The story of Aerosmith

Yonkers, Sunapee and the Jam Band

Steven Tyler was born Steven Victor Tallarico in Manhattan on the twenty sixth of March 1948, and grew up in the Bronx and then Yonkers. His father Victor was a Juilliard trained classical pianist who taught music, and young Steven would lie under the piano listening to him play. Tyler later said that is where the chords of Dream On came from. At school he felt like an outsider, and he was expelled from Roosevelt High just before graduation over marijuana. Summers were different. His family owned Trow-Rico, a lakeside resort in Sunapee, New Hampshire, where he mowed lawns, stocked the trout pond and performed in skits his aunt put on for the kids.[1] [2] [3]

By his late teens Tyler was drumming and singing in New York bands, first the Strangeurs and then Chain Reaction, and he sang backing vocals on an album by the baroque pop group the Left Banke. He would roll into Sunapee each summer with Carnaby Street clothes and long hair. One of the locals who had to clean up after his band was a teenager called Joe Perry, who worked at an ice cream parlour called the Anchorage. Perry, born Joseph Pereira in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1950, had dreamed of becoming a marine biologist like Jacques Cousteau. At a Vermont boarding school he discovered the Yardbirds and Jimi Hendrix instead, and taught himself guitar right handed even though he is left handed.[1] [2] [3]

Perry played in a loose blues group called the Jam Band with his friend Tom Hamilton, a bassist born in Colorado Springs who had switched from guitar at fourteen because a local band needed one. When Tyler finally went to see them at a club called the Barn in Sunapee, they played Fleetwood Mac's Rattlesnake Shake. He later said they could barely tune their guitars, but they had a groove he could not resist. Tyler wanted to combine the two bands, with one condition. He had always been a drummer, but in this band he would only be the frontman. Joey Kramer, a drummer from Yonkers who had studied at Berklee in Boston and had long hoped to play with Tyler, took the drum stool.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1970 the band moved into a cramped, cockroach ridden apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. Perry and Tyler shared a room with bunk beds and cooked brown rice and vegetables. To pay the rent, Perry worked as a janitor at a synagogue and Tyler at a bakery. They watched Three Stooges reruns and argued about names until Kramer suggested one he had scribbled on his school notebooks, Aerosmith, spelled with an A E R O. Tyler's childhood friend Ray Tabano joined on rhythm guitar, and on the sixth of November 1970 they played their first gig at Nipmuc Regional High School in Mendon, Massachusetts. Tabano was replaced in 1971 by Brad Whitford, a Berklee trained guitarist from Reading, Massachusetts, completing the classic line up.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

A record deal and two slow starters

Aerosmith built a following at high schools and frat parties around Boston. A local promoter named Frank Connelly took an interest and connected them with the New York managers Steve Leber and David Krebs. In 1972 the managers brought Columbia Records president Clive Davis to see them at Max's Kansas City in New York. Aerosmith were not even on the bill that night. They reportedly paid out of their own pockets to get a slot, said to be the only band ever to do so at Max's. Davis told them he thought he could do something with them, and they signed with Columbia in mid 1972 for a reported one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars.[1] [2] [3]

The debut album, simply called Aerosmith, came out on the fifth of January 1973. It was recorded fast at a Boston studio, and most of the band had never been inside one before. Tyler was so nervous that he disguised his voice, later saying he sang like Kermit the Frog because he thought it sounded more like a blues singer. The album included Mama Kin, a song Tyler loved so much he had its title tattooed on his arm, and Dream On, a piano ballad whose music he had written years earlier at Trow-Rico. Released as a single, Dream On only reached number fifty nine nationally, but in Boston it was one of the biggest songs of the year.[1] [2] [3]

The album did little at first, so the band hit the road hard, touring in a station wagon and playing Ohio what Perry called a thousand times. One mismatched tour saw them opening for the jazz fusion group the Mahavishnu Orchestra, whose members meditated before shows. Critics were harsh. Because Tyler's big lips and stage moves looked so much like Mick Jagger's, the band were dismissed as Rolling Stones copies. Tyler later admitted the jibe stung partly because it was true, as he adored the Stones. Perry saw it differently. He said the resemblance was only skin deep, and that musically they were closer to the Yardbirds.[1] [2]

Their second album, Get Your Wings, came out on the fifteenth of March 1974. It was the start of a long partnership with producer Jack Douglas, a former Record Plant janitor turned engineer who had worked with John Lennon and the New York Dolls. Douglas made Tyler drop the fake voice and sing in his own. He also quietly brought in session guitarists Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter to play some of the solos, including the opening ones on Train Kept A-Rollin'. Whitford later said breaking that news to him and Perry went down like a lead balloon. Douglas believed it was a lesson. When the band returned from a year on the road, he said they had become great players.[1] [2] [3]

