Tales of Rock: Insane Stories From Aerosmith’s Drug-Fueled Rise To The Top – Part 2

Steven Tyler has had several stints in rehab, but his most rampant drug use occurred throughout the ’70s and ’80s. Tyler remembers getting so high while he was performing that he frequently passed out on stage. Tyler told NME:

I can remember one time I fell down and my foot kept going like this [shakes foot wildly] and this guy carried me off and I went “I just drank too much.” I was embarrassed. I literally couldn’t finish the show.

He added, “We just got caught up in it. We were too rich, too young, too dumb. That’s all. I just got caught up in it, I loved it. I went too far with it.”

Steven Tyler and the gang already had a roadie whose sole job was to give them continuous bumps of cocaine, but that wasn’t enough for Tyler, who kept his stash in a drum on stage.

“I kept my medicine cabinet on stage, in a 14-inch drum head, the bottom of which contained… one Dixie cup with a straw and blow in it and the other with Coca-Cola and Jack Daniels in it,” he wrote in Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

For Aerosmith, cheating on their wives and girlfriends wasn’t so much a moral dilemma. The only real issue was getting caught. To prevent this, the band had a rule that no one would have sex for 10 days before the end of a tour. This allegedly gave them enough time to refuel their “reserves.”

“You didn’t have sex for 10 days at the end of tour, but that was so you’d be sure to go home with a full cup of chowder. If you didn’t, you were definitely suspect,” Tyler told Elle.

In 2009, a 61-year-old Steven Tyler found himself within inches of death when he fell off a stage during a performance in Rapid City, South Dakota. The singer had been snorting the sleep aid Lunesta when he took a tumble. Tyler was airlifted to a local hospital where he got 20 stitches in the back of his head and discovered that his shoulder was shattered.

“I was doing the Tyler shuffle and then I zigged when I should have zagged…AND I slipped, and as I live on the edge… I fell off the edge,” Tyler said in a statement.

The singer managed to finish the song like a pro, but the band had to cancel their tour. Tyler, who has a titanium knee from a previous stage accident, was “grateful” that he didn’t break his neck and later admittedto being high during the accident.

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Aerosmith aren’t strangers to singing about attraction to family members, but “Janie’s Got a Gun” doesn’t hold a candle to French pop singer Serge Gainsbourg’s song “Lemon Incest,” a duet about interbreeding sung with his young daughter in far-too-intimate tones. When translated into English, the lyrics read “Exquisite outline, delicious child, my flesh and blood/Oh my baby, my soul/incest lemon, lemon incest.” The video featured a shirtless Gainsbourg lying in bed with his daughter. Joe Perry lent his guitar skills to the track.

When Joe Perry was 21 years old, he had an affair with actress Judy Carne, who was 11 years his senior. Judy opened his eyes to a new world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. She had a doctor’s bag that was filled with cocaine, pill bottles, powders and syringes. Most of her drugs were totally legal, prescribed to her by a doctor. She even managed to get a prescription of cocaine.

This was all very attractive to Steven Tyler, especially because Carne was generous when it came to sharing her drugs. According to Perry, Tyler not only wanted to get into her stash, but he wanted to have a threesome and repeatedly called Perry hoping to be invited over. During this time, Carne was bed-ridden because of an injury, and Perry wasn’t having it.

“I now sensed that Steven wanted to get into her doctor’s bag — and maybe get into something else. I never invited him over,” Perry recalled in his memoir Rocks: My Life In and Out of Aerosmith. “Forced to stay off her fee, Judy was naked most of the time and didn’t want company. I had no interest in a threesome and neither did she. We just wanted to be alone.”

Steven Tyler wasn’t in a good place with his bandmates when he started thinking about being a judge on American Idol. The Aerosmith singer had recently undergone surgery after falling from a stage and being taken to a hospital. None of his bandmates visited him during his recovery, which definitely soured the singer. His bandmates weren’t too thrilled either when they found out Tyler had taken the job behind their backs. Joe Perry reported to the Boston Herald that he discovered Tyler’s new gig through the internet “like the rest of the world.”

Tyler’s bandmates were furious that the singer became an American Idol judge without telling them, and they consistently threatened to replace the singer in their project of 40 years.

“It’s his business, but I don’t want Aerosmith’s name involved with [American Idol]. We have nothing to do with it,” Perry said in an interview. “[Idol] is a reality show designed to get people to watch that station and sell advertising… it’s one step above Ninja Turtles… [You’ve got] four guys that are great together, and if you find the right singer, there’s no reason you can’t go and entertain people,” he added.