One of the most unusual results came from creating the song ‘Flesh’, on which Steven worked with Joe and Desmond Child. This song has been dubbed a weird S & M trip. Steven had not written anything like it with Child before. This departure in style for a lyricist more prone to helping rock stars write commercial power ballads stemmed from when Joe had come up with a guitar riff which evoked an unnerving darkness and reeked of sleazy adult themes. By Perry’s own admission the song seemed to delve down strange alleys which Steven and Desmond were lured to explore. Tyler was as surprised as Child at the way it worked out.
‘Crazy’, Desmond Child’s other collaboration with the Aerosmith pair, was a belter of a bluesy ballad, more in keeping with expectations. Said Joe: ‘That title probably summed up our career. “Crazy” has a cool rhythm and blues feel to it. I get a real kick out of playing this one live.’ ‘Crazy’ featured Steven’s signature harmonica playing, which also punctuated to great effect the other power ballad in the pack, ‘Cryin’, written by Tyler and Perry with songwriter Taylor Rhodes. Steven cheekily quipped that ‘Cryin’ was ‘the only song I ever got away with that’s about a blow job!’ In a more serious vein, Joe explained: ‘Taylor writes songs from a different angle to us, which gives “Cryin’” a fresh perspective. ’ Aerosmith had frequently been accused of projecting a Neanderthal mentality in their songs. Said Perry: ‘The Stone Temple Pilots said that we were sexist. So we thought: “Fuck it. We’ll show ’em!”’ The lead guitarist’s solo composition was a number called ‘Walk on Down’, on which Joe sang lead vocal.
Although ‘Crazy’ and ‘Cryin’ were almost guaranteed to be hit songs, the number which rose like cream to the top was ‘Livin’ on the Edge’, on which Steven and Joe worked with Mark Hudson. Steven had wanted to steer the boat into unusual waters, and ‘Livin’ on the Edge’ joined ‘Janie’s Got a Gun’ as one of the band’s rare forays into social issues. The song was inspired by the fact that America was a tinderbox of civil unrest, which ignited in late April 1992 with three days and nights of race riots in Los Angeles. Four white policemen had just been acquitted of criminal wrongdoing in the case of black motorist Rodney King, whose beating by the officers the year before had been captured on videotape. Tyler knew that they had something special with this song. With an attention-grabbing opener, during which Steven’s vocals were deeper register than almost ever heard from him, the number erupts into a thumping hard rock song that takes twists and turns and cleverly changes tempo throughout.
Beginning in October 1992, recording stretched into January, by the end of which Aerosmith had their album in the can. They titled it Get a Grip, and along with joy and relief, there was nervous tension. It had been four years since Pump’s release and in that time it had become public knowledge that the band’s first work on the new album had been rejected by Geffen Records, that they had been sent back into the trenches to collaborate with outside songwriters. So a question mark hung over their heads with music journalists, who were quick to query whether Aerosmith could still cut it - particularly since, in the intervening years, the music scene had changed.
The Aids issue had been shoved to the fore by Freddie Mercury’s death in November 1991. The hedonistic, reckless rock world, which had thus far preferred to ignore ‘the Aids thing’, had suddenly been forced to confront its glitzy but thoughtless way of life. As it fell back on its heels a while, through the centre had emerged a new, low-key, scruffy, alternative rock movement dubbed grunge. A blend of pop metal and a resurrected 1990s version of punk rock, its first exponents were Seattle bands, notably Nirvana, fronted by Kurt Cobain. The high critical acclaim afforded to Nirvana’s late 1991 hit album, Nevermind, and its spin-off single, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, had lit the way for the likes of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. Aerosmith was coming out with its new album at the height of the grunge rock wave, and would have to produce something really special to appeal to critics who only had ears for music from the current grunge trend.
Steven was acutely conscious of the stark contrast between the deliberately downbeat, scarcely moving stage style of grunge bands and the colourful high-octane rock entertainment that Aerosmith personified. He knew that he could not stand still on stage if his life depended upon it - it is in his blood to throw his body around in performance - and Joe Perry was alive to the danger that in ‘coming back’, a band like theirs ran a huge risk in changing times of looking like a caricature of itself. Steven, though, refused to stand aside and see these grunge bands as the latest spokesmen for a generation.
