Steven Tyler: The Biography (2 page)

With a distinct lack of imagination, some of his peers continued to disparage his looks, particularly making fun of his wide mouth and big lips. His fightback by now was not always successful, however. Tyler explained: ‘My mother tried to bail me out, saying: “Just tell them, they’re all the better to kiss girls with.” But then I got decked out for being a wise guy!’ Being decked out too often was not an option in the Bronx where, as the years went by, the streets only got meaner. Steven rapidly learned how to stand his ground, and became embroiled in bruising bare-knuckled mass brawls in the neighbourhood. ‘Street fights went on for an hour and a half and I’d come home bloody as hell,’ he later recalled. Confronting at times a cesspool of bigotry, Tyler grew up grasping the putrid nature of prejudice. ‘Jewish white kids were constantly picked on. It was terrible.’ Despite the tribal atmosphere around him, Steven never had an aggressive gang member mentality. Knowing what it felt like to be hassled, indeed, he tended to be very protective of the underdog and of kids with learning difficulties.

Already a poor area, suffering from a chronic lack of investment and raging crime, the Bronx sank to new depths when a wave of arson attacks began amid the borough’s many overcrowded apartment buildings. Rundown and like dry bracken anyway, homes were going up like touchpaper, which was an added nightmare for the 1.4 million residents. The Tallaricos decided that it was time to move house and so the family relocated to Steven’s birthplace. The largest city in Westchester County, Yonkers borders the Bronx and has an undulating landscape rising dramatically from sea level to hills high enough to be seen as landmarks from as far away as New Jersey. Steven’s family moved into a house just off Central Avenue in the north-east quarter, which had a large Italian-American community.

One constant source of delight throughout Tyler’s life was the time spent at the summer town of Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire. In the 1920s, the Tallarico family had bought property and a few hundred acres of land there for about $5000, and over the ensuing years they had developed it into Trow-Rico, a small holiday resort. To Tyler it was a magical place. The state has over eighty mountain peaks, of which the White Mountains are its most famous range. With picturesque villages and lakeside resorts it was extremely popular as a holiday destination; Trow-Rico proved to be a good investment.

From a young age, Steven quit the city every summer and headed with his family to Lake Sunapee to visit his grandparents for the vacation season, where he became very much a barefoot mountain boy. Hunting and trapping all day long, he grew familiar with guns and was particularly deadly with a slingshot. He hunted for raccoons, skunks and possum until he acquired a baby raccoon as a pet, which altered his entire outlook. ‘It got to be my buddy and I could never kill anything after that,’ he recalled. He named the raccoon Bandit, and the pair went fishing together along the riverbanks. ‘Deer were my friends,’ said Steven. ‘I would spend time walking through woods, looking at the most beautiful things.’ He was extremely happy whenever he was at Lake Sunapee - a teenager’s place of dreams.

Already used to live performance from playing drums with his father’s band at New York dances, he was always up for it when amateur stage shows were mounted at a makeshift theatre at Lake Sunapee. The small audiences comprised holidaying families, who were indulgent to a fault with the many gaffes, but it still gave Tyler such a frisson of excitement; he knew in his bones that a stage was his natural habitat. He began to live the dream vividly in his head. ‘I’d close my eyes, picture crowds, and shivers would start at the base of my spine,’ he remembered.

As for many future rock stars, February 1964 was a pivotal point in Steven Tyler’s life when America got its first taste of Beatlemania. With ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ topping the US singles chart, the Beatles arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport amid chaotic scenes, with hundreds of screaming hysterical teenagers forming the welcoming committee. When the Liverpool lads made their live US debut on CBS TV’s
Ed Sullivan Show
, they drew over seventy-three million viewers. The British invasion had begun.

For Steven Tyler, British bands were the best, and over the coming years his focus fell not on the lovable mop-top Scousers but rather on grittier bands. He explained: ‘I was listening to The Who, The Pretty Things, The Kinks, and when the Rolling Stones came along I thought Mick Jagger was the baddest boy on the block!’ Steven avidly collected all the British rock publications he could lay his hands on, soon adding the Yardbirds to his roll of heroes. Playing in a band became his main aim in life. ‘I was crazed,’ he confirmed. ‘I wanted to play rock ’n’ roll.’

