Private Air Magazine
March 13, 2008
Stream On -- Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler has been flying high (sometimes in more ways than one) for close to 40 years. Now, just back from the band’s most sweeping tour to date, the loyal Gulfstream customer explains what makes him the most down-to-earth superstar in rock. Steven Tyler does not sit still. He bounces, he struts, he moves, he laughs and, thanks to the collection of watches, bracelets and necklaces that adorn his 59-year-old frame, he jangles. More than that, though, Tyler veritably hums with that rare blend of energy and vibe that turns mere rock stars into icons. “First of all,” he begins with a wry smile, “I’m that big-lipped guy in Aerosmith. I’ve been around forever, but it feels like whatever time of year, whatever time of day, it was just yesterday that we were at Max’s Kansas City.”
Then, out of the blue, Tyler breaks into “No Surprize,” from Aerosmith’s 1979 release Night in the Ruts, a song that recounts the night in 1971 at Max’s, the legendary Manhattan club, when Aerosmith’s career was launched: “1971, we all heard the starter’s gun/New York is such a pity/But at Max’s Kansas City we won/We all shot the shit in the bar/With Johnny O’Toole and his scar/And then old Clive Davis said/He’s surely gonna make us a star.”
A year or so before Tyler’s “yesterday” at Max’s, the singer had met guitarist Joe Perry and bassist Tom Hamilton at an ice cream parlor in Sunapee, New Hampshire, and the three decided to start a band. Guitarist Brad Whitford and drummer Joey Kramer joined them in short order and the five moved to Boston, where they started to write songs, play concerts and make their name.
In the early ’70s, the world opened up for a hard-living, hard-rocking band that specialized in catchy melodies, lyrics filled with double entendres and pulsating music. In the 35 years since its eponymous debut — which included “Dream On,” one of the most celebrated ballads of all time — Aerosmith has been up, down and, now, back up again. What’s striking, though, is how philosophical the singer of “My Big Ten Inch” is about the whole experience.
“To be in Aerosmith is to live on the tail of a comet,” Tyler proclaims, settling into a creaky recliner in the office above a hangar at Norwood Memorial Airport, a small strip 25 miles southeast of Boston. The comment brings to mind the one real plane he ever owned — he has leased hundreds — a Wiley Twin Turbo Conversion Cessna he bought in 1976. “It was stupid,” he recalls.
“It was so fast. We used to do these things called parabolic arcs where you become weightless. If someone doesn’t know what you’re doing, they get scared and think they’re dying. The truth is that you’re just experiencing weightlessness for what it really is. It’s the same thing you did when you were a kid, when you jumped out of your favorite apple tree and experienced weightlessness for a tenth of a second.”
Not dying, in other words, but just experiencing the briefest, faintest whiff of death, so you can get it out of your system and enjoy the ride.
Livin’ it up when I’m going down . . .
Lovin’ it up till I hit the ground.
— “Love in an Elevator”
Aviation has been a part of Aerosmith, however tangentially, from the beginning. As the story goes, the members of the band used to sit around every afternoon getting stoned and watching Three Stooges reruns. One day, they had a post-Stooges meeting to try to come up with a name. Kramer volunteered that when he was in school he would write the word Aerosmith all over his notebooks. The name had popped into his head after listening to Harry Nilsson’s album Aerial Ballet, an homage to Nilsson’s grandparents’ aerial circus act, that featured jacket art of a circus performer jumping out of a biplane. Initially, Kramer’s bandmates were nonplussed; they all thought he was referring to the boring Sinclair Lewis novel they were forced to read in high school English class. “No, not Arrowsmith,” Kramer explained. “A-E-R-O . . . Aerosmith.”
Skip ahead to 1977. The name and wings in its logo notwithstanding, Aerosmith has spent most of its early tours riding in a bus. When the band did fly, it flew commercial, but just before the Aerosmith Express Tour with AC/DC, Tyler — who had purchased the Cessna for his personal use the year before — became convinced by one popular argument in favor of chartering: less surveillance.