In April 1993, ‘Livin’ on the Edge’ was the first single to be released from Get a Grip. It peaked in America at number eighteen, one place higher than its best performance on the UK singles chart. The song’s amazing video had been filmed at Culver City Studios near Los Angeles, and to match the number’s unusual start the first shot of Steven is breathtakingly dramatic. With the right side of his face and body painted black, he stands naked, holding his genitals as a bilious green inner demon lunges out of his ‘dark’ side. There were scenes of roller-skating schoolgirls vandalising cars with hockey sticks, of pupils being scanned for weapons, and to keep the adrenalin pumping there was one particularly clever special effects scene involving Joe Perry. Playing lead guitar while standing on a snowy rail track as a freight train bears down on him from behind, he nonchalantly steps aside at the last second, still playing guitar. For other sequences, Steven had endured being spun back and forth, round and round and upside down while strapped spread-eagled on to a giant gyroscope. There was an oddly evil artistry which suited Tyler when, sheathed in a gauzy black costume, his heavy long black hair hanging about his face, he aims a cigarette holder elegantly into his mouth, his expressive eyes heavily surrounded by black make-up with tiny glittery mirrors stuck to his skin. It is a fantastically weird video, spliced with a visually and musically dynamic stage performance by the band, and Steven was charged with a frenetic energy throughout. He electrified the screen in whatever guise he appeared. Said Tom Hamilton: ‘There was something that just came together on that video that, to me, made it so cool!’
Governor William Weld declared 13 April as ‘Aerosmith Day’ in the state of Massachusetts. Three weeks later, Get a Grip was released and became Aerosmith’s first album to debut at number one in America’s Billboard album chart. It also became the band’s bestselling studio album worldwide, notching up sales in excess of twenty million copies. Get a Grip took the number two slot in the UK chart; rewardingly, Steven felt that this work encapsulated the best of everything he was creatively capable of giving at that time.
At the beginning of June 1993, Aerosmith kicked off a sixteen-month mammoth world tour at the Expocentre in Topeka, Kansas. They gigged around north America throughout the height of summer, when Steven’s stamina and the band’s stage mastery drew constant praise. Ira Robbins for Newsday wrote: ‘Whatever it is that fuels Aerosmith’s unforgettable fire after all these years, it must be plentifully stocked backstage. The band’s live sets are only building more momentum as their new lifestyles fire them into a natural oblivion on stage.’ There were those who were aching to take a swipe at Steven, and some young journalists confronted him with queries as to how a forty-five-year-old man could possibly imagine that he could still get away with singing songs like ‘Young Lust’. Tyler succinctly pointed out that that song was not about him lecherously ogling underage girls. He also pointed out that he may be in his mid-forties but he did not look, feel or act it. Steven’s daughter Mia was asked by one interviewer what it felt like seeing her middle-aged father clutching his genitals during his stage act. Her spontaneous response, revealing her natural discomfort with this public aspect of her father’s life, did not immediately go down well with Steven.
‘Eat the Rich’ petered out at number thirty-four in Britain and did not chart in America, but recognition continued to mount in a variety of ways. Towards the end of August, Aerosmith received the inaugural star in Boston’s Tower Records Walk of Fame
- a large brass star bearing the band name was embedded into the shop’s stair landing. On 2 September, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Aerosmith won the Viewers Choice Award for ‘Livin’ on the Edge’, which they performed during the show. A month later, ‘Cryin’ was released, peaking at number twelve at home and making the UK Top 20.
The video for this power ballad, depicting how a teenage girl exacts a unique form of revenge on her unfaithful boyfriend, again captured the music-loving public’s imagination. Some scenes had been shot earlier in the year at the Central Congregational Church in Fall River, Massachusetts, when Steven’s emotive delivery breathed extra dynamics into the number. Two young actors were drafted in to portray the main characters in the song’s story. They were Stephen Dorff, who starred that year as the doomed original Beatle, Stuart Sutcliffe, in the feature film Backbeat, and a sixteen-year-old actress from San Francisco named Alicia Silverstone. The ‘Cryin’ video became one of the most requested videos on MTV of 1993 and brought Alicia a degree of local fame. She later reflected: ‘All of a sudden it was this huge thing. It was like: “There’s the Aerosmith chick!” I was going through puberty.’ Alicia would feature in two more Aerosmith videos for songs from Get a Grip, which strengthened her fame among MTV viewers.
