Aerosmith won the 1989 Boston Music Award for Outstanding Rock Band of the Year. They also earned two award nominations: the 1989 Grammy Award nomination for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal for ‘Love In An Elevator’, and the 1989 MTV Video Music Award nomination for Best Heavy Metal Video for ‘Rag Doll’. In mid-February 1990, Aerosmith appeared on NBC TV’s top-rated show Saturday Night Live, with Steven and the others hamming it up in a wacky skit alongside Mike Myers and Dana Carvey. They also performed two new numbers, ‘Monkey On My Back’ and ‘Janie’s Got a Gun’. ‘Dude (Looks Like a Lady)’ was reissued in Britain, where it reached the Top 20. Then, on 6 March, Aerosmith was inducted into Hollywood’s Rock Walk on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Two days later, Rolling Stone’s Critics Award for the Best Heavy Metal Band of 1989 went to Aerosmith - all of which recognition helped Steven to enjoy three sell-out dates at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, California. With the award season in full swing, Tyler saw his band mop up, taking five trophies at the Boston Music Awards, including the Outstanding Pop/Rock Album Award for Pump and Outstanding Song/Songwriter Award for ‘Janie’s Got a Gun’, and four prizes in Britain when in March 1990 at the Kerrang Readers Poll Awards, Aerosmith walked off with the top honours for Best Band, Best Album (Pump), Best Tour/Live Gig and Best Male Singer.
In April, ‘What It Takes’ peaked at number nine on Billboard’s singles chart. After a brief respite, Aerosmith’s world tour resumed with a second US leg. By late spring, with Chelsea just past her first birthday, Steven’s wife Teresa learned that she was pregnant again. That summer, Steven’s eleven-year-old daughter Mia, living with Cyrinda in New York, enrolled at Manhattan’s Professional Children’s School. Twelve-year-old Liv, also in New York, attended York Prep.
Plying his trade on the road, Tyler concentrated on further developing his stagecraft as Aerosmith ricocheted around America and Canada, playing at the end of June at the Skydome in Toronto on a heavy metal bill that included the Black Crowes, Metallica and Warrant. The final single from Pump, ‘The Other Side’, was released and peaked at number twenty-two in America, taking longer in Britain to stall just inside the top fifty. At the end of July, this second leg of the Pump tour closed with a gig at the Capital Center in Landover, Maryland, when the band’s short break allowed Steven to return to the pregnant Teresa and their baby daughter.
Soon, however, Steven had to hit the live circuit again, playing gigs in the UK and Europe. Most notably, he was looking forward to taking part in mid-August 1990 in the Monsters of Rock Festival held at Castle Donington in Leicestershire. The village lies north of East Midlands airport, and in a huge field nearby 72,500 rock fans gathered to enjoy Whitesnake, Poison, the London Quireboys, Thunder and Aerosmith. It had been thirteen years since Aerosmith last played at an outdoor British rock festival, in Reading, and they were second to Whitesnake on this Donington bill. ‘From where we are at the moment in Europe, I don’t think that we are big enough to headline that event,’ confessed Joe Perry at the time. ‘We will be next year but at the moment [in Britain] we’re doing big halls.’ Tyler was confident that Aerosmith would connect with the new wave of heavy metal UK fans. He said: ‘I don’t feel an age gap with music fans but then again, we don’t create one. You have to be in touch with what younger fans are going through in their lives and I think we are. Anyone can write mature songs. It’s harder to write songs about what you really are and we’re all kids at heart!’
To Tyler’s delight, during their performance at Donington, Aerosmith was joined on stage by one of their all-time heroes, Jimmy Page, who accompanied them on a rendition of the 1965 Yardbirds classic, ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’. Led Zeppelin’s famed lead guitarist again jammed with Aerosmith on stage when, two nights later, they played at the Marquee Club in London before a few hundred people. Festival appearances also featured in Europe as the weeks rolled on - at the Swiss music festival in Winterthur, and the Super Rock ’90 Festival in Mannheim, Germany, again alongside Whitesnake and Poison, among other bands.