Toys in the Attic and Rocks

Toys in the Attic, released on the eighth of April 1975, was the album where everything came together. For the first time the band wrote much of it in the studio. Walk This Way began as a riff Perry played at a soundcheck in Honolulu while thinking about the New Orleans funk band the Meters. In New York the band still had no words or title, so they took a break to see Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein. They came back laughing about the scene where Marty Feldman tells Gene Wilder to walk this way, and Jack Douglas suggested it as a title. Tyler then lost his lyrics in a cab and rewrote them in pencil on the stairwell wall of the Record Plant.[1] [2]

Sweet Emotion grew from a bass line Tom Hamilton had written in high school and had been too shy to show anyone. On a so called jam day at the end of the sessions, he finally played it, and the song came together in an afternoon. Perry's talk box makes the guitar seem to sing the title, and with no maracas in the studio Tyler shook a packet of sugar instead. Released in May 1975, Sweet Emotion became the band's first top forty hit. Columbia then reissued Dream On, which climbed to number six in April 1976, their biggest single of the decade. Walk This Way followed into the top ten early in 1977. Toys in the Attic went on to sell nine million copies in America.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rocks came out on the thirteenth of May 1976 and was one of the first albums ever to ship platinum. The band recorded much of it by backing the Record Plant's mobile truck into the Wherehouse, their rehearsal base in Waltham, Massachusetts. Perry wrote the opening riff of Back in the Saddle on a six string bass, inspired by Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, and later admitted he was very high on heroin at the time. The band spent hours trying to crack a real bullwhip for the sound effects, and got cut and hurt without success. In the end the crack came from swinging a long cord and firing a cap gun. Whitford co-wrote the hit Last Child.[1] [2] [3]

By now Aerosmith were headlining stadiums and festivals across America. Their audience was so thick with teenage boys in denim jackets and jeans that the band called it the Blue Army. Toys in the Attic and Rocks later appeared on Rolling Stone's list of the greatest albums of all time, and they shaped a whole generation. Members of Guns N' Roses, Metallica and Mötley Crüe cited them, and Kurt Cobain listed Rocks among the records that most influenced Nirvana. Perry later said Eddie Van Halen told him his band started out playing Aerosmith songs in the suburban Los Angeles clubs. Hamilton said the dream had been simple. They wanted to be the American answer to Cream, the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Toxic Twins

Success brought money, and money brought drugs. Tyler and Perry became known as the Toxic Twins for their use of cocaine and heroin on and off the stage. In 1977 manager David Krebs had the band record Draw the Line at the Cenacle, a vast former convent near Armonk, New York, hoping to keep them away from temptation. It failed completely. Dealers delivered, the band raced Porsches around the countryside and fired guns in the attic. Kramer recorded Kings and Queens on the altar of the chapel while Jack Douglas sat in the confessional. The caricaturist Al Hirschfeld drew the album cover there. Perry later called the record the beginning of the end.[1] [2] [3]

This period also contains a story that returned decades later in a courtroom. In 1973, after a show in Portland, Oregon, the twenty five year old Tyler met Julia Holcomb, who was sixteen. He obtained guardianship of her from her mother so she could live with him and travel across state lines, and they were together for about three years, taking drugs together. She became pregnant, and after a fire at their apartment the pregnancy ended in an abortion that Tyler wrote about in his own memoirs. Holcomb has described the relationship as abuse, and her story was told in the 2021 documentary Look Away. The lawsuit she later brought is covered in its place in this story.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The crowds were getting wilder too. In October 1977 a cherry bomb thrown on stage at the Spectrum in Philadelphia burned Tyler's cornea and cut an artery in Perry's hand, ending the show. The band returned in November 1978 to a billboard apologising for last time. Six songs in, a bottle smashed on a monitor in front of Tyler and glass cut through his cheeks. The band walked off, got in their cars and drove out as riot police arrived. They did not play Philadelphia again for more than four years. In 1978 they also appeared as the villainous Future Villain Band in the film Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and their cover of Come Together became their last top forty hit for nearly a decade.[1] [2] [3]

Tyler later claimed he had spent sixty four million dollars on drugs, a figure Perry dismissed as impossible. Whatever the number, the band had stopped steering their own ship. Perry said you can hear the focus of Rocks disappear on Draw the Line, and that they had become drug addicts dabbling in music rather than musicians dabbling in drugs. They were isolated from their families, paranoid, and surrounded by people living the same way. Kramer later wished someone had slapped them. But he admitted anyone who tried would have been gone, because nobody told one of the biggest bands in the world what to do. Jerry Garcia, Tyler said, called them the druggiest band the Grateful Dead had ever seen.[1] [2] [3]

