By GWEN
FILOSA
Over a scratchy phone connection from a car in Sunapee, Steven Tyler's love for New Hampshire sounded as heartfelt as his brand of rock 'n' roll.
"Is that the sun coming out?" he asked, taking in the sights of the stomping grounds that gave rise to one of the world's biggest bands - and one of the last of the full-blown rock stars.
"Oh my God," Tyler said in his famous rasp. "Otter Pond is like a mirror."
Tyler, the flamboyant front man who started Aerosmith in 1970 and never let go as the band stumbled, soared, collapsed and resurrected itself as a powerhouse hit-maker, may have been born in New York, but home is a place called Sunapee.
"I carved my childhood memories out of New Hampshire," he said. In a recent interview, Tyler sorted through Aerosmith's past, which took shape near Lake Sunapee, where his family headed from New York every summer.
"It was probably one of the greatest gifts my parents could have given me, bringing me up here every summer. It was a gift from God, having both sides - the cement streets and the dirt between my toes."
Aerosmith, with 20 albums and three decades behind it, has a bloodline that traces back to the stately homes and shimmering harbor in Sunapee. Boston lays a big claim to America's ultimate party band, but New Hampshire is where the boys who would be rock stars cut their teeth in start-up bands and where three of the original members got together in 1970 before moving to Commonwealth Avenue.
Rewind the 29-year history of the mighty band that launched a thousand imitators and a cutout bin-defying string of hit records, and you'll hear the names Steven Tallarico, Joe Perry, Tom Hamilton and a teenage hangout called The Barn.
Tyler and guitarist Perry first laid eyes on each other at the Anchorage, a family-style restaurant in Sunapee where Perry once worked. Their families summered near the lake, and there they found a music scene, notably at a three-level barn in Georges Mills that hosted rock bands and drew hundreds of college students, townies and summer kids.
Aerosmith bassist Tom Hamilton went to high school in New London and got together with Perry in bands, including the Jam Band. Tyler, like all the members of Aerosmith, has played in bands since he was a kid. A drummer first, he played with his father - the classically trained pianist Victor Tallarico - at the Sunapee Lodge. People around Lake Sunapee remember Tyler's grandmother, known as "Mrs. T," who taught piano to local kids.
By the late '60s, Steven Tallarico (he switched to the non-ethnic Tyler in 1972) was already a name around Sunapee. He formed his first serious band, The Strangeurs, in the resort town and acted like rock royalty even then, playing clubs in New York and New England.
"He really believed in himself more than anything," said Edward Malhoit of Claremont, who booked bands in New Hampshire in the late '60s, including some of Tyler's. "He made believers out of everybody."
Tyler, who keeps a lakeside home in Sunapee (Perry has one, too), has a memo for anyone who dares discount his band's New Hampshire ties: "Tell them I said," and then he spat a raspberry. He laced the retort with a few lines from Bob Dylan, ending with, "Don't criticize what you don't understand."
He kept his place in Sunapee so his kids could have the outdoor experience he did, Tyler said. In every corner of Sunapee, the rocker also revisits his own youth.
"I had a relationship with the spirits of the woods," Tyler said, recalling days of running through the wilds of Sunapee. "I called them the children of the woods."
In New Hampshire, Tyler spent summers playing gigs and hanging out with friends. Sunapee is Aerosmith bedrock, he explained.
"It's where we smoked our first joints. It's where I had sex with my first girlfriend," Tyler said. "All those firsts."
Back to The Barn
Aerosmith's roots reach back to a summer day in 1969 when Tyler was out mowing the lawn at his parents' resort, Trow Rico, in Sunapee. Perry drove up in his MG and asked Tyler to come see his band, the Jam Band, play at The Barn.
The night Tyler saw the Jam Band play, something clicked inside his head. Sitting on the club's floor in front of the tiny stage, he turned to a buddy and said he had just found his next band. Soon, Tyler, Perry and Hamilton hooked up and headed for Boston, where drummer Joey Kramer and rhythm guitarist Brad Whitford would complete the band.
