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Phil Kettner remembers the first time he saw Metallica live. “My first reaction was, ‘Oh wow, it’s punk rock with long hair,’” says Kettner, who was guitarist with San Francisco proto-thrashers Lääz Rockit at the time. Kettner’s own band were tipped as the Bay Area’s next big thing, but this was something completely new.

Metallica played their first show in San Francisco at The Stone in September 1982. Within a few months, they had relocated to the the city from their native LA, recruiting bass wunderkind Cliff Burton the process. A brand new scene quickly grew up around them, and the Bay Area became the epicentre of the fastest, loudest, heaviest music in the world: thrash metal.

“‘Thrash’ wasn’t used that much as a term in 1982,” says Ron Quintana, one of the architects of the Bay Area thrash scene. Quintana was the editor of the seminal Metal Mania fanzine, which exhaustively covered the San Francisco metal and punk scenes in a rage of caustic humour, slapdash cut-and-paste layouts, and inky newsprint. He was also a DJ at KUSF, a community-run radio station that operated out of the University of San Francisco. “I think it was more in 1984, with speedsters like Exodus, Slayer, Possessed, and Suicidal Tendencies, that we called them thrash and not just metal or punk.”

Regardless of what it was called in its infancy, the sound produced by these early San Francisco bands was like nothing ever heard before. Young, fleet-fingered savages like Metallica, Death Angel, Exodus, Lääz Rockit, Possessed, Blind Illusion and a handful of others were pushing musical boundaries, playing faster and with more intricacy then seemed humanly possible.

There were a myriad of places for these bands to play all over the city, at now-infamous clubs like Ruthie’s Inn, Kabuki Theatre, The Fillmore, The Keystone, The Stone and The Mabuhay Gardens, which was host to the equally envelope-pushing hardcore punk scene. There were record stores and hangouts, a healthy college radio scene and a smattering of enthusiastic fanzines covering it all. So how did this happen? Was it the work of perpetual schemer Lars Ulrich and his collection of Angelwitch imports, as is often reported in the annals of metal?

“[SF radio stations] KUSF and KALX were playing extreme metal in 1982, so NWOBHM was old hat by the time,” says Quintana. “Lars and company could play two Diamond Head and one Blitzkrieg song at any audience, but there were two amazing record import stores and tons of Tower LP stores supplying the maniac habits of fans.”

“The independent record stores were great,” says Rob Cavestany, guitarist and co-founder of Death Angel, one of the first and surely the youngest of the Bay Area thrash bands. “There was the Record Exchange and the Record Vault. These were the main shops, where all the metalheads would come down and find the latest new releases and hear about the latest bands. This was even before Metallica, when we were first hearing about bands like Tygers of Pan Tang, Loundness, Riot. Those were the bands we were tripping on.”

Things changed drastically, however, once Metallica came to town. “I don’t know exactly when they formed in relation to when we did,” says Cavestany, “but I do know they made a wave quicker than we did, we were way into them, and were very influenced by them. We saw them play at the Keystone in Berkeley, and it was an eye-opening evening, for sure.”

“The shows were always totally packed,” adds Kettner. “There were a lot of sold out shows back then. At the time, we had a manager who was very tenacious about getting out-of-town bands to play. We actually brought Metallica up to play their first show at the Old Waldorf. We did a famous show back in 1983 with Metallica headlining. We supported them, and Exodus opened up. That was at The Stone.”

“There were a lot of future musicians in those crowds,” recalls Quintana. “But there were lots of all types, even posers.”

“We played with Metallica for the first time at the Kabuki Theatre,” says Cavestany. “It was with Metallica and Armored Saint. But we’d been playing for years before that. We started playing out in 1982. I was about 13, 14 years old at the time. Andy [Galeon, Death Angel drummer] was about nine or ten. I mean, we were very young. But there were all-ages clubs going on, there were parties, things like that we played. And the other times, when there was some kind of age restriction, they basically just snuck us in. We played with Exodus, Legacy – who later became Testament – Slayer, Megadeth, Mercyful Fate, Lääz Rockit. And we played with all the punk bands as well.”

Punk Rock was alive and well in San Francisco in 1982, although not all of the metal bands in town embraced it. “It was pretty segregated,” says Kettner. “I’m sure there were people from both those scenes that went to different shows but we didn’t book any shows with, like, Black Flag or TSOL. We never booked shows with those guys, which I regret, because I think it would have opened people’s eyes. That’s where the thrash thing came from, it crossed over from the punk element. Consider the circle mosh and stage diving and stuff like that – that came directly from the punk scene.”

Unlike Lääz Rockit, Death Angel dived headfirst into the metal-punk crossover movement. “We played with a lot of punk bands,” says Cavestany. “That’s how the crossover thing came about, really. We played shows with Cro Mags, GBH, DRI, Verbal Abuse, Suicidal Tendencies, DR. Know – we played with those guys all the time.”

“Poor LA music fans had only hair bands or punk shows, there was no crossover,” says Quintana. “But punks up north went to metal shows, and vice versa. In LA, hardcore punk shows were extremely violent. Suicidal Tendencies couldn’t even play their hometown. They had to come up north to play. That crossover created lots of good, usually friendly competition in the Bay Area.”