Milk, a walkout and the wilderness years

By 1979 the band could not finish their next album. Tyler was blocked on lyrics, the budget was gone, Perry reportedly owed the band eighty thousand dollars in room service, and management sent them on tour to raise money. On the twenty eighth of July 1979 they headlined the World Series of Rock at Cleveland Stadium. Backstage, Perry's wife Elyssa threw a glass of milk at Tom Hamilton's wife Terry, and a screaming match broke out. Tyler confronted Perry about his wife, the two had a furious row, and Perry left the band that night. Whitford remembered that being in Aerosmith then was like walking into a dog fight where both dogs bite you.[1] [2] [3]

Night in the Ruts was finished with fill in guitarists, including Whitford, the band's writing partner Richie Supa, and Jimmy Crespo, a Brooklyn session player who became Perry's full time replacement. The title was a spoonerism of a crude phrase, and its only single, a cover of the Shangri-Las' Remember Walking in the Sand, stalled at number sixty seven. The tours shrank to smaller venues. In 1980 Tyler collapsed on stage in Portland, Maine and did not get up for the rest of the set. That autumn he was badly hurt in a motorcycle accident and spent two months in hospital. Ironically, Columbia's 1980 Greatest Hits album went on to become the band's biggest seller in America, at twelve million copies.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1981 Brad Whitford walked out too, after recording just one song, Lightning Strikes, for the next album, and formed a duo with singer Derek St. Holmes. His place was taken by Rick Dufay, a Paris born guitarist recommended by Jack Douglas. Rock in a Hard Place came out on the twenty seventh of August 1982, reportedly after spending more than a million dollars, and reached only number thirty two. Dufay later said Tyler was so ill in Florida that he was nodding off while trying to write lyrics, and that he helped nurse him back to health. Kramer's verdict was blunt. He said the record did not suck, but it was not a real Aerosmith album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Perry was faring no better. His Joe Perry Project sold two hundred and fifty thousand copies of its first album, but later records sold far less, and he ended up broke, sleeping on his manager's couch and in a Boston boarding house. Tyler, meanwhile, lived in squalor at a New York hotel chosen for its closeness to the dealers on Eighth Avenue. Perry's new manager Tim Collins took him to see Aerosmith at the Worcester Centrum, where Tyler shared heroin with him backstage and then collapsed on stage. On the fourteenth of February 1984, Perry and Whitford saw Aerosmith play Boston's Orpheum Theatre. Within weeks the original five were talking, and by April they were a band again.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Back in the Saddle and getting clean

With Tim Collins as manager, the reunited band went out in 1984 on the Back in the Saddle tour, without a new album. Collins called it guerrilla warfare. They were still tied to their old managers and label, so he set up a fake company for each show so that creditors could not seize the box office takings. The shows drew crowds, but the old habits came straight back. In Springfield, Illinois, Tyler collapsed and the show was cancelled, and Collins sent every ticket holder a free copy of Greatest Hits to repair the damage. After every major label passed, A and R man John Kalodner signed them to Geffen Records.[1] [2] [3]

Their Geffen debut, Done with Mirrors, came out on the fourth of November 1985. Producer Ted Templeman recorded them without telling them the tape was rolling, to capture a raw live feel, and the sessions were held in Berkeley to keep them away from drug connections. All the text on the original sleeve was printed backwards, to be read in a mirror, and the title itself was a nod to cocaine. Some critics liked it, but it only went gold and produced no hit. A television executive later said that by then Aerosmith were seen as a bit of a joke. Perry called it their least inspired record, though a necessary step to the next one.[1] [2]

The rescue came from an unlikely place. In 1986 producer Rick Rubin had the hip hop trio Run-DMC cover Walk This Way, a song they had rapped over at parties without knowing the words. Run and DMC thought the lyrics were hillbilly nonsense, but Tyler and Perry came in to re-record their parts, and Perry played bass on an instrument borrowed from one of the Beastie Boys. In the video, shot for about sixty seven thousand dollars, Tyler smashes through a studio wall that divides the two bands. The single reached number four, higher than the original, became the first hip hop single to reach the top five, and introduced Aerosmith to a whole new generation.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Success alone could not fix the drugs. In 1986 Collins, a doctor and the band staged an intervention on Tyler, who went to rehab at the Caron Foundation in Pennsylvania. Tyler later admitted he felt bitter at the time, because some of the people lecturing him had problems of their own. Over the next couple of years the rest of the band got clean too, through twelve step programmes. Whitford dealt with his drinking. Collins had pledged that if they all stayed sober he would make Aerosmith the biggest band in the world by 1990. Tyler has been open that sobriety is a lifelong fight, admitting later that he relapsed and went back to recovery.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The greatest comeback in rock