"It's so storybook," Tyler said, "every bit of it."
The Aerosmith storybook, though, is for adults only. Their recent autobiography, Walk This Way, chronicles the band's life with all the conceivable details - booze, drugs, a whirlwind of women - fully intact. But it also goes back to a more innocent time measured out in the summers of the '60s in a New Hampshire resort town. Back then, the state had a rollicking music scene all its own, with big dance bands and some scrappy rock groups.
Teenagedom was king in Lake Sunapee. Summer kids, townies, Colby-Sawyer girls and Dartmouth boys huddled around the harbor. Rock 'n' roll was their soundtrack, and The Barn was their source.
"After the Beatles hit, it was all over," the prologue of Walk This Way explains. "Lake Sunapee was the address where the world first encountered Aerosmith as a rough beast, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born."
Harold "Zunk" Buker watched the slouching begin. The New London native met Tyler when they were little kids and grew up in those same lake- and sun-filled summers. Later he and his father were Tyler's pilots, flying the band to gigs.
Buker's face lit up while taking a visitor to what used to be The Barn - it's now storage for the attached furniture store. Owned by the late John Conrad, The Barn rocked in the late '60s, with live music on four nights a week in the summer. Wednesday was "Teen Night."
On a recent chilly day with a dusting of snow outside, Buker walked into the barn, packed with furniture. He pointed to where the dance floor used to be. It had a railing around it and booths were placed along the wall. Buker plodded up to the small stage where Tyler, Perry and Hamilton, in different bands, once played. Upstairs is another floor, with a ladder leading into a cupola - its walls still lined with graffiti from the club's heyday.
Tyler's band would pack The Barn's rafters. Hundreds of kids came, Buker said, with the line streaming out the door.
"They charged $5 - in 1966 - and you would still have kids lined up because it was an event," he said.
The Barn jumped with music and teenage libidos. On hot summer nights when the music caught hold, the place smoldered.
"You can still smell what The Barn was like," said Tyler, who has one of the original booths as a keepsake. "The dance floor, the booths in the back where we'd go and suck face in."
Aerosmith has toyed with the idea of returning to that barn on Prospect Hill Road. "MTV, VH-1, they're all ready to bring cameras in at the drop of a hat," Tyler said. "We're not ready yet."
'America's band'
Aerosmith got its wings in 1970, playing its first official gig at Nipmuc Regional High School in Mendon, Mass. The band members shared an apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Ave. in Boston and, during lunch time, would set up their gear outside of Boston University and wail away. Unsigned and dodging eviction notices, the band pressed on to land a record deal with Columbia and released a self-titled album that first introduced the radio warrior, "Dream On."
The band would peak in 1976 as a solid headliner with "Sweet Emotion" and "Walk This Way" entering music history. In simple terms, Aerosmith rocked, sharing the kind of fan swell that ZZ Top and KISS enjoyed, but the guys with the Sunapee roots had a success story all their own.
"We were America's band. We were the garage band that made it really big," Joe Perry said in Martin Huxley's 1995 book Aerosmith: The Fall and Rise of Rock's Greatest Band.
In 1999, Aerosmith means dramatic power ballads and laughingly lewd music videos; those with longer memories - or the box set - are more likely to think bad-boy blues meets arena rock. Monster songs like their cover of "Train Kept A Rollin," "Lord of the Thighs," "Back in the Saddle," "Same Old Song and Dance."
When they began, critics called them Rolling Stones knockoffs. Robert Christgau, the dean of popular music criticism, said 1974's Get Your Wings was a variation of the "Grand Funk principle."
"If a band is going to be dumb," Christgau wrote, "it might as well be American dumb."
But the generation that grew up with Aerosmith on its car radios could not have cared less. Two decades later, the songs fill the airwaves. "Dream On," which rewrote the power ballad, still remains hauntingly beautiful, and "Sweet Emotion's" guitar riffs sound like dirty thunder two decades later.
