'Just about the time the army was dropping hot dogs out of the sky, I happened to bump into Joey,' Tyler recalls, not at all ironically. I didn't know what Tuinals were back then so I was 30,000 feet above sea level.'Īerosmith was still a year away - Tyler was still in Top 40 New York City club bands like the Chain Reaction and William Proud - and it's at Woodstock he met Joey Kramer, who would become the band's drummer. I was wandering around aimlessly for three days with 350 mics of LSD in my system. 'I had pitched my tent somewhere near Ken Kesey's bus, so I had to make it across that field of dreams to the stage. 'I was in between the Hog Farm and Groovy Way,' Tyler insists. 'I was on the other side of the fence 25 years ago,' Tyler bubbled over the phone during another stop on Aerosmith's Get a Grip World Tour, which started in June of 1993 and will wind down 200 concerts later this fall.

That, of course, freed Tyler up for a last-minute trip to Bethel. And it only took 25 years!Īerosmith was the Saturday night headliner and show-closer at the recent Woodstock '94, but back in 1969, the soon-to-be group's soon-to-be lead singer was just a 21-year-old guy whose band had lost a weekend gig. It's a long journey, man, and the steps go sideways – it would have been an interesting thing if it came to pass.SOME FOLKS made both Woodstocks, but Steven Tyler is quite likely the only person to have graduated from the field to the stage. 'We're probably as close together now as we've ever been, and we're looking forward to getting back on the road together. 'Things went the way they did, everybody got out of the system what they wanted to, and then we slowly glued back together,” Perry told UCR. In the end, Tyler stayed on, and the decision worked out well for Aerosmith in the long run. I was thinking, ' Livin' On The Edge, I'll fucking kill that song!’ And then I woke up on the beach and said, 'You know what? I can't do this.' So that was it.' I was listening to all of the tunes and all of this stuff. I got down to Cabo, and I really relaxed and thought about it. 'But that was real tempting there for five minutes. When the arguments start, I'm outta here. 'The problem is, I would have taken the toxicity out of the whole thing ! It probably would have bombed because I'm not a toxic kind of guy. 'The Aerosmith hint came around that time when Joe Perry tried to get me to join that band, and the management asked me to go to South America and try it out.

Lead singer of aerosmith