the cold weather, how could a monkey, who doesn’t even know how to buy a coat? So if you go back, you’re black. It’s so stupid to go around saying, “I’m Italian” (the way I do all the time).
My way of avoiding being beaten up at school was to play the drums in a band. My first group was the Strangers: Don Solomon, Peter Stahl, and Alan Stohmayer. Peter played guitar, Alan bass, Don was the lead singer, and I played drums. We would set up in the cafeteria and do a mixer after school. I played “Wipeout” and sang “In My Room.” In high school the key to not being made fun of is to be entertaining, the same way that some fat people become funny, tell jokes, make fun of people, and then they get left alone. I was skinny and big-lipped and pinheaded. I grew my hair and played the drums in a band, and that was my key to acceptance. I knew about music from my dad, and so rock ’n’ roll was a case of please-don’t-throw-me-in-the-Briar-Patch!
I was giddily starstruck. At the Brooklyn Fox I ran up onstage and touched Mary Weiss, the lead singer of the bad-girl group the Shangri-Las. With her long blond hair, black leather pants, and melancholy eyes, Mary Weiss was a teen goddess. She alone was reason enough for making rock ’n’ roll your own personal religion, especially while she was singing “Leader of the Pack.” She was a gorgeous tough girl who later got questioned by the FBI for carrying a gun across state lines. I was completely smitten with her. The next time I saw her it was a little more intimate—but not because Mary Weiss wanted it that way. In 1966 I went to Cleveland with one of my later bands, Chain Reaction, to do this teen dance show, Upbeat. I wanted to sing lead, so I got David Conrad (nephew of John Conrad, who ran the Barn) to play drums. There were no dressing rooms, so I went into the bathroom to change. I heard someone in the next stall. Thinking it was David, as a joke I hoisted myself up to the top of the stall. But when I peered over, there was Mary Weiss, with her black leather pants around her ankles and her patch showing. I got such the boner from that—I fantasized about that for weeks! It got me through a lot of cold winter nights up in Sunapee.
At our house in Yonkers, no one locked their doors, so with the advent of sex and drugs I had to figure something out to stop anyone from catching me smoking pot or rubbing one out or whatever else I was doing up there. A serious problem for a teenager. You had to put a chair in front of the door, but what a drag! From working with traps I knew how to rig things, and I came up with an ingenious way of locking a door. I drilled through the tongue—the metal latch that goes into the strike plate of the door—and put a coat hanger through it, leaving four inches sticking out like a pin on a hand grenade. If you turned the handle the door wouldn’t open.
Then I devised a more fiendish plan. Through the mail I bought an induction coil, which is nothing more than a transformer for an electric train. On your train set you can turn the transformer up to ten, twenty, thirty, forty, so your Lionel train is just whippin’ around the track until it’s going so fast it falls off the tracks. I took the induction coil and attached it to the railing on the way up to my room so that if anyone touched that railing, they’d be zapped right off their feet. I’d be upstairs doing a girl, parents were gone for the weekend, those few, chosen moments when I needed serious warning. And YES, people did get zapped. But only my best friends! I’d go, “Touch that!” and they’d go “Yeeoooow!” Suddenly best friends were so well behaved. I don’t know what happened.
Once I ran a wire all the way down to the basement and up under the couch and the pillows. I undid the wires, stripped about four inches off the insulation, spread them out—the positive and negative wires—and put them under the cushions so that whoever sat on the couch would get zapped. My best friend was down there eating peanuts. “Here, have this beer,” I said. “I’ll be right back!” I’m upstairs in my room, turning the train transformer on, and I get the door open and I switch it on. I’d hear the transformer buzz as it connected. I’m waiting there, listening to hear what happens . . . “Yow!” Just a little evil teenage fun.
When “The House of the Rising Sun” came on the radio, I thought it was the greatest record I’d ever heard. I saw the Animals perform it at the Academy of Music and was so overcome with raw emotion I jumped out of my seat, ran up the aisle, and shook the bass player Chas Chandler’s hand. Then came the Stones. Rock is my religion, and these guys were my gods!
You don’t need to go to the fucking Temple of Doom to find my banter on the Stones or the Yardbirds—what I thought about back then in my sixteen-year-old make-believe mind. It would have been the desire to write a song or be in an English band when the first Brit Invasion came over and—more than anything—fame! Immortality! I wanted to inject myself into the grooves of the record. I wanted dreamy nubile girls to listen to my voice and cry. A thousand years after my death I fantasized that there’d be people in the outer galaxies listening to “Dream On” and saying in hushed tones, “It’s him, the strange Immortal One!”
And then, briefly, I was touched by the caressing hand of fate when, sometime in 1964, I became Mick Jagger’s brother, Chris. Mick Jagger was the baddest guy on the block, and of course I empathetically picked up on all his shit. Mick and Keith and all that—it hit me like a locomotive. “It’s All Over Now” was like a fucking blues freight train coming straight at me.
In the summer of ’64, I went to a lake in upstate New York, Bash Bish Falls or something like that, up near Utica, with a bunch of kids from Yonkers. Long hair, sixteen, no band, but somebody said, “Wow, you look like Mick Jagger!” And that was it . . . off and running! “You know what, I’m Chris, Mick Jagger’s brovver. I am him!” And I went with it like mad. Shot off from there to this Limey planet and immediately lapsed into a Cockney accent. I was talking like “Bloody bleedin’ ’poncey wanker, spot of Marmite, darlin’? Care for a leaper, mate? Ghastly weather we’re ’avin, innit?” It’s called, you know, lost days of youth. When you’re a kid you can jump into other people’s personalities like a transmute. I can still relate to that.
In those days of the British Invasion you had to be a Brit to make it. First of all, you had to have a bloody English accent. That was number one. And that I could do. I still have those Strangers clippings at home: “Steven Tyler, his lower lip hanging like Jagger’s, brought the front row to its feet.” They wrote that in the paper. Bought my Mick impersonation lock, stock, and barrel. I couldn’t believe it. But of course, I—more than anyone else on the planet—believed it. I was him. I was barely sixteen but in my mind already one of “England’s Greatest Hit Makers.” Even if the Strangers sounded more like a bad imitation of Freddie and the Dreamers than the Stones. Yonkers Greatest Hit Makers maybe.
In the early seventies I was embarrassed to say I was into Mick, because the press was already harping on the Mick Jagger and Steven Tyler thing and I wanted to get as far away as possible from those comparisons. I was hoping they would find something in my music that would have some merit other than making Aerosmith into some sort of tribute band with me as a mock Mick Jagger.
But yes, he was my fucking hero. There was actually a six- or seven-year period where I was afraid to tell the press that. I was, like, “No he isn’t!” And then, of course, I came out of the closet and went, “Fuckin’ A, he is!” To this day, to this minute, to this second, Mick Jagger is still my hero. I remember being at a club at One Central Square in the West Village in early ’66, turning around and seeing Mick Jagger and Brian Jones sitting behind me. Not a word came out of my mouth.
I didn’t become Steven Tyler all at once. I made him up, bit by bit. He kind of grew out of playing all the clubs in New York and doing acid and hanging out in Greenwich Village and tripping and going to be-ins in Central Park. All that stuff is where I come from. But more than anything I was shaped by the kind of music that I listened to in ’64, ’65, ’66. The Yardbirds, the Stones, the Animals, the Pretty Things and their wild drummer Viv Prince—he was Keith Moon before Keith Moon became the maniacal drummer of the Who. Moon used to go down to the Marquee Club to watch him and pick up a few mad moves. And of course the Beatles, whom I saw at Shea Stadium. They were the musical G-spot.