Permanent Vacation, released on the twenty fifth of August 1987, was the first album the band made sober. At Kalodner's urging they worked with producer Bruce Fairbairn in Vancouver and with outside songwriters like Desmond Child, Jim Vallance and Holly Knight. The band resisted at first, and Tyler was furious that Knight got a credit on Rag Doll after changing a single word of the title. But Dude Looks Like a Lady, Angel and Rag Doll all reached the top twenty, and Angel climbed to number three. The album sold five million copies in America. The band toured with a young Guns N' Roses as openers, and Collins kept the two camps apart to protect Aerosmith's sobriety.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pump arrived on the twelfth of September 1989 and was even bigger, selling seven million copies in America. Love in an Elevator was based on a real encounter of Tyler's when the doors opened at the wrong moment. Janie's Got a Gun, written by Tyler and Hamilton, told the story of a girl who shoots the father who abused her. Tyler said it was inspired by a magazine piece on gun deaths and by women he met in recovery who had survived abuse. Kalodner insisted on softening one line so radio would play it. The video was directed by David Fincher, and the song won the band their first Grammy, a quarter of a century after they formed.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Aerosmith had become pop culture fixtures. In February 1990 they appeared on Saturday Night Live's Wayne's World sketch, where Mike Myers and Dana Carvey bowed down chanting that they were not worthy and quizzed them about the fall of communism. E later ranked it the number one moment in the show's history. They played MTV Unplugged, toured Australia for the first time, and in 1991 appeared as themselves in The Simpsons episode Flaming Moe's. That year they released the box set Pandora's Box and a remixed Sweet Emotion with a new video. They also signed a reported thirty million dollar deal to return to Columbia, though they still owed Geffen more records.[1] [2]

Get a Grip, released in April 1993, became their first album to debut at number one and sold over twenty million copies worldwide. Kalodner had rejected the first version and sent them back to write more with collaborators. The ballads Cryin', Amazing and Crazy dominated MTV through videos starring a teenage Alicia Silverstone, who became known as the Aerosmith girl. The Crazy video also gave Tyler's daughter Liv her first screen role. Livin' on the Edge and Crazy each won Grammys. In 1994 the band became the first major act to release a song as an exclusive download, offering Head First on CompuServe. Around ten thousand people downloaded it in the first few days, despite each download taking most of an hour.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Get a Grip tour lasted eighteen months and took them to Woodstock 1994 and Donington's Monsters of Rock. They opened their own club in Boston, the Mama Kin Music Hall, and starred in Wayne's World 2 and the arcade game Revolution X. Massachusetts governor William Weld declared the thirteenth of April 1993 Aerosmith Day. By the mid nineties the band had won four Grammys for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group, second only to U2 in that category, and ten MTV Video Music Awards. Critics grumbled about outside songwriters and power ballads, but one writer called the turnaround the single most successful comeback in the history of heavy metal, if not all popular music.[1] [2]

Nine Lives and a number one at last

The next album nearly broke them. Sessions in Miami with producer Glen Ballard stalled, and Joey Kramer, still grieving his father's death, fell into depression and missed rehearsals, so another drummer was brought in. In 1996 the band fired Tim Collins after almost twelve years. Perry later wrote that they felt betrayed because Collins had pitted the members against each other and fed them false information. With new producer Kevin Shirley they re-recorded everything with Kramer back behind the kit. Nine Lives came out on the eighteenth of March 1997, debuted at number one and sold over two million copies in America. Its original cover, adapted from a Hindu image of Krishna, was withdrawn after protests.[1] [2] [3]

In 1998 came the biggest hit of their career, and they did not write it. Diane Warren wrote I Don't Want to Miss a Thing after hearing James Brolin tell Barbara Walters he missed Barbra Streisand even while she slept. It was the love theme for the film Armageddon, which starred Liv Tyler. The producers had first approached U2. Aerosmith's version debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for four weeks, their first and only American number one, and the only number one debut by a rock group on that chart. It was nominated for an Oscar and topped charts across Europe and Australia.[1] [2] [3]

The Nine Lives tour ran for over two years, despite Tyler injuring his leg on stage and Kramer suffering second degree burns when his car caught fire at a petrol station. In July 1999 Disney opened the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith in Florida, launching riders from nought to fifty seven miles an hour in under three seconds to the band's music. A second version opened at Disneyland Paris in 2002. In January 2001 Aerosmith co-headlined the Super Bowl halftime show with NSYNC, joined by Britney Spears, Mary J. Blige and Nelly for a closing Walk This Way.[1] [2]

