to his facility, Steps, outside Malibu. It would be a place where we could put all complaints, misunderstandings, resentments, and expectations on the table. It would be a chance to bring the band back together. Collins agreed. He would attend. He was enthusiastic about the idea. The get-together was even given a name: Conflict and Resolution Week. But what if Steven refused to attend?

  Tim stretched out on the couch and, with some arrogance, said, “I’ll get Steven’s therapist to convince him to show up. If the therapist doesn’t agree to help us out, I’ll threaten to have his license removed. I can do that.” Collins said this with an alarming sense of calm, as though such a maneuver was the most natural thing on earth. It seemed to be a clear window into what he’d been doing for years. Walking out of that meeting, I thought, Man, this is one week I’m looking forward to. Collins is gonna have to face some pretty intense music.

  We were all relieved when Steven agreed to meet us in California. He was just as eager as us to iron things out. When he showed up at Steps, it was great to see him. The feeling was warm.

  Steve Chatoff had a professional demeanor. He wore a suit and tie and didn’t try to look like a rock star. He was a New Yorker, a man who announced that he himself was in recovery. He gave the impression of being a sensible and sensitive therapist. The first thing he said was that he wanted to meet with the band alone. Collins would wait in a nearby hotel until we were ready for him.

  It didn’t take Chatoff long to see what was happening. Even before this first meeting, Collins had been calling him, trying to plan the agenda and manipulate the outcome. Chatoff had told him that he wanted no contact with him before speaking with the band and would accept none of his calls. This was critical: Collins could not manipulate Chatoff.

  At this point Chatoff extended the initial band-only meeting to a second day. He wanted us to vent all the feelings and facts without Collins’s involvement. Chatoff was a good listener, and we had a lot to say. Steven was the most vocal. But we all had a go at it. Our view was that Collins had polluted our relationships, that he lacked any reasonable boundaries, and that his managerial style had wreaked havoc. In the course of the meeting, the dialogue went like this:

  Tom to Brad: “Collins said that about me to you? I can’t believe it.”

  Brad to Joey: “Collins said that about me to you? I can’t believe it.”

  Joey to me: “Collins said that about me to you? I can’t believe it.”

  Me to Steven: “Collins said that about me to you? I can’t believe it.”

  The revelation of half-truths and innuendos came spilling out. All of us had stories that we hadn’t shared with each other. We put our petty comp
laints aside. This was the five of us against an outsider. Finally, the band had pulled together. At the end of that day, Chatoff said what we had already known. “You guys are fine. You’re at a good point in your recovery. You just have to figure out what you want in a manager—and what you don’t want.”

  After a few days of being alone with Chatoff, we had some clarity. We were grateful to Collins, who had been there when no one else was. He’d helped bring us back from the dead. But he had gone too far by entangling himself in our private lives. The new paradigm would be simpler: Take care of our business. Period. No more interfering in our personal stuff. No more triangulation. No more psychobabble bullshit.

  “I think you’re ready to meet with your manager now,” said Chatoff.

  But Collins refused. He said he felt like he was being set up. He would not subject himself to any of our questions. This was not a setting in which he felt safe. Although he was in a hotel down the street, he would not—under any circumstances—come to meet us. In short, Collins boycotted Conflict and Resolution Week.

  To Chatoff, Collins’s boycott was not the critical point. “The critical point,” he said, “is that you guys are not using. You’re not acting out. You’ve stuck with your sobriety and simply want to get back to making music. My overview is that you’ve lost your power as a band and need to take it back.”

  Chatoff added, “Steven’s going to be the way he is. You can’t change him. If Steven wants to change, that’s going to have come from Steven. Collins can’t fix him. Collins can only fix Collins. Joey can only fix Joey. We are who we are. And if we don’t accept each other as we are, we’ll be spending all our time angling for control. Ultimately, that’s an exercise in futility.”

  With those few sentences, Chatoff turned on the lights. At that moment, it all seemed so clear. Collins couldn’t face us. He couldn’t face the truth. He had to go.

  Finally, in heart and soul, we were back together as a band and ready to move on. It was decided that we would call a meeting back in Boston and invite the entire management team. Since I had brought Tim on, it was also decided that I’d be the one to dismiss him. We’d keep Burt Goldstein and Wendy Laister as managers until things settled down. After all, for the past couple of years they’d been acting as our day-to-day managers. That would assure our label and promoters that business would continue as usual.

  I felt as though an enormous weight had been lifted off my shoulders. The thought of the band taking back its power was thrilling.

  I went to the suite we had reserved at the Four Seasons, the battleground for so many of these monumental meetings. We knew that Collins was running around like a madman, trying like Humpty Dumpty to put the pieces together. But it was too late. Conflict and Resolution Week had proven to be an apt name. We had to resolve this thing. We had to rid ourselves of a manager who had co-opted our autonomy. Billie had made the point to me for years, but for years I didn’t want to realize she was right: The man screaming loudest about the pitfalls of codependency had made us all pitifully codependent on him.

  Now all that would change.

  With the full management staff in attendance, the mood was somber. Collins knew what was coming.

  I led off. I said, “We appreciate all your hard work. We appreciate all that you’ve done for us in these past twelve years, but we’re moving on. We don’t need your services as a manager anymore.”

  We went around the room and everyone—Tom, Brad, Joey, and Steven—addressed Tim directly. No one was accusatory or caustic. We all simply thanked him for his service and let him know, in no uncertain terms, that his services were no longer required.