By the mid 1980s, the punk influence on the San Francisco metal scene was embraced and championed. But the glam bands? Not so much. “We knew a lot of kids back then who were real adamant about the whole ‘Bang the head that does not bang’ thing,” says Kettner.

“There were glam bands in SF, and some of them were cool guys,” explains Cavestany. “You got Jetboy, Sea Hags, Vain. Davey Vain actually produced our album, Frolic Through The Park (1988). We played shows with some of them in the early days, until thrash got the ‘kill poseurs’ vibe, and then the lines of separations happened, where these kids wouldn’t be caught dead at one of our shows.”

“Like rats, glam was everywhere,” snarls infamous poseur-hater Quintana. “Van Halen was king and even clone bands had big followings, too.”

Exodus, arguably the most musically violent band in the Bay Area thrash movement, were also the most vocal in their hatred of fishnet-wearing glam-rockers, often calling for their fans to “Kill the poseurs”, wherever they may be found. As such, SF thrash shows often devolved into mayhem.

“There was violence going on in the audience, for sure,” says Kettner. “People were throwing each other around, but then you’d go out for a beer afterwards. I’m sure there were a few people that were pointed out for not fitting in within the scene, or for trying to act like something you’re not, and those people would most likely be ostracised and/or beaten in the alley. But I wasn’t witnessing that.”

“It was reality, though,” says Cavestany. “Poseurs did get their asses kicked. Don’t let [original Exodus singer Paul] Baloff catch one of them around.”

“We did get very wild and crazy at points,” says Kettner. “I’m not really sure how to look at all that because on the one hand, yeah, it was crazy and aggressive, but there was a lot of camaraderie at the same time. I just remember thinking, ‘Why aren’t we getting arrested?’”

By the late 1980s, when Metallica, Slayer, and Megadeth had all graduated to arenas, SF thrash began to mutate into different, less punk-derived strains. Second-wave thrash bands like Testament and Machine Head added their own twists, from progressive elements to ‘groove’ into the mix. The original wave of bands were either millionaires, cult heroes, or on their last legs. And then the clubs started to go up in smoke.

“They closed the Kabuki Theatre,” sighs Kettner. “That place was amazing, this huge old theatre. I remember seeing Metallica supporting Raven there, Mercyful Fate… When you went to a show there, you realised just how big this thing was really becoming. I think that’s kinda what killed the scene, in the later 80s and early 90s. The Keystone Berkeley burned down, Wolfgang’s burned down, The Stone burned down…”

“Bands and scenes are cyclical, and being a rather small metro area, Bay Area thrash bands either got signed, moved on, broke up or mutated,” says Quintana. “And few could replace that original energy and power.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer Presents Metallica And Thrash Metal, July 2008

Classic Rock contributor since 2003. Twenty Five years in music industry (40 if you count teenage xerox fanzines). Bylines for Metal Hammer, Decibel. AOR, Hitlist, Carbon 14, The Noise, Boston Phoenix, and spurious publications of increasing obscurity. Award-winning television producer, radio host, and podcaster. Voted “Best Rock Critic” in Boston twice. Last time was 2002, but still. Has been in over four music videos. True story. 

When it comes to rock’n’roll beefs, few are as a long-running or entertaining as that between David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar. The pair started talking smack about each other pretty much as soon as Sammy succeeded Diamond Dave in Van Halen in 1985, and haven’t let up since. Even an ill-fated 2002 tour featuring both singers failed to thaw this cold war – in fact it only seemed to make matters worse, with Hagar telling Classic Rock that a barricade was erected between the stars’ respective dressing rooms. Even now, the barbs continue to fly, though it’s mostly in one direction from Sammy towards Dave.

All that is spectacularly amusing, but it does ignore one thing – the two of them were both fantastic frontmen for Van Halen. Dave was the ultimate showmen, a pirouetting, high-kicking force of nature with the charisma of a movie star and the presence of a neutron bomb. Sammy was the powerhouse singer and songwriter, who didn’t just come in to rescue Van Halen after Dave’s acrimonious departure, he helped kick them to the next level.

Both have their devotees and detractors, but which one is actually better? Classic Rock writers Paul Elliott – a Dave devotee – and Jerry Ewing – a Sammy man – make the case for each of these monsters of rock’n’roll. And at the end of it, you can have your say in this ultimate showdown. Let battle commence…

“As far as I was concerned, Sammy Hagar was a total dick”: the case for David Lee Roth

It happened decades ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday. In 1985 I was an A-level student, and it was a friend from college – Graham Stroud – who broke the news to me in a phone call one weekend.

“Are you sitting down?” he asked. I said I was. Then he told me: “There’s bad news, and there’s really bad news.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“Dave is out of Van Halen.”

This wasn’t bad news. It was a disaster. This was my favourite band he was talking about, and a big part of what made this band so great was the singer. Yes, it was Eddie Van Halen’s band. Eddie was the greatest guitar player on Earth, and the band was named after him and his brother Alex, the drummer. But Van Halen without David Lee Roth? That was unthinkable.

Diamond Dave might not have been a great singer in any conventional sense, but he was perfect for Van Halen. He couldn’t hit the notes that Ronnie James Dio could, but his whiskey-and-cigarettes voice oozed rock’n’roll attitude. And as a rock star, Roth was pretty much in a league of his own. He was cooler, funnier and better looking than guys like Vince Neil could ever dream of being. As a frontman, only Freddie Mercury was better than Roth. Diamond Dave was like the quarterback and cheerleader all rolled into one. The sheer force of his personality was a big part of what gave Van Halen their edge over other arena rock acts. And now he was gone.

