Sunday, March 16, 1997

TORONTO -- Steven's first marriage, Joe's solo career, Steve's heroin habit, Joe's heroin habit, Steve's motorcycle accident, rehab, Night In the Ruts, rehab again, David Geffen saying "you guys are over" ... that's nine and we haven't even got to the making of Aerosmith's new album, Nine Lives.

"Ask me how many lives I've got," says flamboyant lead singer Steven Tyler, the man who once walked out of This Is Spinal Tap because it was "too real."

He continues, "Honestly, at times - and these are my honest, scary, crying thoughts - I look up and I go, wow, something's going on."

Something's going on, all right. Aerosmith is one of the last surviving classic American rock bands that's managed to stay on top. The Toxic Twins, as Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry used to be known, can't quite believe their good fortune. The Boston Bad Boys went from washed-up, drugged-up has-beens in the late '70s to being bigger than ever in the '90s.

"We screwed the band into the ground in 1979," admits Perry during a round of press interviews in Toronto last month. "Every mistake you can make, we made, but we've just been lucky for some reason or another to be able to come back. Fortunately, none of us died along the way."

The Detox Duo insist they're still clean and sober, but they went through hell making Nine Lives. Tyler says he'd just as soon quit than go through it again. The album finally hits the stores Tuesday, only about six months late.

It started with Glen Ballard, Alanis Morissette's co-writer and producer. Aerosmith wanted a change. But after an entire album's worth of material was recorded in Miami, initially without drummer Joey Kramer, Aerosmith's manager Tim Collins decided it was too much of a change. Sony Music, which had shelled out $30 million to steal the band away from Geffen Records, wasn't happy, either. The band was sent back to try again with a new producer. Meanwhile, creative differences built up to the point where Collins was "let go."

Collins, an anti-drug activist who was credited with getting Aerosmith sober and back on its feet again, then suggested to reporters that Tyler and Perry might be toxic again.

Tyler recalls, "Of course, the press in Boston said, `are you saying they're getting high again?' And he said, `I'm not saying they are, I'm not saying they're not.' What kind of answer is that? That's lighting the fuse to a dud. Bomb's not going to go off because I'm not getting high.

"However, my daughter's had a couple of kids come over to the house for a sleepover and one of her best friend's fathers said, `I don't want you sleeping at the Tylers' house.' And that hurt me. (Collins) was angry that we asked him to step down, so he went right for my heart. I'm still pretty angry about that.

"He said that the reason that I was on drugs was because when I was in Florida writing songs like Kiss Your Past Goodbye and Taste of India, that my behavior was drug behavior. Excuse me? I was in my zone. I stayed up two nights in a row - that's the longest I can stay up now without getting high; I used to be able to stay up for three days, and then I would fall out - I'd stay up for two days and write lyrics. And in a songwriting mode, I'm very passionate. If Joe doesn't play the guitar the way I think it should be, I will fight him on it. I will scream and yell.

"I don't think it's anybody's place to judge me. `Well, you used to yell when you were high, so that must mean you're high now.' What kind of thought is that? Man, I got 10 years sobriety, and he's got a lot of balls to try to take it away from me. However, he can't, because I am sober."

Perry, who quit the band in 1979 for a solo career and came back in 1984, is like Tyler's opposite - dark, quiet and looking like he just walked out of a casting call for The Crow. The pair may have fought like mad in the old days, but their mysterious chemistry is what makes Aerosmith work. Perry says he's also been able to get into "the zone" without drugs.

"Frankly, it's a lot easier now," he says. "There was a time when it worked really well. For me it was a shortcut to that place where I need to be. But it stopped working. It became the end-all and be-all to get high. As opposed to it being like a freeing thing, it was a deadening thing, debilitating. What I've found now is I can get to that place without having to medicate myself."

There are a few references to drug rehab on Nine Lives, namely on a psychedelic romp called The Farm (sample lyric: "There's a cockroach in my coffee/there's a needle in my arm/and I feel like New York `Cittay'/get me to the farm.")

"The Farm was a blast," says Tyler. "If you were there, you would've felt we were on drugs."