Steven Tyler: The Biography

by Laura Jackson

  It was a destructive time in many ways, and as Tyler’s mental meltdown continued, his slide towards becoming a fully fledged junkie was inevitable. In addition to consuming Tuinals and other strong pharmaceutical drugs, his increasing use of cocaine and heroin meant that if he did not black out, much of the time he had trouble even seeing straight. It was a sordid scene, as every member of Aerosmith was getting into harder narcotics. Said Steven: ‘We became professional drug addicts who dabbled in music, instead of professional musicians getting high once in a while.’ His grasp of reality slackened further as one day simply ran into another in this secluded environment. He could not sleep because of the level of stimulants in his system, so he lived in a blur in which anything could happen. Once, he passed out in the driveway with a loaded rifle in his hands. On another occasion, he had a drug-induced seizure while driving. He lost control of the Jeep, crashed it into a tree trunk and blacked out. Miraculously he was not injured, but he was found slumped over the steering wheel with a loaded shotgun in his lap. By their own admission, the band went wild, spending most days cruising crazily all over The Cenacle’s grounds, the surrounding countryside and around Armonk itself on two or four wheels, high as kites and therefore oblivious of the danger to themselves or to anyone else. Ostensibly, the nights were set aside for recording, but Steven had not written a single song before arriving at the retreat and nothing was likely to materialise there considering his condition and the state the others were in. Various recording facilities had been built inside the convent, which meant that the guys did not record on the same floor as each other, let alone in the same room, and that was only if they all turned up for recording duty after midnight.

  In recent years, Joe Perry has maintained that he always made sure that ultimately he did not go too far, but at The Cenacle he was in pretty bad shape. Doped to the eyeballs and often sick, he would turn up to play guitar scarcely able to walk in a straight line. Once he was discovered flaked out in an upstairs doorway, having failed to make it into the room, with a hypodermic needle sticking out of his arm. If anyone did show up for work there was no guarantee he would be able to remain awake long enough to complete a session of work with producer Jack Douglas, who was also staying at the former nunnery. Everything was unravelling. It was noticeable that Perry was becoming less inclusive about his music. Tyler needed the music to stimulate him lyrically - no music meant no modelling clay - but by now Steven had stopped caring. At this place of former spiritual reflection and worship, individually every member of Aerosmith was reaching into darker, more unnerving realms.

  After weeks of indulgent drug abuse and delirium, the band left The Cenacle at the end of May. Even then, drama unfolded. On the highway, on his way home, drummer Joey Kramer fell asleep at the wheel of his Ferrari and crashed at 135 miles per hour, cutting himself badly on his shattered windscreen. Days later, Joe Perry had a car accident, writing off his Corvette. ‘I can’t even count all the smashed-up cars among us,’ admitted Perry.

  Work on the new album now got under way at Record Plant Studios in New York; in the circumstances it was hardly surprising that there was a complete lack of cohesion to the material. Gone was their clarity, and confidence was clearly absent, which showed most in the negativity of the lyrics. Only three numbers were Tyler/Perry collaborations - ‘Get It Up’, ‘Draw the Line’, which featured one of Joe Perry’s all time favourite riffs, and the reflective ‘I Wanna Know Why’, of which Tom Hamilton later said: ‘I always thought that song was a reaction to all the shit Steven was getting into at the time.’ The bass player, along with Tyler and producer Jack Douglas, came up with a number called ‘Critical Mass’, while ‘Bright Light Fright’ was every step of the way a pure Joe Perry project. Both ‘The Hand That Feeds’ and the dynamic ‘Kings and Queens’ seemed to involve everyone except the lead guitarist. ‘Sight for Sore Eyes’ included input from David Johansen, lead singer of the New York Dolls. Only one cover version would be added to the album - ‘Milk Cow Blues’ by Kokomo Arnold. Although working at Record Plant Studios brought some structure to the material, it would take several more months to actually complete. The album title became Draw the Line which, bearing their drug abuse in mind, had other connotations, but they opted to reflect the title literally on the cover illustration. At The Cenacle they had been visited by Al Hirschfeld, an artist whose line drawing of the five produced the caricature ultimately featured on the album sleeve.

