by Joe Perry
As we stormed the country, it became clear that Guns N’ Roses was the new young thing. It had been years since we had played that role. At one point Rolling Stone came out to do a story about our comeback but wound up writing about Guns N’ Roses. I wasn’t happy, but I understood. By the time the tour was over, the focus had flipped from us to them—and deservedly so. We were playing great, revitalized by a fresh slate of songs and a hot record, but here in the eighties Axl and Slash had that kind of fresh-blood energy that had characterized us in the seventies. They were in their twenties; we were in our thirties—a huge difference in rock. If anything, their heat helped us fuel our own fire. The tour ended, a tremendous overall success. The old tradition had the headliners giving gifts to the openers—and the openers letting the headliners have it. In our case, that meant a giant pie fight at the end of the last show. We gave each of the Guns N’ Roses guys a set of top-of-the-line Halliburton luggage as a token of gratitude. When I see Slash these days, he says he’s still using those suitcases.
DINOSAURS EATING CARS
It was funny looking at Bruce Fairbairn, noted stamp and butterfly collector, running through the open field chasing butterflies with a net. It isn’t an activity usually associated with a rock producer. But there he was, in the fields of Massachusetts, chasing down some rare species while, from the porch of the rehearsal studio, Steven and I watched in amazement.
By then we had moved into houses on the suburban South Shore of Boston. We had both bought big places on large plots of land not far from each other. Steven had married Teresa and was relatively calm—that is, calm for Steven.
The studio where we worked, halfway between Steve’s place and mine, belonged to our friend Rick Tinory, whose fame came from writing a hit song about the Pope visiting Boston.
Fairbairn had flown in from Vancouver along with Jim Vallance to help us get started writing songs for our new record, our third for Geffen and our second with Bruce as producer. Although we liked Jim as a songwriter, we weren’t at all sure we needed to collaborate with outsider writers again. We viewed Aerosmith as a self-contained unit. We were certain we had all the necessary writing talent. But John Kalodner saw it differently. Like all record men, he had a simple attitude—repeat the winning formula. Because we were so confident in our ability to write hits, especially after we’d been doing just that for some eighteen years, we challenged that attitude.
We prevailed because Steven and I were working with greater synchronicity than ever. I came up with the riff for “Monkey on My Back” early in the rehearsal process, and Steven nailed the lyrics. We were on a creative roll. Tom inspired the music for one of Steven’s most serious lyrics, “Janie’s Got a Gun”—a song about physical abuse by a parent—which wound up winning a Grammy. Steven collaborated with Brad on the stirring “Voodoo Medicine Man.”
To shake things up, I listened to “Rag Doll,” from Permanent Vacation, backward and, strangely enough, began developing new chords that turned into “Don’t Get Mad, Get Even.” We didn’t simply want to follow up our last album with something good; we were driven by the Aerosmith ethos: Fuck whatever we did last time. This time we can do it better. ’Cuz in this biz you’re only as good as your next record.
I wrote the riff to “My Girl” out of my passion to reconnect with the raw rock of the sixties that I’d heard in the Kinks. Steven’s lyrics matched the frantic pace of the music. It was a great one to play live.
“Young Lust” contained that same kind of a paradox—a throwback to the days of horny youth even as we approached our forties.
Kalodner insisted on bringing Desmond Child back into the mix. Desmond helped us write the bridge to a tune that didn’t make the record. Oddly enough, another song written by Steven and me needed a bridge and the discarded one worked. Thus the Perry-Tyler-Child collaboration called “F.I.N.E.,” which stands for “Fucked up . . . Insecure . . . Neurotic . . . Emotional.”
“Love in an Elevator,” still another expression of Steven’s libido, was a pure Perry/Tyler product. In fact, of the final ten songs, Steven and I wrote six alone.
