Steven Tyler: The Biography

by Laura Jackson

  In 1964, along with other teenagers from Yonkers, Tyler formed his first band. The line-up would change, as would the band name. It started off as the Strangers until it transpired that another band had that name. Initially, they played around with the spelling but in time switched to calling themselves Chain Reaction. Irrespective of the band’s line-up or billing, Steven threw himself wholeheartedly into performing as drummer and lead vocalist, scraping up bookings wherever he could. He also moonlighted occasionally as a vocalist with Yonkers’ other best-known band, the Dantes, in which his neighbourhood friend Raymond Tabano played.

  By the age of seventeen, Steven was already dabbling in drugs, smoking pot. At 5’10”, he had an incredibly lean, near skeletal, physique. His dark brown hair was luxuriously thick and, in keeping with the times, grew down on to his shoulders. He may have been relentlessly teased when he was younger about his unusual looks but the vibrancy he now radiated, the glint in his eyes and the stimulatingly unpredictable aura he oozed attracted the girls, all the same. In 1965, Rolling Stones’ music topped the soundtrack of Tyler’s teens. ‘I grew up with ’em!’ he declared. ‘I smoked so many joints, listening to their albums, fucked so many girls in high school. That was my whole youth, man! I spent it with the Stones.’

  That autumn, with Out of Our Heads having recently topped the US album chart, the Rolling Stones launched an extensive North American tour, during which they courted controversy every step of the way. Their gig at the Memorial Auditorium in Rochester, New York, in early November had to be stopped by police after only seven minutes when three thousand delirious fans tried to storm the stage; all of this fuelled their raucous, rebellious reputations. Tyler lapped up all this bad press and tried to see his idols in the flesh. In New York one day, he got his chance to rush up alongside Mick Jagger stepping out on to a pavement and had his photo taken with him. It was a different story when Steven stumbled across the Stones’ founder and musical genius, Brian Jones. The most striking Stone, the blond-haired Jones was actually extremely approachable but he had an indefinable presence. Brian was sitting enjoying a quiet drink in a club in Central Square when Steven walked in and did a sharp double take. The usually irrepressible Tyler froze. ‘I was so taken aback, I couldn’t talk,’ he recalled. Someone who can well relate to that reaction is Vicki Wickham, one of the producers of Britain’s best sixties pop show, Ready, Steady, Go! She reveals: ‘Brian Jones was absolutely stunning! The band were all eclipsed by Jones. You had to be around him in person to truly grasp what I mean.’

  Steven clamoured to see all his favourite bands when they hit town. He managed to see the Kinks in summer 1965, when they made their US live debut at the Academy of Music in New York. Completely carried away that night, he yelled his head off until he was hoarse. Fired up, he put even more into his own personal performances. He was insatiable when it came to music. ‘I love the buzz,’ he explained. ‘The only other thing that gives you a buzz like that is drugs, but music is stronger.’

  In the mid-1960s, Steven experienced adrenalin rushes from landing the chance to play support to several top acts. His band opened for the Yardbirds at New York and Connecticut gigs, when Tyler was so keen to connect with the British band he eagerly helped the roadies handling the equipment. He was in seventh heaven supporting the incomparable Byrds at a concert at Westchester County Center in White Plains, New York, enjoyed supporting the Lovin’ Spoonful, and was blown away when his band opened for the Beach Boys before thousands of screaming fans at Iona College in New Rochelle. At home in Yonkers, Steven had for years absorbed the Beach Boys’ immaculate vocal harmonies and the brilliant production values in songs ranging from the jaunty ‘I Get Around’ and ‘California Girls’, to the more introspective ‘In My Room’, which Dennis Wilson dubbed a classic make-out song. Asked what it had meant to him backing the Californian band, Tyler succinctly said: ‘Fucking everything!’

  The year 1966 saw some significant changes in his life. With Chain Reaction he recorded two singles, ‘The Sun’/‘When I Needed You’ and ‘You Should Have Been Here Yesterday’/‘Ever Lovin’ Man’. All four songs were recorded between August and September at New York’s CBS studios, and S. Tallarico appears on the songwriting credits for both ‘When I Needed You’ and ‘The Sun’, along with fellow band members of Chain Reaction, Barry Shapiro, Don Solomon, Alan Strohmayer and Peter Stahl. The first single was released late that summer on Date Records, part of CBS Records. Tyler reflected: ‘I can’t ever forget how excited I was about being in an actual recording band. It was a total dream come true.’

