How did Joe Perry and Steven Tyler meet?
It’s perhaps music’s greatest commercial comeback success story. Before their MTV renaissance in the mid-1980s following the career-reviving hip-hop rework of ‘Walk This Way’ in cahoots with Run-DMC, Boston hard rock outfit Aerosmith‘s future was looking bleak. Establishing themselves to the fore of the East Coast heavy stadium swagger off the back of riff royalty records such as Toys in the Attic and Rocks, the pitfalls of fame and hedonistic excess finally took their toll on frontman Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry.
Following a clash backstage at their 1979 Cleveland World Series of Rock headliner, Perry called it quits and left the group as both their heroin habits were at their peak. Doggedly steering the band without its founding guitarist into the next decade, the diminishing sales and ever-shrinking venues saw Tyler’s drug addiction reach its lowest ebb.
“I made like $4-5million by 1979,” Tyler told FHM in 1997. “And by ’83… I lost it all. I remember in the early days looking at another fucked-up rock ‘n’ roll star and thinking, ‘I will never end up like that, man.’ They had all these riches and blew it all. That would never happen to me… I forgot about reality and just loved shooting dope and coke. Stupid.”
After rekindling their creative partnership and clearing the air, Perry rejoined his old band and brought with him a new manager, Tim Collins, who pushed ‘The Toxic Twins’ to enter drug rehab programmes, negotiated their signing with Geffen Records and ultimately shepherded the group to a whole new stratum of fame.
So, how did Perry and Tyler meet?
The tumultuous mythos that surrounded Perry and Tyler was forged way back in the late 1960s. Already playing drums for the British Invasion-inspired Chain Reaction, Tyler’s former band had supported The Beach Boys, The Byrds and The Yardbirds during their brief existence, and a chance shared-billing in New Hampshire with Joe Perry’s fledgling Jam Band in 1970 triggered the early Aerosmith spark.
“I can remember seeing, aside from the bands that I used to see in Boston like The Who or The Jeff Beck Group, they were a great band,” Perry recalled on Jeff Zito’s Celebrity Jobber podcast in 2023. “I remember, finally, we had a chance to jam together and decided that I had something he didn’t have, and he had something I didn’t have…”
Loving each other’s sound and energy, Perry and Tyler, along with Tyler’s old school friends Joey Kramer and Ray Tabano and Jam Band’s Tom Hamilton, agreed to join forces on one condition: Tyler was going to be the frontman and lead vocalist of the new group; otherwise, he was out. All agreeing, Aerosmith was born. The gang moved to Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue and conceived the material, which was later realised on 1973’s eponymous debut.
Finding huge success throughout the 1970s and serving as many young artists’ gateway into rock, Kurt Cobain including Rocks in his famous top 50 albums diary entry, Perry and Tyler’s chance encounter at that New Hampshire gig marked an essential moment in rock lore they could never have anticipated.