I was still in shock when Graham said: “Here’s the really bad news. Sammy Hagar is in.”

“In what?”

“In Van Halen. He’s the new singer.”

This really was too much. As far as I was concerned, Sammy Hagar was a total dick. Yes, he was brilliant in Montrose – on the first album, at least. And yes, I liked his song I Can’t Drive 55 – definitely the best thing he’d done as a solo artist. But while I could appreciate that Sammy was a good singer, there was a lot about him that I hated. In 1984 – as Van Halen and Dave had been riding high with Jump – Hagar had made an album V.O.A. on which he positioned himself as the Voice Of America. And what he represented, in the Cold War era, was the kind of hawkish bullshit that I despised. If Roth was an all-American hero, Hagar was an all-American bozo. And now, that bozo was going to ruin the band I loved…

Moreover, I have even grown to like Sammy as a person after interviewing him several times over the years. I’ve interviewed Dave many times too, and both he and Sammy were exactly as expected: loud, funny and opinionated.

But for me, Van Halen were never as great without Dave. In the band’s original line-up – the two brothers, Roth and bassist Michael Anthony – there was a magical chemistry. Every one of the six albums they made between 1978 and 1984 is a classic. There is not one bad song on any of them. Nothing from Van Hagar – not even the brilliant 5150 – can match what the band created in those six albums with Roth.

Many years ago, before Roth rejoined Van Halen, I received as a birthday present a t-shirt made by the singer’s fan club Roth Army. The back print stated in huge block capitals: DAVID LEE ROTH IS VAN HALEN. When I wore that t-shirt to a Def Leppard gig in California, I lost count of the number of people who said they loved the shirt and agreed with that statement.

I was shocked when Dave left Van Halen and I was shocked again when, after earlier false starts, he rejoined the band in 2008. It’s just a shame that Michael Anthony wasn’t invited to be a part of this reunion. Without that guy, something is missing. It’s like Black Sabbath without Bill Ward.

But on those first six albums, they got everything right. Roth once called heir music “turbo pop”. It was high-octane, testosterone-charged hard rock with killer tunes and a knowing sense of humour. And it was so much fun while it lasted. Van Halen with David Lee Roth – it’s what summer was invented for.

Paul Elliott

“Van Halen were a band fast running out of ideas and interest. And David Lee Roth was the biggest culprit”: the case for Sammy Hagar

Was any Van Halen album that David Lee Roth sang on as good as the band’s electrifying 1978 debut? No.

Sure, Van Halen II, Women And Children First and Fair Warning are cool records. But is anyone other than the most foolhardy Diamond Dave zealot going to deny that Diver Down represents worthy evidence that Van Halen in 1982, fronted by Roth, were nothing more than a pale, washed up imitation of the incendiary band they once were.

They may have fluked a hit with Jump on 1984, but you listen to the rest of that album. Every damn song just peters out into a disinterested fade. Sure, there are some great ideas, killer riffs and cool choruses on offer, but the lack of impetus from the band in getting the job finished is all too evident. And given that a stack of ideas that had cropped up on early demos were even appearing on 1984 suggests they were a band fast running out of ideas and interest. And David Lee Roth was the biggest culprit.

Evidence you ask? The band’s performance at Donington in 1984, when they were widely expected to blow headliners AC/DC away. A chance blown with indulgent solos and Roth’s ego-run-wild raps between songs, allowing the headliners, themselves experiencing a creative lull, the chance to reaffirm their position as one of the world’s greatest hard rock acts. Little wonder it all fell apart with Roth within the year. Sure, early Van Halen with Roth on stage must have been a sight to see. But then people used to think The Darkness were an an enjoyable sight to behold!

Now Sammy Hagar – he’s got real class. Not the brash, glitzy, cartoon effrontery of Roth. He sang with Montrose. On their blistering 1973 debut album. An album Van Halen had largely based their entire career on. So with the cartoon Pinocchio of rock out the band, why not go for the original puppet master? Van Halen did just that. And they never looked back. For the next decade at least.

Sammy Hagar was the perfect fit at the perfect time for Van Halen. Unlike AC/DC, who’d brought in the relatively unknown Brian Johnson to replace the much-loved Bon Scott, and still reaped enormous commercial and creative dividends, the move by Eddie and Alex Van Halen after they’d be introduced by a garage mechanic was far more astute. Hagar was already an incredibly successful solo artist in his own right. An unknown in this instant could never have worked (see the sorry plight of the reasonably well-known Gary Cherone when he hooked up for the dire Van Halen III). Hagar was a star who could fill the boots of Roth. He’d already helped lay the blueprint for Van Halen, and perhaps most importantly, worked with Van Halen producer Ted Templeman on that Montrose album.