  That Tyler’s destiny lay in music and not academia was just as well, for 1966 was also the year he was expelled from Roosevelt High School, having been busted along with others by an undercover narcotics cop for taking marijuana. Tyler explained: ‘They put this narc right there in the school. Right up until he popped us, he was selling us nickel bags of good shit.’ Several students were nabbed in the bust and dragooned to the police station. Their worried girlfriends were all crying, and many a dismayed parent was forced to face up to their offspring’s drug taking. Tyler went on: ‘They took me from my front door in handcuffs as my father was arriving home from work.’ Steven’s mother, Susan, stood on the doorstep in tears and with the neighbours rubbernecking to get a better view of what was going on, Tyler felt for his parents. The drug bust made front-page news next day in a Yonkers daily newspaper.

  Steven faced felony charges, and when he appeared in court he promised the judge that he would walk the straight and narrow from then on. In that split second as he said it, he probably meant it, for he was numb with fear at the idea of being sent to prison. He was given one year’s probation and was now classed as a YO - a youthful offender.

  Not surprisingly, Steven quickly learned that he was not welcome back at Roosevelt High when term started in September, so his parents sent him to Quintano’s Professional School in New York, which catered for kids with aspirations in the arts - music, acting, dance. Steven mainly gave this school a miss, teaming up instead with the other ‘black sheep’ to spend most days hanging around the parks, smoking dope.

  His other high continued to come from gigging, and he especially enjoyed playing at The Barn with Chain Reaction. A nightclub held literally in an old barn on a farm in the village of Georges Mills, near to Lake Sunapee, it was a bring-your-own-booze venue and was locally the place to perform. As a recording band, Chain Reaction appeared an enviable cut above the ordinary to the other music-mad teenagers, a distinction which delighted Steven. The Barn itself, he adored. From the tiny lip of a stage, he could look out at the crowd jostling intimately up close to him, and there was a loft area with wooden spar fencing. As Tyler belted out cover versions of Stones, Beatles, Animals and Yardbirds songs, legs would dangle and sway within touching distance above his head. When his band’s second single, ‘You Should Have Been Here Yesterday’/‘Ever Lovin’ Man’, was released on Verve Records (part of CBS Records), it only enhanced Tyler’s local hero status up at Lake Sunapee. He did not know it, but future Aerosmith members Joe Perry and Tom Hamilton would hang around outside The Barn, as yet too young to get in, listening to Tyler’s rafter-rattling performances.

  A child of the sixties, by 1967 Steven embraced the summer of love - the make love, not war ethos, sharing joints with total strangers and opposing the Vietnam conflict. His youthful offender status kept him clear of the draft, but he has maintained that he would have refused to fight in Vietnam anyway. ‘I didn’t believe in it,’ he stated. He once expanded: ‘When they said: “Don’t smoke pot,” we said: “Fuck you!” When they said: “Go to Vietnam,” we said: “No.” And it wasn’t just because we were stoned and high. It was because we were right. I got into the paraphysical. I was into the Maharishi and trying to get spiritual.’

  He continued to open for big bands working the clubs around Greenwich Village and over almost the whole of New York. He also played to a lot of what he called ‘strait-laced’ audiences when his b
and hit the grand ballroom circuit. His father had long ago imbued in him the need to nurture his craft, and so Tyler chose to see these unbending audiences as good training grounds. He did still play the drums but was more and more prone to grabbing the microphone stand and singing lead.

  Mick Jagger continued to be his idol. ‘I can remember when I was just another teenager from Yonkers going to Madison Square Garden to see the Stones and looking down and saying to myself: “Wow, man! Is that tiny figure all the way down there really Mick Jagger?”’ In 1968, the Rolling Stones released the hard-rocking number ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, the promotional clip for which had been shot by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Although crude in quality by today’s sophisticated video standards, at the time it was considered innovative and dark, with the Stones wearing face paint and looming through the gloom into the camera lens.

