Steven Tyler: The Biography (25 page)

A year on from
Armageddon
’s release, Aerosmith was still garnering awards for ‘I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing’, and in June the power ballad won Best Song from a Movie at the 1999 MTV Movie Awards. The number has also become one of the most requested songs ever played on British radio. One bum note that summer concerned Woodstock ’99. Intended to mark thirty years since the original music festival, this event was slated to take place in Rome, New York, between 23 and 25 July. Back in April, Aerosmith had been confirmed as one of the few acts that had played at Woodstock ’94, and would again be taking part this time around. However, due to unforeseen scheduling conflicts and other obligations, it was not now going to be possible, and Aerosmith had to back out. The band issued a statement setting out its decision not to take part in Woodstock ’99, in which they said that they ‘regretted the inconvenience and sent a heartfelt apology to fans who had purchased tickets to see them perform as part of the weekend festival’.

Meantime, back in vocal form, Steven set out to strut his stuff for the final leg of a world tour that had kicked off over two years earlier. Opening on 10 June at the Globen in Stockholm, Sweden, it was a trek around Europe playing at outdoor arenas. Having racked up appearances in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Aerosmith hit Britain for a single gig at London’s Wembley Stadium before heading to Belgium. On 11 July, they took part in the Monza Rock Festival, appearing the following evening at the Neapolis Festival in Naples before quitting Italy for one gig in Spain, then winding everything up on 17 July with a performance at the Super Rock event held at the National Stadium in Lisbon, Portugal. Over the course of this mammoth undertaking, Aerosmith’s opening acts and guest performers had included Spacehog, the Black Crowes, Lenny Kravitz, Bryan Adams and Stereophonics.

Back home with his family for the remainder of that summer, Steven was well rested by the time he was invited to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ in mid-September prior to the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts football game held at the Foxboro Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. More changes came into effect in the business and accounting areas of the band’s working world while publicly their star continued to rise. On 8 December, at the Billboard Music Awards, Aerosmith was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

For many artists, the new millennium was a chance to stage a spectacular showcase gig. Aerosmith chose to greet the dawn of a new century by playing a mini-tour of Japan, dubbed the Roar of the Dragon. Commencing on 29 December at the Dome in Osaka, they played six shows. The stage setting for each gig had a striking theme incorporating dragons and other representations of East Asian culture. Their second gig at the Osaka Dome was on New Year’s Eve, spilling over into 1 January 2000. The band’s American fans had hankered to see them perform on home soil at this unique moment in time. However, they were able to enjoy a small segment of this show when ABC television’s
New Year’s Eve Millennium Celebration
special programme streamed Aerosmith’s performance of ‘I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing’ live from Osaka. On 2 January, they performed at the Nagoya Dome. A single stop in Fukuoka followed, then there were two consecutive nights at the Tokyo Dome, bringing the tour to a close on 7 January. It had been a huge success, and their Japanese hosts and fans had made the band feel most welcome.

For many, this historic dawn ushered in a burgeoning optimism; people felt inspired to hit new heights - in Tyler’s case, literally. During his off-duty periods he had become addicted to extreme sports such as hang-gliding. Wearing a parachute and hang gliding several thousand feet above the ground gave Steven the kind of heady rush that illegal substances once used to. He also enjoyed waterskiing and careering around on a mountain bike. Watching his family of four grow up and spread their wings thrilled him, too. Nine-year-old Taj and eleven-year-old Chelsea were happy, healthy youngsters, each developing their own distinctive personality, while Steven’s two older daughters continued to carve their individual career paths.

Throughout 1999, Liv had appeared in three movies,
Plunkett & Macleane
,
Cookie’s Fortune
and
Onegin
. She would soon be seen in
Dr T and the Women
but her biggest screen role was just around the corner. Liv felt frustrated whenever film magazine and newspaper features labelled her as Liv Tyler, ‘daughter of Aerosmith rock legend Steven Tyler’. It was no reflection on her pride in, or her love for, her father, but she had begun to feel suffocated by the tag to the extent of thinking she should have kept the surname of Rundgren. Liv landed roles on her own merit as an actress but undoubtedly the Tyler name attracted attention - the lifeblood of any performer.

