“We’re rocking harder than ever”: The lesson New York Dolls taught Joe Perry about Aerosmith
It can be hard to avoid being dragged into the life of excess when you’re in a successful rock group, and as much as they may already have been aware of the dangers of their lifestyle habits, Aerosmith certainly took this trope to another level.
It’s almost cliché to think about rock stars snorting several lines of whatever substance they can get their mitts on before, during or after a show, and you’re very rarely ever given good reason to picture the same individuals partaking in a more relaxed and mindful activity such as crochet or sudoku. There’s probably a good reason for that, and they’d hardly be hailed as uber-cool figures of rebelliousness if they were caught doing such a thing.
However, for Aerosmith, their commitment to over-indulging is the sort of thing that ought to be used as a decent advisory for why you shouldn’t be doing drugs all day, every day, and while addiction is a hard battle to come out victorious in and something that can suck its victims in unexpectedly, glamourising it is far from a responsible way of handling your substance issues.
Only a few years into their career, the group had developed something of a reputation for their excessive drug use, with various tours of theirs being marred by incidents that had been fuelled by their rampant substance intake.
By the mid-1980s, frontman Steven Tyler had to be encouraged to spend a period of time in rehab to treat his addictions, and with him eventually emerging as a changed man, the rest of the band sought to follow suit in order to ensure that they had a future together.
While all of the band’s members would eventually clean up their act and find a second wave of success while sober, guitarist Joe Perry reflected on his experiences with the band during their wilder, substance-fuelled days in an interview with Glide Magazine in 2014, claiming that while they had seen other bands fall apart due to their similar attitude to drug use, they were too arrogant to think that they could possibly follow suit.
In fact, they almost idolised bands like New York Dolls for how they had chosen to adopt this excessive lifestyle, wilfully ignoring how it could end up damaging not only their health as individuals, but also their career prospects. “It was the easiest thing in the world for me to look at the dying Dolls and say, ‘That’ll never happen to us,’” Perry proclaimed, seeing what David Johansen and his band had done prior.
He then continued, noting how the constant flow of drugs entering their bodies was not only cool, but providing them with the energy required to continue at one point. “We’re rocking harder than ever, and all the drugs are doing are putting more fuel in our tanks,” he added. “Besides, waving a bottle of Jack Daniels guarantees a huge response from our fans.”
While Perry and Tyler, formerly known as the ‘Toxic Twins’, no longer engage in such reckless activities and maintain a sober lifestyle, it’s clear that looking up to a band like the New York Dolls as your idols was always going to be a slippery slope for anyone attempting to emulate them by the book.
