Steven Tyler: The Biography (26 page)

CHAPTER 14

A Road Paved With Passion

HAVING LATELY
performed at the NFL Super Bowl and at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, on 27 May 2001 Steven completed a hat-trick of appearances at grandiose events when he sang America’s national anthem at the pre-race ceremony of the 85th Indianapolis 500. This legendary car race, held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, sees dozens of drivers compete for the million dollar first prize over a two and a half mile circuit, before a crowd of over a quarter of a million. Vehicles had displayed band names before but this was the first year that an Indy 500 race car sported the image of a rock band. The Aerosmith vehicle was painted pink and silver, carried Aerosmith’s winged logo and an image of the scantily clad female robot that featured on the cover of the newly released album
Just Push Play
. In deference to Tyler’s nickname, the car was called The Screaming Demon and displayed on its conical nose a caricature of a yelling Tyler, plus Steven’s autograph. After Steven performed the national anthem, veteran Indy racing driver Jeff Ward slid behind the wheel of this customised car and joined battle with the other competitors.

Quitting Indianapolis, Tyler hightailed it back to his bandmates, who were excitedly anticipating the imminent launch of the
Just Push Play
tour. Regardless of how many times he had gigged around the globe, Steven was not jaded. ‘You gotta keep it fresh, coming up with new stage designs and places to go. You always want to outdo what you did last time,’ he said. Asked how Aerosmith could do that this time, Steven riposted: ‘We could have bombs and blow-up dolls, but it’s better to keep my sex life out of this!’ In keeping with
Just Push Play
’s cover design, the stage set for this tour had a futuristic theme in silver and white. There would be two impressively sweeping staircases and a huge video wall, which Joe Perry had faint reservations about. ‘The biggest thing on this tour, literally and figuratively, will be the video screen in back. We’ve never brought a screen with us before, so we hope it will add to the live performance, not take away from it,’ he said.

With Fuel as the warm-up act, Aerosmith launched the world tour on 6 June at the Meadows Music Center in Hartford, Connecticut. They delivered a playlist that alternated between hard-rocking numbers and soaring ballads in a show designed to appeal to all ages, rounding off with an encore that included the haunting and powerful ‘Livin’ on the Edge.’ One MTV gig report stated: ‘The band seemed under-rehearsed at times - Steven Tyler missed his harmonica cue during “Cryin’” - but Tyler went into charismatic hyperactive ringmaster mode and, overall, the band hit a groove and stuck in it.’

Gigging over a handful of states throughout the month, Aerosmith played a single Canadian concert at the Molson Amphitheater in Toronto before reverting to more North American performances; they completed this first leg on 23 July in Englewood, Colorado. After a two-week break, a second US leg got under way, with scintillating performances creating such a lust among fans for more gigs that, on a high, Aerosmith announced several extra dates to be added to their itinerary between October and December. Fired up, the band quit North Carolina for a gig on 11 September 2001 at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Virginia Beach, when everything came to a hideous halt with the terrorist attacks that were launched on the United States.

Sent reeling like the rest of the world, Aerosmith cancelled the Virginia gig and pulled the plug on dates in New Jersey and Maryland. Less than a week after that mind-numbing tragedy, they went back on stage in Atlanta, Georgia. Steven was uneasy about whether it was right to carry on with the tour. The mood in America was understandably like a tinderbox, with unimaginable sorrow and grief for the thousands of people who died in the attacks, mixed with an equally understandable collective volatile rage. When performing in Nashville, Raleigh and West Palm Beach to conclude this stint, the band remained sensitive to the situation. Would people feel guilty about going out and trying to have a good time for a few hours? Or would they welcome being able to get out from under the blanket news of this atrocity and somehow begin to get on with their lives? There was a remarkable sense of defiant resilience resonating at street level.

Although Steven concentrated on walking a fine line at concerts, aiming to maintain a positive vibe, like every other American he was inwardly gutted. He told Alex Beam for the
Boston Globe
: ‘You have to stand at ground zero to experience the magnitude of the hot heaping helpings of hate that people have. I visited ground zero at the Pentagon. The giant hole - the devastation! They rocked America’s world.’