In March 2001 they released Just Push Play, whose single Jaded reached the top ten. Weeks later, on the nineteenth of March 2001, Aerosmith were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the only band inducted while they had a song active in the charts. Perry later called Just Push Play his least favourite record, because all five members were never in the room at the same time. That autumn they played a benefit in Washington for victims of the September eleventh attacks, then flew to Indianapolis for a show the same night. In 2002 MTV gave them its Icon honour, with Pink, Shakira, Kid Rock and others covering their songs.[1] [2] [3]

Illness, feuds and American Idol

In 2004 Aerosmith went back to their roots with Honkin' on Bobo, a blues covers album recorded with Jack Douglas at Perry's home. Then the bodies began to fail. In 2006 Tyler needed surgery on a ruptured blood vessel in his throat, and the rest of a tour was cancelled. That September he revealed he had lived with hepatitis C for eleven years and had endured months of treatment he called agony. Weeks earlier, Tom Hamilton announced he had throat and tongue cancer. He had never missed an Aerosmith show before, and former Joe Perry Project bassist David Hull filled in while he had radiation and chemotherapy. Hamilton was declared cancer free that December, though the illness returned in 2011.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2008 they became the first band to get their own Guitar Hero game, which became the best selling band centred game of its kind. The original master of Dream On could not be found, so they re-recorded it. But the 2009 tour with ZZ Top was a disaster. Whitford missed the start after hurting his head getting out of his car, and on the fifth of August 2009 Tyler fell off the stage in Sturgis, South Dakota, and was airlifted to hospital with head and neck injuries and a broken shoulder. The rest of the tour was cancelled. Late that year Tyler entered rehab for an addiction to painkillers, brought on by years of injuries to his knees, legs and feet.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The fall set off the worst feud since 1979. In November 2009 Perry told a newspaper that as far as he could tell Tyler had quit, and wrote online that the last time he phoned him, Tyler hung up. Days later Tyler walked on stage at a Joe Perry Project show in New York and told the crowd he was not leaving Aerosmith. In January 2010 Perry said the band would audition new singers, and Lenny Kravitz was reportedly approached. Tyler's lawyer sent a cease and desist letter. By June they were back together headlining Download, with Perry calling Tyler the best lead singer on the planet.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then Tyler signed up as a judge on American Idol without telling the band. Perry said he found out on the internet like everyone else. That same summer Tyler accidentally hit Perry with his microphone stand in Wantagh, New York, and Perry bumped Tyler off the stage in Toronto. Tyler judged two seasons, starting in January 2011, and later said his troubles with his bandmates were the main reason he took the job. The band finally finished a new album with Jack Douglas, Music from Another Dimension!, released on the sixth of November 2012. They celebrated with a free concert outside their old apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue. In 2013 Tyler and Perry entered the Songwriters Hall of Fame.[1] [2] [3]