During the recording at Little Mountain Sound in Vancouver, I was after the maximum sonic boom. With Fairbairn’s help, we achieved it. To borrow a phrase from Frank Zappa, it sounded like dinosaurs eating cars. To heighten the record’s drama, between each track we inserted short, bizarre interludes: cries, chants, and foreign dialogues. This was done with the help of a local Vancouverite who had an astonishing collection of world instruments. Our motto was, “If it makes sound, use it.”
The last piece of the puzzle was the title. As usual, deliberations went on for weeks. It was only Brad’s question—“Why don’t we just call the thing Pump?”—that sealed the deal.
We also wanted videos that matched the energy of the music. Director Marty Callner understood how to project the larger-than-life images that would show a band reclaiming its former stature. On “Love in an Elevator,” our sexiest video to illustrate our sexiest song, we start out as well-mannered patrons in an art deco department store and wind up grooving on a variety of voluptuous beauties in a variety of positions. Billie is the topless woman I’m making out with in the elevator. It was Billie or no one! The theme is athleticism in the name of love. The performance segments are shot in an arena-like ambience to underscore the point: Aerosmith is back rocking huge venues.
“The Other Side” has us, as stiffs, being carried out of coffins and placed onstage—a metaphor for our rebirth. Steven is more animated than a Disney cartoon, back-flipping like some scrawny teenager.
Was that good? Was that bad? Whatever it is, it was Aerosmith—a hardworking rock band gunning for mega-success the second time around.
We did things that went against the grain of our original vision in the seventies. But this was a new era. We slipped under the wire and still looked young enough to fit in with the new baby bands on MTV. As a result, we were bigger than ever. Rather than lose old fans because of our sobriety, we gained new fans because we tried new things. We also played better than ever. All this came in the middle of the Golden Age of Arena Rock.
Adding to the allure was a third video—this one with a radically different feel—that immediately went into heavy rotation on MTV. For “Janie’s Got a Gun” we hired David Fincher, the future director of Fight Club, who fashioned a compelling crime narrative with top production values to complement Steven’s noirish lyrics. If you calculated the cost of these videos—many done by top-flight feature-length directors—on a per-minute basis, each would have the cost of a high-budget action movie.
Released in 1989, Pump was our farewell record to the eighties. Like Permanent Vacation, it sold multimillions. Even reviewers who had spent much of their careers kicking our ass had to admit this was some strong rock and roll from a band that was not about to fade away. We couldn’t wait to play it live for the fans.
On the first part of our tour, a new band called Skid Row was set to open. Their lead singer, Sebastian Bach, was like a kid in a candy store, loving every minute of his new success. Before one of our shows he came to my dressing room and said, “Man, my greatest dream in the world would be to smoke some hash with you and Steven.”
“That’s not gonna happen,” I said, laughing.
“I need to get high with you guys, just once,” he insisted.
“Sorry,” I said.
And that was it.
As much as I appreciated Skid Row’s appeal to a younger generation, I couldn’t help but bemoan the dilution of the musical tradition. I’d be shocked if anyone in most of these young bands had ever put a needle down on a John Lee Hooker record. The blues, the basis and beating heart of this art form, was slipping further into obscurity.
No matter—I loved the tour. Not only did we blast fresh music from Vacation and Pump, we also played on one of the coolest sets of our career: a stage set that replicated the rooftop of an urban apartment building. Steven and I ran up and down staircases and ramps while Joey’s
drums spun like a top.
We flew from city to city on a Citation II that we christened Aeroforce One. Our touring paradigm had us based in a central city like Chicago or Dallas that we used as a hub for two weeks at a time. From there we’d hit every city within an hour’s flight. We’d leave the hotel about 2 P.M. and fly back to the hub that same night. Billie would travel commercially with little Tony and set up house at the various hotels. I’m glad to say that the Perry family adapted to this gypsy lifestyle. Billie homeschooled Tony on the road; when we were in Boston, he entered a Montessori school whose flexibility matched our own.