"At the end of the day," Tyler said, "we still play so the girls shake their asses."
Down - and back up
The fact that Aerosmith survived its days of drugs and excess is landmark itself. Sober for more than a decade, the band turned around lives and careers that had once appeared doomed.
Money and privilege turned into the proverbial double-edged sword that has given VH-1 enough tragic tales to make a series out of (Behind the Music), and Aerosmith famously went down the well-worn rock star road that turns into a drain. To add further insult, 1982's Rock in a Hard Place - bearing a Stonehenge-style cover - coincided with a mock-documentary about a pathetic British band whose name would become a Dorian Gray mirror for pretentious, washed-up rockers. For Aerosmith, the timing smarted.
"I took Spinal Tap real personal," Tyler told an interviewer.
Anything worth doing was worth overdoing, Tyler likes to say in interviews, and tension among the band was a byproduct. By the start of the 1980s, Perry and guitarist Brad Whitford quit to do their own thing. Tyler regrouped and recorded without them.
They reconciled at an Aerosmith show in 1984 and geared up for Done With Mirrors, their supposed comeback that didn't cut it with radio or record store cash registers. Its gimmick - all the words on the album need a mirror to read straight - didn't help.
Aerosmith seemed on the road to kaput until some rappers scratched out a new version of "Walk This Way," and an album called Permanent Vacation unleashed arguably the most unexpected - and perfect- rock return ever.
Run-DMC put Tyler and Perry on MTV in a different light: two music veterans who could smirk at their own reputations. When "Dude Looks Like a Lady" sent Aerosmith smack into 1987, a whole new band emerged. The ingredients for success included horn sections, Tyler's vocal chord workouts and enough sexual double entendres to make a nation of high-schoolers' heads spin.
"Even critics liked them better the second time around," according to Rolling Stone's Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll.
Pump, in 1989, proved Aerosmith's comeback was no fluke. It got some of the best reviews the band ever saw and smashed the charts. "Love in an Elevator," "The Other Side" and "What it Takes" owned radio play lists. MTV couldn't get enough of the band's videos, especially the dramatic story line of "Janie's Got a Gun," a song about incest that alongside Pearl Jam's "Daughter" is one of the few mainstream rock offerings to address the issue.
The band's serious side usually shows up off the records. Behind its bad-boy image is a heart of gold: Aerosmith gives back through charities and appearances. In 1992 the band gave $10,000 to a controversial MIT photo exhibit that the National Endowment for the Arts pulled the plug on. Recently, band members visited a survivor of the Columbine shooting with Tyler writing an op-ed piece for a Denver newspaper about the killings. The Aerosmith AIDS Endowment fund gave $500,000 to Children's Hospital in Boston, and this month Tyler and Perry sang Christmas carols with kids there.
Thirty years later, Aerosmith has become a corporation as much as a band, expected to crank out the hits at a moment's notice. Their reported $30 million deal with Columbia (Sony's flagship label) is going strong. Nine Lives, the band's 12th studio album, entered the chart at No. 1. The 1998 summer ballad, "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing," from the Armageddon soundtrack, was the band's first No. 1 single.
They write songs these days with hired guns of the industry (Glen Ballard, Desmond Child), and they remain on the awards show circuit, snapping up a Grammy and a Billboard honor this year. An Aerosmith tribute album came out this year, along with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's nomination for induction next year (the band was passed over this time).
When 2000 rings in, Aerosmith will be playing onstage in Osaka, Japan, with a string of Japanese dates following. A new album is forecast - the title might be something like Just Push Play, according to Tyler.
And although Tyler seems to sing dramatic love ballads more often than blues-borne swagger, his fans still marvel and he still has his moves and his brothers behind him.
"There is no substitute for arrogance," Tyler said. "We made something good come out of it."
Or, better yet, as his last words in the Walk This Way autobiography explain, "It's too late to stop now."