“A couple times, because of our habits, we even leased a DC-3, because that was all that was available,” he recalls with a sly smile. “It was a real tail-dragger, but it has to be the safest plane ever.”
To be sure, those were some bleary, bottle-strewn, smoke-obscured days. (Ground crews were never Aerosmith’s biggest fans.) And as the creative juices began to dry up, the band very nearly augured in. In 1979, Perry left to start his own group. A year or so later, Whitford was also gone. When Tyler collapsed on a stage in 1982 during the Rock and a Hard Place tour, Aerosmith seemed destined for a tragic, Behind the Music–worthy rock n’ roll ending.
Perry and Whitford returned to the fold in 1984, though, and the band started its ascent anew with the Back in the Saddle tour. It released a new album, recording “Walk This Way” with hip-hop legends Run-DMC, and suddenly found itself with a new smash single. By the end of the ’80s, each band member had completed a thorough stint in rehab. Former “Toxic Twins” Tyler and Perry, in particular, became dedicated health-and-fitness fanatics, hiring a retinue of personal trainers, macrobiotic chefs and massage therapists.
Aerosmith, circa 2008, has once again reached a nice cruising altitude. Its recent tour — its first to literally take it around the world — sold out 70,000- and 100,000-seat stadiums in Europe, India, Latin America and the U.S. Don’t confuse Aerosmith with the Beach Boys or any of the other geriatric rockers who have recently been propped up for theme-park crowds; indeed, one could argue that as they close in on their fourth decade together, Tyler and his fellow former train wrecks have become the iconic live-performance rock band, save for perhaps their rival pensioners the Rolling Stones. There’s even talk the boys may yet have another “Dream On” — or at least a “Black Cherry” — in their bag of tricks. “We’ve got one more record with Sony, and we’re looking forward to bringing closure to a great 20 years,” Tyler says about the still-unnamed album, due out later this year. “We don’t want to put out some sucky, mediocre blues album. We want do a nice, real record. Get in there like the old days. I still don’t think we’ve written our best songs.”
When Aerosmith is on tour these days, the band will set up camp in, say Chicago, then travel to each Midwest stop in one of the G4s or G5s it typically charters. Tyler likes the routine this set-up offers — waking up every morning in the same hotel room with a bit of breakfast and a workout before the trip to the airport and flight to the venue. “We get to the gig at 6, backstage at 7, then I always eat wild salmon and broccoli every night two hours before the show,” he says. “Then I’m onstage from 9 to 11.”
Shortly after the last encore, they’ll hop into a car and follow a police escort back to the airport. “As we take off, I look out my window — I’m always on the right side — and see the cars lining up to get out,” he says. “It’s like the end credits of Field of Dreams when you see all those cars lining up.” Tyler always takes the first seat on the right, settling in with a stack of pillows he’s pilfered from the hotel, as the rest of the band piles in back. “I’m a Type A personality, so I care about a lot of things that the other guys don’t,” he says. “I sit up front and bitch and complain, and they sit in the back and play cards.” The top items on his checklist: a plane with a bathroom (he is 59, after all) and a pilot who has kids. “I always tell them, they’ll miss me when I’m quiet.”
All this talk of planes and flying prompts Tyler to raise his left hand. “Have you ever seen one of these?” he asks, offering a close-up view of some obscure, remarkably high-tech instrument watch. “You unscrew this dial, and it’s got a hailing frequency. These are illegal in the States, but I had to have one. I think you have to be a licensed pilot to own one. I don’t know what the restrictions are, but I had to buy it in France and smuggle it in. So no matter where I am, if I open that up, someone will show up within 20 minutes. It’s usually the Navy, and then I get busted and interrogated for an hour until I wind up signing their bulletproof vests and I’m on my way.”
His fans might be surprised at what a geek Tyler is. He says he has been this way since he was a kid and saw his first mini-bike. “I’d had a bicycle, but I never imagined you could get one with a motor. It was a little Briggs & Stratton motor, and I had to have one.”