  Michael Lindsay-Hogg recalls of the shoot: ‘We had started at midnight and were going to work till dawn. By halfway through the night we had filmed it straight, just a performance with some flashing lights, and it was fine. Then Brian [Jones] came up with the suggestion that they should alter their whole look by using dramatic make-up and as it was a tough number, they should give it a harder edge. I liked it, so we shot a second version. When we had finished, that’s the version everyone liked and it was the very first pop promo that had that extra something in it which set it apart from the normal performance clips.’ When Steven Tyler saw this moody promo clip for the US chart-topping single, it played directly to his own developing sense of the dramatic and stage theatrics. He had turned twenty by now, but still hoped to bump into Mick Jagger for a chat, and he often hung around outside the Scene Club in New York, which the Stones frequented, just on the off chance.

  Any involvement in music excited Tyler, and he guested in a recording studio on back-up vocals with a band called the Left Banke whose bass player, Tom Finn, recalled of Tyler: ‘He was hungry and a good singer, so I put him on there.’ One thing that seemed to escape Steven was that not everybody was quite so hungry for success and focused on attaining it as himself. To his way of thinking, the members of Left Banke were pretty laid-back. He later stated: ‘I’ll never forget being in their apartment one day and one of them saying: “What’s the date today? Are we recording tonight? What are we going to record?” I couldn’t believe they were taking it so lightly!’

  Steven had continued to co-write songs with keyboard player Don Solomon, and the band had made demos of another handful of songs, with a view to recording an album, but in the end it never materialised. By this time, the band personnel had changed again and the name had been switched to The Chain.

  Times were changing in more ways than one. Dr Stephen Perrin, a specialist in 1960s counter-culture, explains: ‘In 1967, you’d had Scott McKenzie singing about people going to San Francisco wearing flowers in their hair but then the original hippies moved out of Haight-Ashbury and the mafia moved in and controlled the drug supply. They caused an LSD famine and flooded the place with speed and heroin. So where we had the flower children before, we now had a bunch of very strung-out people.’

  Over on America’s east coast, Steven Tyler had placed his feet on an increasingly darker road in relation to his drug consumption; he was taking speed and dropping acid. In August 1969, Tyler went to the now-famous Woodstock festival at Yasgur’s Farm, close to the village of Woodstock in Bethel, New York state, but it was all a blur to him as he was tripping his brains out. He was so far gone, he had no idea even of where he was. He revealed: ‘My brain was on LSD, not just one tab because I had snorted another.’

  When he came back down to earth, Steven knew that as the decade was dying things were not working out for him. He was going nowhere fast. With his huge well of optimism he had promised his mother that he would become so famous in a rock band that it would change the Tallarico family’s whole way of life, but when he hitch-hiked back to Lake Sunapee that summer he felt his tail wedging dejectedly between his legs. He could not know it, but he was about to meet a guy who would soon breathe new life into his folding world.

  CHAPTER 2

  Fake It, Till You Make It

  WHAT STEVEN inwardly craved, come the summer of 1969, was a creative partner - a soulmate. ‘I wanted a brother, that Ray Davies/Dave Davies thing,’ he recalled. That soulmate came in the shape of Joe Perry, a gifted young guitarist who was also heavily influenced by British bands, and whose parents owned property at Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire.

  Born Anthony Joseph Perry on 10 September 1950 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Joe was raised along with a younger sister by their parents, Mary, a high school physical education teacher, and Anthony Perry, an accountant, in the small town of Hopedale, Massachusetts. His father was ex-military and Joe grew up interested in guns, becoming handy with a .22 rifle. Drawn from an early age to music, he tinkered with the ukulele before progressing to guitar, persevering to teach himself to play right-handed, despite being naturally left-handed. When he was fourteen, he sat up and took notice as the Beatles hit America, but Joe was most influenced by much meatier musicians such as Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green, and John Mayall.

  School held no attraction for Perry and, as a loner, he tended not to hang out with the crowd. He preferred to hole up in his bedroom, practising guitar for hours on end, but with a goal in mind. Throughout his teens he became involved in several bands - Flash, Plastic Glass, Pipe Dreams, Just Us and the Jam Band. Joe Perry perhaps did not have the openly irrepressible nature of Steven Tyler, but in his quiet, stubborn way he was also a renegade spirit. A slender, handsome young guy, Joe grew his black hair so long it brought him into conflict first with school authorities, then with employers, but he stuck to his guns and refused to cut it.