Aerosmith once again appeared on Saturday Night Live before heading to Europe for a series of gigs, performing for the first time in some countries. Soaking up the undiluted adulation he received night after night, Steven curiously sought some anonymity, too, and on a free evening in Amsterdam he and Joe Perry took an acoustic guitar and went out busking on the street. Passers-by threw money into the open guitar case, oblivious of who was entertaining them. It tickled Tyler no end, and when he and Joe called it a night, they tipped their takings into a legitimate busker’s case further along the road.
On 26 October 1993, Aerosmith performed live on MTV Europe for the first time. During this leg of their world tour Tyler realised that it was taking a little bit of time to warm up their audiences. Even though ‘Cryin’ and ‘Livin’ on the Edge’ were instant favourites, they had to rejig their set to suit what European fans were familiar with from their back catalogue. Audiences undoubtedly have moods, and Steven was candid that while some shows ignited, others were less successful. Aerosmith hit Britain, playing at London’s Wembley Arena in December. Back home, at the Billboard Music Awards, the band was voted the Number One Rock Artist.
By the time they arrived back in the States, ‘Amazing’ had dropped anchor at number twenty-four. Some in the music industry had been sceptical that Aerosmith could ever exceed the success achieved by Pump. Get a Grip proved those people wrong. Yet the band never seemed to feature in those endless Top 100 lists, which at times irked Steven. In Europe, he had happily busked unnoticed, but he never normally liked to be overlooked, as Joey Kramer has vouched. Out in public, Tyler loved talking with anybody and everybody, was never precious or pretentious, and thoroughly enjoyed being mobbed. What amused the drummer was that on the very rare occasions that the frontman was prowling the streets and no one realised he was in their midst, Tyler would do something outrageous to ensure he grabbed their attention.
After twenty years in the business Tyler still found the enthusiasm to wake up each day eager to see what else lay around the corner. He was very happy in his marriage to Teresa and as a father to their two children, Chelsea and Taj. Apart from the obvious reasons for refraining from adultery, now that the spectre of Aids loomed large he, like several other rock stars, viewed casual sex while touring as just too dangerous a caper. He knew that he had a wife who deeply adored him, knew too that he was still on a learning curve to becoming a selfless husband; while he had begun by appreciating her unswerving devotion when he had been down and out, he now admitted to loving Teresa more than ever.
After playing sold-out shows at the Boston Garden on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, in January 1994 Tyler was thrilled for Aerosmith to be undertaking its first tour of South America. During this exotic leg of the Get a Grip world tour the band performed at the Hollywood Rock Festival in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Their own gigs also took them to Argentina and Mexico. It was an eventful trip, which threw up a few surprises for the experienced frontman. More than a decade earlier, on their first jaunt through Mexico, Queen had been bombarded on stage with boots, bottles, batteries and other hazardous missiles. Coming off stage thoroughly dejected, assuming that the audience had hated them, Queen were greeted by a local official gleefully explaining that, on the contrary, that ordeal was a traditional show of appreciation. In these humid climes, times had not changed and Steven was subjected at some gigs to fans in the front row spitting on him whenever he came near the lip of the stage. The promoter’s assurance afterwards that it was well meant did little to excuse this disgusting behaviour.
Aerosmith opened their next north American leg of the tour on 1 February in Florida at the Orlando Arena; that same month they played an exhilarating gig to a sold-out, delirious crowd at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Along the way, at the American Music Awards held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, they picked up two trophies - Favourite Pop/Rock Band, Duo or Group and Favourite Heavy Metal/Hard Rock Artist. In March, at the Grammy Awards at Radio City Music Hall in New York, Aerosmith performed ‘Livin’ on the Edge’ and collected their second Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal for this increasingly lauded number.
