Image Credit: Andrew Evans/PR Photos
Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler has confessed to snorting cocaine as recently as December, 2009, less than a year before it was announced that he was to be a judge on American Idol. The revelation comes in his new autobiography Does The Noise In My Head Bother You?, which is published today by the HarperCollins imprint Ecco.
In the book, Tyler recalls how he put drugs behind him in the mid-’80s, but then, in 2006, started taking prescription medication while being treated for hepatitis C. The singer’s drug usage escalated after he was diagnosed with a painful foot complaint until he was once again ingesting a range of narcotics, including cocaine. By late 2009, Tyler was staying at the New York apartment of his daughter Liv — who was away making a movie — and bingeing on drugs. In his memoir, Tyler writes that “During Thanksgiving I drank, did some blow again, and then Christmas was coming up so I had a guy bring me an eight ball of coke and a bunch of pills. And those deliveries got through Erin [Brady, Tyler's girlfriend]. But by December, the last package arrived and Erin saw it and said, ‘What is this?’ I said, ‘Gimme that!’ I pulled it away from her and the package ripped. Cocaine went all over the place. I went back later that night and snorted it all up, off the counters and everywhere.” Shortly after that incident, Tyler checked himself into the Betty Ford clinic.
Tyler also claims the band’s sobriety during the ’90s was not as complete as they once claimed. “Not everybody cleaned up and that’s the truth,” he writes. Indeed, the singer says that at least one member of the band was “using” when they performed last year: “It was a bit ironic and a thorn in my side, but not worth getting angry over after spending three months in rehab, that I came back to a band where someone was still using. I don’t give a f—. I live for this band, but the world needs to know.”
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