Nine Lives and Counting

Steven Tyler, the flamboyant voice of Aerosmith, blows into guitarist Joe Perry’s spacious suburban home, located just outside of town, like a skinny, shaggy-haired hurricane.

After shouting out greetings to his bandmate’s wife and toddler son, Tyler bounds downstairs to the basement, which Perry has converted into a home studio, equipped with a vintage control board from the ‘70s and decorated with pictures of scantily clad blonds.

As the relatively sedate Perry, 46, burns vanilla incense, Tyler, 48, finally sits down on a stool, looking ready for business--at least, as ready for business as a guy wearing a leopard-print shirt and shades could be expected to look.

The two principal characters in one of the most colorful and longest-running chapters in American rock are here to discuss important matters: a high-profile change of record labels and managers, as well as drug-relapse rumors.

“I want to say it’s like the ice on the ocean has melted, and the sun came out, but it’s so much more than that,” says Tyler, relieved to have survived all the tension and turmoil of recent years.

Aerosmith’s formal resurfacing begins March 18 when the group releases its first studio album in four years. Fittingly titled “Nine Lives,” the collection marks the band’s return--under a whopping $30-million contract--to Columbia Records, where it launched its career in the early ‘70s.

It didn’t take long for the original contract to pay off. Aerosmith was soon selling out arenas, thanks to such massive hit singles as “Dream On” and “Walk This Way.” Some people even began calling the band a junior-grade Rolling Stones--which wasn’t too difficult a leapsince Tyler and Perry seemed to pattern themselves after Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, from wardrobe to rebellious antics.

In the early ‘80s, however, years of drug abuse and personal tension began to take their toll. Record sales slipped, and Perry and rhythm guitarist Brad Whitford left to pursue other projects.

In 1984, the guitarists rejoined the band, which also includes bassist Tom Hamilton and drummer Joey Kramer. The following year, though, the band’s future seemed so bleak that its contract was not renewed by Columbia.

With its options limited, Aerosmith accepted an offer from a then-upstart company called Geffen Records. That led to one of the great rock recoveries ever. With the release of the late-’80s albums “Permanent Vacation” and “Pump,” Aerosmith’s sales surpassed even those of the group’s first glory days.

But as a new decade dawned, a funny thing happened, says Tyler: “Our manager [Tim Collins] heard rumors that [label owner] David Geffen thought that we didn’t have another album in us.”

“[Geffen and his staff] were divesting themselves of a lot of music from the ‘80s,” Perry says, “and I think they saw us as part of that. Clearly, we didn’t agree.”

Just as Aerosmith started questioning Geffen’s loyalty, Columbia came a-courtin’. Michelle Anthony, the executive vice president of Sony Music Entertainment (which has owned Columbia since 1990), and Columbia chairman Don Ienner orchestrated a deal with Collins, even though the band still owed Geffen three more albums. Anthony and Ienner later persuaded John Kalodner, the artists-and-repertoire executive who engineered Aerosmith’s Geffen deal, to join Columbia once his contract with Geffen expired in 1994.

Given that the members of the band would be nearly 50 by the time the new contract kicked in, many industry observers scoffed at the Columbia deal.

But the label’s faith seemed vindicated in 1993 when “Get a Grip,” Aerosmith’s final studio album on Geffen, shot to the top of the charts and matched “Pump’s” sales of 7 million in the U.S. alone, according to the Recording Industry Assn. of America. A double-platinum greatest-hits collection, “Big Ones,” followed in 1994, leaving the group free to record “Nine Lives” for Columbia. (The final album owed Geffen, due probably next year, will reportedly be a live collection that will draw on the group’s entire catalog, including “Nine Lives.”)

While the thrashing rockers and power ballads on Aerosmith’s new album hardly seem like a departure for the band, Tyler says that Columbia’s support has played an important role in building the band’s confidence.

“Positive affirmation fans the flames of creativity,” says the singer, flashing his Cheshire-cat grin. “When I hear, ‘Donnie [Ienner]’s rockin’ out so much to your music, and he’s such a big fan’ . . . that’s just a kick in the ass. And it feels good.”

To help them write the songs on “Nine Lives,” Tyler and Perry turned to, among others, longtime standby Desmond Child, who collaborated with them on such hits as “Angel,” “Crazy” and “Dude (Looks Like a Lady),” and Glen Ballard, who produced and co-wrote Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” album.

