Amazing they can walk at all

A book that would be selling comfortably in Thailand if the band had played here this year, as a local promoter intimated they would, the Aerosmith autobiography is a goldmine for devotees and a minefield for everyone else. The behind-the-scenes stuff is thrilling for any fan of rock, but the wasteful excess is even more appalling than you expect. As it turned out, Aerosmith’s current Global Warming Tour rolled into Manila in May, was blocked by authorities in Jakarta for alleged security reasons, and gave Bangkok a miss altogether for whatever reasons. And that’s it for Asia unless you want to travel to Japan in August.
It would have been a good night at Impact Arena – the Filipino reviewers were all impressed with the American band’s first visit to Southeast Asia – but it’s taken a stunning convergence of luck and circumstances to keep these guys on their feet. Long ago sobered up, they maintain an impetus that could yet carry them further. Another hit single would really cap their remarkable comeback, and that’s still possible.
Stephen Davis, a Rolling Stone magazine regular from Massachusetts, Aerosmith’s home turf, does a great job assessing the good and the bad in this 500-page 1997 chronicle updated last year for the band’s 40th anniversary. A thoughtful writer with a theatrical flair, he lets the die-hard cheerleaders generate occasional hyperbole while, for his part, keeping the story real, even opening the book with the dramatic 1986 intervention that finally shook the drugs out of singer Steven Tyler’s system.
Nor does Davis attempt to disguise the reasons for the band’s “legendary” status. Having written acclaimed biographies of artists from Bob Marley to Jim Morrison, he’s well placed to assign Aerosmith its true place in pop history. The way he sets out the context is one of the book’s finest attributes.
There seems to be no way around the fact that Aerosmith always was derivative. The band members fumed when critics constantly likened them to the Rolling Stones thanks to Tyler’s oversized mouth and the way he and guitarist Joe Perry pose onstage like Jagger and Richards. (In my mind they were always the poor man’s Stones.) Their rebuttal: No, they were more akin to the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin. That’s not much of defence.
With the second wave of British rock groups like Zeppelin abating in the early 1970s and little else happening in the US since the San Francisco scene faded, Aerosmith became “America’s Greatest Rock Band” virtually by default. The New York Dolls garnered more press, but quickly succumbed to drugs and never did well in the Midwest anyway. The J Geils Band relinquished the Boston battlefield. Edgar Winter hit and ran. Bruce Springsteen had yet to record “Born to Run”.
No one was filling the void, and Aerosmith might not have made it either if its members weren’t such rock-star wannabes. They wanted the adulation, mansions and swank cars so bad that they worked their butts off, touring incessantly and gradually goosing their records up the charts. It took three years for “Dream On” to become a hit.
That they built such a huge fan base – the Blue Army – with live shows alone is astonishing given the substance abuse to which they now readily (and ruefully) admit.
Unfortunately, when they finally had rock-star bank accounts, they could afford better drugs, and their performances and albums showed it. Perry and Tyler added heroin to the already crushing mix of booze, coke and pills and started fighting with each other more than ever. Several guys in the band had seizures. Everyone crashed his Ferrari. Studio time was booked and never used. New releases charted low. They could be cruelly abusive to fans and crew.
“Being in Aerosmith was like walking into a dogfight and both dogs bite you,” guitarist Brad Whitford recalls of the chronically squabbling “Toxic Twins” in 1979, when Perry quit to try life solo.
Perry came back, of course, but, amusingly enough, it took rap to pull the rockers out of the grave they’d dug. Run-DMC covered “Walk This Way”, Aerosmith went along with the tribute, and suddenly people were interested in them again. Now even MTV was in the mood.
The ride back was not smooth, however, and to this day their luck is a fair-weather friend. All five members of the band work hard at “being in recovery” even if they’re still prone in their 60s to adolescent arrogance. Theirs is quite a story – not rock’s finest hour by any means, but gripping nonetheless.
 

Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith
By Aerosmith with Stephen Davis
Published by itbooks (HarperCollins), 2012
Available at Asia Books, Bt472
Reviewed by Paul Dorsey