Aerosmith had returned to America when, on 7 September, at the seventh MTV Video Music Awards, they won two trophies - Best Metal/Hard Rock Video and Viewers Choice Award, both for ‘Janie’s Got a Gun’. With just time to headline at the opening night of the Las Vegas Hard Rock Café, Steven and his bandmates took the Pump tour next to the Far East and Australia. From the stage each night, Steven loved to see the blend of ages coming to enjoy his band. Older fans tended to be content to sit further back, to listen and absorb, while the younger rock fanatics still crushed at the front, reaching up at his legs just out of their grasp, and Steven thrived on being able to reward fans by injecting even more zest into his performance. Joe Perry also vouched for the benefits of the new health-conscious regime they were all loyally sticking to. He stated bluntly: ‘I’m not spending the whole day of a show looking for drug dealers.’ That autumn, Aerosmith appeared on the MTV Unplugged series, performing at New York’s Ed Sullivan Theatre. Then in October, having played 163 gigs to over three million fans spread across fifteen countries, Aerosmith’s mammoth Pump tour came to an end in Australia. They were one of the top three highest grossing US live acts of 1990, raking in in excess of $25 million in concert ticket sales alone. Aptly, ‘What It Takes’ in late December won the Top Album Rock Track category in Billboard’s Year in Music Awards.
The year 1991 kicked off with the birth on 31 January of Steven’s first son, whom he and Teresa named Taj Monroe Tallarico. Steven was present at the birth, and cut the umbilical cord. Now the father of four, clean and sober, the forty-two-year-old star must have wondered - having had a rollercoaster life himself during which he had diced with death at times - just how each of his children would turn out. His own ethos, he has often stated, was: ‘I would rather grow up wrong, than be right in someone else’s eyes.’ As his offspring grew up, though, it would naturally be hard sometimes for Steven not to try to give them the benefit of his experiences, and an appreciation of how taking wrong turns can seriously screw up your world.
There were no shadows in the first quarter of the new year - only happiness and yet more success for the band. Aerosmith picked up two American Music Awards for Favourite Pop/Rock Band, Duo or Group and Favourite Heavy Metal/Hard Rock Artist. They were named Best Band in Rolling Stone’s Readers Picks Awards and on 20 February the band won its first Grammy Award when ‘Janie’s Got a Gun’ took the trophy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.
Although Steven had two infants at home to keep him on his toes, he kept in touch with his elder daughters, Liv and Mia. The girls had the kind of up-and-down friendship many sisters do. Two very different personalities and independent spirits were bound to make for a lively interaction, with the young girls sometimes competing for their father’s attention. Looking on, Cyrinda sometimes felt that Liv, at least on the surface, had more confidence than Mia and enjoyed good-naturedly ribbing her half-sister that she looked more like Steven than she did. Mia had only ever known Steven as Dad, and it felt strange to hear Liv speak of him in that way. It was no more than sisterly rivalry, which levelled out in time.
In July, when Liv turned fourteen, it became public knowledge that Steven Tyler was her natural father. With Aerosmith one of America’s biggest rock bands, it was also going to help having taken the Tyler name, for in about a year’s time Liv would make a bid to break into the modelling world, with her mother acting as her manager.
Steven and the band had been working on new material at Little Mountain Sound Studio in Vancouver alongside producer Bruce Fairbairn. Although still signed to Geffen Records, in late summer Aerosmith closed a $30 million deal with Sony which would come into effect in 1995. When this was announced to the press in September, it was revealed that a generous royalty rate had also been agreed. This multi-million-dollar record deal established them even more firmly amid rock music’s top strata. Sony now owned Aerosmith’s original record label, Columbia Records.
In an indu
stry driven by youth, rock journalists were quick to point out that by the time this highly lucrative deal came into effect Steven Tyler would be forty-seven. Such talk only sharpened Tyler’s ambition to prove to these sceptics that he and his band still had a great deal more to offer. Aerosmith had just got the wind back beneath their wings for the 1990s, and Steven was determined to stay at the top. That was publicly. Privately, Steven did not let his feet leave the ground. A $30 million deal sounded a fantastic sum of money but, in reality, Sony did not actually hand over that sum on signature; $30 million was worked out as being potentially what the record deal was worth.
