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1. Aerosmith formed over french fries.
After playing a show in New Hampshire on July 4, 1966, with the Strangeurs — one of his many pre-Aerosmith bands — Steven Tyler grabbed a bite to eat. Wowed by the excellent French fries, he complimented the moody, long-haired chef. “That was Joe [Perry],” Tyler says. “It turned out he was mad because we always threw food, and he had to clean up after us.” Four years later, Tyler and Perry formed Aerosmith.

2. Tyler took a big chance at the high-school dance.
“With a missy who was ready to play? Yeah. They had record hops in the lunchroom of our high school on Friday afternoons. I thought, ‘What if we had a band?’ So I got a band together. Then I met the cheerleader, was a real young bleeder . . . So, the high-school dance? You betcha. We played there, and all the girls who never looked at me saw me up there playing ‘Wooly Bully’ and wanted to sharpen my pencil.”

3. Tyler was a teenage Trekkie.
“When I was in high school, I’d smoke a joint in my closet in Yonkers, New York, and watch Star Trek. I knew Sulu. When Uhura said ‘Open all hailing frequencies,’ I picked up my phone. After all, my darling, we lived on the dark side of the moon for so many years.”

4. Aerosmith have done lots and lots of drugs.
Tyler and Perry weren’t known as the Toxic Twins for nothing. “Incredible excess,” nods Tyler. How much drug use? “A swimming pool filled to the top with blow would be about right,” he says.

5. False Aerosmith rumor number 1:
Tyler and drummer Joey Kramer are just good friends, despite the fact that, as Kramer explains in the Aerosmith autobiography Walk This Way, “Someone put out a rumor at the beginning of the band that we were gay.” “Me and Joey Kramer? The drummer?” asks a wide-eyed Tyler. “That’s the damnedest ******** thing, man!”

6. Regrets? They’ve had, well, one.
“I had fun with girls,” says Tyler, “but I’m also bummed — because when you’re high, you’re not in the clubs looking for the puss. I spent a lot of my time in the bathroom with Rod Stewart, snorting blow.” Says Perry, grinning: “There’s that gay thing again, Steven. You’ve got to watch what you say.”

7. You can’t fit much on Steven Tyler’s arm.
The words MA KIN are tattooed on his left arm, a 1971 testament to his faith in the song “Mama Kin.” Why not the full title? “I couldn’t fit it on,” shrugs Tyler. Adds Perry, “He was young and skinny, so that’s all the room there was.”

8. Joe Perry has a guitar-shaped swimming pool.
“The neck isn’t on it, but it looks like a guitar,” he says. “Of course, the house would be the amplifier.”

9. Perry also has his own brand of hot sauce.
Joe Perry’s Rock Your World Boneyard Brew is available online at ashleyfood.com. Do profits go to charity, as with Paul Newman’s salad dressing? “Yeah, the Joe-Perry-put-a-neck-on-my-guitar-pool charity,” cracks Tyler.

10. Dealing with Tyler, Joey Kramer says, gave him a nervous eye twitch.
“He likes to say that, but it goes a bit deeper than that,” Tyler protests. Kramer did vacuum up miles of coke with the rest of them in the band’s heyday. “He’s lucky it isn’t both eyes,” says Perry.

11. Tyler and Perry argued about everything.
“We still do!” Tyler says. “What else are you going to do? Count your money?”

12. Perry’s girlfriend bit him on the face in 1974.
“You can get into some amazing fights if you set your mind to it,” he muses. “I’ve still got the scar. It’s around here somewhere.”

13. False Aerosmith rumor Number 2:
Perry did not do so much heroin before his wedding (to face-biter Elissa Jerret on August 5, 1975) that he almost got sick on the cake. Oh, he did the heroin — he just didn’t feel especially ill. “I was a very fastidious junkie,” he notes.

14. Perry smiled only once in the 1970s.
“I remember it, too,” says Tyler, referring to Perry’s twenty-sixth birthday in 1976, when his hero, Jeff Beck, joined Aerosmith onstage. “That was amazing,” Perry says. “I had reason to smile. I don’t know if I did or not.”