  As an eighteen-year-old, Joe swapped Hopedale for summer at Lake Sunapee with his family, where he took a job in a café-cum-ice cream parlour called the Anchorage at Sunapee Harbour. His tasks there included anything from sweeping the floor and washing dishes to frying chips and hamburgers. In the bustling kitchen he kept up with the latest sounds via the radio; he also kept tabs on a local rock star - Steven Tallarico. Chain Reaction singles featured on the jukebox at the Anchorage, and he could not help but notice Steven around the resort. For one thing, the New Yorker dressed very trendily and was not shy of lapping up the local hero status his band acquired through playing gigs at The Barn. Steven would frequently barge into the Anchorage with his mates and take over a booth, where their high-spirited capers sometimes got a bit out of hand - food would end up flying through the air - and their general exuberance could annoy other patrons. Joe said years later: ‘I guess that’s how you were supposed to act when you had a rock band - dress like you came from Greenwich Village and be loud.’ As soon as Steven and his crowd dispersed, Joe would emerge from the kitchen and watch the guys heading off as he cleared up the mess they had left behind. At this time, Joe was plugging away with the Jam Band, comprising drummer Dave Scott and another friend and future Aerosmith member, bass player Tom Hamilton.

  Blond-haired, brown-eyed Thomas William Hamilton was born on 31 December 1951 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to George and Betty Hamilton. Because his father was in the air force, Tom and his three siblings moved house quite a lot. Suffering a serious brush with scarlet fever and falling prey to the odd boyhood accident, Tom was a cautious sort who took time to develop a more outgoing attitude to life. Overawed by his father’s military exploits as a World War II pilot, he very much looked up to him as a role model. A love of music then kicked in and he began to teach himself the guitar at the age of twelve, quickly switching to bass.

  The following year, by now living in New London, New Hampshire, seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show sent his passion for music into overdrive. ‘I used to go to bed imagining myself as one of the Beatles, up on stage, singing those songs,’ Tom recalled. Like Joe Perry, however, Tom’s focus shifted towards a rockier sound; the hypnotic heartbeat of some of the Rolling Sto
nes’ early rhythm and blues-influenced numbers strengthened Tom’s attraction to bass guitar. In his teens, Tom joined a variety of bands with weird and wonderful names before teaming up with Joe Perry - whom he had met at Lake Sunapee - in Plastic Glass, Pipe Dreams and the Jam Band. By this time Tom had acquired a rather lurid local reputation, having been busted for dropping acid. It was later claimed that this brush with the law was the first acid bust in that particular part of New Hampshire. The local notoriety this incident brought Hamilton in such a small town left him feeling uncomfortably like public enemy number one; this outlaw image was only enhanced by his avid interest in the nubile young ladies around him in class. Years later, with brutal candour, Tom confessed: ‘I was just about the horniest little bastard you could possibly imagine.’

  Ploughing his pent-up energies into playing gigs with the Jam Band, he especially enjoyed nights at The Barn. Just a couple of years earlier, he and Joe Perry had lurked around outside The Barn listening to Steven Tyler fronting Chain Reaction, and the passage of time had deepened Tom’s respect for Steven. He felt it obvious that Tyler was destined for big things, so he was impressed when, in August 1969, Steven showed up to see the Jam Band perform.

  According to Tyler, he has no clear recollection of why he went to see the Jam Band that evening. He does recall having no great first opinion of what he saw. In inimitable fashion he has frequently declared: ‘They sucked!’ To his trained musical ear, the Jam Band lacked precision, their timing was erratic and their tuning left much to be desired. Unimpressed, Steven was on the brink of going home when the band plunged into the Fleetwood Mac number ‘Rattlesnake Shake’, and Perry’s suddenly slinky, sensuous lead guitar work stopped Steven in his tracks; he was mesmerised. Tyler later said: ‘They had a lot of raunch.’ Now watching the Jam Band closely, he grew strongly aware that were he to mesh his melodic qualities and discipline with their more raw abilities, they could create something very special together. The notion quickened Steven’s senses - it was what he had been looking for - and he quit The Barn that night with a lighter step than he had had for some time.