Ten days on from the terrorist attack, with America a cauldron of seething emotions, a hastily arranged two-hour telethon called ‘America: A Tribute To Heroes’ was broadcast live from New York, Los Angeles and London (by satellite) on all major US television networks; the kaleidoscope of feelings was reflected by the evident state of mind of many of the performers through their telling choice of song. Belligerence shone out when Tom Petty opted to perform his band’s hit, ‘I Won’t Back Down’. U2 offered more subtle strength in the face of intense adversity with ‘Walk On’. Paul Simon turned in a soul-searching rendition of his classic, ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, and Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora performed a hauntingly introspective version of ‘Living on a Prayer’.

Ten days into the third leg of the
Just Push Play
tour, Aerosmith decided almost at the last minute to take part, on 21 October 2001, in the United We Stand: What More Can I Give? benefit concert for the 9/11 victims held at the RFK Stadium in Washington DC. Other performers included Rod Stewart, Bette Midler, America, Carole King, Mariah Carey and Michael Jackson, each artist being restricted to a five-song set. Aerosmith took to the stage in the afternoon. Wearing a long jacket emblazoned with the American flag, Steven led his band through a gripping set which included performances of ‘I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing’ and ‘Livin’ on the Edge’; in a nation then living on a knife edge the latter took on an evocative new depth.

Straight after coming off stage at the RFK Stadium, Aerosmith flew to Indianapolis to honour their scheduled tour date that same night, at the Conseco Fieldhouse. In a charged state, Steven turned in a riveting show for the equally emotional audience. Inescapably, it was difficult to perpetuate a business-as-usual atmosphere - the reckless spirit of any normal rock concert was wholly inappropriate - but Tyler kept trying to find the right balance. For some time to come, every gig threw up this extra challenge, and nightly it very much depended on the mood of the fans.

With so many people bereaved and suffering, it was not the climate in which to feel sorry for yourself, and so when Steven began to feel tired and unwell, he kept it firmly to himself as long as he could, but eventually a show in Pittsburgh and one in Toronto had to be cancelled. Aerosmith returned to the stage on Halloween for a gig at the Molson Centre in Montreal, Quebec, but Tyler’s throat gave him so much trouble that he had to rest his voice. A date in Ohio was scrapped, while gigs in Boston and Rhode Island were postponed. The band planned to resume the tour in early November at the First Union Center in Philadelphia, but that too had to be rescheduled as Steven’s problems persisted stubbornly. He was well aware of the dangers of placing too much strain on his vocal cords, but a machine used to create dry ice smoke on stage was not helping him, either. The particular machine Aerosmith had been using at indoor arenas was designed for outdoor use; breathing in its emissions so close to the machine for a couple of hours every night on tour had been inadvisable. Tyler saw a pulmonary specialist and for a while was using inhalers, while the dry ice smoke machine was replaced.

The show got back on track on 10 November at the Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky. Nights at New York’s Madison Square Garden and the Continental Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey, also went without a hitch, but Tyler’s sigh of relief was premature. The tour stalled again briefly when their gig at the twelve-thousand-capacity Jefferson Convention Complex Arena in Birmingham, Alabama, on 1 December had to be scrapped at the eleventh hour after a giant scoreboard at the venue fell seventy feet to the ground and was destroyed, just hours before the gig was due to start. Nobody was injured in the incident and it was suspected that the collapse had been due to a snapped cable, but health and safety issues ruled out allowing people into the venue that night. Six more performances brought this eventful leg of the tour to a close in mid-December at the Gund Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. Then Steven was keen to get back to his family.

Back in the summer, for a magazine spread in
Harper’s Bazaar
, Tyler had been photographed surrounded by his parents Susan and Victor Tallarico, his sister Lynda, wife Teresa, sister-in-law Lisa and his children, Liv, Mia, Chelsea and Taj. Now, as 2001 began to draw to a close, he needed to catch up with events on the home front.