(Ballard initially did production work on “Nine Lives” as well, but was replaced late in the game by Kevin Shirley, after complications in the studio prolonged the project, creating a conflict with Ballard’s other commitments, including working with Van Halen.)

In the final stages of writing, Aerosmith’s singer and lead guitarist relocated from Boston to Miami, where they could juggle work with fun in the sun.

“We were able to walk down the beach two miles to get to the gym in the morning,” Tyler recalls, “and then see a couple of [bare-breasted women] on the way back--’cause it was a nude beach! There were birds and fruit and Latino music; it was just a beautiful thing. So many songs were written out of laughter and sheer joy.”

But there was also some aggravation, involving allegations made by former manager Collins, who started working with the band right before its late-’80s comeback, having previously been Perry’s personal manager.

Though he acknowledges that he indulged in drugs with the musicians, Collins eventually helped put them on the road to sobriety a little more than a decade ago--introducing them, Perry says, “to people who had insight, who told us that the drugs had to go.”

According to Tyler, Collins’ arrangement with the band was “open,” in that Collins had agreed he would step down from his position at any time if asked. But when the manager was in fact asked to resign last year, before his third five-year contract had expired--for reasons that neither Tyler nor Perry will specify--his reaction was anything but nonchalant.

“The morning after we approached him,” Tyler says, “[Collins] went to the press and said, ‘I’ve been fired.’ Lie number one. Number two, he said that the band [members] don’t see eye to eye . . . on sobriety issues.”

Collins’ implication, as Tyler and most others saw it, was that someone in Aerosmith had fallen off the wagon, most likely the frontman. Collins gave subsequent interviews, never accusing Tyler outright but suggesting that he had heard reports of drug-related behavior.

When asked to comment, Collins said, “I can tell you that I have not seen Steven Tyler do drugs in over 10 years. But many people came to me and told me he was using them, and . . . [Tyler was] having mood swings in the studio, having difficulty with people, fighting with the band. It was my job to go to him and say, ‘What’s going on?’ . . . Whether it was drugs or not, he was not acting rational.”

Tyler admits that when he’s in his “creative spot,” as he calls it, he tends to put less emphasis on accommodating others. In fact, all five members of Aerosmith last summer checked into a drug-rehabilitation clinic near Los Angeles for what Perry calls “a conflict-resolution week,” where the men could sort out their differences. The group is now managed by Wendy Laister, a former publicist who had worked with the band as a consultant.

“We only went to [a drug clinic] because the guy who runs it is the person we wanted to facilitate our seminar,” Perry stresses, backing up Tyler’s assertion that everyone in Aerosmith has stayed sober.

“At the end of the day,” Tyler muses, “I’d like to remember all the good stuff that Tim did for us. But when my 7-year-old daughter has a sleepover party and her best friend says, ‘My daddy doesn’t want me to come over ‘cause your father is doing drugs,’ and then my daughter confronts me--that hurts. After all he did for us, [Collins] stabbed me right in the heart.”

While the Collins controversy is clearly a thorn in their side, Tyler and Perry say that they’re feeling better than ever about their career these days--although not for the reasons a cynical observer might expect.

Columbia’s Kalodner is confident about the commercial prospects of the “Nine Lives” album. “It has the potential to do as well or better than ‘Get a Grip’ did because it combines the great rock elements of those early Columbia albums with the sort of singles you found on the Geffen albums,” he says. In fact, “Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees)” is already on top of Billboard magazine’s mainstream rock radio airplay chart.

But Tyler and Perry insist that, at this point, the satisfaction of a job well done is reward enough.

“The inspiration is still there,” Perry says proudly of the band’s new music. “We’ve all been through our midlife crises, we’ve been burned out, we’ve gone through all that [expletive] that bands go through. And now we’re sitting in the living room playing, like we did when we were 17. And you know what? It still gets me off.”

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The Amazing Unchanging Steven Tyler

Match the five photos of Aerosmith’s lead singer below with the years they were taken (1977, 1983, 1988, 1990 and 1994). Does his hair give it away? You figure it out.

Answers: A: 1983; B: 1994; C: 1977; D: 1988; E: 1990