Except it went better than that. Hagar was simply a greater singer and better songwriter than Roth had ever been and the sense of excitement when I first heard the new-look Van Halen’s debut single Why Can’t This Be Love pumping out the radio was insane. The flood of delight at hearing it’s blend of Eddie’s dexterity and Sammy’s ear for a melody combining for the first time a release of gargantuan proportions. It’s the perfect Van Halen single, the subsequent album, 5150 the perfect summer metal album. It’s got everything – marrying the finest Van Halen had offered to that point with the class of Hagar’s exemplary solo career. And it rocks like a mother…

Jerry Ewing

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And now have your say…

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2005, Paul Elliott has worked for leading music titles since 1985, including Sounds, Kerrang!, MOJO and Q. He is the author of several books including the first biography of Guns N’ Roses and the autobiography of bodyguard-to-the-stars Danny Francis. He has written liner notes for classic album reissues by artists such as Def Leppard, Thin Lizzy and Kiss, and currently works as content editor for Total Guitar. He lives in Bath – of which David Coverdale recently said: “How very Roman of you!”

Emperor’s 1994 full-length debut In The Nightside Eclipse was far from the first black metal album, but few had the same impact. In 2019, frontman Ihsahn and producer Eirik ‘Pytten’ Hundvin looked back on an album that blew the scene wide open.

The internet seems to think In The Nightside Eclipse came out on February 21, 1994, yet anyone who was there at the time will recall the agonising delays that pushed Emperor’s hotly anticipated debut LP back throughout that year. The record wasn’t unleashed until mid-December ’94 – 17 months after it was recorded, “under the seventh full moon anno 1993” (as specified in the liner notes) – at the end of a breathtakingly fertile year for the newly ascendant force of Norwegian black metal.

Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, Burzum’s Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, Darkthrone’s Transilvanian Hunger, debuts from Gorgoroth and Dimmu Borgir, and the first two albums by Enslaved and Satyricon all emerged in the time it took for Nightside to get its act together. After setting the underground on fire with the Wrath Of The Tyrant demo in 1992 and an eponymous EP in ’93, the still-teenaged Emperor – guitarist/vocalist/keyboardist Ihsahn, guitarist Samoth, bassist Tchort and drummer Faust – had a lot of ground to make up, and a hell of a lot to live up to.

The album’s producer, Eirik ‘Pytten’ Hundvin – already Norwegian BM’s go- to sound man after helming recordings by Immortal, Burzum and Mayhem at Grieghallen Studios in Bergen – checked his original notes to help us pin down the reasons for Nightside’s colossal delay. “I have been through my files from the production and can confirm that mixing was complicated,” Pytten declares. “We had a 16-track analogue multitrack, and linked to it by [timecode-reading device] SMPTE was an Atari computer with linked midi keyboards and sound modules, probably also an 8-track digital recorder. This is a very time-consuming set-up to work. In addition was everyone’s high expectations of the final result, and accordingly some remixes of the songs were adding time.”

Ihsahn remembers remixing The Majesty Of The Night Sky “17 times before we were satisfied”, and as Pytten points out, it was a laborious commute for the young band; Grieghallen lies more than 200 miles west of Emperor’s home town Notodden, in Norway’s Telemark region. Pytten confirms the final day of mastering as August 9, 1994, adding, “Approximately two weeks later all finances were settled. If my notes and memory is accurate, this is a highly acceptable time for settling an invoice!”

Aside from painstaking studio niggles, there was another, more unorthodox reason for Nightside’s delay. Shortly after recording it, three- quarters of Emperor were imprisoned for a variety of crimes: Faust for murder, Samoth for arson and Tchort for assault.

This quartet of misanthropic souls were positioned at the dark heart of an alarming new phenomenon: the Norwegian black metal ‘Inner Circle’, a loose association of like-minded musicians whose turbulent antisocial oneupmanship quickly spiralled out of control. In the time between Nightside’s recording and release, Mayhem guitarist Euronymous had been murdered and Burzum’s Count Grishnackh imprisoned for the crime, and Norwegian black metal had grown from a freakishly cult regional micro-scene to a thriving movement of international infamy.

Yet under all this pressure, Nightside became arguably the crowning achievement of its era – a dizzying, haunting, tempestuous masterwork pushing boundaries of composition, melody and atmosphere to make it arguably the most far-reaching artefact from Norse BM’s early years. The band never had any doubt of their debut’s potency: “It will be a monument in black metal history,” Samoth promised in March ’94 to excellently titled Finnish zine Pure Fucking Hell.

This was a busy time for the guitarist; as well as Emperor, Samoth’s six- string bolstered releases by Arcturus, Satyricon and Gorgoroth, in addition to session bass-work for Burzum. “It’s Samoth who had all the connections, and I tagged along!” admits Ihsahn, recalling the incestuous nature of the Norwegian scene in these early days. “At the time extreme metal was dominated by Swedish and American bands, so maybe since we all hung out a lot, going to shows, a Norwegian identity was created. It fit better with our surroundings. In The Nightside Eclipse was very much influenced by descriptions of stuff that look very much like our Telemark nature.”

The LP’s dramatic evocation of place was signposted by its gatefold sleeve, Kristian ‘Necrolord’ Wåhlin’s moonlit panorama opening to reveal a glorious 24-inch photograph of a mountainous wooded fjord. MTV went to Ihsahn’s home for an interview in ’94, the black-clad youth filmed stalking around conifers, gazing pensively at waterfalls and ruminating on “the winds, the rains… the wastelands, the emptiness, the silence…” Far more than Satan, the unifying essence and motivational impetus of Nightside is the mysterious, rugged landscape of Emperor’s homeland – albeit populated by some deeply unnatural beings.