Lawsuits, a lost voice and one more time

Through the 2010s the band kept touring while chasing side projects. Tyler made a country album, and Perry formed the Hollywood Vampires with Alice Cooper and Johnny Depp, collapsing on stage with them at Coney Island in July 2016 before recovering within days. In 2015 Tyler launched Janie's Fund to help girls who have survived abuse. In 2019 the band began a Las Vegas residency called Deuces Are Wild. When Joey Kramer hurt his shoulder that spring, his drum technician filled in, and Kramer said he was kept out even after recovering, with the band saying his playing was not up to standard. In January 2020 he sued to play at the Grammys, where the band were honoured as MusiCares Person of the Year, and a court refused him.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In May 2022 Tyler checked into rehab after relapsing on painkillers following foot surgery, and residency dates were cancelled. He recovered in time for a fiftieth anniversary show at Fenway Park that September, which Kramer sat out. Kramer's second wife Linda had died that June. In December 2022 Julia Holcomb, now known as Julia Misley, sued Tyler in Los Angeles under a California law that temporarily lifted time limits on childhood sexual abuse claims. She alleged he sexually assaulted her from the age of sixteen, supplied her with drugs and alcohol, and pressured her into the abortion. In 2023 Tyler denied the allegations, argued the relationship was consensual and claimed immunity as her legal guardian, a defence several lawyers told Rolling Stone was baffling.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In May 2023 the band announced Peace Out, a farewell tour of North America with the Black Crowes opening and without Kramer. It began in Philadelphia on the second of September 2023. At the third show, in Elmont, New York on the ninth of September, Tyler damaged his vocal cords, and it emerged he had fractured his larynx. The tour was pushed back a year. On the second of August 2024, the band announced that a full recovery was not possible and that they were retiring from the touring stage, thanking the Blue Army for more than five decades. Hamilton said the band was still alive, and rated his hope for the future somewhere between seven and nine out of ten.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The retirement was not the end of the music. Bored in Florida, Perry told the band's manager he was open to anything, and a meeting was arranged with the young English rocker Yungblud, a devoted Aerosmith fan. They worked together in Sarasota in 2024, and in May 2025 Tyler joined them at Johnny Depp's studio in Los Angeles. That July Tyler sang at Black Sabbath's farewell concert in Birmingham, and in September Tyler and Perry joined Yungblud at the MTV Video Music Awards for a tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne. The result of the sessions was One More Time, a five track EP released on the twenty first of November 2025, the band's first new music in thirteen years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The single My Only Angel went straight to number one on Billboard's hard rock chart. The EP entered the Billboard 200 at number nine, giving Aerosmith top ten albums in six different decades, and in Britain, where they had always struggled, it became their first number one album. As of 2026 Aerosmith are the best selling American hard rock band of all time, with more than one hundred and fifty million records sold, the most gold and platinum certifications of any American group, four Grammys and ten MTV Video Music Awards. As Tom Hamilton once said, remembering when Perry claimed they were not ready for the eighties, for a while they did not have a future, and then they did.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Aerosmith

Steven Tyler and Joe Perry. The Toxic Twins met in Sunapee when Perry was cleaning tables after Tyler's band. They wrote Walk This Way, Back in the Saddle and most of the hits together, and fought for fifty years. Perry compared them to gorillas who wreck the dressing room but never hit each other. The feud split the band in 1979 and nearly again in 2009, yet in 2025 they made new music together with Yungblud.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Steven Tyler and Liv Tyler. Liv was born in 1977 to model Bebe Buell, who told everyone the father was her partner Todd Rundgren, because Tyler was deep in addiction. At about ten or eleven Liv noticed her resemblance to Tyler and asked her mother, and the secret came out. It became public in 1991. She appeared in the Crazy video and starred in Armageddon, whose theme became Aerosmith's only American number one.[1] [2] [3]

Steven Tyler and Cyrinda Foxe. Foxe was a Warhol actress and the former wife of New York Dolls singer David Johansen, and David Bowie said he wrote The Jean Genie for her. She married Tyler in 1978 and their daughter Mia was born that December. They divorced in 1987. She later wrote a memoir about life with him, and he went to court to stop her publishing nude photos of him. She died of a brain tumour in 2002.[1] [2] [3]

Joe Perry and Tom Hamilton. Perry and Hamilton were the band before there was a band, playing together in the Jam Band in New Hampshire and moving to Boston together in 1969. Hamilton stayed when Perry walked out, and was hurt when Perry said Aerosmith were not ready for the eighties. He later admitted it hurt because it was true. Hamilton co-wrote Sweet Emotion and Janie's Got a Gun.[1] [2] [3]

Aerosmith and Jack Douglas. Douglas produced Get Your Wings, Toys in the Attic, Rocks and Draw the Line, and was so close to the band that he was called the sixth member. He named Walk This Way, wrote the lyrics to Critical Mass and co-wrote Kings and Queens. Columbia replaced him during Night in the Ruts, but he returned for Rock in a Hard Place, Honkin' on Bobo and Music from Another Dimension!.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Aerosmith and Tim Collins. Collins went from managing the broke Joe Perry Project to engineering the reunion, the Geffen deal, Tyler's intervention and the Run-DMC collaboration. He promised to make them the biggest band in the world by 1990 if they got sober, and nearly did. By 1996 the relationship had soured, and the band fired him, accusing him of turning members against each other.[1] [2] [3]

Aerosmith and John Kalodner. The Geffen A and R man signed the band when nobody else would, pushed them to work with outside songwriters and producer Bruce Fairbairn, and made them rewrite Get a Grip, which he considered his finest work. He also had them soften a line in Janie's Got a Gun. Famous for dressing in white, he appeared in a wedding dress in the Dude Looks Like a Lady video.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Aerosmith and Run-DMC. Their 1986 Walk This Way broke hip hop onto rock radio and MTV and relaunched Aerosmith. The groups reunited on stage at the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards and toured together in 2002. That October, Run-DMC's Jam Master Jay was shot dead in his Queens studio. His killers were not convicted until 2024.[1] [2] [3]

