Steven Tyler: The Biography (17 page)

It has been suggested that Tyler was resistant to the idea of outside lyricists coming in; at first, by his own admission, he was not one hundred per cent happy with some of Desmond Child’s suggestions, but perhaps the star was showing a touch of territoriality. This was also something strange to deal with when he was already in a raw state, so inevitably he found it a shade intimidating. However, Steven later maintained that he was amenable to the A & R man’s determination to make him work with professional lyricists and he quickly adapted to the situation, enabling him and Child to complement one another.

The single three-way collaboration between Tyler, Perry and Child to emerge was ‘Dude (Looks Like a Lady)’. Steven had almost nailed this raucous hard rock number - he just stumbled over coming up with the first line. As he had done when working with Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora, Desmond first talked with and listened to Steven to get a feel of where he was coming from, then clicked straight in - providing Tyler with an opener for this song that came vividly to life. That kind of clever clarity impressed Steven immensely, and the lingering resistance he harboured to letting a professional songwriter into his creative world evaporated. He and Child spent hours bouncing lyrics off one another, creating a hit song and cementing the camaraderie between them in the process. In short order, Steven and Desmond created ‘Angel’, and Child wrote ‘Heart’s Done Time’ with Joe Perry,

After Desmond Child, John Kalodner enlisted the services of songwriters Jim Vallance and Holly Knight, which added ‘Magic Touch’, ‘Simoriah’ and ‘Rag Doll’ to the haul. One aspect of ‘Rag Doll’ would rankle with Tyler. He had originally titled the number ‘Rag Time’ but Holly Knight was invited to change that lyric. ‘Time’ became ‘Doll’ and Steven was unhappy that someone should get a songwriting credit for changing just a single word. Steven wrote ‘Girl Keeps Coming Apart’ and ‘Permanent Vacation’ with Joe Perry and Brad Whitford respectively, while a number titled ‘St John’ was Tyler’s only solo effort.

Between March and June 1987, Aerosmith recorded this new material at Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver, Canada, under the eye of producer Bruce Fairbairn, whose most recent success was the Bon Jovi hit album
Slippery When Wet
. Fairbairn’s way of working was different from the producers the band were used to, and it all helped to maintain a crucial discipline that kept this new Aerosmith on the right track. Gone were the days of drug hazes and people falling asleep on the job, although Tom Hamilton was still smoking marijuana. The bass player took a good deal of stick from his bandmates over this, while Tyler contented himself with pinning Tom with some pretty piercing looks. Eventually Tom quit the weed, which meant that all five were finally totally clean.

That summer, Steven and the others filmed the video to accompany ‘Dude (Looks Like a Lady)’. It was largely Aerosmith in high-energy performance but incorporated brief cutaway shots showing Geffen A & R man John Kalodner dressed up as a bride and Steven in drag, wearing a pink sequinned dress and looking like a pantomime dame.

Permanent Vacation
was released in August 1987, and exuded confidence, strength and vibrancy through its new musical layers.
Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock
later recorded: ‘Aerosmith forfeited none of their bad boy image and their live shows are among the best of their career. Even critics liked them better the second time around.’
Permanent Vacation
provided the band with their first UK chart success when it ranked number thirty-seven in September. In America it peaked at number eleven, remained on Billboard’s chart for seventy weeks and went multi-platinum.

Mid-month, Aerosmith performed ‘Walk This Way’ with Run D.M.C. at the MTV Music Awards held at Universal Amphitheatre in Universal City, California, but Tyler was fixed on the October release of ‘Dude (Looks Like a Lady)’. Aided by heavy rotation airplay of its video on MTV, this single climbed to number fourteen in the US and made it to number forty-five in the UK singles chart.

Success tasted all the sweeter the second time around, and Steven concentrated on positive thinking, but he had not forgotten the past pannings Aerosmith had taken from critics. Proud of their resilience, he said: ‘It is almost like the world was asphalt and we were these fuckin’ weeds. No matter what they put over us, we grew right through it.’ When asked to pinpoint the best revenge he had ever enjoyed, Tyler unhesitatingly stated that it was his band’s comeback. Interestingly, for a man who had gone through hell to claw his way back, Steven had moments when he felt spooked by the thought of the huge success that was now clearly going to be Aerosmith’s. Towards the end of the 1980s, he maintained that it would frighten him to become as big a star as Jon Bon Jovi, whose band followed up
Slippery When Wet
with
New Jersey
, another triumph. What Tyler had come through had left him with inner scars, for he feared that in climbing so high any fall would be all the more devastating. That said, his renewed health and the success of
Permanent Vacation
gave Steven a new strain of confidence and he was once more passionate about his band.