“We had a strong need for expression, so it was easy to channel that into fantasy-like images and larger-than-life sounds,” recalls Ihsahn. “We were just as inspired by soundtracks that went along with big fantasy movies. We started out with some epicness on the first Emperor EP, but it became very obvious that we wanted to do something that was just out of this world.”

Assisting in that regard was Pytten’s Nightside production, an oppressive cacophony of barbed guitars, blitzkrieg drums and triumphing synth flourishes, heaving with apocalyptic sound effects. Production polarised opinion from day one, some feeling alienated by the harsh, wayward blizzard of sound, others powerfully immersed in its cryptic embrace.

“Aahh, this is a tricky question,” remarks Pytten, when asked how his assessment of the finished product has changed over the years. “With such long times working on the production, so many hours in the studio, so many replays of the songs, so many tries to get the music right, I can go on… I have to admit my first feeling was relief! But the way I see the album after the fatigue left me is that I have never thought, ‘Oh if I only had done so and so instead…’ I think, whatever words are put on the production, this is a captured sound that has a lasting quality. I am quite proud of what we all achieved.”

Ihsahn’s own assessment is even more touching and heartfelt. “I think it’s the purity of it,” ponders the frontman, considering why Emperor’s debut has survived so timelessly. “We had no commercial ambitions; there were none to have. It sounds romantic, but all this music was made purely with artistic motivations, this total, introverted, Norwegian ‘keep it to ourselves’ attitude is what enabled us to create something that no one else had done.

“I always look back at albums and think, ‘Ah, I could have changed that’, but then you go beyond that, it becomes so old that you just appreciate it for being a representation of where you were at that point. And this wasn’t just 25 years ago, it’s almost like another life, being basically a kid. I look back and I think, ‘What an immense privilege, to be able to so deeply get to dedicate so much time and attention to this thing called music that I love so much.’ That whole time formed the basis of me being able to do this for 25 years. What a stroke of luck! It’s almost paradoxical to be so thankful for black metal, given the evilness of it all…”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 323, May 2019

Chris has been writing about heavy metal since 2000, specialising in true/cult/epic/power/trad/NWOBHM and doom metal at now-defunct extreme music magazine Terrorizer. Since joining the Metal Hammer famileh in 2010 he developed a parallel career in kids’ TV, winning a Writer’s Guild of Great Britain Award for BBC1 series Little Howard’s Big Question as well as writing episodes of Danger Mouse, Horrible Histories, Dennis & Gnasher Unleashed and The Furchester Hotel. His hobbies include drumming (slowly), exploring ancient woodland and watching ancient sitcoms.

As 1977 rolled in, Aerosmith were flying high. In January, the band’s latest single Walk This Way, belatedly extracted from 1975 album Toys In The Attic, hit No.10 in the US. And in February, when they toured in Japan for the first time, they experienced a level of hysteria akin to Beatlemania.

There was no rock band on Earth bigger than Led Zeppelin, but Aerosmith were rising fast. As their producer Jack Douglas said: “Kiss was their only competition, at least among American rock bands.”

And yet, in the early summer of ’77, when Douglas started work on Aerosmith’s fifth album, Draw The Line, the problems within the group were plain to see. Hard drugs had taken a hold on the band’s two leading figures, singer Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry. As the latter would put it: “The Beatles recorded The White Album, right? Well, Draw The Line was our Blackout Album.”

It was an album created out of chaos, and it marked a turning point in the life of America’s greatest rock’n’roll band. In its wake came two years of insanity – near-fatal car crashes, on-stage meltdowns, drug mania and fights between their wives and girlfriends, culminating in the shock exit of Joe Perry in 1979. And strangest of all, it was during these wild years, when the band was at its most dysfunctional, that some of Aerosmith’s greatest music was made.

The scene for the recording of Draw The Line was the Cenacle, a vast mansion set in 100 acres in a remote part of New York State near the village of Armonk. In 1977 the owner of the Cenacle was a psychiatrist who planned to turn the old place into a residential home for troubled adolescents. “Instead,” joked Aerosmith’s bassist Tom Hamilton, “he got us.”

By the time the band members arrived in June, Jack Douglas and his team had set up a mobile recording studio on the ground floor, with heavy cables running from room to room. For added natural ambience, Joey Kramer’s drums were recorded in the chapel, and Joe Perry’s rig was installed in a walk-in fireplace. The difficulty for Douglas was in getting the band into a working routine. As Perry later admitted, “We were drug addicts dabbling in music, rather than musicians dabbling in drugs.” Their hazardous recreational habits also extended to racing their sports cars, Ferraris and Porsches, on the surrounding country lanes, and messing around with firearms, Perry having recently added to his private arsenal a semiautomatic Thompson machine gun.

The days and nights passed in a blur. “We were out there at the Cenacle,” said Tyler, whose erratic mood swings were dictated by whatever he was on – snorting fat lines of cocaine one moment, then gulping downers, in particular the sedative-hypnotic Tuinal. During one dusk-till-dawn bender, he and Kramer set out at 5am to shoot beer cans with .22 rifles, only for Tyler to pass out with the gun in his hands before a shot was fired. Perry, meanwhile, was using heroin, breakfasting on White Russian cocktails, and wandering around the place “glassy-eyed”, as Douglas recalled.

