When Aerosmith first found fame, how well equipped were you to deal with it?
“Probably not very well. On one hand it worked because we didn’t actually know much about the business end of what we did, so for us it was a cottage industry. We got paid in cash at every club we played. Obviously we saw The Beatles and the Stones and all the mayhem that went with that, but then there was another generation of bands coming up, like The Who and Led Zeppelin, that we saw playing in clubs and theatres in America. The one thing we were equipped with was the feeling that we weren’t going to fail. Every time we walked out onstage we just did so with the feeling that we had to win over the audience that night, no matter what.”
And that worked?
“Yeah, but success didn’t come fast. It’s not like we had a hit record and all of a sudden we were big in the States. We went to New York, and then we went to Detroit, and on and on. We played every club and theatre and town hall and college that we could find. It was just a matter of doing things city by city. We weren’t getting any love from the radio, that’s for sure. But we weren’t going to give it up, no matter what. We were well endowed with fighting spirit, and that’s what keeps the band going today. We still go out there thinking we have to prove something.”
What do hard drugs do to the chemistry of a band like Aerosmith?
“It depends on the personalities. I don’t think you can have five guys who are all alpha males in a little group like ours. When we used to go to parties where other bands would be, I always used to like to hang out, and if I didn’t know them I could always pick out the guitar players, the bass player and the drummer. There’s always something that draws people to playing their particular instrument that I was always able to pick out. I think the personalities in Aerosmith were a good combination of everybody wanting to be creative, but not everybody being as creative as others. But although it balanced out, it didn’t come without a lot of trying to figure out the other guys in the band. The one thing we weren’t going to do was break up. We were always going to stick it out, one way or another. And by doing that we just got better and better, we wrote better songs and we avoided the pitfalls of egos and girlfriends and got to the point where we were finally making albums that people actually liked.”
You and Steven were known as the ‘Toxic Twins’ thanks to enormous consumption of illicit substances. How did you manage to get anything done when you were that fucked up?
“There was a lot of drama and all that stuff, but everyone showed up at rehearsal when they were supposed to. I don’t think there was ever a point where people didn’t show up because they were too stoned. Not at all. It was more a case of who was going to be late. We had this undercurrent where it was fine to party and fine to do this or that, and we’d do it together sometimes, but nothing’s gonna get in the way of us writing music and practising for tour. If we were as fucked up as some people would have you believe, we wouldn’t have been able to put out the records that we did, or to have played the size of stadiums that we did.”