I don’t want Aerosmith’s name involved with it. Perry initially blasted Tyler to the press, famously saying that American Idol is “ one step above Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He didn’t sit any of them down to tell them the news. The internal workings of the band aren’t that different than they’ve ever been, but because of the circumstances and Steven’s visibility and all that stuff with American Idol, it just got blown out of proportion.”Īerosmith returned to the road in the summer of 2010, but toward the end of the tour the band learned from the media that Tyler had taken a job as a judge on American Idol. “I think a lot of things got taken out of context, and that’s pretty much the big picture. “A lot of that was blown up by the media,” he says. Joe Perry insists all the drama was blown out of proportion. When all this shit was going on, I told the guys, ‘Look, I’m strong. “Imagine what it’s like for me to sit in a room with them and go, ‘Really, right now? Really, the fuck right now?’ But look – life is about looking the other way sometimes. “The band still has the same managers they had when they said they were looking for another singer,” says Tyler. Why are they asking me to do that?'”Īll the turmoil caused Tyler to part ways with Aerosmith’s management and hire his own team. They’d go, ‘What the fuck’s going on, man? I can’t sing your shit. Look, I got calls from the singers they were calling. You sit down next to me.’ It’s a strange dealio between this band and me. I said to him, ‘You go learn the fucking ukulele. “I had some terrible surgery on my feet and I just couldn’t stand.
“Another time they suggested I sit on a stool,” he says. The singer ultimately headed to rehab, but before he left, the band’s management suggested he somehow find a way to finish the tour, possibly in a motorized wheelchair. Also, I wasn’t the only guy in the band using at that time.” “As my beautiful girlfriend Erin Brady said at the time, ‘You were much higher three years ago.’ The weather was bad. “I didn’t fall off that stage because I was high,” Tyler says today. He was further enraged when they went public with their desire to hire a new singer, also noting that they believed he was back on drugs. Tyler claims that nobody in the band visited or called him in the hospital. He suffered severe injuries (including a broken shoulder) and the band was forced to cancel the remainder of their tour. In the summer of 2009, Tyler fell off the stage while performing in Sturgis, South Dakota. Though there is little evidence of band discord on the DVD, the Japanese tour came less than two years after one of the most tumultuous periods in Aerosmith’s extremely rocky history. The show mixes big hits like “Love in an Elevator,” “Sweet Emotion” and “Walk This Way” with deeper album cuts like “Boogie Man” and “No More No More.” The finished product, Rock for the Rising Sun, hits shelves on July 23rd. We originally wanted to do it for the Japanese fans, but it turned into something bigger than that.” “He started putting it together and we realized it would make a great documentary. “He said to us, ‘Hey guys, I think we’ve got something here,'” says Perry. The band’s longtime videographer, Casey Patrick Tebo, filmed all the shows, as well as the band’s offstage interactions with fans as they traveled through the country.
“After we got there, we found out that they were still in shock, but they needed a little shot in the arm of rock & roll.” “We weren’t sure if they were ready to come out and celebrate,” says Steven Tyler. Japan has been a huge market for Aerosmith, going all the way back to the mid-Seventies, but the band wondered if they were ready for a rock tour so soon after the tragedy. You just don’t think about it here in America and it isn’t on CNN much, but they’re living with it every day.” “We definitely went over with Geiger counters and kind of watched the levels. “We were uneasy about the radiation,” says Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry. A devastating earthquake and tsunami in March of that year led to a nuclear disaster that caused many bands to cancel planned Japanese tours. Aerosmith headed to Japan in November 2011 with more than a little trepidation.