As the rock world had gathered to reward its brightest stars and to backslap each other, another casualty was lining up to make a tragically premature exit. Nirvana’s troubled frontman, Kurt Cobain, had been in and out of rehab in 1993 and had overdosed in a New York hotel suite. While in Italy in early March 1994, the twenty-seven-year-old singer downed a cocktail of prescription drugs, anaesthetic and champagne, and slipped into a coma. He was rushed to hospital, where his stomach was pumped, then transferred to the Rome American Hospital to recover. A week later, he was discharged. Towards the end of that month, back on US soil, Cobain checked himself once more into rehab, this time in California, only to check himself out three days later. On 5 April, he shot himself with a Remington 20-gauge shotgun, in a room above the garage at his home in Seattle, Washington. His body was not discovered for three days. His suicide note quoted the Neil Young lyrics, ‘It’s better to burn out than to fade away.’ Steven felt heart-sore for the young man. He stated: ‘When Kurt Cobain did videos, look into his eyes - he could not even face the camera. He was in pain. I’m angry about Kurt. This guy didn’t have to die.’ The same could have been said about Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, all of whom, curiously enough, were also just twenty-seven years old when their lives were snuffed out.
In late April, Tyler set sadness aside to enrapture Japanese fans when Aerosmith’s world tour took the band to the Far East. They opened at the Yokohama Arena in Yokohama and wrapped up this leg in mid-May at the Budokan in Tokyo. Thoughts now turned to the European and UK dates that were next on the agenda. On 4 June, Aerosmith fulfilled Perry’s prophecy and this time headlined at the annual Monsters of Rock Festival at Donington Park in Leicestershire. Said Joe: ‘It really means a lot to us to play at Donington. It’s one of the few festivals - one of the last ones - that’s like a tradition. It’s like a fabled gig.’ The support bill included Sepultura, dubbed ‘Sao Paulo’s angriest young men’. Aerosmith had played with them on a bill in Rio de Janeiro but had not actually caught their act. That night, at Donington, before ripping into a hard rock set of their best-loved hits, Tyler had that split second of disorientation when, walking out on stage before tens of thousands of people, he could hardly grasp that anyone was there. Particularly at night, with the bright stage lights in his eyes, it can feel momentarily as if he is completely alone. That night Aerosmith turned in a stupendous performance and Steven was described next day in The Times’ report of the gig as ‘a glamorous stick insect’. A spectacular pyrotechnic finale capped the night, sending the fans home happy. The fifth single rele
ased from Get a Grip, the rocker ‘Shut Up and Dance’, was released in July in Britain where it peaked at number twenty-four.
Towards the end of that month the power ballad ‘Crazy’, the final single from Get a Grip, was released. Reaching one place higher than ‘Shut Up and Dance’ in the British charts, it lodged at number seventeen in America. Its video featured the third appearance of Alicia Silverstone (she had also featured in the video for ‘Amazing’) and marked the career screen debut of Steven’s eldest daughter, Liv.
At 5’10” tall, the beautiful, dark-haired girl had successfully eased her way into the modelling scene at fifteen; in addition to appearing on the covers of teen magazines she had starred in commercials for make-up and for shampoo. The ‘Crazy’ video makers maintained that she landed the part because of how she had looked and come across on screen in an advert for Pantene shampoo, and that they had not known of her connection to the world-famous Steven Tyler.
The theme of the video, which became one of the most requested on MTV of 1994, was two schoolgirls playing truant, taking off in an open-topped car and basically turning any man they met into putty in their hands, but it was more noted for two specific aspects. One was the suggestion of teenage lesbian romance between the characters portrayed by Liv Tyler and Alicia Silverstone. According to Steven, the original version of the video graphically depicted lesbianism, but on consideration it was decided to tame that element down before its release. Said Liv: ‘I understand why people might have a problem with it but I have no problem with it, Steven has no problem with it and if other people have a problem with it, that’s their problem.’ Then there were the scenes where the girls decide to enter an amateur pole-dancing competition for the $500 prize money. This scene was Liv’s spotlight moment. Dressed in silver trousers and bra she very visibly became her father’s daughter on stage; spitting out a piece of chewing gum, with a leggy high kick she whirled off seamlessly into a slinky, sinuous stage act, plunging her fingers into her long hair and oozing scintillating sexuality.
Steven Tyler: The Biography Page 16
