Any musician who takes up a life as a travelling rock star must know what they’re getting into. Not everything is going to be easy, and when looking at the ins and outs of setting up a stadium show, it takes a small army of people to make sure that even one song goes off without a hitch, let alone two hours’ worth of music. And while Aerosmith were the ultimate road dogs compared to their contemporaries, that didn’t mean that they didn’t have some brushes with the dark side of the road.
Because if there was one thing that would bring the band down, it was the amount that they partied. Even by the standards set by bands like the Grateful Dead, ‘The Bad Boys From Boston’ were truly on a different level with their drug intake, to the point where they were too strung out to work half the time they went into the studio. All’s well if the songs are still coming, but by Draw the Line, their momentum started to go dangerously close to hitting a brick wall.
The album itself is far from terrible, but listening to the band talk about its development, they had hit rock bottom in terms of their drug intake. No one was happy with each other in the studio, and with Joe Perry being strung out on heroin half the time he was camped out in this makeshift studio they made for themselves, he spent the first few weeks in his bedroom firing off guns and getting more blitzed by the day.
So if they are already that dysfunctional when they aren’t moving, imagine what that would sound like when they begin to give it to the people. The band were always a well-oiled machine compared to everyone else in the rock scene, but even when Steven Tyler hit the stage, that onstage banter that he used to have and the creative tension were simply gone.
And looking at their schedule throughout that tour, it’s no surprise they didn’t survive it in one piece. By the time they played one of their final shows on the tour, Perry decided that he wanted out, eventually having a massive screaming match with Tyler backstage after thinking that his wife was getting disrespected by the rest of the band. It was one thing to lose one band member throughout a tour, but if they didn’t know when to say ‘no’ to things, their entire tour could have ended earlier.
Before they got rolling on the touring circuit, the band had to go through many inspections to ensure they were travelling well. They had officially graduated to the kind of massive aeroplanes every massive band was used to, but after going through a few test runs with different planes to work with, they eventually ended up saving their own skin by rejecting the aircraft that ultimately led to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s demise.
The band had only been looking at the plane a few months before the Southern rockers’ plane crash happened, and when Perry heard the news, he was incredibly shaken, saying, “It was a terrible tragedy, and we just considered ourselves incredibly lucky. To be that close to it, and knowing those guys, it was really a blow.” But outside of the Skynyrd tragedy, there was always room for the band themselves to screw things up.
And even if their career didn’t necessarily go down in literal flames, they did have a few rough years after Perry left, with his solo project not having the legs most people hoped for and Aerosmith carrying on with Rock in a Hard Place. Neither camp was ready to be on speaking terms yet, but you’d think that having a brief brush with death would have jolted them out of their own petty arguments.
