From Backstage Battles to Brotherhood: Aerosmith’s Wild Breakup and Reunion

In 2012, Aerosmith dropped Music From Another Dimension!—their first album of original songs in more than a decade. But the real story wasn’t just the music. It was everything that came before: the breakups, rehab stints, reality TV, solo ambitions, and one last shot at doing it right. This behind-the-scenes tale captures the band’s fight to stay together, told straight from the mouths of Boston’s baddest rockers.

Hollywood Lights, Boston Roots

When writer Ken McIntyre flew from Boston to Los Angeles to meet Aerosmith, he was stepping into a world far removed from Fenway Park and Dunkin’ runs. Inside a Sunset Strip hotel room, decorated like a psychedelic thrift store, Steven Tyler greeted him in open-toed sandals, his toes mangled from decades of stage acrobatics.

It was those same broken feet—and the pills prescribed to fix them—that nearly ended Aerosmith. “I went to a pain management clinic for my feet and they said: ‘Here, take this,’” Tyler shared. The pills led to a fall, a busted shoulder, and a relapse that snowballed into solo career rumors and internal chaos.

Back home, Aerosmith is treated like royalty. “Everyone I know who grew up here has an Aerosmith story,” McIntyre said. He once bumped into Joe Perry at a grocery store at 3 a.m. “He nodded and grabbed his bag of Fritos.”

But in LA, it was a whole different scene.

Fallouts and Forgiveness

Aerosmith’s history is full of turbulence, but the near-breakup in 2009 felt like a real tipping point. It all started when Steven Tyler fell off the stage during a show in Sturgis, South Dakota. He broke his shoulder, cracked his skull, and the whispers began: was this the end of the road?

Tyler wasn’t exactly denying things either. “Yeah, I fell off the stage during the ZZ Top tour. I only went on that tour because I thought the band was over,” he admitted. “Six months before that I was at Las Encinas [rehab center] and I couldn’t walk… I was taking that stuff, it’s true. But I think I only had a beer before that gig, and I fell off the stage. My girlfriend said: ‘You weren’t even high that night! Why’d you tell them that?’ Well, I had to tell them something.”

Not long after, Tyler made things even more uncertain when he said he needed time to focus on “Brand Tyler.” The phrase was enough to make his bandmates panic. “It scared the hell out of the band,” he said. “They said a lot of bad stuff about me afterward… But it didn’t mean anything. I mean, it’s interesting: Joe does solo records. Isn’t that Brand Perry?”

Joe Perry, who was touring with the Joe Perry Project at the time, explained their side:

“Steven was going through a mountain of personal stuff. Basically he said he wanted to take two years off… So the rest of us are on the phone going: ‘What are we going to do for two years?’”

Drummer Joey Kramer put it plainly:

“It never went beyond discussion, but we had to talk about it… Even if it did, it would never have been Aerosmith.”

Brand Tyler Takes Center Stage

While rumors swirled and the band held crisis talks, Steven Tyler was living in his daughter Liv’s house in Greenwich Village—high on OxyContin, writing his memoir, and wrestling with anger and pain. “I was in Greenwich Village, working on my book, doing OxyContin and waiting for some blow to come in so I could spend Christmas there and do cocaine again,” he recalled. “The thing is, I heard what the guys were saying about me, and I was mad at them. I fell off the stage, I cracked my skull, I tore my shoulder, and I was in the hospital. And nobody called me. It really hurt me. It hurt me bad.”

With the band considering their options, including possibly continuing with a different singer, Tyler felt the pressure to respond. But instead of holding a press conference, he did something only Steven Tyler would do: he crashed one of Joe Perry’s gigs.

“I found out that Joe was playing in New York, and I got into a limo with a bunch of my friends,” he said. “I looked on the internet for what songs he was doing, and I figured an hour into his set he’d probably be breaking and going into ‘Walk This Way.’ So I thought, I’ll go down, walk in and do the encore. And that’s what I did.”

When Tyler hit the stage that night, the crowd erupted. “I looked out at the audience and they roared when they saw me and Joe together,” he said. “I said: ‘The band is not broken up.’ Then I said some fantastic thing about: ‘Joe, you may wear a coat of many colours but I, motherfucker, am the rainbow.’”

That surprise reunion sent a message louder than any press release: Aerosmith wasn’t over. But Tyler was still in deep, and his path forward would include more rehab, a bestselling autobiography (Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?), and an unexpected new gig as a judge on American Idol.

“I honestly did it because my feet hurt,” he said. “But I was doing Idol, I was on the cover of Rolling Stone, my book was coming out, I had a hit single. That was all from getting sober.”

The Road to ‘Dimension’ Was Bumpy

After the chaos, near-breakup, and solo detours, Aerosmith found themselves staring down a challenge they hadn’t tackled in more than a decade: making a full album of new material. But getting Music From Another Dimension! off the ground was anything but easy.

