Rock ’n’ roll survivor

FOR A MOMENT, Steven Tyler almost runs out of words. He’s standing too close to the edge of a Laurel Canyon cliff, exulting in the panorama of Los Angeles at his feet, the city’s sprawl giving way to white-capped mountains on the horizon.

“I’m really lucky right now,” he says. “I’m on top of the world. I’m Hollywood’s little f---in’ sweetheart.” Four months ago, Aerosmith’s front man moved from Boston to Los Angeles for his life-changing gig as a judge on American Idol. He rented a house in this storied neighborhood, with its beguiling blend of rock history and natural beauty—an echo of the New Hampshire woods where he spent his childhood summers climbing trees and skinning raccoons.

Early most mornings, Tyler hikes to this peak to spar with a trainer. When he hits the top, he puts on boxing gloves and tries to hit as hard as he possibly can. “I’ve been knocked down too many times by the world,” Tyler says. “So it just feels good spiritually. I’m still standing.”

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It’s been a wild journey. His band hasn’t released an album of original songs in a decade; their last real hit, “Jaded,” was in 2001. In the meantime, Tyler faced one knockout blow after another: He discovered he had hepatitis C in 2002; then he was incorrectly diagnosed with a brain tumor. He had surgery for a voice-threatening throat problem, and he struggled with a foot ailment that could have kept him offstage forever. He got addicted to drugs again—prescription ones, mostly; he went through one detox and two rehab stints. He fell off a stage in front of thousands of fans in Sturgis, S.D., and his bandmates threatened to fire him. His wife of 17 years left him. His mom died. “I was a mess,” Tyler says. “I was clinically depressed.”

But the last rehab seems to have turned things around. Tyler’s found a serious new girlfriend, 35-year-old Erin Brady, a long-legged, wicked-tongued brunette bombshell. He’s got Idol—and, hey, hitting bottom just helps him savor this moment, here at the top of the world. “If you’re sober for 20 years, you lose the rewards of first getting sober,” he says.

Early last year, at the height of a months-long feud with his bandmates, an angry and frustrated Tyler began looking for a backup plan: “I told my manager, ‘F--- them, get me a job.’” He ended up as a judge on American Idol, a show he had barely watched.

On the show, he’s far from a Simon Cowell hard-ass (“There wasn’t anything about that I didn’t like,” he recently told one contestant after a performance). And as he might be the first to tell you, America loves him in this new role: He’s moved to tears by the contestants’ sob stories and performances alike (“My feelings, man, I’m beyond touchy-feely—that’s why I say I’m 60 percent woman”). He’s verbally inventive, and avuncular with the young female contestants without creeping out the nation. He seems to maintain a respectful peace with Jennifer Lopez, and has become actual pals with Randy Jackson.

Tyler landed the job by playing piano in a producer’s office and telling stories of his pre–rock ’n’ roll childhood. Tyler’s father was a Juilliard-trained musician, and some of his earliest memories are of lying beneath his dad’s piano as a 3-year-old, listening to him play classical music. “We’d seen probably 40 people for the job,” says Fox executive Mike Darnell, “and actually I saw Roger Daltrey—he came in and he was the complete reverse of Steven, very formal, his hair was cut, he looked like a regular guy. He had lost all that sort of rock ’n’ roll charm. But Steven was unbelievably charming. He was not snobby about music—he told me about his dad being a classical musician. He told me that he sometimes gets emotional about songs and cries when he hears them. I knew right away we had gold.”

“All I did, and I thank the Lord above, I took a risk,” says Tyler. “I think if you were to really peek under the hood of what got Aerosmith back again for our second life in the ’80s, you’d find out that it’s exactly this, it’s the willingness to take a risk.” And his TV gig is just part of a big year for Brand Tyler. His autobiography, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?, came out in May, as did the first solo single of his career. But for all his personal success, he’s endlessly preoccupied with the band he helped form 41 years ago, especially his fraught relationship with lead guitarist Joe Perry. “My other self, my demon brother,” Tyler calls him in his book.

After ’70s excess derailed Tyler and Perry (the Toxic Twins, as they were known), Tyler put together 12 years of sobriety, leading Aerosmith to heights that exceeded their original run. But around 2002, he began to slip. He blames it, a little fuzzily, on the hepatitis diagnosis and the pain of his foot condition. Painkillers and Xanax were his drugs of choice, and as his foot pain got worse circa 2007, he took to snorting huge Xanax pills he called Zanzibars. “I was in a cast for three months, and they gave me a ton of pain meds,” he says. “Being a drug addict and an alcoholic, I was off and running.” By the third month of recovery, he was snorting OxyContin, too. Then one night, he did coke again. “The next day I woke up and said, ‘Holy Mother of God, what am I doing?’”

