MY ROCK STAR LIFE
(Sources: AF1 e Boston Common)
Steven Tyler has been uncharacteristically quiet this year. But while Aerosmith was on hiatus, its front man was busy at home with a new fashion line and new recordings.
By Kim Atkinson
Pics by Gavin Bond
We hear you have a new album in the works.
The band’s never taken a year off. Last August we decided to take one, and three months in I was bored to tears. We have one more studio album and one more live album to do, so I decided to go through the studio tapes. We had played at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas, and the band had never played better than that night. So the album is called Rockin’ the Joint: Live at the Hard Rock. We’re going out on tour Nov. 1.
I also recorded a song with Carlos Santana called “Just Feel Better” for his new album, All That I Am, due Nov. 1.
Tell us about your new fashion line.
I’ve been working with a girl I met three years ago, Elise Overland. She’s from Oslo, Norway. She had designed 30 pairs of pants for a fashion show, and when she had them brought over somebody stole the truck. So a year later everyone in Greenwich Village is walking around with her pants on. I said, “My God, you lost a whole line.” And she goes, “It’s all right, I’ll get it back.” We just thought, we’ll take it to the next level and make a clothing line.
She makes clothes for my tours, my videos. As you know, I’m androgynous. I can wear a jacket that most guys wouldn’t put on. But you make it in guys’ sizes, and suddenly they’re wearing them. I think styles should get back to getting people to wear things that look so good that they don’t care. I mean, as long as it doesn’t have a bra attached, guys can take a risk and wear stylish things that went out of style 30 years ago. As things go around, they come around.
Did you have that in mind when designing the line?
Elise made a women’s line, but when I put the clothes on, it was like, whoops, this isn’t just for women. It’s just very high-end leather and fur, and just phenomenally stylish pieces that will last forever. You can’t wait to get up in the morning and put them on, and get the same feeling you got the night before, when you were wearing them and someone came up to you and asked, “Will you marry me?”
Where do you envision wearing the clothes?
You can wear these jackets and coats with either ripped jeans or stylish pants. So it’s all up to you. They’ll be sold at Barneys, at Maxfields in LA, and some of the high-end, trendy stores. I’m sure Alan Bilzerian will carry a couple of pieces.
So when is the debut?
We will be doing a fashion show in New York during Fashion Week. We’re going to have a runway and models and the whole nine yards. I’m going to get up at the end and sing a song—maybe “Pink.”
Did you ever dream you’d get into fashion design?
I’m not sure about the selling part, but I’ve always found that the things I’ve worn on tour have moved over to what people wear every day. Sometimes the things I wore in the beginning before I had money were things I put together. I would go to Italy and find pieces that no one was wearing. And people like Elise would design pieces for me, with an eye for wear, for structure, for durability, for style.
Do you have pieces from back then that you still wear?
Oh God, yeah. I’ve got scarves and boots from 1970 that I still wear.
How would you describe your style?
Trash meets vaudeville meets highbrow and hipster. It was more about self and what I wanted to do. And now I’m wearing pants with side pockets I would have never worn in the old days. Now I’m way into suits that I can put on whether I took a shower or not, and wear barefoot and paint my toes black or whatever color the suit is. It’s very cool to wear suits like that. Roll up the sleeves and just say yee-haw.
So you’ve been home these past few months on hiatus from the band, spending time with your family. What’s been happening?
People ask me, “What are you doing? Where have you been?” I tell them I’m trying to unlearn. Home is just a place to go and blow it out. I’ve got a huge fence around the house, so I don’t get visits from people who slept in my neighbor’s backyard the night before, going, “Steven, please I come from Germany and I want to see you. Can we have lunch together?”
Your house has quite a lot of landscaping. Did you design it yourself?
I’m really just a country boy. I grew up in New Hampshire. My closest neighbor was a mile away. The deer and the raccoons were my friends. So I would spend time walking through the woods, looking for the most beautiful tropical thing that can survive the winter in the woods in New Hampshire. I started putting things together for my home. Weeping willows and weeping pines. I call it my “avant garden.”
What made you decide to do a photo shoot at your house?
My wife and I had decided not to let anybody take pictures of our home because it was just the last place on earth we had that was unscathed. But people have climbed over the fence; they’ve taken aerial shots. They’ve gotten my address and put it on the Internet. But I thought, my daughter’s here, it’s so beautiful, what better place on a day off would I like to do a photo shoot?
Do you spend time in the studio when you’re at home?