The complexion of Liv’s love life had changed. She and actor Joaquin Phoenix had split up in late 1998 and she had subsequently met and fallen in love with Royston Langdon, then lead singer with the British rock band, Spacehog. In February 2001, Liv and the twenty-eight-year-old frontman became engaged and were living together in a New York apartment. Professionally, Liv had hit the big time for she had been cast as the elven princess, Arwen Undomiel, a leading role in the blockbuster screen version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
trilogy; other main roles were played by Ian McKellen, Ian Holm, Sean Bean, Viggo Mortensen and Cate Blanchett. Liv would star in all three films of this fantasy tale, which was shot on location in New Zealand over eighteen months. Of her screen character, Liv said: ‘I got to play someone three thousand years old, so that’s quite an acting challenge.’ As the mythical princess, Liv looked enchanting. Behind the scenes, however, she had her hiccups when the prosthetic ears her character sports melted in the sun. ‘I was so upset,’ she revealed of this mishap. ‘The ears were amazing and I kept them on the dashboard of my car but they’re made of gelatine so, of course, by the end of the week one of them had melted into a sticky mess.’ The first film in this multi-million-dollar trilogy,
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
, had its glitzy world premiere in London at Leicester Square’s Odeon Cinema in December 2001, when Liv walked the red carpet alongside co-stars Sean Bean, Christopher Lee and Elijah Wood as a two-thousand-strong crowd of film fans crammed up against the crush barriers.

Steven, then still on tour in the States, was bursting with pride. With her profile sky-high, it was even more inevitable during media interviews that Liv would be quizzed about her parents, particularly her colourful father and the fact that she had grown up for years calling another man Dad. With unwavering candour, Liv talked of the wild and wayward lives her mother and father had led, but she was not prepared to prudishly judge either of them; off the bat, she established that she had been raised always knowing that she was loved by both parents. Of Steven, she declared: ‘He has been through rehab and he’s clean now but he had some very bad years. The drugs gave him seizures and he could have died. Because of his experience with drugs, I will never go near the stuff.’ Of her mother, Bebe Buell, Liv revealed: ‘I forgave my mom for deceiving me as to who my real dad was. My mom and I are still close, but my dad and I are true soul-mates! ’

Offsetting Steven’s pleasure in the positive path Liv’s life was taking, was his concern for Mia. Her modelling career continued to flourish but in 2001 her mother, Cyrinda Foxe, suffered a stroke that left her partially paralysed, and her ill health would drastically worsen. The downside of being a successful touring rock star is being unable to be there at crucial times for one’s family. Steven’s wife, Teresa, knew how much that aspect of his fame tortured him. That said, she and Tyler’s eldest daughters each knew how committed he was to his craft. Steven once confessed poignantly that when he is on the road during these gargantuan world tours, in the absence of having his loved ones around him, each night at gigs the fans filling the front row become his ‘family’. Let loose on tour, Tyler knew that he had to toe the line and look after himself. He still remembered those decadent days when a drug cocktail would await him backstage in his dressing room, but ruefully he accepted that nowadays with grown-up daughters ready to catch him out, the wildest defiance left to him was to hack into a fresh cream cookie when no one was looking!

In early January 2002, Steven limbered up for a fourth, though short, seven-date North American leg of the
Just Push Play
tour. Commencing in Denver, it wrapped mid-month in San Diego. Some things never changed, though. While Tyler remained absolutely focused on every minute detail of each show and its sound, his best mate Joe Perry continued to take a more laid-back approach. When these separate approaches clashed, Steven and Joe would lock horns. Perry has admitted that he can be deliberately contrary, just to annoy his friend. Then, having thought about things, he sometimes has to concede that Tyler is right. No one in the know took any notice of these noisy arguments, for all they did was spark up the dynamic between the men, which in turn spiced up the band.

Out on stage, Tyler continued to hold court as the consummate showman, and such was the enthusiasm Aerosmith met on this leg that when they played at The Joint, a two-thousand-seat venue within the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, on 11 January, they recorded the show for future release as a live album. After a stint in Japan, the
Just Push Play
tour ended in February, with the statistics reading nicely. The tour ranked as the eighth highest grossing of the previous year - the total gross was more than $43.5 million - and over the entire length of the tour Aerosmith had performed to nudging one million fans.