At the annual MTV Video Music Awards ‘The Other Side’ picked off the Best Metal/Hard Rock Video Award, and ‘Janie’s Got a Gun’ continued to claw in trophies to add to Aerosmith’s growing collection. Their celebrated association with the adopted hometown was further recognised on 14 November, when the band was inducted into the Boston Garden Hall of Fame. Just a week later, Aerosmith lapped up the accolade of a guest appearance in The Simpsons, performing ‘Walk This Way’ at Moe’s Tavern in the episode titled ‘Flaming Moe’s’. On 3 December 1991, Aerosmith took part in MTV’s tenth anniversary celebrations, having previously been filmed performing their power ballad, ‘Dream On’, accompanied by a full orchestra conducted by Michael Kamen.
Over the years, Columbia Records had periodically released Aerosmith compilation albums: Aerosmith’s Greatest Hits; Classics Live; Classics Live II and Gems. Before the end of the year, Columbia brought out a fifty-two track three CD set titled Pandora’s Box. Exquisitely packaged, this collection was a mix of early Aerosmith numbers, live performances and some previously unreleased tracks from the band’s first decade together; it reached number forty-five in the US album chart.
The multi-million-selling album, Permanent Vacation, had been franked by the phenomenal success of Pump, and Aerosmith’s recent world tour cemented the band’s remarkable resurrection. From having stared into the abyss, all five had fought major battles on several fronts to become an award-laden rock band on its best ever footing, and no one was in the mood to take a breather.
Steven was impatient to push on. The work that was under way on new material was stimulating but still fluid, and he enjoyed discovering where his creativity was going to take him next. He could not view an album as a single entity. Each idea, every song, had its own individual importance and could not be corrupted to form a pattern. On the other hand, seeing how a song collection could stitch together to create a cohesive album was rewarding in itself.
Having successfully scaled the heights again, Aerosmith was a source of fascination to the music media and an inspiration to a new generation of rock stars, some of whom already looked ripe to fall by the wayside. Steven was often asked if he would give the young turks the benefit of his experience. It was a strange situation. Although he knew that he was immensely fortunate to have survived his descent into addiction hell, and was constantly aware of having to keep the tightest grip on his recovery, in a certain sense he could not hand on heart totally regret the path he had taken in life, because it had all been an intrinsic part of his nature. Not a man to navel-gaze, he still knows that he can be hypersensitive and that his emotions often spill over in different ways - through his highly demonstrative manner, his volatile temper and in the way he pours his feelings nakedly into his lyrics. Having fought his way back into the rock game, he had every intention of grabbing the ball and running full tilt with it.
CHAPTER 11
When Size Really Does Matter
‘IF WE hang ourselves, it’s going to be on the tree of creativity,’ declared Steven. He was certainly suffering for his art during the long and arduous process of finding the follow-up to Pump. Managing to nail songs was frustratingly elusive, and when Aerosmith went into A & M Studios in Los Angeles to start recording with producer Bruce Fairbairn in December 1991, problems only worsened. In many ways it might have been expected that the more firmly Aerosmith had their feet back on the ground, the more they would want to wrest total control of the reins. This caused power struggles and tense arguments between the band, its management and the record company. Unable to bottle things up, Steven singled himself out by making his feelings on the issue more clear than the others. He, in turn, came in for vocal criticism from some band members, who felt that the songs he was coming up with were unacceptably sexist. Tyler’s risqué style of lyrics has always been one of Aerosmith’s hallmarks, but this time they were felt to be too near the knuckle. Tyler did not agree; he made no bones about his enjoyment of sex, nor of his opinion that no matter how people like to deny it, sex makes the world go round. As if to emphasise his stance, he bluntly claimed that he would only cease singing and writing about sex the day he wakes up in the morning, as he put it, ‘without a hard-on’.