That experience also inspired his current pet project, Red Wing Motorcycles. He started the company with engineer Mark Dirico and Stephen Talarico of New Hampshire–based AC Custom Motorcycles, and the trio recently released their first bikes. “It brings me great joy,” Tyler says. “I’m not going to make a ton of money from this, that’s for damn sure, but some people are going to get the bike of their dreams. They’re gorgeous. We kept it retro and rideable. Very dependable and very demon-of-screamin’.”
It’s odd that, given his fascination with machines and testing the laws of gravity, Tyler has never taken pilot lessons. Which is not to say he hasn’t piloted. “I was in Vegas in 1986, and I saw a paraglider with a big fan on the back. I said, ‘I don’t care how much that little bitty old plane is; I want that.’ So I bought it, threw it in the back of the car and then went to Hawaii on vacation,” he recalls.
Tiring now of his recliner, Tyler leaps up and mimics how he assembled the windsock, started up the engine (cue engine noises) and then jumped off the cliff. “You’re hanging in the diaper, and you pull the metal rod out and put your feet in the wires on either side of you.” He’s visibly excited now. “You scoot back, and you’re in the air. It’s like flying lawn chairs. It is so much fun to be able to fly up to the top of a 300-foot oak tree and pick the top leaf and eat it.
“I will never forget my first time getting up. I was scared to death. I was leaning over when I was 500 feet up. I just sat there and said ‘Steven, you are 007.’ You have to come to the realization that you’re in a parachute. So I turned real slow, and it got real loud. I was up 4,000 feet, my kids were down there looking up and it was freezing.”
The one frontier Tyler hasn’t traversed — yet — is space travel. A couple of years ago, he got the money together to go up in a Russian Soyuz. “They were going to teach me Russian and I was going up. The only reason I passed on it was because of my kids. I was sitting in a restaurant, and they started crying. ‘Daddy, no, no.’ But, I was ready. I was so ready.”
Instead, Tyler satisfies his galactic jones by occasionally dropping by Kennedy Space Center to visit whichever astronauts are currently aloft. “They let me go into the command room, and I use whatever code names I have to — I’m not at liberty to say what those are — and then say to them, ‘Ah, guys, this is Steven Tyler. I hope you are rockin’ out for us up there like we are down here for you.’ Then the guy goes, ‘Wait a minute. . . . ’
“One time I was using the simulator, and I had a chance to take off and land the Shuttle. It’s really difficult, you know. You can’t look out the window and tell if you’re upside down, because you’re in space.” He laughs. “So you have to know by feeling. I was wrong, and I pulled up. It got too hot, the Shuttle caught on fire and we crashed. But I did land it another time.”
It’s late now, and Tyler has some friends waiting to join him for dinner. Sitting back down on the edge of the recliner, he contemplates the question of whether he feels lucky to be alive. After a few seconds of silence, easily the longest of the day, he sits up and offers an appropriately elliptical answer. “I could give it all to luck or God, but I choose not to. I choose to say that some of it was luck, but most of it was a gift that I chose to see. I chose to own it. My father played the piano five hours a day. I could have not listened, but I just took it. I caught the ball.
“When I met Joe and those guys, they couldn’t tune their guitars or sing in key, but I was sure they had something that none of my other bands had. So I took that and my melodic sensibility, put it together and one and one was two. It’s hard to say. I believe in God. I believe in a higher power, but I believe more in getting out of your own way, which is ego . . . everyone has one. I don’t have much of one. I choose not to keep one, because people who have one invest too much in it.”
Then he stands up, jangling and ready to strut. “What a waste of time to deal with an ego. You know what? You will never meet anyone who made more mistakes than I did. Let’s leave it at that.” He lets out another laugh, saving the loudest for last. “The only difference between me and other people,” he says before dropping to a whisper, “is that I learned something.”
And he’s off, ready to get back on the tail of the comet.
More photos: (here).
