The Aerosmith member who tried to kill Steven Tyler: “He grabbed the knife”
None of the members of Aerosmith could really claim to be the most wholesome characters when they first started.
I mean, who are we kidding here? This was the same band that Jerry Garcia felt partied too much, so it wasn’t really much of a case for them being choirboys whenever they stopped performing. They were going to take everything to the nth degree when it came to sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but for a pack of rabid dogs, they could equally turn on each other whenever someone made the wrong move.
Then again, none of them really needed that much of a reason to start causing a scene backstage. The whole reason why Joe Perry left the fold in the first place was because his wife was getting disrespected after some milk was thrown backstage, and even when they were decades behind that, the band were going through an equally ridiculous tailspin when they decided to part ways with Steven Tyler for a little bit after they found out that he had decided to become a judge on American Idol without them.
At the same time, is there any real case to be made for Aerosmith without ‘The Demon of Screamin’? The band were always thriving on that massive voice behind all of their tunes, and even if Tyler wasn’t always the most reliable bandmate, the magic that he created with Perry whenever they performed together is the reason why everything worked so well. And if you don’t know what I mean, just have a listen to what he sounded like when he was working on a record like Rock in a Hard Place.
Tyler was missing Perry the same way that someone misses their long-lost lover, and when you think about the kind of songs they were making with Jimmy Crespo, no one was going to care. Even after Brad Whitford left the fold before the album got finished, his replacement, Rick Dufay, remembered more than a few shows where everyone was shouting for Perry before they had even played a single note.
So when Perry and Whitford came back to the fold, it felt like the family reunion everyone wanted. They had been estranged for so long, but that didn’t matter so long as they seemed to be on the same page again. But even if Done With Mirrors wasn’t to everyone’s taste when it was released, Perry remembered things getting a little too violent when Whitford showed up backstage with a knife and saw his singer go one step over the edge.
Whitford might not have wanted to cause trouble, but when Tyler decided to use his knife without asking, Perry remembered things escalated way too quickly, saying, “Brad pulled out an expensive pocketknife he just bought. He passed it around for us. When Steven got it, he started stabbing huge holes into the top of a metal container. Brad saw red. He grabbed the knife, got Steven in a headlock, put the blade to his throat and hissed, ‘If you ever do that again to any of my things, I’ll kill you.’ After he let him go, there was dead silence. We were in shock–especially Steven.”
While Perry wasn’t around to see the fallout between Whitford and Tyler, it wasn’t like you could see how annoyed he was getting. The rest of the band that weren’t ‘The Toxic Twins’ had always been known as the least important members of the group, and now that Tyler started using Whitford’s stuff, it didn’t take him long to start going off after having to deal with his antics behind the scenes for so long.
Then again, it’s a common rule of thumb to not try to threaten the lives of the people that you work with whenever you’re trying to reform your band. There are many times where the creativity can get more than a little bit tense, but we should all be grateful that the golden throat that Tyler had didn’t get split open that day.
