“Standing in my limelight”: The band Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler said stole his routine
The early 1980s were a bad time to be Aerosmith. They spent the 1970s as arguably America’s premier rock ‘n’ roll band, with platinum-selling records, sold-out arenas and enough drugs to kill a rhino every night. For some, though, fame and success make for a heartless and fickle beast, and this was absolutely the case for Steven Tyler and Joe Perry’s Boston bad boys.
First, the records started going from thrillingly raunchy rock bangers like Rocks and Toys in the Attic to uninspired, tuneless dirges like 1979’s Night in the Ruts. For a band of Aerosmith’s stature, that’s not exactly the end of the world; they were clearly in it for the long haul, and sometimes, a band has a string of duff albums that are merely there to give them an excuse to tour. However, the rot ran a lot deeper.
The all-encompassing drug habits that gave Tyler and Perry the nickname the ‘Toxic Twins’ were fully blossoming into an unignorable problem. This led to interpersonal problems that left the very existence of Aerosmith on a knife-edge, and thus, the group reached the 1980s looking worryingly like has-beens.
It was bad enough that the band were so radioactively uncool that they were barely able to fill the venues they were selling out multiple nights a few years ago. What must have stung more than anything else was how the rock ‘n’ roll groups of the day all owed an enormous debt to Aerosmith. Pretty much all glam metal heroes of the 1980s wouldn’t have been a band if it wasn’t for them, yet they were now the cool ones, and the originals weren’t doing so well.
Who did Aerosmith feel were the worst offenders in this?
Bands like Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe and Poison were having their first flush of genuine, mainstream success. That must have been difficult enough to take, but one band above all was the harbinger of Aerosmith’s full ire, taking everything the latter had laid the foundations for and making it louder, shinier and a hell of a lot more technical.
It says a lot that at one of the lowest points in Steven Tyler’s life, all he could think about was this band. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Tyler talks about how he had a serious motorcycle accident while in a drug-fueled haze. He said, “I was in the hospital with a cast up to my hip, and I remember hearing about this new band Van Halen with David Lee Roth. Who does this fucking guy think he is? He’s standing in my limelight!’ I’d fucked myself up royally.”
He was right, though. Van Halen was basically a manifestation of what if Aerosmith had taken ‘The Substance’. All the gritty riffs, skyscraping choruses and ludicrous charisma of Tyler’s band, but just newer, fresher and better. They shot out with their guitarist’s neo-classical guitar wizardry, cutting out the classic blues plodding that Aerosmith could sometimes be guilty of. However, the band would eventually pull itself back from the brink.
1987’s Permanent Vacation began a trilogy of mega-hit albums precision-engineered to show the whipper-snappers how it’s done. There is something poetic about the fact that in order to get back on top, Aerosmith had to take some tips from those who’d ridden their coattails to fame and fortune. Hopefully, it doesn’t take the rest of us a drug-fueled breakdown to start learning from the new generation.