“We tried to make this record probably three times,” Joe Perry admitted. “When you go to make a record, there are certain protocols that are met. You’ve got a record deal, and the label gives you a certain amount of money to make it. Money goes out to the producer, goes out here and there, so as soon as you start making it the machinery starts. That happened three times before we actually made the record.”

The band’s momentum after 2001’s Just Push Play was strong, and they seemed poised for another radio-friendly hit. But the timing never felt right. Early attempts fizzled. One involved legendary producer Rick Rubin—an experiment that quickly flopped.

“We went in the studio with him one night to see how it would work,” Perry recalled. “That was miserable. We just didn’t click.”

Tyler didn’t mince words either. “Whassisname… that fat guy,” he said, referring to Rubin. But Perry clarified, “It wasn’t because of him. It was because of us. We were still getting fucked up. We weren’t in the right place headwise. We were just realising we were a band again and that we were able to work together, but we were still fucked up.”

The failure stung. “I remember waking up the next day and calling Steven and saying: ‘This is shit. We suck,’” Perry said.

Instead of forcing it, the band pivoted. They reached out to their old producer and friend, Jack Douglas—the man behind Aerosmith’s classic albums like Toys in the Attic and Rocks. It seemed like the right move, but they still weren’t ready to dig deep and commit. So they made Honkin’ On Bobo, a gritty blues covers record that satisfied their desire to play together without the pressure of writing new songs.

“That was supposed to be this record,” said Perry. “We got into a room, turned the tape machine on… but we weren’t going to be able to buckle down. Nobody was in the right headspace.”

Still, working with Jack lit a spark. “Even if we were still high, one of the great things about Jack is… he would have gotten something out of us,” Tyler said.

It would take another few years and a lot more soul-searching, but eventually, the band found their way back to the studio—together and sober.

Old Riffs, New Life

By the time Aerosmith finally regrouped to record Music From Another Dimension!, they weren’t starting from scratch. Over the years, Tyler and Perry had built up a vault of old demos, half-finished ideas, and abandoned riffs—many of which would find new life on the album. Some fans criticized the band for using older material, but for Aerosmith, it wasn’t about when a riff was written. It was about whether the song was ready to breathe.

“I took a couple licks that I knew we had there,” said Tyler. “They were just sitting there. The song Out Go The Lights was originally Bobbing For Piranha, but I just never wrote lyrics to it. It was a great Joe Perry lick, and I arranged it with the band a gazillion years ago, but we never added any lyrics and I knew the lick was so good. Jimmy Page would have paid good money for it. All I had to do was finish it.”

For Perry, the criticism about recycled material never made sense. “As far as I’m concerned, a piece of music is done when we’ve finished it, when it’s been recorded, mixed, mastered,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if I wrote the riff yesterday or 20 years ago. Some people don’t get that. They say: ‘Well, it was written way back when, so it must be a reject.’ Well, that just isn’t true. It just wasn’t its time.”

He added:

“That’s obviously true, or the Rolling Stones wouldn’t have a career, because half the songs on their early albums were old blues songs that were written years before.”

As the sessions progressed, new songs emerged too—but not without a bit of friction. Tyler worked with outside collaborators like Desmond Child and Marti Frederiksen, which stirred some tension inside the band. “Using outside writers is like being married forever and using a sex toy,” Tyler quipped. “Hello, it helps. Your wife’s gonna scream again like she did in the beginning. Whatever it takes.”

Still, he made an effort to include everyone. “Tom wrote a song with me, Sweet Emotion. But that was 40 years ago, and he still needs to feel part of it,” Tyler explained. “This time we came back and Tom had two songs, Joey wrote three by himself… Everybody’s got a piece of it.”

In the end, Music From Another Dimension! became a blend of the old and the new—just like the band itself.

The Fire Still Burns

Despite all the conflict, the love for music and each other pulled them through. “We just can’t find anything better to do,” laughed Tom Hamilton. “We’re just five guys that love playing with each other. It’s worth all the trouble.”

Even Tyler, often seen as the wild card, gets introspective:

“I live for Aerosmith. I couldn’t be a mechanic or a cook or even a piano tuner. I need to sing… My wings get heavy when I stand on earth.”

Perry agreed:

“There might be a time when the gigs get fewer and farther apart… but we’re all in it.”

Kramer summed it up best:

“There’s still lots of juice left.”

There’s no fairytale ending here, no perfect bow tying up their story. But there is grit, survival, and a drive to keep going, no matter how much has changed. “Listen,” Tyler confessed, “I cannot command court in a fuckin’ stadium. Because of my feet, I just can’t do that any more. It made me cry when I realized that. But clubs I can do, and we will.”

And maybe that’s Aerosmith at its core: five guys from Boston who built something massive, wrecked it, rebuilt it, and still find a reason to plug in and play. Maybe they don’t fly like they used to—but they still soar when it counts.

“The secret to all this,” Tyler said with a smile, “is that we love playing together. Or maybe we love building it up and taking it down again. No, it’s not that,” he corrected himself. “It’s miracles. Maybe we just love making miracles.”