Steven Tyler: The Biography (3 page)

Any involvement in music excited Tyler, and he guested in a recording studio on back-up vocals with a band called the Left Banke whose bass player, Tom Finn, recalled of Tyler: ‘He was hungry and a good singer, so I put him on there.’ One thing that seemed to escape Steven was that not everybody was
quite
so hungry for success and focused on attaining it as himself. To his way of thinking, the members of Left Banke were pretty laid-back. He later stated: ‘I’ll never forget being in their apartment one day and one of them saying: “What’s the date today? Are we recording tonight? What are we going to record?” I couldn’t believe they were taking it so lightly!’

Steven had continued to co-write songs with keyboard player Don Solomon, and the band had made demos of another handful of songs, with a view to recording an album, but in the end it never materialised. By this time, the band personnel had changed again and the name had been switched to The Chain.

Times were changing in more ways than one. Dr Stephen Perrin, a specialist in 1960s counter-culture, explains: ‘In 1967, you’d had Scott McKenzie singing about people going to San Francisco wearing flowers in their hair but then the original hippies moved out of Haight-Ashbury and the mafia moved in and controlled the drug supply. They caused an LSD famine and flooded the place with speed and heroin. So where we had the flower children before, we now had a bunch of very strung-out people.’

Over on America’s east coast, Steven Tyler had placed his feet on an increasingly darker road in relation to his drug consumption; he was taking speed and dropping acid. In August 1969, Tyler went to the now-famous Woodstock festival at Yasgur’s Farm, close to the village of Woodstock in Bethel, New York state, but it was all a blur to him as he was tripping his brains out. He was so far gone, he had no idea even of where he was. He revealed: ‘My brain was on LSD, not just one tab because I had snorted another.’

When he came back down to earth, Steven knew that as the decade was dying things were not working out for him. He was going nowhere fast. With his huge well of optimism he had promised his mother that he would become so famous in a rock band that it would change the Tallarico family’s whole way of life, but when he hitch-hiked back to Lake Sunapee that summer he felt his tail wedging dejectedly between his legs. He could not know it, but he was about to meet a guy who would soon breathe new life into his folding world.

CHAPTER 2

Fake It, Till You Make It

WHAT STEVEN
inwardly craved, come the summer of 1969, was a creative partner - a soulmate. ‘I wanted a brother, that Ray Davies/Dave Davies thing,’ he recalled. That soulmate came in the shape of Joe Perry, a gifted young guitarist who was also heavily influenced by British bands, and whose parents owned property at Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire.

Born Anthony Joseph Perry on 10 September 1950 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Joe was raised along with a younger sister by their parents, Mary, a high school physical education teacher, and Anthony Perry, an accountant, in the small town of Hopedale, Massachusetts. His father was ex-military and Joe grew up interested in guns, becoming handy with a .22 rifle. Drawn from an early age to music, he tinkered with the ukulele before progressing to guitar, persevering to teach himself to play right-handed, despite being naturally left-handed. When he was fourteen, he sat up and took notice as the Beatles hit America, but Joe was most influenced by much meatier musicians such as Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green, and John Mayall.

School held no attraction for Perry and, as a loner, he tended not to hang out with the crowd. He preferred to hole up in his bedroom, practising guitar for hours on end, but with a goal in mind. Throughout his teens he became involved in several bands - Flash, Plastic Glass, Pipe Dreams, Just Us and the Jam Band. Joe Perry perhaps did not have the openly irrepressible nature of Steven Tyler, but in his quiet, stubborn way he was also a renegade spirit. A slender, handsome young guy, Joe grew his black hair so long it brought him into conflict first with school authorities, then with employers, but he stuck to his guns and refused to cut it.

