FACT NO. 1: If someone had asked the question ten years age where the members of Aerosmith would be in 1990, the informed and quite reasonable answer would have been "Possibly Dead". If the field had been narrowed to Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, the notorious Toxic Twins, the pair that had personalized the 'Health-free lifestyle' the odds on them not seeing the 90's would have been even shorter.

FACT NO.2: The most hotly anticipated tour of 1990 is about to occur and the band entrusted to deliver the goods is Aerosmith. They've just had their most successful album ever in Pump and they've regained the status they held in the late 70's as the world's most popular rock n' roll band.

I figure by now that Steve Tyler must be getting tired of talking about his return from the nearly dead and so when the phone rings at 3:00 am I plan not to ask too many questions about that topic. Perhaps it's the thrill of being alive and pumpin' that inspires Tyler, but he's got other ideas. I ask him about the joys of success (not excess) and he launches into short form history of Aerosmith.

"What we did was we drunk ourselves into a stupor, you know?," he begins. ... "We got so high and so loaded at the end of the 70's it was like wearing blinkers. You don't see what the fuck's really happening to you. If there was a turning point it was when Joe Perry left and I said 'Fuck you, I'm going to keep the band going'. But I still had the same problem. I was still getting really fucked up and not thinking with my rock n' roll head. Or maybe I was thinking with a rock n' roll head - I'm not going to decide that yet. Aerosmith without Joe Perry worked for about one and a half years but the problems were still there. I was so fucked up I was only giving it 20 percent. But I never thought 'What the fuck's going on?' I thought 'This is great, fuck Joe Perry, we don't, need him'. But it finally sunk in. I really did miss the guy. Time heals all wounds and all that shit and fortunately we were able to see that something was killing our band. Never mind killing us. Who gives a shit what's killing you, so long as it's fun. But when we could see that Aerosmith was getting flushed down the toit., that was the time we grabbed the reins and realised we'd do fuckin' anything to get our band back."

It wasn't an immediately successful rehab. An album Done With Mirrors, recorded with Perry back in the fold, was O.K. but still suffered from the same disarray as the minds of it's makers. In 1986 Aerosmith re-recorded in early hit Walk This Way with Run DMC. Suddenly Aerosmith was the word on a new generation of kids lips and when the likes of Van Halen and Bon Jovi began calling Aerosmith their major influence the spark of interest ignited. 1987's Permanent Vacation fanned the flames with songs like Dude Looks Like a Lady and Rag Doll and so by the time Pump came out Aerosmith were back on top. Not satisfied to put out an album that simply compared well with their imitators Aerosmith turned Pump into a knock-out punch. I'd argue it's one of the great rock n' roll records of all time and one that stylistically was light years ahead of its mass of hard rock contemporaries. With Pump Aerosmith have set the pace for the 90's and it's up to the pretenders to try and catch up - again!

"After being around for eighteen years and people calling us 'legends', I don't feel like that," comments Tyler. "But what I do feel is that once you've got more than five or six albums under your belt you feel that unless you do something different and innovative you're going to lose your licence to rock. Doing the same old bullshit is not being a musician really. It's O.K in the beginning. You have to copy someone. You might like the blues so you do something like Elmore James or Muddy Waters. Then if you're around long enough you can do a take off on that.

"Then somehow if you're lucky enough it becomes your style. With all the rock n' roll we've done people, after ten albums, are finally taking stock of what we've done. But me, all I give a shit about is being up there with Joe Perry. I think he plays fuckin' great. When I'm on stage and I look around and see these guys I flip out. Then I look into the audience and they see me loving it and they pick up on that vibe.

"We were real lucky to come up with the equation for Pump. Joe and I said 'We don't want to do anything like Permanent Vacation'. We didn't need that, we needed songs that were as good as but better. We completely dismissed anything that had something to do with Permanent Vacation. We started all new.

"So what happens if you take a chance? 1) Everyone will go 'Oh wow, that's fuckin' great' or 2) They'll go 'that fuckin' sucks'. I would rather go into a project knowing that we took a risk. Anyway I liked it, Joe liked it and anything that Joe and I like most people usually like. We've been real fortunate that we've never put anything really dumb on an album, but I suppose that could be debated with."

Much has been written about Pump's pre-occupation with the topic of sex and despite songs like Janie's Got A Gun (a narrative examination on the psychology of a child abuse victim) or Monkey On My Back (a personalized chronicle of substance abuse) the comment is an accurate one. It's bought about a series of comments along the 'sex is rock n' roll and rock n' roll is sex' line but that's kind of missing the point. Aerosmith's sexuality isn't of the 'cucumber down the pants' type; it's more primal and musical, and less blatantly contrived than that. When I suggest to Tyler that Aerosmith's sexuality is musically not lyrically founded he knows what I mean. In Love In An Elevator it's not that Tyler says 'going down' that sparks it, it's the way he says it.

"Sometimes the way Joe Perry and Joey Kramer lay down a groove turns sexual to me. It's hard to explain. I guess it's real basic, strippers have done it for years. But yeah, it all has to do with the way you say it. If you're real crude with it in rock n' roll, it aids and abets the slamming of it. Some journalists can really get away with knocking the dumbness of sex in some rock n'roll. But I like to think that the way I do it is more burlesque and real 'naughty'. It's 'seam down the back on the lace stockings' type stuff. I don't know it is that I go into a ladies store and I try on different shirts and they look good on me whereas on someone else it looks stupid. But I weave that into the music and I think a lot of the sex I has a lot to do with what Joe Perry weaves in there with his instrument too."

Tyler has been quoted as saying that rock music allows him to let the kid inside him out and this goes a long way to explaining how millions of kids are still able to relate to a band made up of guys who are, well, forty-something. Most bands like to talk about being able to relate to their audience but in Tyler's case he's got something more concrete to base his allegiance on.

"I can still relate to being a kid only because I think I started abusing drugs and alcohol when I was sixteen years old and I didn't stop until I was forty years old. They say that you are emotionally as old as you were when you started, so I guess right now I'm about nineteen years old because I've only had about three years being sober."

He's got a point that's well illustrated by Janie's Got A Gun. At his age his peers are the parents, the abusers yet the song so effectively sees the situation through the eyes of a child, the victim.

"As soon as I started thinking about child abuse. I realised what 'abuse' could mean. It could be a father sexually molesting a four year old child to a ten year old kid being called an idiot by his parents. They're both really strong forms of abuse. A lot of parents don't know that. The kids are the ones getting the shitty end of the stick. So the kids can relate to the side of being abused. When I was a kid my parents were beautiful to me but part of the reason I was a conscientious objector to authority was that there was a form of abuse in my school where my teachers were null and void and said 'Don't, don't, don't'. I know that eight out of ten kids are abused - not all the same way but it's something I can relate to."

Perhaps the main reason for Aerosmith's current prevelance over a scene that they helped create before vacating office is the fact that they learnt the ropes in an era where the band itself mattered a whole lot more than the marketing of that band. These days so much emphasis is placed on the video, the compulsory power ballad, the clothes and the hairstyle that perhaps the marketers are forgetting that rock n' roll (you remember - the music) still actually matters to the audience, or potential audience.

"That's right," affirms Tyler. "Rock n' roll is a life and language all it's own. it goes way past A.B.C.D.E.F.G. It's a real incredible medium. You may look around and think that everybody is ignorant but everyone is getting a lot smarter and realizing that there's a lot more problems going on than ever before. But there is a solution to those problems. Personally who would have thought I could get through a day without looking for a buzz. That was my whole life - getting fucked up. There's a solution to being abused. And it's all in the language and how you speak it. I'm just learning how to do it."