Aerosmith and Guns N' Roses. Guns N' Roses covered Mama Kin on their first record and opened for Aerosmith in 1988, at a time when the newly sober headliners had to keep away from their openers' drug use. Slash has called Aerosmith his favourite band and credits Brad Whitford as a hidden influence. Slash once owned a Les Paul Perry had sold in his divorce, and eventually gave it back to him as a fiftieth birthday present.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Joey Kramer and Aerosmith. Kramer named the band and played drums for half a century, but his relationship with his bandmates broke down after his 2019 injury, when they said his playing was not up to standard. He sued in 2020 to play at the Grammys and lost. He sat out the 2022 shows and the farewell tour. As of 2026 the band's manager describes him as sort of retired from playing with them.[1] [2] [3]

Aerosmith and Yungblud. The young English rocker, a lifelong fan, first recorded with Perry in 2024, then with Tyler and Perry in 2025. Together they performed an Ozzy Osbourne tribute at the MTV Video Music Awards and released the EP One More Time, which gave Aerosmith their first UK number one album and brought the retired band back to the charts.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Aerosmith

• Steven Tyler sang backing vocals on a Left Banke album before Aerosmith existed. As a teenager in New York, Tyler sang backing vocals on The Left Banke Too, the second album by the New York baroque pop group, before he had formed Aerosmith.[1]
• Joe Perry is left handed but taught himself to play guitar right handed. Perry took up the guitar at ten. Although he is left handed, he learned to play the standard right handed way, and he later credited undiagnosed ADHD with both helping and hurting his playing.[1]
• Joe Perry originally wanted to be a marine biologist. Growing up in Hopedale, Massachusetts, Perry idolised Jacques Cousteau and dreamed of the sea. His parents even dangled a summer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution if he improved his grades.[1]
• Before fame, Joe Perry worked as a janitor at a Boston synagogue. In the early Boston days, the band avoided the club circuit and took part time jobs to survive. Perry cleaned a synagogue while Tyler worked in a bakery.[1]
• Aerosmith's very first gig opened with songs by the Yardbirds, the Stones and John Lennon. At Nipmuc Regional High School in November 1970 they played Shapes of Things, Live With Me and Cold Turkey. Hamilton said Tyler and Perry argued that night about Perry playing too loud, starting an Aerosmith tradition.[1] [2]
• Aerosmith reportedly paid their own money to play the night Clive Davis saw them. They were not booked at Max's Kansas City, so they paid for a slot on the bill, reportedly the only band ever to do so there. The song No Surprize later celebrated that night.[1]
• The first pressing of their debut album misspelled a song as Walkin' the Dig. Columbia's hastily made sleeve for the 1973 debut printed Walkin' the Dog as Walkin' the Dig. Perry later called the packaging sloppy and said the band did not see the cover until it was printed.[1]
• Mama Kin and Seasons of Wither were written on a guitar Joey Kramer found in the rubbish. Kramer pulled a warped, stringless acoustic out of the trash on Beacon Street in Boston. Tyler dried it out, put four strings on it because that was all it would take, and wrote two classics.[1] [2]
• Tyler loved Mama Kin so much that he had the title tattooed on his arm. The song from the 1973 debut became a live staple, was covered by Guns N' Roses, and gave its name to the club the band opened in Boston in 1994.[1] [2]
• Aerosmith once toured as the opening act for the Mahavishnu Orchestra. It was an odd pairing. Tom Hamilton recalled that John McLaughlin's jazz fusion band meditated before playing, while Aerosmith had their own chemical ways of meditating.[1]
• The walk this way line in Walk This Way comes from the film Young Frankenstein. Stuck for a title, the band saw Mel Brooks' comedy in Times Square and laughed at Marty Feldman's line to Gene Wilder. Jack Douglas suggested it for the song.[1]
• Steven Tyler shook a packet of sugar on Sweet Emotion because the studio had no maracas. He also played a vibraslap, which he said broke on the third hit. The break can still be heard on the finished record.[1]
• The whip cracks on Back in the Saddle are a swinging cord and a cap gun. The band spent hours trying to crack a real bullwhip in the studio and only got cut and hurt. The finished effect came from whirling a long cord and firing a cap gun.[1]
• The cover of Draw the Line was drawn by the famous caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld visited the band at the Cenacle, the former convent where they recorded. Tyler said he made them look like freakish specimens pinned under glass.[1]
• Kings and Queens was recorded with the drums on a chapel altar. At the Cenacle, Kramer played in the chapel with the pews removed, while producer Jack Douglas sat in the confessional hitting a snare drum. Douglas also played mandolin on the track.[1]
