LIFE Aerosmith

LIVIN’ ON THE EDGE In their early days, Aerosmith (working on the album Draw the Line at AIR Studios in London in ’77) dreamed of being rock stars. “The only things I knew to expect from being in a band and making it were girls, money, and fame,” Tom Hamilton told Variety in 2019 as the band was about to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “Oh, and being on American Bandstand. I never expected videos, digital recordings, playing in Russia, or having a roller coaster at Disney World—never mind a star on Hollywood Blvd.” “We weren’t too ambitious when we started out. We just wanted to be the biggest thing that ever walked the planet, the greatest rock band that ever was.”—STEVEN TYLER…

Steven Tyler is seated behind a white grand piano at the top of the Green Monster, the iconic left field wall at Boston’s Fenway Park. Tyler unwinds the melody to “Dream On” on the keys and powers up his trademark scream. More than 38,700 fans howl back at him: “Sing with me, sing for the year, sing for the laughter, and sing for the tears.” Tyler is 74 years old. Below him, 71-year-old Joe Perry rips through the song’s iconic guitar solo, provoking a fresh round of cheers. The rest of the band digs into the classic, pushing “Dream On” toward its enormous crescendo, one first heard 49 years ago on Aerosmith’s debut record. In five decades, “Dream On” hasn’t lost an ounce of its appeal and Aerosmith’s audience has…

Front and Center Aerosmith producer Jack Douglas identified Steven Tyler’s essence immediately. “Steven is the real deal,” he said of the flamboyant lead singer (in Munich, Germany, in 1999). “He’s musically talented, he’s got a great voice, he’s got all the goods … He’s a rock and roll animal.” Guitar Hero From “Walk This Way” to “Love in an Elevator,” Joe Perry (on tour in Japan in 2002) has proven to be a riff-smith of the first order. “When we get together, I listen closely to Joe,” said the band’s rhythm guitarist, Brad Whitford. “Joe Perry playing the guitar is like fuel for us. Flashes of lightning. Bolts of brilliance.” Bass Ace Tyler and Perry get the most attention, but bass player Tom Hamilton (in Washington, D.C., 1976) has cowritten…

Before Steven Tyler got behind a piano, he got under one—a Steinway grand. Born on March 26, 1948, in New York City, Steven Tallarico whiled away the hours camped out below the massive piano his father managed to get into an 8-by-12-foot living room on the top floor of a Bronx apartment building. “It was a full-blown Steinway grand piano, not a little upright in the corner,” Tyler wrote in his 2004 memoir, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? “I grew up, under the piano, listening and living in between the notes of Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Debussy. That’s where I got the ‘Dream On’ chordage.” Music ran deep in Tyler’s family. His dad studied at Juilliard and played Carnegie Hall. His dad’s dad played mandolin and formed a…

To win over America, Aerosmith would have to tour America. Every inch of it. Through 1973, the band rode a station wagon from club to club, college to college. The guys supported anyone they could get on a bill with: the Kinks, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Sha Na Na. It was a humbling experience. “There was one gig where it was outrageously embarrassing,” Steven Tyler recalled. “The audience was dead, stillborn. I have tapes where they’re going clap/clap/clap in slow motion … sometimes we felt really rejected.” But the shows did make Aerosmith tighter. And looser. “John McLaughlin and the band would meditate before they started playing,” Tom Hamilton said of the Mahavishnu Orchestra guitarist. “And as you might imagine, we weren’t really into meditating. We’d already found our own ways to…

On August 20, 1977, Steven Tyler collapsed onstage three songs into the band’s set at a German festival. At another concert that year, he started spitting up blood. Other shows saw Joe Perry smashing guitars and knocking amps off the stage. Dates were canceled. Room service bills skyrocketed to $100,000. The price tag for Draw the Line thinned the band’s profit margins. “Aerosmith represented the living spirit of American rock ’n’ roll,” manager David Krebs said. “To see them destroy themselves through immense disregard for anything but self-indulgence was a tragedy.” Ironically, many of the band members had “settled down” and married by the mid-to-late 1970s—although certainly Perry’s wife, Elyssa, shared her husband’s appetite for destructive substances. Meanwhile, Tyler ran through a series of relationships. He dated ’70s sex symbol…