With Tyler and Perry zonked, shut away in their second-floor rooms for days at a time, the band was, in Hamilton’s words, “split in two”. Most evenings, it was just the trio of Hamilton, Kramer and guitarist Brad Whitford working on tracks. Tyler, holed up in his room, was struggling to write lyrics, and on the rare occasions when Perry did show, he was barely able to string a few notes together – in Douglas’ estimation, “totally wrecked”. Perry never denied it. By this stage, he said, “Steven and I had stopped giving a fuck.”

After six weeks at the Cenacle, with the album still unfinished and tour dates looming, the band headed home to Boston. But in the condition these guys were in, minds frazzled, two of them were lucky to make it back alive. Kramer reckoned he was doing over 130mph in his Ferrari when he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a guardrail. He was hospitalized with a head injury but quickly discharged with seven stitches. The $19,000 Ferrari was a write-off. Perry was also driving at high speed when he lost control of his Corvette and hit an unmarked police car. He emerged unscathed, and as he later noted, with some amusement, the cop kindly took him to a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts.

Others might have seen this as a wake-up call, but not Perry. At home during a brief period of downtime, he got loaded on opium, rolled into a ball and swallowed whole, drank vintage wine like it was water, and rode his luck time and again in what he described as “a series of car accidents”. The madness continued unabated on tour, for which the road crew packed a chainsaw for Perry to dismantle hotel furniture.

What was officially named The Aerosmith Express Tour – but known among the band’s long-suffering crew as The Lick The Boots That Kick You Tour – ran from June to October, beginning and ending in the US, with European dates in between. Throughout this period, Jack Douglas was kept busy: taping shows for a live album and, during breaks in the tour, conducting the final sessions for Draw The Line at The Record Plant studios in New York City, where Tyler applied what little discipline he had to finishing his lyrics and vocals.

In Europe in August, a performance at the Lorelei Festival in Germany was cut short when Tyler collapsed after just three songs, but at the Reading Festival, the band turned it on, winning over a rain-soaked audience mired in mud. And it was during their time in the UK that Perry recorded his solos for the new album’s title track at AIR Studio in London, owned by The Beatles’ producer George Martin. On that occasion, Perry played with genuine conviction as his new friend, Queen guitarist Brian May, watched on.

In October, back on home turf, there was another close call during a show at the Philadelphia Spectrum. With 17,000 fans in rowdy mood, an M-80 firecracker was thrown on stage, the deafening explosion leaving Tyler with a burned cornea and Perry with a burst artery in his right hand. As Whitford said: “Steven could have been blinded.” Later that month, as Tyler and Perry added the finishing touches to Draw The Line at The Record Plant, they had even more reason to count their blessings. On October 20, a plane carrying Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd crashed near Gillsburg, Mississippi, killing six of the occupants, including singer Ronnie Van Zant and guitarist Steve Gaines. This plane, a Convair CV-240, had been offered for Aerosmith’s use earlier that year, but had been declared unsafe by the band’s head of flight operations.

What happened to Lynyrd Skynyrd had a profound effect on the members of Aerosmith. As Joe Perry said: “It was a terrible tragedy, and we just considered ourselves incredibly lucky. To be that close to it, and knowing those guys, it was really a blow.” But in the immediate aftermath, just a few days after the disaster, Aerosmith hit the road again, and while the shows were selling out, the flagship single for the new album, its title track, bombed. “It didn’t make the Top 40,” Tyler said. “And this was supposed to be a huge album for us, a big follow-up to our best work.”

A turbulent year for the band ended with the album’s release on December 9. And just as Tyler knew how much was riding on it, so did Jack Douglas. As he explained: “It took us six months and half a million dollars to make that record.”

Demand for a new Aerosmith album was sky-high, and Draw The Line took off like a rocket. The bottom line was what mattered to Columbia Records, and according to Douglas, this was “the fastest selling record the label ever had”. But by January 1978, the album had peaked at Number 11 in the US – a major disappointment after the previous record, Rocks, had reached Number Three. And in Rolling Stone magazine, a review of Draw The Line was as stinging as it was perceptive: “Chaotic to the point of malfunction, with an impenetrably dense sound adding to the confusion… This album shows the band in a state of shock.”

Going for the jugular, that review pinned Draw The Line as “a truly horrendous record”. The truth of it was not quite so simple. Certainly, this album was no match for what came before, the twin peaks of Toys In The Attic and Rocks. But there was a powerful intensity, a cocaine-induced mania, in the title track and the Perry-sung Bright Light Fright, the latter inspired, so Perry claimed, by the “energy” of the Sex Pistols – evidence, albeit slight, that some outside influence could permeate his fazed consciousness. There was depth in Kings And Queens, a weird and heavy trip in which Tyler sang of ancient European history, guillotines and Vikings – Walk This Way this was not.

The album’s best track, I Wanna Know Why, proved that Aerosmith could still sound as cool as fuck, even if Tyler and Perry had stopped giving a fuck. And while their version of Milk Cow Blues – a 1930s song credited to American bluesman Kokomo Arnold and famously recorded by Elvis Presley in the 50s – was laid down because they were short on original material, it had a real swing to it, and carried a little poignancy following the death of Elvis on August 16, 1977.