In 1964, along with other teenagers from Yonkers, Tyler formed his first band. The line-up would change, as would the band name. It started off as the Strangers until it transpired that another band had that name. Initially, they played around with the spelling but in time switched to calling themselves Chain Reaction. Irrespective of the band’s line-up or billing, Steven threw himself wholeheartedly into performing as drummer and lead vocalist, scraping up bookings wherever he could. He also moonlighted occasionally as a vocalist with Yonkers’ other best-known band, the Dantes, in which his neighbourhood friend Raymond Tabano played.

By the age of seventeen, Steven was already dabbling in drugs, smoking pot. At 5’10”, he had an incredibly lean, near skeletal, physique. His dark brown hair was luxuriously thick and, in keeping with the times, grew down on to his shoulders. He may have been relentlessly teased when he was younger about his unusual looks but the vibrancy he now radiated, the glint in his eyes and the stimulatingly unpredictable aura he oozed attracted the girls, all the same. In 1965, Rolling Stones’ music topped the soundtrack of Tyler’s teens. ‘I grew up with ’em!’ he declared. ‘I smoked so many joints, listening to their albums, fucked so many girls in high school. That was my whole youth, man! I spent it with the Stones.’

That autumn, with
Out of Our Heads
having recently topped the US album chart, the Rolling Stones launched an extensive North American tour, during which they courted controversy every step of the way. Their gig at the Memorial Auditorium in Rochester, New York, in early November had to be stopped by police after only seven minutes when three thousand delirious fans tried to storm the stage; all of this fuelled their raucous, rebellious reputations. Tyler lapped up all this bad press and tried to see his idols in the flesh. In New York one day, he got his chance to rush up alongside Mick Jagger stepping out on to a pavement and had his photo taken with him. It was a different story when Steven stumbled across the Stones’ founder and musical genius, Brian Jones. The most striking Stone, the blond-haired Jones was actually extremely approachable but he had an indefinable presence. Brian was sitting enjoying a quiet drink in a club in Central Square when Steven walked in and did a sharp double take. The usually irrepressible Tyler froze. ‘I was so taken aback, I couldn’t talk,’ he recalled. Someone who can well relate to that reaction is Vicki Wickham, one of the producers of Britain’s best sixties pop show,
Ready, Steady, Go!
She reveals: ‘Brian Jones was absolutely stunning! The band were all eclipsed by Jones. You had to be around him in person to truly grasp what I mean.’

Steven clamoured to see all his favourite bands when they hit town. He managed to see the Kinks in summer 1965, when they made their US live debut at the Academy of Music in New York. Completely carried away that night, he yelled his head off until he was hoarse. Fired up, he put even more into his own personal performances. He was insatiable when it came to music. ‘I love the buzz,’ he explained. ‘The only other thing that gives you a buzz like that is drugs, but music is stronger.’

In the mid-1960s, Steven experienced adrenalin rushes from landing the chance to play support to several top acts. His band opened for the Yardbirds at New York and Connecticut gigs, when Tyler was so keen to connect with the British band he eagerly helped the roadies handling the equipment. He was in seventh heaven supporting the incomparable Byrds at a concert at Westchester County Center in White Plains, New York, enjoyed supporting the Lovin’ Spoonful, and was blown away when his band opened for the Beach Boys before thousands of screaming fans at Iona College in New Rochelle. At home in Yonkers, Steven had for years absorbed the Beach Boys’ immaculate vocal harmonies and the brilliant production values in songs ranging from the jaunty ‘I Get Around’ and ‘California Girls’, to the more introspective ‘In My Room’, which Dennis Wilson dubbed a classic make-out song. Asked what it had meant to him backing the Californian band, Tyler succinctly said: ‘Fucking everything!’

The year 1966 saw some significant changes in his life. With Chain Reaction he recorded two singles, ‘The Sun’/‘When I Needed You’ and ‘You Should Have Been Here Yesterday’/‘Ever Lovin’ Man’. All four songs were recorded between August and September at New York’s CBS studios, and S. Tallarico appears on the songwriting credits for both ‘When I Needed You’ and ‘The Sun’, along with fellow band members of Chain Reaction, Barry Shapiro, Don Solomon, Alan Strohmayer and Peter Stahl. The first single was released late that summer on Date Records, part of CBS Records. Tyler reflected: ‘I can’t ever forget how excited I was about being in an actual recording band. It was a total dream come true.’

