Aerosmith, 50th Anniversary Updated Edition

The Ultimate Illustrated History of the Boston Bad Boys

Richard Bienstock

• Publisher: Voyageur Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780760369357
• eBook ISBN:
  9781610597692
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

One of Guitar World magazine's Top 15 rock books of 2011.

Aerosmith is one of the greatest rock 'n' roll bands of all-time. After their 1970s success was derailed by band strife and Dionysian excess, Boston's Bad Boys received a career jump-start in 1986 via their collaboration with hip-hop legends Run-DMC and producer Rick Rubin. This first complete illustrated history of one of the world's most successful and popular bands features a band history by music journalist Richard Bienstock and sidebar album reviews from a host of well-known music journalists, including Greg Kot, Jaan Uhelszki, Chuck Eddy, Bill Holdship, Martin Popoff, Daniel Bukszpan, and more. Illustrated throughout with hundreds of stunning performance and backstage photographs, as well as rare memorabilia, including gig posters, backstage passes, 7-inch picture sleeves, ticket stubs, and more.

“They hated us at the clubs. Because we did our own songs and the owners would go, ‘Ooh, but the kids can’t dance to it, they don’t know those things.’ The problem was they would just stand there in awe!”

—Steven Tyler, quoted by Sylvie Simmons in Sounds, July 1979

August 12, 2010. Jones Beach Theater, Long Island, New York. Another year, another tour, another full house. Nine p.m., the shed goes dark to match the sky above. Cue drum count-off; cue Joe Perry “Toys in the Attic” intro lick; cue curtain drop. In a flash, night becomes day, and it’s Lights!/Voices scream/nothin’s seen/real’s the dream. . .

Onstage, the cast remains the same: Joey Kramer and Tom Hamilton clustered in back; Brad Whitford, shades on and ball cap pulled low, riffing stage right; Joe Perry, head down, leg cocked, black hair in face, planted stage left. Perched on a catwalk dead center, like ripe fruit dangling off the end of a branch, all mouth, hair, and multicolored scarves, Steven Tyler—the last (or is it the eternal?) child.

Leavin’ the things that are real behind . . .

“Toys” wraps with Tyler and Perry, forever the dual eye of this enduring hurricane, at close range around one microphone, voices and, practically, bodies entwined. Then it’s on to and through a set list that doubles as a primer on several decades’ worth of classic American rock ’n’ roll. Cue smoke; cue Perry guitar smash, cue crowd cheers—Good night!

Aerosmith’s first publicity photo, 1972. GEMS/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES

Some forty years into their career, and firmly ensconced as rock elder statesmen, Aerosmith remain as thrilling and combustible as ever—onstage and off. Just months prior to embarking on this recent round of live dates, the five men otherwise known as the Bad Boys of Boston—and, hyperbole be damned, America’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band—stood on the precipice, hardly for the first time in their long history, of ripping apart at the seams. Before 2010 came to a close they threatened the very same once more.

But Aerosmith has weathered this particular storm, and dozens others, time and again. Credit to anyone, in fact, who can identify another band that ascended to such dizzying heights and then plummeted to equally profound depths, only to rise anew, transcending time, trend, and age for a second (is it now a third? fourth?) act filled with still vaster, if not wholly unimagined, raves and rewards. America’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band? Quite likely (know one that’s done it better, and for longer?). The Bad Boys of Boston? Absolutely, though Aerosmith’s story begins in earnest in the sleepy resort region of Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, and, years earlier, New York City.

Harlem, to be exact. . .

Steven Victor Tallarico was born March 26, 1948, with music in his blood. Giovanni, his paternal grandfather and an accomplished cellist, emigrated from southern Italy to the United States in the late 1800s. He and his three brothers formed a classical quartet that worked in ballrooms and hotels across the country. Father Victor was a Julliard-trained pianist who also played professionally, later finding employ as a music teacher in the New York City public school system. He and wife Susan were residing in Harlem, not far from the Apollo Theater, when Steven arrived. The family, including older sister Lynda, eventually settled in Yonkers, just north of New York City. Speaking to Musician magazine in 1990, Steven summarized his formative years by saying that he “grew up under [his] father’s piano. . . . My father talked to me playing Debussy and Beethoven. That’s where my emotion comes from.”