Oh, yeah. What starts out as fear and “Oh my God, I’ve got another album” turns into a labor of love and something I never thought I could pull off. I wrote “Pink” and “Jaded” in my studio. And “Nine Lives.” So many songs. I’ve got a local kid named Paul Santo who’s my home engineer and who’s an extraordinary musician. He’s played on 20 different songs that we’ve done in the past. He’s a great keyboardist. He’s a great drummer, great guitar player. He helps me get the sounds. More than anything, he knows Pro Tools, and he knows how to catch it. I may know where the fish are, but he has the drift net to catch them.
Does your family join in?
My daughter Chelsea is a great singer. She’s forever singing as she goes from room to room in the house. My son Taj plays guitar. So he’s got that cranked on 90, using one of Joe Perry’s old amps. And a Joe Perry guitar that he gave us. At midnight the other night, Taj said to me, “Do you want to go over to the studio?” So I started playing the drums, and he started playing the guitar, and we figured out how to play “Train Kept A Rollin’.” He knows how to play the entire song “Seasons of Wither.” And that kind of a night is a regular occurrence around here.
You’ve got quite a menagerie at your house.
I’ve got two dogs, Bailey the beagle and Lucky, my black lab with one blue eye and one green. I’ve got a cockatiel named Knuckles and a cat named Pookah that I saved from a fire. There are three peacocks, one named Harley and one named Davidson, and they had a baby. And I’ve got 12 chickens. I’ve got two wild turkeys that I found after their mom got hit by a car. They followed me around; they were so small and so cute. I called up my friend Fawn who works at the New England Wildlife Center in Hingham. She takes care of all the baby animals that get hit by cars in the area, and they took the turkeys. She’s got a staff of people that hand-feed the babies for a couple of months until they are ready to be put back in the wild again.
What else do you do when you’re at home?
There’s a great horseback-riding stable a mile from my house. I’ll go and borrow somebody’s horse and just go up in the woods for three or four hours and get lost. And that’s just unbelievable. I like to go to fairs when I can. My son is 13, and he’s the greatest to hang out with and just go into the woods. We like to go play paintball. I go to Humarock Beach and hang out there with all my friends who are police and firemen. And I go places with Joe Perry or Joey Kramer. We’ll go to the cymbal plant and check out cymbals to buy for the tour.
Tell us about your summer vacation.
Paulie Senior from Orange County Choppers sent his jet for me, and we went to the Grand Canyon, then all the way up to Glacier National Park. It was just an incredible 1,500-mile trip. Every day I would see bear and elk and coyotes and geese and bald eagles. I’m on this giant Harley, all yellow, with saddlebags, and everything I own in my saddlebags. I was listening to XM radio with buttons that had 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s rock. And I just couldn’t believe it, every turn I took, every mountain peak I was on, I was hearing another song that I either had my first love affair to, or was thrown out of school to, or my daughter got married to. Songs like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” or “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby” by the Rolling Stones, “Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” “Green Tambourine.” It was such a blowout. Every night we would drive until we’d just find a hotel, you know, eeny, meeny, miny, moe. We’d stay at Motel 6, get up at 6 in the morning, have an egg fry at Jake’s Diner. Hit the frog and toad again.
Who do you consider your great friends in Boston?
Richie Balsbaugh is just a really great friend. Alan Bilzerian. Billy McDonald. Don Law. That’s just for starters. Donna Green, a very famous artist—she has a picture hanging in the White House. I hang out with Frank Gangi, and he takes me in his jet—at the drop of the hat we’ll go to Chicago and have lunch. I meet him at the airport, and we’re there by noon.
What are your favorite things to do when you’re in Boston?
I like to stop at Sonsie and get their spring rolls. That’s first and foremost. There’s always the North End. And then there’s my favorite pizza place besides my restaurant, Mount Bleu—I love to stop at Santarpio’s. They’ve been feeding Aerosmith since day one. The lamb on the skewers—oh my God, it’s a must-stop on the way to the airport.
Your daughter Liv and her husband, musician Royston Langdon, recently had their first child, Milo. What did you think when you heard the news?
I don’t mind being a grandfather; I’ve been a mother for so many years. You just can’t believe what it’s like being a father. Especially when you come out of the chaos of the road to getting married and having children. It’s phenomenal. You know, it just made me cry. I called Liv and she said, “I think I’m going home today. But Daddy, the damn paparazzi, they’re trying to cut me off to get a glimpse of the baby.” I called up Frank Gangi, and an hour later we were at her house. I got to hold the baby and look at his little red face. It’s a new era. He definitely looks a bit like Mom, but boys tend to look like their fathers. And I see Royston in Milo. He’ll have to be a musician.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
Hopefully on an island somewhere where the colors are gorgeous and it’s always spring and warm and alive. Somewhere I can ride my motorcycle with just a T-shirt on. Someplace where everything’s young, alive, and growing.
Is that how you feel right now?
You always do when you have something new cooking. A song in your heart and in your back pocket, a CD.
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