Steven Tyler: The Biography (20 page)

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.

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.