So he went off to rehab again, and he was soon clean but in unbearable pain, wondering how he could ever tour. In the summer of 2008, Tyler flew home to be with his ailing, elderly mother. She was his first fan, she drove him to gigs; she didn’t laugh when he told her, as an unknown 19-year-old, that she was going to have to buy a new house soon to get away from his crazed fans. She died in July 2008, and Tyler couldn’t take it—just a few months after rehab, he began using drugs again.

THE DAY AFTER we met on the cliff, Tyler is in his American Idol trailer on a studio lot in West Hollywood, with a stylist and a makeup artist working simultaneously on his hair and skin—they’re detailing him like he’s a vintage sports car. Early Stevie Wonder is playing from an iPod, and a live feed of the Idol rehearsals is on a muted TV. Tyler is about to do his first show with a live audience, but he’s still busy talking about Aerosmith. “Did I take this job to show the band? F---, yeah.” Agitated, as usual, he says, “I will be my own hostage. The band can’t throw me out.”

Truth is, this wasn’t even the first outside job Tyler considered. “You’re looking at a guy who played with Led Zeppelin,” he says with boyish pride. In September 2008, Tyler flew to London, and walked into a rehearsal room where Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and Jason Bonham were waiting. Tyler was the right guy for the job, but he turned it down. “I called Jimmy up two weeks after I left and said, ‘You’re a classic band, and so is mine, and I just can’t do that to my guys, and I can’t do it to Robert.’” In any case, he went to the Betty Ford Center for three months at the end of 2009, and this time he got really clean.

Meanwhile, the band members asked their lawyer to look into the possibility of firing Tyler, and made a point of telling the press that they were seeking out new singers. He still did makeup dates with Aerosmith—“with hate in my eyes”—which to him ended up feeling like some of their best shows ever. “I’ve been a little foolish, but I’m glad I was foolish, because it kept us an old-fashioned band, five members who all get equal pay for an unbelievably long time,” Tyler says.

Tyler’s assistant and his leather-clad personal stylist—a French guy who looks like a hipster Dracula—are nudging him to get ready. “Hold on, guys, I only have one thing to do, and that’s to step into a pair of pants, okay? Step into a pair of pants, baby!” Eventually, he excuses himself. Flanked by an SUV-size bodyguard, he heads off to the hangar-like studio where he’ll shoot Idol for the next three months and find himself in the middle of his latest comeback.

BACK IN LAUREL Canyon, Tyler is doing the full Tyler: yodeling and scat-singing into the hills to test the echo, singing bits of Beatles, Byrds, and Aerosmith songs in full voice, and showing off a remarkably proficient birdcall. “You must admit,” he says, “through all the frills and all, I’m one of the most interesting guys you’ve ever met.”

Almost every car that passes slows down, and the drivers roll down their windows to tell Tyler how much they love him on Idol. I ask him if he’s worried that he might become too beloved, too safe, if there’s a danger of being seen as the sort of caricature Ozzy Osbourne turned into for a while in the wake of The Osbournes. As he thinks about it, another car approaches, and actually stops in the middle of the road—the couple inside get out and ask for a picture. Tyler poses graciously and continues his thought as they drive away. “Whoever I am, or think I am, whoever you think I am, maybe I’m not that guy,” he says.

DOCTORS AT ONE rehab (where he was working out his co-dependent relationships with the rest of the band, not any addiction) made the mistake of sticking him in a “sexual concerns” group. “I’m in the wrong place!” he said. “I want to be between three women, not chained to a f---ing urinal at the Ramrod Room.” But he’s convinced that his many liaisons—including the on-tour hookups that ended his most recent marriage—were merely the result of opportunities not available to other men. New Age author Marianne Williamson, a friend who helped him break his drug and alcohol dependencies, once told him, “What do they expect? You’ve been a rock star for 20 years.”

“I had a choice not to,” says Tyler. “I f---ed up. But when you’re tempted, if you’re a bear and you’re not supposed to eat honey, but everywhere you go there’s bees, you’re going to dip your tongue in!”

Priapic as he may be, Tyler is 63 years old, though he hates when journalists point that out. He doesn’t think much about mortality. “I’m going to get up to heaven, and the gate’s going to open, and God’s going to go, ‘You know what, I threw Beelzebub out while we were listening to one of your songs.’” But he does imagine, rather frequently, just how he might die. “I’m very vivid with my imagination: getting stabbed and pulling the arrow out, or I can picture my guts spewed, or more often than not, lately, it’s in a bed with my children around me, as my mom passed, hoping they don’t give me too much drugs where I’m like this”—he sticks his tongue out spastically. Then he gets serious for a moment and continues. “I think I’ve been so lucky in my life that I’ll probably die in my sleep, thank you, Lord Jesus.”

Copyright 2011, Rolling Stone. Published in Rolling Stone. Distributed by Tribune Media Services.