Steven Tyler, 1973. © RON POWNALL/ROCKROLLPHOTO.COM

Chain Reaction, New York City, circa 1967. MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

Preternaturally hyperactive and a self-described problem child, music was just one of many life-shaping forces in young Steven’s life. Summers were spent at Trow-Rico Lodge, a 250-acre family-owned musical retreat on Lake Sunapee, in New Hampshire. Ensconced in the creative environs of Trow-Rico, Steven got an early taste of the performer’s life—he performed skits at Friday-night parties and, when the adults turned their backs, got drunk on homemade hard cider. Back in Yonkers, he began getting into trouble at school, fought with older kids who called him “nigger lips” for his prodigious mouth (“My mom said, ‘All the better to kiss the girls with,’” Tyler told MTV), and, along with his friend Ray Tabano, joined a street gang called the Green Mountain Boys. Tyler also tried his hand at piano, but when his father’s instruction didn’t hold, he switched to drums. At fifteen, he joined Victor’s big band, Vic Tallarico’s Orchestra, playing for the society set around Sunapee. “Like Johnny Carson’s theme song, ‘Begin the Beguine,’ that type of shit,” Tyler told Rock Scene in 1986.

But with his teenage years came drugs, liquor, girls, and rock ’n’ roll. When the British Invasion hit U.S. shores, Tyler was a goner. “I remember the first Stones album, the Who, the Rats from England, the Pretty Things,” he told Spin magazine in 1988. “Mick Jagger, the baddest boy on the block, my idol. I said, ‘Fuck, I can do that too.’” He was well on his way. At eighteen, Tyler was making regular pilgrimages to Greenwich Village, where he and his friends spent long nights hopped up on booze, acid, and amyl nitrates, engaging in myriad carnal delights and taking in lots of rock shows—everyone from the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Fugs to the Animals and the Rolling Stones.

By this time Tyler was fronting his own band—though from behind the drum kit. The Strangers (later altered to the Strangeurs to avoid conflict with an older New York act of the same name) worked rooms from Long Island to Lake Sunapee, playing four sets a night and brandishing business cards that read “English Sounds, American R&B.” The band, with Tabano on bass, was raw but driven, and no one more so than Tyler, whose leadership qualities and perfectionist tendencies were already coming to the fore. In time, the Strangeurs landed a manager and secured opening slots for everyone from the Kingsmen to the Byrds. (A March 1966 review in the Yonkers Herald Statesman said of the latter show “Lead singer Steven Tallarico came on like Mick Jagger of the Stones: bottom lip hanging, tambourine slapping against thigh.”) A gig at Iona College in New Rochelle supporting the Beach Boys in July of that year led to an audition with Date Records, a subsidiary of CBS, who signed the Strangeurs and quickly rechristened them Chain Reaction. The band’s debut single, “The Sun” b/w “When I Needed You,” was a slice of Brit-influenced, mildly psychedelic pop. It received some airplay in the greater New York area throughout the fall, and Chain Reaction gigged hard across the region, including an opening slot for Tyler’s idols, the Yardbirds (with Jimmy Page on guitar), at Staples High in Westport, Connecticut, on October 22, 1966.

Chain Reaction’s “You Should Have Been Here Yesterday” b/w “Ever Lovin’ Man,” promo disc, 1966.

If Chain Reaction weren’t exactly full-blown rock stars, they certainly looked and acted the part, wearing their hair long and dressing in the Carnaby Street style of the Stones and other British acts. Meanwhile, the increasingly extroverted Tyler was becoming something of a regional hero around Yonkers and Lake Sunapee. Chain Reaction packed in the kids at local Sunapee hangouts like the Barn, and raised a mild ruckus at joints like the Anchorage, a Sunapee Harbor ice cream parlor. They’d stroll in, order French fries, and leave a rock-star-sized mess for the shaggy-haired, bespectacled dishwasher to clean up. In a 2002 interview with Blender magazine, Tyler revealed the identity of the poor, disgruntled employee: “That was Joe [Perry],” he said. “It turned out he was mad because we always threw food, and he had to clean up after us.”

But things soon began sputtering out for Chain Reaction. A second single issued on Verve, “You Should Have Been Here Yesterday” b/w “Ever Lovin’ Man,” stiffed, and in June of 1967 the band ground to a halt. Tyler started a few short-lived projects and, for a moment, sang backup for the Left Banke (of “Walk Away Renee” fame). In August 1969 he left Yonkers for upstate New York, where he and Tabano snuck into the Woodstock festival, took in electrifying sets by the Band and the Who, got blitzed on pills, and ran into an old Yonkers drummer acquaintance, Joey Kramer. Afterward, Tyler retreated to Lake Sunapee and headed out one night to meet up with a drug-dealer friend at the Barn. Onstage was a raw and ragtag power trio called the Jam Band with Tom Hamilton on bass and a dark, intense nineteen-year-old Joe Perry on guitar.