As an eighteen-year-old, Joe swapped Hopedale for summer at Lake Sunapee with his family, where he took a job in a café-cum-ice cream parlour called the Anchorage at Sunapee Harbour. His tasks there included anything from sweeping the floor and washing dishes to frying chips and hamburgers. In the bustling kitchen he kept up with the latest sounds via the radio; he also kept tabs on a local rock star - Steven Tallarico. Chain Reaction singles featured on the jukebox at the Anchorage, and he could not help but notice Steven around the resort. For one thing, the New Yorker dressed very trendily and was not shy of lapping up the local hero status his band acquired through playing gigs at The Barn. Steven would frequently barge into the Anchorage with his mates and take over a booth, where their high-spirited capers sometimes got a bit out of hand - food would end up flying through the air - and their general exuberance could annoy other patrons. Joe said years later: ‘I guess that’s how you were supposed to act when you had a rock band - dress like you came from Greenwich Village and be loud.’ As soon as Steven and his crowd dispersed, Joe would emerge from the kitchen and watch the guys heading off as he cleared up the mess they had left behind. At this time, Joe was plugging away with the Jam Band, comprising drummer Dave Scott and another friend and future Aerosmith member, bass player Tom Hamilton.

Blond-haired, brown-eyed Thomas William Hamilton was born on 31 December 1951 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to George and Betty Hamilton. Because his father was in the air force, Tom and his three siblings moved house quite a lot. Suffering a serious brush with scarlet fever and falling prey to the odd boyhood accident, Tom was a cautious sort who took time to develop a more outgoing attitude to life. Overawed by his father’s military exploits as a World War II pilot, he very much looked up to him as a role model. A love of music then kicked in and he began to teach himself the guitar at the age of twelve, quickly switching to bass.

The following year, by now living in New London, New Hampshire, seeing the Beatles on the
Ed Sullivan Show
sent his passion for music into overdrive. ‘I used to go to bed imagining myself as one of the Beatles, up on stage, singing those songs,’ Tom recalled. Like Joe Perry, however, Tom’s focus shifted towards a rockier sound; the hypnotic heartbeat of some of the Rolling Stones’ early rhythm and blues-influenced numbers strengthened Tom’s attraction to bass guitar. In his teens, Tom joined a variety of bands with weird and wonderful names before teaming up with Joe Perry - whom he had met at Lake Sunapee - in Plastic Glass, Pipe Dreams and the Jam Band. By this time Tom had acquired a rather lurid local reputation, having been busted for dropping acid. It was later claimed that this brush with the law was the first acid bust in that particular part of New Hampshire. The local notoriety this incident brought Hamilton in such a small town left him feeling uncomfortably like public enemy number one; this outlaw image was only enhanced by his avid interest in the nubile young ladies around him in class. Years later, with brutal candour, Tom confessed: ‘I was just about the horniest little bastard you could possibly imagine.’

Ploughing his pent-up energies into playing gigs with the Jam Band, he especially enjoyed nights at The Barn. Just a couple of years earlier, he and Joe Perry had lurked around outside The Barn listening to Steven Tyler fronting Chain Reaction, and the passage of time had deepened Tom’s respect for Steven. He felt it obvious that Tyler was destined for big things, so he was impressed when, in August 1969, Steven showed up to see the Jam Band perform.

According to Tyler, he has no clear recollection of why he went to see the Jam Band that evening. He does recall having no great first opinion of what he saw. In inimitable fashion he has frequently declared: ‘They sucked!’ To his trained musical ear, the Jam Band lacked precision, their timing was erratic and their tuning left much to be desired. Unimpressed, Steven was on the brink of going home when the band plunged into the Fleetwood Mac number ‘Rattlesnake Shake’, and Perry’s suddenly slinky, sensuous lead guitar work stopped Steven in his tracks; he was mesmerised. Tyler later said: ‘They had a lot of raunch.’ Now watching the Jam Band closely, he grew strongly aware that were he to mesh his melodic qualities and discipline with their more raw abilities, they could create something very special together. The notion quickened Steven’s senses - it was what he had been looking for - and he quit The Barn that night with a lighter step than he had had for some time.

The next day, still thinking about the gig, as he mowed the sloping lawn at his family’s property, Trow-Rico, Steven had stopped to adjust the grass cuttings box when he looked up to see a sleek MG sports car pulling into the drive. Out stepped Joe Perry, his long black hair glinting in the summer sunshine as he pulled off a pair of dark glasses. He approached Steven, who had abandoned the electric mower and was walking over to meet him. This meeting has since assumed near-mythical status in Aerosmith’s history, but at the time they were simply two music-mad young guys exchanging a few words - except that Steven did instantly sense a compatibility between them. His parting shot was that maybe someday they would play music together. Steven Tyler and Joe Perry went their separate ways that day, and Steven trained his sights on forming another new band. He fronted an outfit called Fox Chase, which included Don Solomon from Chain Reaction, with whom he also went on to form a band called William Proud.