  The album was still a work in progress when Aerosmith went out on the road in June. Opening acts included AC/DC and Ted Nugent, and audience reaction varied from gig to gig. To diehard Aerosmith fans Tyler and co could do no wrong. Other times, the shows clearly went down in spectacular flames. Steven confessed that one Cleveland concert was later denounced in regional radio polls as the worst show of 1977.

  Steven did not know that while he was gigging around America, at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City Bebe Buell had gone into labour. On 1 July 1977, she gave birth to a daughter she named Liv. One of Bebe’s earliest visitors in the maternity ward was Mick Jagger, who found that he had to share the model’s attention with the newborn. Buell later said of Jagger: ‘He said: “All right, put her away now. I can see you’re a mother.”’ Jagger’s appearance in the maternity wing sparked talk that Bebe’s daughter might be his illegitimate offspring, and for a while Jagger quite enjoyed the speculation. Todd Rundgren, though, was widely assumed to be the girl’s father, while Liv’s biological father had no idea; sunk in his own degenerating world, he continued to push himself to the limit.

  The fast-moving UK and Europe tour that summer was a huge drain on Tyler. After playing to an appreciative crowd of American troops stationed in Stuttgart, West Germany, gigs followed in Hamburg, Munich and Frankfurt. Europe was experiencing unusually heavy rainfalls, and many a gig turned into a quagmire. Steven would not deny that some shows were dire. Early into one performance he passed out before thousands of bemused fans, and his voice was already a problem. One evening he spat up blood as he threw himself about the rain-drenched stage. Yet he failed to recognise that his health was breaking down.

  Off stage the tour was the classic rock riot - hotel rooms were trashed and television sets sent sailing over balcony rails to splash into swimming pools, to the background growl of a chain-saw ripping apart offending furniture. Steven was hurtling out of control. Speaking of these hedonistic excesses, he later admitted that almost everything he had enjoyed in life throughout the 1970s was either immoral or illegal and it came at an escalating cost. ‘I was a junkhead,’ he confessed. ‘I reckon, I did over a million dollars on drugs. I was paying one thousand dollars a gram for heroin and I’d do about three to five grams a week. I would have traded in my nuts for a good ounce of heroin.’

  Joe Perry had become dope-sick in Germany, and the tension between a spaced-out Steven and his lead guitarist was turning nasty. As is the nature of addicts, whatever dope they could get their hands on they zealously hoarded to feed their own habit. Tyler would become furiously frustrated when he ran out of drugs and Joe refused to share his stash with him. The aggravation between the addicts began to show in public. On stage, they would bait one another, coming to blows - or, at least, hitting one another not exactly accidentally with mike stand or guitar. Their bandmates and many people in their entourage looked on anxiously from the wings as this volcano rumbled.

  When the band arrived in the UK towards the end of August, bearing in mind the frosty reception they had received last time, Tyler kept his expectations low. He felt that to break the British music market Aerosmith would need to blitz the country for a good six months, putting themselves about enough to get a groundswell going, and they did not have the time to try that. Although the foundations of new wave music had been laid in America some years before, in 1977 the punk movement was taking centre stage with bands such as the Clash, the Damned and the Sex Pistols ruling the charts. Punk would die out in roughly eighteen months, although it is often claimed that its
influence was long-lasting. At any rate, the music press had latched firmly on to punk rock and were predicting the demise of hard rock acts. Steven quickly came up against this mindset when he embarked on the PR circuit soon after arriving in England, and he was blunt with his opinion. ‘It seems that every time something happens in Britain, it’s gotta be a big ya ya!’ he remarked. ‘The Beatles and the Stones were big but punk rock isn’t.’

  Picking up on the signs of discord within Aerosmith, some music watchers queried whether Tyler would ever consider flying solo. Steven admitted that he could do a solo album and believed that it would do well, but he stated emphatically that he had no interest in breaking away from his bandmates. Aerosmith closed their European tour by taking part in the mud-bath event that was that year’s Reading Rock Festival, held in Berkshire. When their flight took off from London at the end of August, Aerosmith would not perform outside the United States for another decade.