What was lacking in Draw The Line was anything approaching the beauty in songs such as Uncle Salty and You See Me Crying from Toys In The Attic, and the ballad Home Tonight from Rocks. This album, born of excess, was all hard edges. The only lightness of touch was in the illustration on the cover, a portrait of the group by caricaturist Al Hirschfeld.

As Jack Douglas put it: “Draw The Line is a classic title that says it all, the coke lines, heroin lines, drawing symbolic lines and crossing them all – no matter what.”

By this stage, it was no secret that Aerosmith were into the hard stuff, Tyler and Perry most of all. “The press started referring to Joe and Steven as The Toxic Twins,” Tom Hamilton said. “We started hearing rumours that we were breaking up when word got out how crazy things were.” What was unknown, outside of the band’s inner circle, was the twisted little drama playing out in Tyler and Perry’s personal lives.

Perry and his wife Elyssa were tight with David Johansen, singer for the New York Dolls, and his wife Cyrinda Foxe, a model, actress and protégé of Andy Warhol. Johansen had even co-written the song Sight For Sore Eyes from Draw The Line. When it was discovered that Tyler and Cyrinda were having an affair, Elyssa was mortified. “I felt like an idiot,” she said. “David was good friend.” Her worst fears were confirmed when Cyrinda left Johansen for Tyler, and then revealed that she was pregnant.

With the relationship between singer and guitarist deteriorating, the tension heightened by non-stop drug use, Aerosmith manager David Krebs devised a simple strategy for 1978 in an effort to keep the band together. As he explained it: “We had reached the top, but the band was dying. I wanted to give them time to work out their problems. We came up with these giant events. That’s how they spent most of the year, headlining ten major festivals.”

One such event came on March 18, California Jam II in Ontario, 30 miles from Los Angeles, where an audience of 350,000 saw Aerosmith topping a bill featuring Ted Nugent, Foreigner, Heart and Santana. And it was during this trip to California that this band of Beatles fans got to work with George Martin, the man known as ‘the fifth Beatle’.

Martin was producing the soundtrack album for the movie Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a musical comedy, loosely based on The Beatles’ most famous work, starring the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, and created by Robert Stigwood, the manager of the Bee Gees and the brains behind the box-office smashes Saturday Night Fever and Grease. The Sgt. Pepper movie had Beatles songs sung by a diverse cast – the Gibb brothers and Frampton, Alice Cooper and the comedians Frankie Howerd and Steve Martin. And for Aerosmith, there was a cameo role in which they played to type as ‘The Future Villain Band’, performing a rocking version of the Fab Four’s funkiest number, Come Together. The track was recorded with Martin in just two takes, and while the movie and soundtrack album would bomb, Aerosmith would have a Top 30 hit with Come Together in September, the month in which Tyler and Cyrinda were married.

Through that summer, the band played more of those giant events. On July 4, American Independence Day, they top-billed at the Texxas World Music Festival at the 100,000-capacity Dallas Cottonbowl, with Ted Nugent and Heart again as support acts, along with Journey and Eddie Money. They also played a few low-key club shows, billed as Dr. J. Jones And The Interns, which were recorded by Jack Douglas for the live album that was released on October 27. They named it Live! Bootleg, and the titled implied, it was, by design, the antithesis of Peter Frampton’s sweet-sounding mega-hit Frampton Comes Alive!

The true measure of what Aerosmith delivered in Live! Bootleg was summed up by Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash, who was just a kid of thirteen when the album came out. “That was the big one for me,” he said. “Live! Bootleg is one of the most underrated albums of all time, one of the best live rock’n’roll albums ever made. It started the trend for me to go out and discover new bands by buying their live albums, because that way I could get all the best songs and for me the whole live thing was the most exciting thing in the world. The way that Live! Bootleg starts with Back In The Saddle, that whole intro with the crowd going crazy and the flash-pots going off, that whole build-up, made it so exciting to me.”

Live! Bootleg was a triumph, but within a month of its release, with the band back out on tour, a shocking incident in a Chicago hotel pushed Tyler and Perry even closer to breaking point. An argument between Elyssa and Cyrinda, the latter eight months pregnant, escalated into a brawl, in which Elyssa was alleged to have kicked Cyrinda in the stomach. Brad Whitford’s wife Karen witnessed what happened, later recalled it as “a very ugly scene”, and noted, “Things between Steven and Joe went immediately downhill, as you can imagine.”

Fortunately, Cyrinda’s pregnancy was not affected. On December 22, she gave birth to a healthy daughter, whom they named Mia. But for the band, the writing was on the wall.

In January 1979, even as Live! Bootleg rose to No.13 on the Billboard chart, Rolling Stone stuck the knife in again. “Aerosmith is a dinosaur among bands, the last of a generation of rock’n’rollers being edged out by more streamlined competition like Boston, Foreigner and Fleetwood Mac,” proclaimed the magazine.

But it wasn’t this new breed of Adult Oriented Rock band that was hurting Aerosmith. Nor was it the advent of punk rock and new wave. The damage was coming from within. Aerosmith was a band self-destructing – with the drugs and the booze, and with the enmity between their women that was effectively a proxy war between the guys themselves. Tyler and Perry had always been the axis on which the band revolved, but in the summer of ’79, that bond was broken.