With his professional life straightening out, in late 1987, aspects of his private life had to be attended to. For Cyrinda and Mia, things had been far from easy. When Steven had visited his daughter, each time the youngster wanted him to stay longer, becoming distressed when he had to leave. To Cyrinda, the lake-front house in New Hampshire was no longer idyllic. It had fallen badly into disrepair and she could not afford to have tradesmen carry out extensive renovation work; at the time Steven had been in no position to help, either. Over time she had relied on help from her circle of friends - local bikers who could turn their hands to plumbing, joinery and decorating. These people were platonic acquaintances and Cyrinda had valued their friendship. She was deeply dismayed when, during the divorce proceedings, some of these friendships were alleged to be something more.

In November 1987, just short of Mia’s ninth birthday, Steven and Cyrinda’s divorce became final. Cyrinda retained custody of their daughter but she was extremely unhappy with the alimony arrangements - she later publicly revealed the amount to have been a little over $252 per week. She also later stated her feeling of having been badly advised when it came to some aspects of the divorce settlement. From Cyrinda’s point of view, the problem was that during the period when these matters were thrashed out, Steven was on the skids, in the grip of drug and drink addiction. Aerosmith was washed up and at that point no one could have predicted a Lazarus-style revival. Cyrinda had hoped to secure a stake in songwriting royalties for Mia but was advised that that would not be forthcoming. Even during the divorce proceedings, although Aerosmith’s new album and single had charted, that did not equate with pots of cash instantly pouring into Steven’s bank balance.

With a Boston Music Award for Outstanding Rock Band of the Year under their belt, Steven and Joe went on a press tour of Europe. It was Tyler’s first visit to the UK in a decade; he talked frankly to the music media about his drug-free, rejuvenated band - preparing the way for Aerosmith going back on the road. The
Permanent Vacation
tour, commencing in autumn 1987 in Binghamton, New York, stretched over the next twelve months and took in more than 150 shows in forty-two US states and overseas. Throughout the tour, Tyler worked himself to the bone to reclaim Aerosmith’s crown as a dynamic live act, and it proved to be one of the happiest tours of the band’s career. They got themselves a double-decker bus and brought along their loved ones. Steven has particularly fond memories of night journeys across Europe between gigs, when he would gaze through the windscreen at the stars in the early hours, as the countryside flashed by. For an outdoors man at heart, it had a liberating feel. Of gigging around America, Tyler said: ‘I’m having so much fun, getting up in the afternoon, flying to a show, rockin’ the asses off twenty thousand maniacs, flying home at midnight and sitting up till 3.00 a.m. thinking how beautiful life is.’

As newly recovered drug and alcohol addicts, though, stringent steps had had to be taken to prevent them from falling off the wagon. In advance of Aerosmith arriving in each town and city, their hotel room mini-bars had to be stripped of anything alcoholic. Among those around the band, including any support act, there was a complete ban on drug taking, and if anyone wanted to drink alcohol they had to do it well away from Aerosmith. With a brief break for Christmas, the tour picked up again in mid-January, taking in the southern and western states, and beyond.

On 26 March 1988, Tyler turned forty. That spring,
Permanent Vacation
spawned its next hit single, ‘Angel’, the sentimental ballad written by Steven with Desmond Child. It lodged in the UK chart at number sixty-nine but soared in the States to number three on Billboard. During the tour, Steven drew immense satisfaction from hearing the audience sing the lyrics of this song along with him. It was moments like these that drove home to him just how wasteful those years had been when he had been too stoned on stage even to stay upright.