• Night in the Ruts was originally meant to be called Off Your Rocker. The album was due in June 1979 but had no lyrics. The final title is a spoonerism of a crude phrase, hinted at on the back cover.[1]
• Joe Perry found out about Aerosmith's Greatest Hits when a fan asked him to sign it. In 1980, broke and out of the band, Perry had no idea Columbia had released the compilation until a fan approached him in a supermarket. It became their best selling album in America.[1] [2]
• All the text on Done with Mirrors was printed backwards. To match the title, the original sleeve and even the first CD booklet had to be read in a mirror. Those first CDs are now collector's items.[1]
• Only Tyler and Perry appear in the Walk This Way video, not the rest of Aerosmith. The other rock musicians were played by members of a little known band called Smashed Gladys. The video cost about sixty seven thousand dollars.[1]
• Joe Perry played bass on the Run-DMC Walk This Way using a Beastie Boy's instrument. The studio had no bass guitar, so one of the Beastie Boys who was hanging around went home and fetched his own.[1]
• Motown's Holland Dozier Holland got a songwriting credit on The Other Side. The songwriters threatened to sue because the melody resembled Standing in the Shadows of Love. As part of the settlement, their names were added to the credits.[1]
• Tyler recorded with Mötley Crüe while both bands were in Vancouver in 1989. Aerosmith made Pump at Little Mountain Sound while Mötley Crüe recorded Dr. Feelgood. Tyler and Aerosmith's horn section ended up on several Mötley Crüe tracks.[1]
• A drum Tyler stole from his high school is heard on Livin' on the Edge. According to the band's autobiography, four loud beats in a pause before the last chorus come from a bass drum Tyler took from his old school.[1]
• Aerosmith were the first major act to release a song as an exclusive download. In June 1994 they put Head First on CompuServe as a four megabyte file. About ten thousand people downloaded it within days, each download taking most of an hour.[1] [2]
• Janie's Got a Gun originally used a harsher word that radio would not play. Tyler's lyric said the father raped a little baby. Geffen's John Kalodner persuaded him to change it to jacked, and Tyler often sings the original line live.[1]
• A man in a wedding dress in the Dude Looks Like a Lady video is a record executive. The bride is John Kalodner, the band's A and R man, who famously dressed all in white. It was a private joke.[1] [2]
• The first cover of Nine Lives was withdrawn after protests from Hindus. It showed an image based on Krishna dancing on a serpent, altered with a cat's head. The band had not known the source, and the label apologised and replaced it.[1]
• I Don't Want to Miss a Thing was inspired by a Barbra Streisand interview. Diane Warren heard James Brolin tell Barbara Walters he missed Streisand even when they were asleep. She wrote down the phrase before the song existed, imagining Celine Dion singing it.[1]
• For Guitar Hero, Aerosmith had to re-record Dream On because the master tape was missing. When the game was made in 2007, the original master of their first hit could not be found, so the band recorded it again.[1]
• Before his 2006 cancer, Tom Hamilton had never missed an Aerosmith show. He sat out the Route of All Evil tour for radiation and chemotherapy, with former Joe Perry Project bassist David Hull filling in.[1]
• Tom Hamilton was accepted into two acting schools before choosing music. He had also worked as a nursing home orderly. He eventually got to act, joining the cast of the Boston stage show Banned in Boston in 1996.[1]
• Before Aerosmith, Joey Kramer played in a Boston band alongside keyboardist Bernie Worrell. In Boston before Aerosmith, Kramer worked with Chubby and the Turnpikes, the group later renamed Tavares, with Worrell in the line up.[1]
• Jeff Beck once joined Aerosmith on stage as a birthday present for Joe Perry. Perry has named Beck one of his main influences, and in 1976 Beck played with the band as a gift for him.[1]
• Massachusetts once declared an official Aerosmith Day. Governor William Weld proclaimed the thirteenth of April 1993 Aerosmith Day in the band's home state.[1]
• Aerosmith's original touring van turned up on the TV show American Pickers. In 2018 founding guitarist Ray Tabano authenticated the old International Harvester van. It was bought for twenty five thousand dollars, restored, and bought back by the band.[1]
• I Don't Want to Miss a Thing is the only Hot 100 number one debut by a rock group. It entered at number one in September 1998 and stayed four weeks. It remains their only American number one single as of 2026.[1] [2]
• Aerosmith's 2022 Fenway Park show broke the ballpark's attendance record. The delayed fiftieth anniversary concert on the eighth of September 2022 drew over thirty eight thousand seven hundred fans.[1]
• With One More Time, Aerosmith scored top ten albums in six different decades. Billboard noted only Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen and James Taylor had done the same.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.