In the preceding months, the band was still functioning, to a point. They were still doing the big shows – headlining the California Music Festival at Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles on April 7, with Nugent again on the undercard, alongside Van Halen and Cheap Trick, and 100,000 tickets sold. In May, work on a new Aerosmith album began. But on July 28, at another marquee event, the World Series Of Rock festival at Cleveland Stadium, the shit hit the fan.

The line-up that day was out of this world: below Aerosmith and, as usual, the Nuge, were Journey, Thin Lizzy, AC/DC and Scorpions. But when Aerosmith got up on stage, it wasn’t pride, the desire to prove they were still top dogs, which had them fired up. It was hatred for each other. Moments before show time, in a backstage trailer, Elyssa Perry had traded insults with Tom Hamilton’s wife Terry, thrown a glass of milk at her, and in the ensuing scuffle, all five members of the band ended up throwing punches. All of that bad energy went into what Elyssa described, mischievously, as “the best show of the tour”. But once it was done, and they were all back in the trailer, Tyler and Perry went right at it. As Tyler recalled: “Joe goes, ‘Maybe I should leave the band.’ I said, ‘Yeah, maybe you fuckin’ should.’ Joe goes, ‘Oh yeah?’ And gets up. And I yell: ‘FUCK YOU, THEN! GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!’ And he left.” Tyler concluded, funnily but somewhat simplistically: “Aerosmith literally broke up over spilt milk.”

In the weeks that followed, as rumours of Perry’s exit circulated in the rock press, the rest of the band got back to work on the new album at Media Sound studios in New York, while also auditioning new guitarists. One of the candidates was Michael Schenker, the mercurial German genius who had walked out of two major bands, UFO and Scorpions. It was Schenker’s brusque manner – as Tyler quoted him, “Before I join your band I vant it clear I’m taking over right now!” – which turned them off. Schenker was similarly unimpressed. “Steven,” he said, “was not in a good shape.” In the end, it was a 23 year-old New Yorker, Jimmy Crespo, who replaced Perry.

Schenker’s gut feeling about Tyler was correct. The singer was so deep into drugs while Aerosmith were finishing the album Night In The Ruts that he later described the experience as “like a fuckin’ solar eclipse.” But even with Perry gone, and Tyler so far gone, this album, while jokingly named, turned out to be one of Aerosmith’s very best.

A press release dated October 10, 1979 had put an end to speculation: “Joe Perry and Aerosmith announced today Perry’s plans to depart the group to purse a solo career.” The statement concluded with a barefaced lie: “His departure is described as amicable.” And while the cover for Night In The Ruts featured Perry – in a photo of the band dressed as coal miners, shot in March 1978 – any talk of reconciliation was ended on November 16, the date of the album’s release. That night, with a sense of comic timing, the guitarist’s new group, The Joe Perry Project, played their debut show at Boston College.

Six songs on Night In The Ruts had been co-written by Perry, and five featured his playing: Chiquita, Cheese Cake and Three Mile Smile, all lean-and-mean rockers in the classic Aerosmith tradition; No Surprize, the ballsy opening track, in which Tyler told the story of the band’s salad days; and Bone To Bone (Coney Island White Fish Boy), a frantic number named by Tyler after slang for a used rubber.

But in Perry’s absence, Jimmy Crespo and another guitarist, Richie Supa, gelled pretty much seamlessly with Brad Whitford. And while the album was filled out with three cover versions, they all worked brilliantly: The Yardbirds’ Think About It played at maximum overdrive, the old blues song Reefer Head Woman pulling raw emotion out of Tyler, and Remember (Walking In The Sand), a hit for 60s girl group The Shangri-Las, handled with finger-clicking panache. But in the album’s final track, a beautiful ballad named Mia, there was, as Tyler later admitted, heavy significance. “It was a lullaby I wrote on the piano for my daughter,” he said. “But the tolling bell notes at the end of the song and the end of the album sounded more like the death knell of Aerosmith for people who knew what was going on.”

In January 1980, when Night In The Ruts reached No.14 on the US chart, it seemed that Aerosmith might pull through without Joe Perry. But in the same month, when the band headed out on tour, it was heavy going. Tyler got so drunk before a show in Portland, Maine that he keeled over midway through the set, and had to be carried offstage. And even when the band had a good night, fans were still calling out for Perry, whose debut album with the Project, released in March of that year, was titled, pointedly, Let The Music Do The Talking.

Night In The Ruts was a great record, but for Aerosmith there were hard times ahead. The rot had set in. The decline was inevitable. Steven Tyler was just too proud to admit it, and too messed up to do anything about it.

Aerosmith had it all and blew it, and they had nobody else to blame but themselves. As David Krebs said: “In 1978, Aerosmith represented the living spirit of American rock’n’roll. To see them destroy themselves through immense disregard for anything but self-indulgence was a tragedy.”

Originally published in Classic Rock Presents: Aerosmith

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2005, Paul Elliott has worked for leading music titles since 1985, including Sounds, Kerrang!, MOJO and Q. He is the author of several books including the first biography of Guns N’ Roses and the autobiography of bodyguard-to-the-stars Danny Francis. He has written liner notes for classic album reissues by artists such as Def Leppard, Thin Lizzy and Kiss, and currently works as content editor for Total Guitar. He lives in Bath – of which David Coverdale recently said: “How very Roman of you!”