ELLE.com
By Andrew Goldman
January 7, 2009
Photo: Melissa MahoneySteven Tyler hasn’t missed a thing—including fun at every altitudeMight it be that Steven Tyler, at 60, is just counting the days until his Social Security payments kick in so he can finally retire from his job touring with Aerosmith, his 39-year-old band? How else to explain how Yonkers’ mouthiest son—born Steven Tallarico—continues, facing the indignity of women a fraction his age thrusting all those naked breasts in his face, not to mention the requisite detoxing and delousing the lifestyle requires. Shuffleboard and obit scanning await! Why, just last year, there was that brawl in a Florida nightclub in which his thirtysomething girlfriend, Erin Brady, fought with another woman over his skinny carcass. Wouldn’t an earlybird special and a schvitz be a nice alternative to this madness? As one of the all-time great rockers once sang, dream on.
ELLE: What can you tell me about your first sexual experience?
Steven Tyler: It was at the age of seven with twins.
ELLE: Where does a boy go to find naughty prepubescent twins?
ST: They sat next to me in the church choir. They were French.
ELLE: At that age, I can’t imagine you got the full ménage à trois.
ST: They took me home one day, and we had a you-show-me-yours-I’ll-show-you-mine session. Isn’t that great? You know, I look at their pictures now and think to myself, How much sweeter does it get? And isn’t it crazy that my ex-wife Teresa was a twin and my girlfriend now is a twin?
ELLE: So in your marriage to Teresa, was there ever any serious talk of bringing the other twin into the bedroom?
ST: I asked her for years and I got so smacked down.
ELLE: Since you’ve had a couple marriages fail, I wondered: If you could will your voice to be heard in the head of every man a split second before he pops the question, what would you say?
ST: “Don’t get fuckin’ married.” And “Lie till you die.”
ELLE: Over the years, your relationship with Aerosmith’s guitarist Joe Perry has been more contentious than many bad marriages, but you still play together. How do you manage that relationship?
ST: There’s that famous saying, “This thing is bigger than both of us.” Some guys will have terrible feelings about an ex-wife they had a child with, but after giving birth to something so beautiful, how can you hate that person? We’ve given birth to those songs.
ELLE: You wrote the pointed lyrics of “Sweet Emotion”—“You talk about things that nobody cares/ You’re wearing out things that nobody wears”—about Joe’s then-wife Elyssa. Why?
ST: I was pissed off. We had all been living in a house and writing many great songs together, and then he moved in with her. Suddenly, I only saw him at rehearsals. I’d lost my guitar player.
ELLE: How did he react to those lyrics?
ST: I don’t think he put it together. Guitar players never listen to lead singers.
ELLE: When you and Joe competed for women, who won?
ST: Well, we didn’t compete, but we did share. And the crabs won.
ELLE: In Walk This Way, the oral history of Aerosmith, the band’s engineer, Rabbit Hansen, said that band members weren’t to accept oral sex for the last 10 days of tour so as not to spread venereal diseases to girlfriends at home.
ST: That wasn’t the band’s rule. You didn’t have sex for 10 days at the end of tour, but that was so you’d be sure to go home with a full cup of chowder. If you didn’t, you were definitely suspect.
ELLE: Women know that men touch themselves. Isn’t that a good excuse for, uh, low chowder levels?
ST: That only holds with a woman the first couple times.
ELLE: In the ’70s, you once told an interviewer, “I’ll tell you what’s fun—finding the right stewardess and turning her upside down in the back of a plane.” Did this actually happen? I mean, aren’t flight attendants too busy to be nailing passengers?
ST: Are you kidding? They would tell me, “I’ll meet you in the bathroom in 10 minutes.”
ELLE: Do you think post-9/11 this might be harder to pull off?
ST: The bathroom’s still there. You just open the door and walk in. But if it happens now, it’s usually on night flights.
ELLE: Noncelebrities find sex with new partners exciting because of that feeling of “I can’t believe this person is willing to do this thing with me.” As a rock star who’s fending off flight attendants, do you feel like you miss out on that excitement?
ST: No, because you still think to yourself, My God, I can’t believe this is happening. You don’t ever take it for granted, unless you’re Gene Simmons and so full of yourself.
ELLE: Has any female celebrity ever shunned your advances?
ST: Never. I’m a persistent motherfucker. I’m very sensual and very rhythm-oriented and into poetry. Women can feel that.
ELLE: Tell me a story of public humiliation that involves a woman.
ST: I can’t really think about anything other than things I really don’t want to talk about—like divorces, or my girlfriend, Erin, getting in a fight in a club defending my honor, and then people saying she got me on drugs, which is the furthest thing from the truth. That’s the press for you.
ELLE: How exactly did your girlfriend defend your honor?
ST: A girl was sitting on my lap too long, and my girlfriend just threw her off. It turned into a brawl.
ELLE: But the question remains: Why was this girl sitting in your lap for so long?
ST: That might have been my fault.
