The story of the Aerosmith 1980s collapse is one of the most brutal in American rock history: platinum-selling arena giants reduced, within a few chaotic years, to members selling guitars, flogging houses and scraping by on $20 a day. It did not happen overnight. It happened note by note, drink by drink, line by line.
Faking seizures and forgetting the words
January 1980. Aerosmith are at the Civic Centre in Maine, playing from their Night In The Ruts album to a sold-out room. Singer Steven Tyler, frustrated at having no cocaine to cut through the booze already coursing through him, decides the most dignified exit is to fake a seizure. He throws himself to the stage and twitches his leg to make it look convincing. The band stops. He is carried off. It is, by any measure, rock bottom, except rock bottom keeps descending.
To that point the tour has lurched along badly enough. Guitarist Joe Perry had left the previous year, replaced by JP-lookalike Jimmy Crespo, and the band have been playing shows where Tyler forgets his lines and sits on the drum riser too unsteady to stand. After the fake seizure they cancel a week of dates, resume, and limp to the end of the tour in a haze of drink and drugs.
Meanwhile Perry, touring separately with his Joe Perry Project, is in no better shape: a barely functioning drunk addicted to snorting heroin, complaining that his own singer Ralph Morman had become an out-of-control drunk. As Perry recalled in his autobiography Rocks: ‘One night he showed up in a wild state of inebriation. I hauled off and decked him.’ The irony was not lost on everyone except Perry.
No money, no record, no band
The Aerosmith 1980s collapse was as much financial as chemical. Their fourth album Rocks had shipped platinum and reached No.3 on the Billboard chart in the mid-1970s. By 1980 that felt like a dispatch from another civilisation. Co-manager David Krebs informed Perry he personally owed $180,000 in room service charges and suggested a solo album might clear the bill.
Back in the main band, work on a follow-up ground almost to a halt after Tyler was badly injured in a motorcycle crash. Poverty moved in quietly and stayed. Bassist Tom Hamilton recalled selling his house and moving into a condo while the album, titled Rock In A Hard Place, was ‘always two months away’ for two full years. Drummer Joey Kramer put it plainly: ‘It was rough. There was no money. I was on the balls of my ass. I spent everything I had… until, finally, nothing.’ Guitarist Brad Whitford sold his guitars, sold his house, and eventually walked. Aerosmith were down to three original members.
When Rock In A Hard Place finally appeared in August 1982, written largely by a hallucinating Tyler scoring heroin from a friend, it peaked at No.32 on the Billboard chart and earned a Gold award, ending a run of Platinum hits. Tyler later admitted: ‘By 1983 I had no money and no future except getting further into the pit. Back in 1976, when I read stories about guys who lost everything and blew a million bucks snorting all they had, I used to say: “That’ll never happen to me.” But in the end, I blew $20 million.’
Perry’s situation was equally grim. Elyssa, his wife, continued spending as though he were still riding the arena circuit. He walked out on her after six-and-a-half years together, but paying for access to their son Adrian ate into whatever remained. His new manager Tim Collins became, in Perry’s words, ‘the only steady force in my life’, partly by taking away a grocery bag full of unopened bills, IRS claims and foreclosure notices and coming back a week later offering to pay off ‘a big portion’ of the debts, no strings attached.
Collins eventually negotiated Perry away from Columbia Records and onto MCA for the Project’s third album. The headline gigs, Perry admitted, ‘were getting smaller and smaller’. What did improve his life: meeting Billie Montgomery, a model discovered while the Project were casting a video for Black Velvet Pants. He describes it as love at first sight; they are together to this day.
The reunion, the Geffen deal and the road back
The catalyst for the Aerosmith 1980s collapse coming to an end was, in the end, petty competitive jealousy. Alice Cooper’s management called Collins sounding out Perry for a guitar slot. Perry took the meeting and, while Alice played golf the next day, rang Tyler to gloat. Tyler, then living in a hotel on $20 a day, eventually called back: ‘Are you seriously going to be his guitar player? What the fuck? Just stop. The shit’s over. Why don’t you just come back with Aerosmith?’
The five original members convened at Tom Hamilton’s house in early 1984, Hamilton being, as Perry noted, the one who had been ‘more conservative with his money.’ Perry’s condition for returning was that the band cut ties with Leber-Krebs Management entirely and move across to Collins. They agreed, and pointed the finger at David Krebs as the source of their financial woes. Perry was direct about it: ‘Was it immoral? Yeah!’
According to Encyclopedia.com, within two months of a Valentine’s Day 1984 reunion, the band signed with newly formed Geffen Records and were back on the road. The Aerosmith 1980s collapse had a hard end date after all. The ‘second career’ the band later described, one that would see them selling records at platinum quantities again, was just around the corner, though nobody was placing bets on it from the floor of Tom Hamilton’s living room in early 1984.
