The one person Steven Tyler said tried to ruin Aerosmith: “Making up some nasty rumours”
It’s practically a miracle that Aerosmith are still standing today.
Despite retiring from the road, every member of the band has managed to weather through every single hardship that rock had to offer and still rose from the ashes as one of the greatest American rock bands of all time. But while everything from creative tension to drugs vowed to tear them apart, not many people expected that one of their worst enemies would end up coming from their inner circle.
Then again, the sworn enemies in the band always came back to Steven Tyler and Joe Perry. ‘The Toxic Twins’ are two sides of the same coin most of the time, but even in their prime, they were always clashing on everything about the show, from Perry playing way too loud to Tyler being way too much of a perfectionist behind the scenes whenever they began working on a record.
That certainly wasn’t helped by Perry spending too much time away from the band with his girlfriend, and by the time 1979 rolled around, it truly felt like all the magic was gone. One of their last shows, Perry played with the band, ended with him storming out over spilt milk, but after a few years apart, there was no doubt that they needed each other. Perry’s solo career never really got off the ground, and even Tyler seemed to miss Perry in the same way that someone would miss their lost lover.
So when they finally got back together with the help of manager Tim Collins, it felt like everything was right with the world. They weren’t off the drugs yet, but after spending some time getting clean, Permanent Vacation set them up as the elder statesmen of rock. The new generation of rockers had already been stealing many of their moves from hair metal, so when they started making tunes like ‘Angel’ and ‘Love in an Elevator’, they fit right in amongst the Bon Jovis of the world.
But after one too many years in power, Collins started to overstep his bounds a few too many times. He knew how to push the right buttons among the band members, but when he started to accuse Tyler of being back on hard drugs and trying to play everyone else in the band against him, they all realised that they had made a terrible mistake giving him too much power in the group.
While the band did eventually give Collins credit for helping them get clean, he knew that they would never work with him again, saying, “[Collins] started making up some nasty rumours – that I was back on heroin and the band were breaking up. He told the band a lot of things that I never said. It was control issues. He went from being a really good facilitator and pilot of the Aerosmith ship, a conscious pilot to a Pontius Pilate. He went to Rolling Stone magazine and told them he knew I was fucking women, just a whole barrage of things that no true friend or manager should do to their client.”
Even though the band were able to cut themselves loose from Collins for the rest of the 1990s, the cherry on top of everything would come when they were granted their first number-one for ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’. They were definitely more pop than usual, but you could hear that they were a lot more happy than being treated like pawns in someone else’s game whenever they performed.
But the fact that they even had to deal with this kind of issue is a lesson that every single band needs to learn at some point in their lives. There are sharks everywhere in the music industry, and you have to be extra careful about who you align yourself with before you actually sign that contract.