Not everyone was in such a mellow mood, and it was now that Steven’s ex-wife chose to challenge the financial settlement agreed in their divorce. Aerosmith’s comeback was clearly going to be sustained, and Cyrinda still felt deeply aggrieved. Her life with Mia continued to be anything but the comfortable existence that she felt it ought to be. Money remained tight and she found it hard sometimes even to keep warm. Once, when Steven paid a visit to the house in New Hampshire he asked where his boat had gone and Cyrinda had snapped: ‘I burned it so that your daughter wouldn’t freeze to death, you bastard!’ Cyrinda’s hopes that legal wrangling would improve her status did not materialise - at least, not to the level that she had hoped for - but changes did occur. Part of the 1987 divorce settlement held Steven responsible for paying for parochial schooling for Mia. When Cyrinda upsticked from the rundown lakeside house in 1988 and relocated to New York, Mia was enrolled at Marymount School. She and her mother at the same time moved into a nearby apartment on Madison Avenue, where they would stay for the next few years. Cyrinda had managed to improve their situation but was sometimes wearied by the fact that everything had to be achieved via lawyers.

Not put off by the demise of his first marriage, during a break in touring, Steven wed for a second time when, on 28 May 1988, he and Teresa Barrick tied the knot during a ceremony held in Oklahoma. At the end of June, Teresa became pregnant and was expecting their child the following spring. Also in June, ‘Rag Doll’, the third single from
Permanent Vacation
, was released and peaked in America at number seventeen, but was not issued in Britain. Then in July the tour resumed. This time out on the road, Steven was more than ever alive to potential danger, as their support band for the major venues was the turbulent and volatile Guns N’ Roses. Signed to Geffen Records two years earlier, Guns N’ Roses had supported Iron Maiden and Motley Crue. Their 1987 debut album,
Appetite for Destruction
, was aptly titled, for some of the band’s members already had problems with chemical abuse and alcohol addiction. Steven said of Guns N’ Roses’ frontman, Axl Rose: ‘He’s just the kind of “trash the dressing room” egomaniac that I used to be, but when you’re young, when you’re making a lot of money and you’re bent out of shape - you trash dressing rooms!’

According to Guns N’ Roses’ lead guitarist, Slash, even landing the support gig had provoked some over-the-top antics. The band had been asked to meet Tim Collins at a hotel to discuss the possibility of backing Aerosmith on the road; during the course of the evening, while Collins was occupied with something else, the guys in Guns ran up a huge room service bill, then trashed the room. Said Slash to
Rolling Stone
: ‘But they must have liked us a lot because they put us on the bill anyway.’

The scope, then, for problems for the rehabilitated Aerosmith was huge. To get around this a system was worked out whereby Guns N’ Roses agreed to confine any substance and alcohol abuse to their dressing room. They would play their support gig slot and leave the venue, taking all trace of temptation with them before Aerosmith arrived to headline. On the whole, this revolving door arrangement worked, but on one occasion Steven walked into a dressing room to find Slash still there. By the evidence lying around, the twenty-three-year-old had consumed a fair amount of Jack Daniel’s. Tyler started to say something but stopped himself. Tyler maintained in 1988: ‘I’m always there if they want to talk about it. I can tell them exactly how screwed up I was and what I did with it but I don’t wanna get into the preachin’ trip.’

In late August, on the evening Aerosmith was to play at the Great Woods outdoor arena in Massachusetts, events took a major turn for Steven, personally. Before the gig, Bebe Buell and eleven-year-old Liv visited him in his dressing room. His daughter Mia was already there, and the two dark-haired girls, barely eighteen months apart in age, eyed one another for the first time. Liv recalled: ‘We were like identical twins.’ When the performance began, Liv sat next to her mother in the audience but her eyes were riveted on Steven. She had idolised him as a rock star but all of a sudden Liv turned and asked her mother straight out if Steven Tyler was really her father and not Todd Rundgren as she had been led to believe. Faced with such a direct question, Bebe could not withold the truth any longer and under cover of the music blasting off the stage, emotionally she came clean to Liv.

Some time soon after, Bebe had to let Steven know that Liv now knew the truth, after which he and Liv had to talk. When Steven confirmed to Liv that he was her real father he found it immensely moving, especially when the girl was patently delighted about it. To regularise matters, a blood test was carried out, paternity was proved and Steven made the appropriate financial arrangements.