He had been dubbed immature and a sex addict, and although he did not appreciate either tag, he let such barbs glance off him. Come March 1992, however, he reacted strongly when John Kalodner told Aerosmith that he disliked the material so much that the album would have to be rewritten. Kalodner knew that the band had genuinely worked hard all winter but he had serious difficulty stomaching those lyrics that were devoid of Tyler’s usual tongue-in-cheek humour. He felt strongly enough about this issue that he was prepared to dissociate himself from the material. Steven was infuriated, feeling that manager Tim Collins could have been more openly supportive of the band over the issue. Although things got unpleasant and heated, everyone involved only wanted the best for Aerosmith - they just differed on how that could be achieved. Kalodner suspected that the band was not always comfortable with the degree to which he had a say in what happened on their albums, but the experienced A & R man would not budge. He wanted new songs written, and to draft in outside professional lyricists again. Disliking anything that remotely smacked of an ultimatum, initially Steven was livid but inwardly uncertainty set in. One night he would listen to the material and like it, the next night he would be left wondering if some songs worked after all. Despite the fact that some in the band had nursed doubts about certain numbers, actually being sent back to the drawing board by Geffen Records stunned them all. Brad Whitford felt this setback was bound to be sounding alarm bells at Sony, who had recently inked a $30 million deal with Aerosmith. When the material to hand was subjected to intense scrutiny, about five songs survived and Tyler had to just let go of the others.
Away from the cauldron of the recording studio, Steven continued to work on his physical health and fitness. He was kept busy carrying out interviews and would subject himself to marathon photo shoots. Socially, if ever he fell into the company of those getting high on drugs he found the strength to turn around quietly and walk out - to take himself away from temptation. He knew that he needed to be alert and in top form for when he and the others headed to Vancouver to concentrate on creating material that everyone, this time around, could believe in.
Steven and Joe Perry lived about five miles apart, and as summer 1992 progressed they shuttled back and forth between their houses, bent on crystallising their ideas. They were set to work with songwriters Jack Blades, Tommy Shaw, Taylor Rhodes and Mark Hudson, and were also reunited with Desmond Child and Jim Vallance. Said Steven: ‘It opens up another door. I thought in the beginning: writing with somebody else? There goes our sound - but that is not what it’s all about. You don’t go in there to write, say, a Jack Blades song.’ John Kalodner had feared that, in the present testy climate, the band might not easily accept external contributions, but productivity proved rewarding. No one looked for any great bonding or social involvement. Collaborators came to Steven and Joe, spent a day or so working on numbers and then they went their separate ways.
To Tyler, the secret was to write more than double the number of songs needed to comprise an album. Usually, he only had a couple of numbers that never made it; top of his selection criteria was to consider how a song would stand up when played live. A song had to be able to energise a crowd and
himself, singing it at gig after gig. The upshot of all this industry was a richly diverse musical mosaic.
Steven and Joe teamed up with Jack Blades and Tommy Shaw to come up with a pacy number called ‘Shut Up and Dance’, which to Tyler smacked of rock and roll, Brits style - distinct, he feels, from Americans’ understanding of this genre. He particularly liked the ballsy attitude in the song, and of performing the number he declared: ‘It’s such a rush, stronger than any drug that I ever took.’ Joe stated: ‘We wrote “Shut Up and Dance” because we’re entertainers. We’re supposed to take you away for an hour and a half, or for five minutes.’ ‘Eat the Rich’, co-written with Jim Vallance, was also a slick rock and roll song. ‘Gotta Love It’, created by Steven, Joe and Mark Hudson, was a rhythm and blues number that had the power to send Tyler on a drug-free trip, as did the similarly influenced ‘Fever’, the only Tyler/Perry collaboration in this collection.
‘Get a Grip’ was another collaboration between Tyler, Perry and Jim Vallance, as was an instrumental called ‘Boogie Man’. Lenny Kravitz guested on ‘Line Up’ and Eagles drummer Don Henley provided distinctive backing vocals to ‘Amazing’, an emotive rock ballad that Steven had written with an old friend, Richie Supa. It had had its dangers co-writing a song with someone from his days of excessive drug taking and of spiralling out of control. Steven had been very conscious till then of needing to isolate himself from reminders of those times; it was a measure of how much stronger he felt he had become that he could not only work with his old friend but also come up with arguably his most autobiographical song yet.
Steven Tyler: The Biography Page 15