Twenty-one-year-old Mia was working on a career as a plus-size fashion model (plus size in America being a ladies size 10-12). At 5’ 7” tall, with long dark hair, she had developed into a strikingly beautiful young woman, who was often refreshingly candid in interviews. Said Mia: ‘I was always chubby as a kid. We’re a family of big eaters and if you look at my older sister Liv, you’ll see that she’s not super-skinny either. She is totally happy that she has a womanly shape.’ Pointing out that that is a rarity in a country and an industry that favours waiflike figures, Mia was frank that while she had grown up comfortable that she was not sylphlike, it could have been made easier. ‘I know that it would have been better if I had seen role models who had figures like mine. Beauty comes in all different packages,’ she maintained. ‘My dad has a fast metabolism when he is touring and running around on stage but my family never pressurised me to be skinny. We’re very tolerant and supportive of each other.’ Mia would go on to become a catwalk queen, taking part in a provocative plus-size lingerie fashion show in New York, among other things. At a time when the danger of anorexia was fast gaining publicity, both Mia and Liv helped promote a healthier body image for women.

Regarding Aerosmith, Steven was having to fend off any notions that with the band entering its fourth decade in music, it was really time to shuffle quietly away into muted retirement and leave the stage for the young, mainly media-manufactured pop stars coming along. The Rolling Stones, who had started their career a clear decade before Aerosmith, were still touring the world, and Tyler boldly pronounced that so long as he was able to draw breath, he would continue to perform live. To prove that there was life in the fifty-two-year-old yet, Steven now let it out that work had begun on Aerosmith’s thirteenth studio album.

As had been the case for the past thirty years, Steven and Joe Perry sparked creatively off one another, but Perry also revealed: ‘Lately, we’ve found it more exciting to work with other people. Steven and I have sat there in an empty room with a blank tape, me with a guitar in hand and he at the keyboards, a lot of times. I’m not saying we won’t sit down and write songs again alone, but for now it’s fun to bring in other people.’ The outsiders included former collaborators Mark Hudson, Marti Frederiksen and Steve Dudas. Over time, songs emerged including ‘Just Push Play’, ‘Beyond Beautiful’, ‘Under My Skin’, ‘Light Inside’, ‘Sunshine’ and ‘Jaded’. Written by Tyler and Marti Frederiksen, ‘Jaded’ particularly excited the frontman. He declared: ‘It felt phenomenal when I hit on that melody. I didn’t tell the band for two months. I loved the way the song wrapped around itself and within a couple of weeks it went from “Jaded” to “J.J.J.Jaded” with the rhythm and everything. It helped a lot that I was a drummer first.’

The songs were written at the Boneyard, a recording studio Joe Perry had had built in the basement of his house at the ranch he owns near Boston. The demos they made of these songs sounded so good that Steven believed they were as professional as anything then playing on radio. They played music round the clock, creating such a great feeling that it spurred them to record the album in this studio and to produce it themselves, with assistance from Mark Hudson and Marti Frederiksen. Tyler quipped that so many record producers had said that Aerosmith was a pain in the ass to work with, that they had wanted to find out if it was true. Seriously, Steven relished the band taking this aspect of their work into their own hands. They had learned a lot over the years from working with experienced producers and were itching to spread their own wings.

The entire band believed strongly that they now had no need of a coach. Said Tom Hamilton of this new work: ‘We did it all close to home and as one long, continuous, very organic process, as opposed to in the past when there would be a four-week blast of writing then there’d be some appearance we’d have to make that would completely break up the momentum.’ When it came to shooting a video to accompany ‘Jaded’, however, the band was happy to work with director Francis Lawrence. Aerosmith already had a trophy cabinet crammed with awards for their innovative and outlandish videos, but the video for ‘Jaded’ still stirred the normally supremely laid-back Joe Perry.

Aerosmith had thrashed out their ideas with the director and between them they had come up with a storyboard depicting the tale of a young woman who is losing touch with reality. The set design was elaborate and extravagant, even for a band accustomed to excess. Said Perry: ‘It was the first time I’d ever walked on to a set and got goose bumps. When I saw that first shot, the big staircase, all those performers and the giraffe, I felt like I was in a Fellini movie. It was incredible!’