That Tyler’s destiny lay in music and not academia was just as well, for 1966 was also the year he was expelled from Roosevelt High School, having been busted along with others by an undercover narcotics cop for taking marijuana. Tyler explained: ‘They put this narc right there in the school. Right up until he popped us, he was selling us nickel bags of good shit.’ Several students were nabbed in the bust and dragooned to the police station. Their worried girlfriends were all crying, and many a dismayed parent was forced to face up to their offspring’s drug taking. Tyler went on: ‘They took me from my front door in handcuffs as my father was arriving home from work.’ Steven’s mother, Susan, stood on the doorstep in tears and with the neighbours rubbernecking to get a better view of what was going on, Tyler felt for his parents. The drug bust made front-page news next day in a Yonkers daily newspaper.

Steven faced felony charges, and when he appeared in court he promised the judge that he would walk the straight and narrow from then on. In that split second as he said it, he probably meant it, for he was numb with fear at the idea of being sent to prison. He was given one year’s probation and was now classed as a YO - a youthful offender.

Not surprisingly, Steven quickly learned that he was not welcome back at Roosevelt High when term started in September, so his parents sent him to Quintano’s Professional School in New York, which catered for kids with aspirations in the arts - music, acting, dance. Steven mainly gave this school a miss, teaming up instead with the other ‘black sheep’ to spend most days hanging around the parks, smoking dope.

His other high continued to come from gigging, and he especially enjoyed playing at The Barn with Chain Reaction. A nightclub held literally in an old barn on a farm in the village of Georges Mills, near to Lake Sunapee, it was a bring-your-own-booze venue and was locally
the
place to perform. As a recording band, Chain Reaction appeared an enviable cut above the ordinary to the other music-mad teenagers, a distinction which delighted Steven. The Barn itself, he adored. From the tiny lip of a stage, he could look out at the crowd jostling intimately up close to him, and there was a loft area with wooden spar fencing. As Tyler belted out cover versions of Stones, Beatles, Animals and Yardbirds songs, legs would dangle and sway within touching distance above his head. When his band’s second single, ‘You Should Have Been Here Yesterday’/‘Ever Lovin’ Man’, was released on Verve Records (part of CBS Records), it only enhanced Tyler’s local hero status up at Lake Sunapee. He did not know it, but future Aerosmith members Joe Perry and Tom Hamilton would hang around outside The Barn, as yet too young to get in, listening to Tyler’s rafter-rattling performances.

A child of the sixties, by 1967 Steven embraced the summer of love - the make love, not war ethos, sharing joints with total strangers and opposing the Vietnam conflict. His youthful offender status kept him clear of the draft, but he has maintained that he would have refused to fight in Vietnam anyway. ‘I didn’t believe in it,’ he stated. He once expanded: ‘When they said: “Don’t smoke pot,” we said: “Fuck you!” When they said: “Go to Vietnam,” we said: “No.” And it wasn’t just because we were stoned and high. It was because we were right. I got into the paraphysical. I was into the Maharishi and trying to get spiritual.’

He continued to open for big bands working the clubs around Greenwich Village and over almost the whole of New York. He also played to a lot of what he called ‘strait-laced’ audiences when his band hit the grand ballroom circuit. His father had long ago imbued in him the need to nurture his craft, and so Tyler chose to see these unbending audiences as good training grounds. He did still play the drums but was more and more prone to grabbing the microphone stand and singing lead.

Mick Jagger continued to be his idol. ‘I can remember when I was just another teenager from Yonkers going to Madison Square Garden to see the Stones and looking down and saying to myself: “Wow, man! Is that tiny figure all the way down there
really
Mick Jagger?”’ In 1968, the Rolling Stones released the hard-rocking number ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, the promotional clip for which had been shot by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Although crude in quality by today’s sophisticated video standards, at the time it was considered innovative and dark, with the Stones wearing face paint and looming through the gloom into the camera lens.

Michael Lindsay-Hogg recalls of the shoot: ‘We had started at midnight and were going to work till dawn. By halfway through the night we had filmed it straight, just a performance with some flashing lights, and it was fine. Then Brian [Jones] came up with the suggestion that they should alter their whole look by using dramatic make-up and as it was a tough number, they should give it a harder edge. I liked it, so we shot a second version. When we had finished,
that’s
the version everyone liked and it was the very first pop promo that had that extra something in it which set it apart from the normal performance clips.’ When Steven Tyler saw this moody promo clip for the US chart-topping single, it played directly to his own developing sense of the dramatic and stage theatrics. He had turned twenty by now, but still hoped to bump into Mick Jagger for a chat, and he often hung around outside the Scene Club in New York, which the Stones frequented, just on the off chance.