Steven had renewed his fascination with backstage groupies. After the show I’d have to stand around for hours before we left. This became a real source of friction between me and Steven. I was never one for the short-skirt room. I sometimes imagine myself standing outside the Pearly Gates with St. Peter, who asks me, “You wasted how many hours of your life waiting around for this guy?”
On the Citation II, the Aeroforce pilot let me sit in the copilot seat and at times fly the plane as we cruised to the next show. I must have logged hundreds of hours in that copilot seat. By then, I had spent a good many hours taking private lessons in a small plane. One night the pilot let me land the Aeroforce jet. When the other guys saw that I was at the controls there was dead silence. It was too late for them to do anything about it. After I executed something close to a textbook three-point landing, most of them were impressed and didn’t mind. But Tom was upset. In a low voice he said, “That’s the last time you’ll ever do that.”
The Black Crowes, another young band about to break through, opened the second leg of our American Pump tour. I was glad to have them aboard because their first album was one of the best rock records in recent years. There was an uncomfortable friction between the two brothers—Chris and Rich Robinson—who ran the band, but I saw that as growing pains. Chris had a big mouth and, as much as he’d admired us in the seventies, he yapped to the press that we were sellouts because we had a guy who helped with background vocals; he also said that we used tape vocals. Only the first accusation was true, but he still didn’t have to go to the press. As the years went on, however, we let it go, became friends with the Crowes, and often played on the same bill.
By the end of the summer of 1990, right around my fortieth birthday, in one year alone we had played to more than two million people in America during our one hundred–plus shows. We also had a very pleasant moment doing MTV’s Unplugged.
When we got to Europe, the pandemonium continued. In England, Jimmy Page, by then a good friend of mine, and his manager spent the weekend with us. We were set to play the Marquee club, followed by a big gig at Monsters of Rock.
Standing onstage at the Marquee during the sound check, Jimmy, Brad, and I had our favorite Les Pauls in our hands while Steven blew harp. I felt like I was seventeen years old again. My mind went back to suburban Hopedale, where I’d sit in front of the record player for countless hours, trying to absorb Page’s electric mojo. I did that by letting the riff play, lifting the needle, trying to copy it on my guitar, and repeating that process for hours. Now we were colleagues. We played those Yardbirds songs—“I Ain’t Got You” and “Smokestack Lightning”—that had lit up my life as a boy and changed my life as a man. When Jimmy sat in at the show, it was so intense that we blew out the power—twice. But it was during that five-hour sound check that we were living the dream, playing every Yardbirds song in the book.
The next night Jimmy rode with us on our bus out to Donington Park for the Monsters of Rock, a huge outdoor event. Jimmy sat in again during our last few songs, raising the stakes even higher. It was a night when we really rode the wave of the crowd’s incredible energy. As we were walking offstage—sky-high on the music—we heard a huge roar that drowned out the crowd. We looked up at the sky and saw the Concorde taking off just one thousand feet above our heads, the perfect punctuation point to a weekend none of us would ever forget.
For me, the start of the nineties was a good time. Billie proved to be the woman I had longed for. Her ethic and mine were the same: to live a happy and healthy creative life free of drama. We planned for our second child together. The longer my sobriety lasted, the freer I felt. I had successfully learned to fly a small prop plane solo over the rooftops of our South Shore surroundings. I had even buzzed Steven’s house and wiggled the wings to say hello. With Billie in the back, I had flown over the breathtakingly beautiful New Hampshire mountains in peak fall foliage. Outside the band, life was sweet.
Inside the band, the drama would never cease—then, now, and forever. The truth is that in the beginning of this new decade, the Aerosmith drama deepened, turning crazier with each new day.
CULT
There are many definitions, but the one that hit me hardest says, “A cult is an insular sect built around the veneration of a person or belief where outside criticism cannot be tolerated.”