The invigorating experience of making this new album, the fresh freedoms enjoyed by having recorded and produced it themselves, did not mean that there were no spats between Tyler and his ‘twin’. They still got embroiled in heated arguments, but they were productive ructions and always about the music. Anyone visiting the Perry family home and overhearing the rumpus going on down in the basement had to file it under ‘Keep Out! Volatile Men At Work’.

Mainly, though, they had a ball at Perry’s ranch. Joe owned a sizeable collection of off-road vehicles, of which the band made full use. At times they were as headstrong as a bunch of unruly teenagers. Joe recalled one occasion when they could have come a nasty cropper. ‘We were riding around on dirt bikes and somebody forgot that I have a swimming pool. They came up over the hill and slammed the brakes on really hard and we got to see just how many times a dirt bike can go end over end. Fortunately, there were no broken bones.’

In mid-September, Steven poked his head above the parapet long enough to clock up that Aerosmith was among sixteen artists being tipped for possible induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001. Among the others were AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Lou Reed, Michael Jackson, Paul Simon, Queen, Bob Seger and Steely Dan. Several hundred people from across the music business, including artists, record producers, journalists and industry figures, all voted on the nominees, whittling the number down over a period of weeks to those who would be inducted. To be eligible for induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an artist or band had to have been in the recording business for at least twenty-five years, but Tyler was not holding his breath. They had been passed over before for this industry honour. On 12 December 2000, however, it was announced that alongside Paul Simon, Queen, Michael Jackson and Steely Dan, Aerosmith would be inducted. By the end of the year, some music commentators were touting Aerosmith as arguably
the
pre-eminent American hard rock band; in VH1’s ‘100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock’ they ranked number eleven. And the accolades kept coming.

In January 2001, at the American Music Awards, Aerosmith received the Award of Achievement, which had at that point only been given to Michael Jackson, Prince and Mariah Carey. Aerosmith performed at the ceremony, debuting their as yet unreleased single ‘Jaded’, and were rewarded with an enthusiastic standing ovation. Weeks later, on Sunday 28 January, Aerosmith performed at the half-time show during America’s NFL Super Bowl XXXV game between the Baltimore Ravens and the New York Giants, held at the Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida. Nearly seventy-two thousand people packed the arena, and the whole event was also watched live by 750 million television viewers worldwide. Other performers included Nelly, Mary J Blige, N’Sync, Tremors and the Earthquake Horns and Britney Spears. The half-time show culminated with all the performers joining Aerosmith for a rendition of ‘Walk This Way’. When later challenged as to how it felt as hard rockers, performing with breezy young pop stars, Joe Perry drolly remarked that if they could get away with appearing on stage with Britney Spears, then the band was surely bullet proof!

In March, Aerosmith’s thirteenth studio album,
Just Push Play
, was released. It lodged at number two on Billboard and quickly went platinum. In Britain, the album made number seven; ‘Jaded’ soon reached the same peak in the US singles chart, stopping six places lower in the UK. A further three singles would spin off
Just Push Play
: ‘Fly Away From Home’; ‘Sunshine’, and the title track, but ‘Jaded’ was the most successful and in 2001 its video won the Billboard Music Award for ‘Best Hard Rock Clip of the Year’.

Without doubt, the landmark event of 2001 was being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 19 March at a ceremony held during a black tie dinner at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel. In anticipation of receiving this recognition, Steven remarked: ‘Not bad for a bunch of guys that got kicked out of clubs for playing their own songs.’ Aerosmith was the only band to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the same time as having a hit song (‘Jaded’) played on radio across the nation.

Aerosmith was inducted by Kid Rock, who said during his introduction: ‘Aerosmith are to rock and roll what Fonzie was to
Happy Days
.’ While the audience politely tried to work out the significance of this remark, Kid Rock carried on with his speech and ended by inviting Aerosmith up on stage as ‘the greatest rock and roll band in American history’. After receiving their coveted statuettes, Aerosmith launched into blistering renditions of ‘Sweet Emotion’, ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ and ‘Jaded’. If some recipients of this honour preferred to play things cool backstage after the induction, Steven was far from blasé. Openly thrilled, he declared: ‘To know that you’ve got a place next to Elvis Presley? This is totally overwhelming!’