The Ultimate Stoners: the band Jerry Garcia thought did too many drugs
The Grateful Dead have seemed to become known as much for their chemical intake as they are for their music. Yes, they may have come out amid the psychedelic movement and have ingested enough drugs to wipe out an entire nation, but what comes first is the music before anything else. Although Jerry Garcia was more than capable of steering the band through everything, even he could tell when a group like Aerosmith was indulging themselves a bit too much.
Then again, this is Garcia we’re talking about. Compared to the other straights in the music business, Garcia seems to be the last one to tell people how to live their lives instead of just letting everyone go with the flow depending on the music they’re playing, the drugs they’re using, or just how they approach whatever they’re getting themselves into.
Aerosmith were a bit of a different breed, though. While they may have loved to play the same guttural blues that made bands like Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones so irresistible, their love of music was only matched by their excess. Steven Tyler and Joe Perry weren’t given the nickname ‘The Toxic Twins’ by accident, and they made it their mission to indulge themselves as much as possible.
In the beginning, it tended to be all in good fun, with bassist Tom Hamilton telling Behind the Music, “I always loved that term ‘experimented with drugs’. It’s not like they sunk to new lows to get fucked up. No, they experimented. It was an experiment, dammit. Well, the experiment was a success for a while.”
After the band got sober, Tyler remembered how Garcia became worried about them halfway through their prime, telling Rolling Stone, “Jerry Garcia says that we were the druggiest bunch of guys the Grateful Dead ever saw. They were worried about us, so that gives you some idea of how fucked up and crazy we were.”
Whereas the Grateful Dead had their chances to overindulge, they at least knew how much was too much. The word ‘restraint’ wasn’t something in Aerosmith’s vocabulary at the time, usually snorting everything they could get their hands on before they found themselves with mountains of drugs instead of little bags of it.
They may have laughed off Garcia’s warning, but that came back to bite them in the ass as soon as they began work on Draw the Line. After years of excess, the band made an album that sounds like it was recorded during a massive coke bender, down to the overblown production and songs that sound like Tyler is frothing at the mouth half the time.
By the time the Dead had settled into their role as rock veterans, Aerosmith had let all their habits get the better of him. In a scene that felt like the beginnings of a bad soap opera, the band’s fallout over a glass of spilt milk led to everyone getting more blitzed out of their mind, with Perry leaving the group before being convinced that he was better served opposite Tyler than a solo star.
They did make it to the other side, though, with Tyler eventually getting sober, followed by his bandmates in the mid-1980s. When you really look at the amount of stuff that they ploughed through in their prime, it might be in everyone’s best interest to check on someone like Tyler to make sure he doesn’t have mutant DNA.