As amazing as it might sound, this hard-core rock-and-roll band made up of five rugged individualists embraced a cult mentality. This happened for an alarmingly long period of time beginning in the late eighties and moving into the nineties. The cultlike ambience was the product of Tim Collins, the mastermind behind our spectacular comeback—one that, in the rock-and-roll business, was unprecedented. Our stunning resurgence blinded us to the ways in which we were being played. We didn’t want to see it. And once we saw it, we didn’t want to admit it. We just wanted to go on enjoying the enormity of our new success. We were back in the good graces of our fans. And because of all this new adulation, we were on top of the world and didn’t want to reexamine the managerial mechanism that had gotten us there. Beyond that, we were playing better than ever.
By 1991, it was clear that our new professional life was not in our own hands. We were the puppets and Collins the puppeteer. For example, he never wanted any of our wives around, even if, in truth, none of them were causing problems. By this time, we were all raising families, trying to live our lives as grown men. Our wives were essential parts of those lives. But Collins insisted that they have their own separate therapy meetings with the shrink of his choice. God forbid they missed a single meeting. The same applied to the band’s group therapy. Miss a meeting and there was hell to pay.
Then there were his pernicious triangulations.
Billie would ask Collins for a touring schedule and, in response, Collins would call Steven to say, “Joe and Billie are micromanaging the band. Joe is acting out.”
That would hit a nerve in Steven, who would go around bad-mouthing me. Then Collins would call me and say, “Tyler is enraged. He’s furious with you, but I can handle him.”
The rest of the band would get word that Steven and I were fighting and, in reaction, retreat to their own corners. Finally Steven and I would get on the phone to sort out the mess—but this would be weeks later, when the emotional damage was already done. Collins thrived on messes like this. The plain truth was that we were healthy and sober. But, as I came to see it, in order to maintain control over our lives, Collins had to perpetuate the atmosphere of dysfunction. Dysfunction gave him control and, paradoxically, worsened his own psychological health. He became a junkie for control. The puzzlement went like this:
The healthier we became, the sicker he became.
His sickness took the form of trying to undermine our health.
The less stable we became, the more power he could wield.
His drug was power and, as with any addictive drug, he could never get enough.
Because Steven’s personal life was spinning out of control, it didn’t seem unreasonable for him, at Collins’s insistence, to check into the Sierra Tucson care center for rehab. Our understanding was that his treatment was for a combination of issues, including his alleged drug use and sexual addiction. The decision as to whether he should go or not should have been made by Steven and his family. But the Brain Trust, which included John Kalodner and well-known celebrity twelve-step sobriety therapi
st Bob Timmins, prevailed, and Steven went into rehab for an extended stay.
Before our next tour, Steven told us the Brain Trust had the audacity to visit him at his home to say that they felt it was okay for him to get blow jobs on the road. In their view, blow jobs wouldn’t be considered cheating on his wife. Apparently they were afraid that were Steven to remain monogamous, his lyrics would lose their sexual edge. Steven was right to get furious about their meddling. What a mind fuck!
Another mind fuck, this one concerning business: Collins was fighting with Geffen. Tim was talking about taking us off the label and bringing us back to Columbia/Sony, who apparently were willing to pay an incredible amount of money. The numbers made our heads swim.
Collins was pulling all the strings. Not only had he gained a reputation as the guy who ran Aerosmith, but he had also built up his own personal brand as Rehab Guru. It was as though he possessed a magic cure. If a band was strung out on drugs and didn’t know what to do, their manager would call Collins. If he could save Aerosmith, he could save your band as well. Even politicians called him for sobriety advice. His reputation inflated his ego bigger than that of any rock star I had ever known—and his ego rested on his ability to keep us in line.
We never knew, for example, at some special events band members could buy extra tickets. We later learned that Collins was buyng them instead and using the tickets to invite his own sobriety buddies, outside business associates, and big shots he was looking to impress. So much was happening behind our backs, and yet, with so much success, we were looking ahead, not behind us.
In the summer of 1991, Collins called a band meeting. He had recruited a shrink, a specialist in addiction, to sit by his side and echo his position. He demanded that all of us go to Sierra Tucson for rehab.