  In September 1977, with barely a pause for breath, the band hurtled headlong into playing dates around America, during which their condition deteriorated further. As tempers frayed, sound monitors were occasionally kicked over the edge of the stage to crash down into the no-man’s-land between the band and the audience. One night Joe Perry took everyone by surprise by doing a Pete Townshend impersonation and dramatically smashing his guitar to the floor. He later conceded that he had snapped, but insisted that his histrionic display was not the onset of manic madness, more a dose of self-destructiveness peppered with a sense of humour.

  No one was laughing to see the entire band becoming submerged by their addictions. Danger came from all directions. Towards the end of a sold-out show at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, when Aerosmith returned on stage for the encore, a small explosive device was thrown at the band, burning the cornea of Steven’s eye. Panicked because he could not see, he threw his hands up to cover his face. Meanwhile, blood was spurting alarmingly from one of Joe Perry’s hands. The other three men felt the concussion of the device exploding. Shaken and angry, the guys were whisked to hospital for treatment and some shows had to be cancelled that October to allow Steven and Joe’s injuries time to heal. Steven headed for New Hampshire to recover. During this enforced break, the band planned to put the finishing touches to their overdue album, but it was sometimes difficult to get Steven to the Record Plant Studios in New York sober enough to work. The others were in no better shape, and all too soon the live shows resumed.

  In November, the new single, ‘Draw the Line’, was released but it failed to crack the US Top 40. Draw the Line soon followed, went platinum and peaked at number eleven on Billboard’s album chart, but drew sharp critical attack from the music press. Aerosmith’s disintegration as a working unit clearly showed in the end product, and Steven knew it. He knew that they had lost their edge and their direction. The album had cost half a million dollars to make, but Joe Perry commented years later that what truly cost the band dear was that they had become so arrogant that they could not see what they were doing to themselves. They had even ignored any soul who was brave enough to try to warn them. As he bleakly put it: ‘The Beatles made their White Album. We made our blackout album.’

  As performance standards at gigs degenerated, frustrated fans verged on violence - hurling not just boos and catcalls but increasingly heavier missiles at the band. Clearly sensing the alienation within Aerosmith, more and more people left the auditoriums fractious and dissatisfied. Backstage, there was belligerent behaviour, too, with reports leaking out of Steven verbally abusing those around him. When the tour wrapped up, industry rumours began to circulate that Aerosmith was on the brink of breaking up.

  It was around now that Steven Tyler and Joe Perry were tagged by the music press with the moniker ‘The Toxic Twins’, in recognition of their voracious appetite for heroin, cocaine and other narcotics. Their volatile, creative partnership and friendship has always provided an important axis in Steven’s life, just as it has always held the key to Aerosmith’s fortunes. Though dissimilar in nature, the two men have an indefinable chemistry that arguably seems more potent than that of the other famed rock ‘twins’ - Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. The more openly emotional Tyler still did not hide his feeling that Joe’s wife, Elyssa, was an obstacle. By now, however, Steven had a new distraction in his life in the shape of the woman who would become the first Mrs Tyler.

  Kathleen Victoria Hetzekian was born in 1952 in Santa Monica, California. Her parents divorced when she was very young. Growing up in the Midwest, in the 1960s she became an avid fan of the Kinks and the Rolling Stones. By the age of nineteen she had left home and moved to New York, reinventing herself as a bleached blonde named Cyrinda Foxe. As an aspiring actress, she threw herself into the dizzy world of New York’s nightlife, hanging out at Studio 54 and Max’s Kansas City. She soon became part of the Andy Warhol circle, appearing in Warhol’s movie Bad, starring Carroll Baker. Vivacious and ambitious, Cyrinda hung out mostly with musicians, and by summer 1973 had become involved with the twenty-three-year-old Staten Island-born New York Dolls frontman, David Johansen. The New York Dolls and Aerosmith had the same managers, and Cyrinda first saw Steven Tyler at Leber and Krebs’s New York office that same year. Though not yet a star, Steven exuded a magnetism and embodied a style that caught Foxe’s eye.