  We took back our band.

  The coda to our dismissal of Tim Collins was especially painful. Maybe we should have seen it coming, but we didn’t. After we let him go, he took one last shot at us. He called a gossip journalist to say that band members were still using. The item was reported in several national magazines. It was a deliberate lie to make us look bad. He painted himself as the clear-eyed, sober manager that only a band of drunks would be foolish enough to fire. We decided not to dignify or prolong the attack with a response. We just wanted this long and torturous chapter in our lives to end.

  BROTHERS

  After the big meeting in Boston, I took off a few weeks and went to Lake Sunapee with Billie and the kids. I needed the water and the woods to help center me. We called this “the Endless Summer.” It was unusually hot. We were on the boat from morning till dusk, and one night we watched a huge meteor shower. Another night we saw the northern lights.

  It was strange and wonderful being at Sunapee—strange because it was the place where, a hundred years ago, the seeds of Aerosmith had been sowed; and wonderful because the place gave me the same peace as an adult it had given me as a child. The peace of a startling purple-pink sunset; the peace of a starlit night; the peace of the placid lake, the warm afternoon sun, boats bobbing in the harbor, our boys playing by the shore, me water-skiing through the slalom course, trying to improve my speed.

  It was in Sunapee where I reconnected with my brother Steven.

  There are many kinds of brothers, from Cain and Abel, to the Marx Brothers, to Orville and Wilbur Wright. There’s good and bad blood among brothers, love and jealousy, compassion and resentment, and every other emotion in between. I have no doubt that, in a deep and abiding way, Steven Tyler is my brother. Together we have forged and maintained a great band; together we have changed each other’s lives. Our stories are intertwined. For that I’m grateful.

  In the long and agonizing drama in which Tim Collins wound his way into the center of our lives, my relationship with Steven was injured, as was my relationship with Billie. It was difficult for my wife, a strong woman, to see me in a weak position. The whole experience with Tim damaged my relationship with Billie the most. It took several years, but our love proved to be resilient, although the scars were deep for both of us, especially Billie. Our relationship was eventually repaired. Steven was another matter. If our partnership was going to continue, we needed to take stock of what had happened. The damage was considerable.

  Because Steven loves the water and the woods as much as I do, it was there in Sunapee—during that same “Endless Summer”—that we walked and talked about where we’d been and where we were going. One afternoon, we took a break from our families and walked through the woods together.

  We talked about what had happened in the most general terms. Steven knew that I knew that he had, to a large degree, been right about Collins. I also knew that Steven knew that Collins’s contributions had been critical to our comeback. Little more needed to be said. It was just good to be walking through the woods with an old friend.

  A month or so later we were walking through horn-honking crowded midtown Manhattan, going from the Sutton Place apartments we had rented to the West Side, where work on Nine Lives had reconvened. We had reached out to John Kalodner to recommend a producer to replace Glen Ballard. John had suggested Kevin Shirley, a tough South African who had been raised in Australia. His nickname was Caveman. Built like a linebacker, Shirley had the look of a Viking—long dark blond hair and a no-horseshit attitude. His thing was straight-up rock-hard rock and roll. I liked Kevin, though he could be brusque, not a useful quality when trying to communicate with Steven.

  As calm as Steven had been walking through the woods, walking through the concrete canyons of Manhattan had him unhinged. When we went back to work on Nine Lives, his old resentments returned. He kept harping on all the time we had spent on the Glen Ballard version down in Florida. I kept saying, “The past is the past, let’s just move on.” We both needed to vent, and vent we did. Walking to the studio gave us a chance to plan the day and have a few laughs. Taking different side streets, we soaked up the energy of the city, stopping to talk to shopkeepers and street sweepers, some of whom we got to know on a first-name basis. By the time we reached the studio, Steven had calmed down—then his arguments with Kevin Shirley began. />
  I respected Kevin. His primitive approach was in stark contrast to the over-the-top high tech of Glen Ballard. Kevin wanted uncut rock and roll. He wanted all five of us playing together live in the studio, recording on a good old-fashioned 24-track tape. That should have been simple, but Steven gave him fits. They argued over everything, especially which vocal part was more suitable than another. In the studio Steven is meticulous to a fault. He’ll obsess over the smallest musical detail. Kevin was the opposite. He was going for a raw sound. I was with Kevin, but mostly I kept quiet and let the two of them work it out. Keep in mind—the songs hadn’t changed. They were the same basic tunes we had written with Ballard, Hudson, Frederiksen, Supa, and Child in Florida. Now they were stripped of their multiple overdubs and rendered with greater grit. It took a long time to do that strip-down. Weeks of walking from the East Side of New York to the West-Side studio, me trying to chill out Steven on the way. Weeks of running down the songs to where Steven would finally sign off on the final version. Weeks of verbal confrontations between Steven and Shirley to the point where Steven swore he’d never work with Caveman again—which was the same thing he’d said about every producer we’d ever worked with, starting with Jack Douglas.

  In the end, Nine Lives probably should have been called Nine Hundred Lives, because that’s how many lives I felt we had lived to its completion. I thought it came out great—and so did Sony, eager to finally put this sucker out. The overall sound was intense. The album graphics pushed the envelope: A cat in an Aerosmith T-shirt is plastered to a dartboard with knives coming at him. Hints of Hindu symbolism surround the artwork.