“When I first saw these guys they were terrible,” Tyler said of the Jam Band in a 1999 issue of Mojo. “They weren’t in tune and they weren’t in time, but they did [Peter Green’s] ‘Rattlesnake Shake’ and there was a fuckin’ energy that all the bands I’d been in before couldn’t do ever.”

Tyler was smitten and saw his future before his eyes. “What was shining through,” he said, “was the core of Aerosmith.”

It could be said that Anthony Joseph Perry seemed destined for a life of quiet desperation. That things turned out quite differently can be credited to hardheaded determination and sheer force of will. Joe was born on September 20, 1950, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Soon after, dad Anthony moved the family (mom Mary, Joe, and younger sister Anne-Marie) to nearby Hopedale, a small suburban enclave home to Anthony’s employer, the Draper Corporation, a manufacturer of looms for the textile industry.

Joe Perry, 1974. © RON POWNALL/ROCKROLLPHOTO.COM

School didn’t figure prominently in young Joe’s interests, which ran more toward guns and, from very early on, the guitar. He recalled on a 2005 episode of A&E’s Breakfast with the Arts: “I’ve always been fascinated with the guitar. My Portuguese uncle played something that kind of looked like a ukulele, this Portuguese instrument. I remember at family dinners he would take this little homemade instrument out from behind the couch and sing Portuguese folksongs. So I always just loved the idea of that kind of instrument, the neck and the strings and all that. Even though my parents exposed me to piano and clarinet . . . all I wanted to do was play guitar.”

By the age of nine Joe had pestered his parents into buying him his first guitar, a right-handed Sears, Roebuck Silvertone. A natural southpaw, Joe simply adapted and began playing the instrument as a righty. Lessons followed, but not for long. “I took one lesson from a guy,” Perry told Guitar Player’s Steven Rosen in 1979, “and then a week later I saw a hearse in front of his house. He had died. I just took it as an omen.” Instruction went out the window, but Perry’s musical desires only heightened in intensity. “It was the only thing I could do really good,” he told RIP magazine. “It wasn’t anything my parents condoned—not that that mattered.”

He got his hands on a Guild Starfire 5 and absorbed the sounds of everyone from Roy Orbison, Ike & Tina Turner, and the Shadows to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Yardbirds, teaching himself to play along the way. The next step was finding a group. “I just played around and eventually got into a band,” he told Rosen. “I don’t remember the name of that first band, but I do remember I didn’t play guitar, because I wasn’t good enough. I sang. But after a while, I threw everybody out of the band and picked up the guitar and said, ‘I’m starting a band—does anybody want to play in it?’ And that was it.”

Depending on whom you believe, three to six copies of the Jam Band’s only LP were pressed. Mostly recorded live on August 30, 1969, at the Barn, the covers collection featured the Yardbirds’ “Shapes of things”; Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart’s “Let Me Love You” and “Blues De Luxe”; the Jeff Beck Group’s “Rice Pudding”; Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House”; a cover of the MC5’s cover of “Ramblin’ Rose”; the Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’”; and Kokomo Arnold’s “Milk Cow Blues.”

His music education was in high gear, but his grades continued to suffer. In danger of flunking out of high school, fifteen-year-old Joe was shipped off to Vermont Academy, a prep school, to redo tenth grade. There, he didn’t fare much better. “I really started to hate the system at [Vermont Academy],” he said in Circus Raves in 1975. “Every time I picked up the guitar, people would yell at me. They wanted me to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Movin’ Out
• Chapter 2: Good Evenin’ People,Welcome to the Show
• Chapter 3: Getting Wings
• Chapter 4: Walk This Way
• Chapter 5: Rocks
• Chapter 6: Know Where to Draw the Line
• Chapter 7: Critical Mass
• Chapter 8: We Is Goin’ on Trial
• Chapter 9: Push Comes to Shove
• Chapter 10: Back in the Saddle
• Chapter 11: Done with Mirrors (Pun Intended)
• Chapter 12: Aero Force
• Chapter 13: Feelin’ F .I .N .E .
• Chapter 14: Rocksimus Maximus
• Chapter 15: Train Kept a Rollin’
• Afterword: Advice to young bands, by phil sutcliffe
• Appendix A: toys in the studio and on the stage: the guitars of Joe perry and brad whitford
• Appendix B: Just push play: An Aerosmith discography
• Acknowledgments
• Sources
• Contributors
• Index
• Copyright Page