  Over the next three years, because of her involvement with David Johansen, Cyrinda’s path increasingly crossed Aerosmith’s; she became friends with Joe and Elyssa Perry, although her inward attraction was always for Tyler. She fitted right in that scene and by now was experimenting with cocaine and heroin. A liberal free spirit, she maintained: ‘I think sex is an art form - the entire body becomes one sense.’ It was not long after she first spoke with Steven that she made it clear she was not prepared to join the bevy of groupies constantly surrounding him. Despite her attraction to Tyler, Foxe married David Johansen on Staten Island in 1976.

  According to Cyrinda, this marriage was doomed from the start. Instead, she spent a great deal of time with the Perrys and had a ringside view of the tense triangle that Steven, Joe and Elyssa made up. Attraction ricocheted all over the place, mingled with rife jealousies, rampant insecurities and drug-induced paranoia. Amid these crazy head-games, however, she continued to be drawn to Steven, and in autumn 1977 she and David Johansen split up.

  To Steven, Cyrinda was not only ravishingly lovely, he adored her independence and, perhaps significantly, her continued resistance to his approaches. It drove him mad, and the chase was on. Flattered by Tyler’s persistence and unable to resist his roguishness, Foxe eventually succumbed and they finally became an item towards the end of 1977. One upshot of Cyrinda switching her allegiance between frontmen was that she and Elyssa Perry fell out. Rightly or wrongly, Elyssa felt that Cyrinda had struck up a friendship with her simply as a device to get close to Steven. Tyler must have felt that he had been here before. Bebe Buell had felt unwelcome among the band members’ wives - now Cyrinda and Elyssa were at odds. It went rather deeper than the two women simply not talking, however, for those close to Aerosmith could see the tension between Elyssa and Cyrinda becoming absolutely unbearable. Joey Kramer once declared that it felt like they were caught up in a real life soap opera.

  There is no doubt that Steven was aware of the discord his having this very beautiful lady at his side was causing. Cyrinda was stunning, had a vibrant personality that drew the eye of all those around and so, by extension, this made her and Tyler the ‘it’ couple, snatching attention away from Joe and Elyssa. Tyler also knew that this only widened the chasm between himself and Joe.

  For Cyrinda, on a personal footing, things did not get off to the start she had imagined. Her vision of life with Aerosmith’s famous frontman was very different from reality. When she went with Steven to Boston she had anticipated moving into a beautiful, well-staffed luxury home. In truth, his home in the Brookline suburb dismayed her, and at all hours of the day drug dealers and other unsavoury types came visiting. While Steven could be ex
tremely tender and loving, other times their relationship was volatile. Cyrinda called herself ‘high maintenance’ and she was not able or willing to become a domestic goddess. There were occasions when she would come home and find Steven passed out on the floor. Unsurprisingly, there were moments quite early on when she wondered if she had made the right decision in getting involved with him. Nevertheless, in spring 1978, the couple moved to Lake Sunapee, where Steven’s dream house was still under construction.

  Steven could not stay long at the lake, for a mini-tour of America loomed, plus appearances at several major festivals throughout the year. The first of these was on 18 March, when Aerosmith headlined at the California Jam II Festival, held at the Ontario Motor Speedway in California in front of an estimated 350,000 people. Other acts included Ted Nugent, Santana, Heart and Jean Michel Jarre. By the time Aerosmith took to the stage, Steven was so stoned on cocaine that he had to have the lyrics to his own songs written out on pieces of paper scattered around the stage. This performance would become infamous in Aerosmith’s history, but worryingly for Steven his health was so badly compromised by his drug use that he was having difficulty breathing. In a bad physical and emotional state, Steven again ruined the backstage buffet for everyone, picking up plates and bowls of food and violently smashing them against walls.

  From sinking to hideous nadirs, Tyler’s seesaw world bounced up again weeks later when Cyrinda discovered that she was pregnant. Steven must have known that he was in no condition to contemplate fatherhood, but this news so excited him that he proposed to his girlfriend - the whole routine, going romantically down on one knee - and this new state of affairs had a calming effect on him for a while.