Come the end of the 1960s, America’s unsettled mood had grown even darker. For many this was epitomised by the ugly events which resulted in Meredith Hunter, an eighteen-year-old black youth, being savagely beaten to death by a handful of Hell’s Angels at the Rolling Stones’ December 1969 concert at the Altamont Speedway track in Livermore, California. The omens had been bad from the start, and the Stones had just arrived at the site when a teenage boy rushed towards Jagger screaming hatred, and punched him in the face. Drug dealers had descended on Altamont in force and a lot of bad dope had been circulating for hours, adding to the unstable mood before the tragedy unfolded in the crowd while the Stones were performing ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. The Rolling Stones’ album
Let It Bleed
topped the UK charts while, with the Beatles soon to implode,
Abbey Road
reigned supreme in America’s Billboard chart.

For Tyler, life was pretty unsatisfactory as the new decade dawned. In terms of his drug taking, he was now snorting the highly addictive blue crystal methedrine, which stimulated in him a latent instability. William Proud was not working out and Steven was restless. A new breed of band was coming through, spearheaded by Led Zeppelin, featuring frontman Robert Plant and lead guitarist Jimmy Page. The combination of rock and blues that Zeppelin blasted like a life force straight off the stage left Tyler hugely impatient with covering much tamer Beatles songs. He yearned to be delivering a harder rocking sound at his own gigs. William Proud comprised Don Solomon on keyboards, guitarist Dwight Farren, Raymond Tabano on bass, with Steven as drummer and vocalist; in summer 1970 they played regularly at a club in Southampton, Long Island. One evening, mid-performance, the audience was startled by an altercation that blew up on stage before their eyes. The story generally goes that bar staff had to haul an enraged Steven Tyler off Dwight Farren, prising his long fingers from around the guitarist’s throat. Tyler has maintained that he
wanted
to leave his drum kit and go grab the guitarist by the neck, but in his temper he actually tripped over his hi-hat cymbal and cracked a bone in his leg when he fell, some way short of his intended target. In any event, a crossroads had clearly been reached for all concerned; that night Steven quit William Proud and hitch-hiked back to Lake Sunapee with the express purpose of seeking out Joe Perry.

He was easily found. That summer, the Jam Band was the house band at The Barn and Perry was dossing in a decrepit old farmhouse near to the venue. The place was draughty, damp and missing several floorboards, which had been ripped up for fire-wood. Perry’s youth and resilience were keeping his ambition warm. Tom Hamilton and he were immersed in listening to the likes of the Yardbirds, Cream, Ten Years After, and were talking of shortly leaving the area to try their wings in Boston. When Steven showed up, it was a meeting of minds, hopes and dreams; the symbiosis between Steven and Joe was immediately evident.

Perry has likened their incendiary friendship to the core chemicals that create gunpowder - on their own, each element is benign, it is when they are mixed that sparks fly. For his part, Steven recognised Joe as a kindred spirit. Tom Hamilton felt separate from the connection that mushroomed between these two but was not immediately threatened by it. On the contrary, there was a welcome lift to life. The lake shimmered with a fresh clarity and the sun baked down, illuminating a new fork in the road ahead. Gingered up by the prospects, Steven went back to old habits and often took off for the woods and mountains, enjoying communing with nature and recharging his batteries. He knew intrinsically that he possessed what Joe Perry and Tom Hamilton needed, and that the opposite was also true.

The Jam Band’s drummer, Dave Scott, was too young to up sticks and leave home, so it was Steven, Joe and Tom who headed to Boston when summer was fading over Lake Sunapee. Raymond Tabano came too, because Steven wanted to include his Bronx-born friend in any new band line-up. In September 1970, Perry and Hamilton set off first, on a mission to find an apartment to rent.

Boston is often nicknamed The Hub, which it certainly became for the fledgling Aerosmith. An old and gracious city with its own identity, it was also culturally rich. The band found a shabby three-bedroom apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue in the Back Bay area, and their next task was to find a drummer, which would free up Steven to concentrate on lead vocals. Fortuitously, they quickly met twenty-year-old Joey Kramer.