15. Tyler was once a 16-year-old girl’s “legal guardian.”
In 1975, Tyler’s girlfriend was — according to various accounts — 14, 15 or 16. He maintains she was 16 when he approached her parents about being her legal guardian, so she could tour with him. “She was doing things I was dreaming about,” he recalls. “She sure didn’t act 16.”

16. Aerosmith nearly chartered the Lynyrd Skynyrd death plane.
After hearing reports that the pilots had sometimes smoked marijuana and drunk Jack Daniels, Aerosmith decided not to hire a Convair plane to ferry them around on their 1977 tour. Three months later, a Convair crash killed half of Lynyrd Skynyrd. “We were that close from it being us, and we’ve always been that way,” says Tyler.

17. The whole band was drunk during filming of the 1978 turkey Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Director Michael Schultz asked, “Who are these drunks on my ******** set?” “It was fun,” recalls Perry, “but yeah, we were pretty drunk most of the time.”

18. False Aerosmith rumor Number 3:
Tyler was never so drug-addled during the recording of 1977’s Draw the Line that he saw triple, despite rumors that he did. “Can someone see triple?” Tyler wonders. “I’d be so stoned on Valium and muscle relaxers that my eyes would cross, and I couldn’t uncross them. I even remember driving like that.”

19. Perry once racked up $80,000 in room-service charges.
In 1979, after the Draw the Line tour, Perry was presented with the colossal bill — for hotel “incidentals.” How does one amass that big a tab? “Easy,” he says.

20. Tyler has a rather unusual way of giving gifts to women.
On a 1979 Caribbean vacation in St. Martin with his first wife, Cyrinda Foxe-Tyler, the singer presented her with a diamond-and-emerald bracelet by wearing it around his p***s and asking her to “dive for it, no hands.” “A double surprise for her,” he says.

21. Perry and Tyler really like knives.
To illustrate, Tyler pulls out a switchblade and pops it open. “Isn’t that nice?” Says Perry, reaching into his pocket, “I love a well-made piece of machinery. This is from a guy Steven and I know in Maui. It’s called an ‘assisted-flick’ — just touch it and it opens.” Indeed, with the lightest touch, the blade springs into place. “That’s a $1,200 knife,” Tyler notes. “I use this to open my fan mail.”

22. Perry and Tyler really like guns, too.
“I don’t know how many guns I have,” Perry says. “Not too many, probably about 50.” That seems like quite a few. “Not relatively speaking,“ he reasons, “when you start meeting guys who are into it. We know guys who have hundreds.”

23. The rest of Aerosmith prefer gentler pursuits.
Perhaps that’s why they call themselves the “L.I.3”: Less Interesting 3. Bassist Tom Hamilton is quite the tennis player, guitarist Brad Whitford has his own go-kart track and Joey Kramer collects cars. “He buys a new car every two months or so,” says Perry.

24. Kramer once exploded.
The drummer was gassing up his Ferrari near Boston in 1998 when it went up in flames, badly burning his arms. “He left the ignition on,” Tyler explains.

25. Tyler can fit into his daughter’s jeans.
Which daughter? Liv. “And my 13-year-old, Chelsea — about a month ago, I could wear her pants, but I’ve come off the road and gained six pounds.”

26. False Aerosmith rumor Number 4:
They never played just one song (“Train Kept a-Rollin’,” legend has it) and then left the stage, believing they’d performed a whole show. “Oh, no,” says Tyler. “That’s what blithering idiots do. We were just drug addicts.”

27. Without Mötley Crüe, there would be no “Dude (Looks Like A Lady).”
Tommy Lee and friends inspired Tyler to write his anthem to big-haired girly-men. “They got into my limousine after a show,” Tyler explains. “Every other word was dude. They were way ahead of their time. Dude! It was hilarious to me.”

28. False Aerosmith Rumor Number 5:
Aerosmith didn’t stop Permanent Vacation tourmates Guns N’ Roses from drinking while on the road in 1988. “We’d just gotten sober,” explains Tyler, “so I told those guys, ‘This is my dressing room, and if you whip out the coke, I’m going to have to leave.’ That was it. Then it was printed that we banned them from drinking backstage. Never.”

29. Over 29 whirlwind years, Aerosmith have scored just one number 1 single.
In 1998, the Diane Warren?penned power ballad “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” from the Armageddon soundtrack, provided the band with its sole number 1 hit. “Is it a soppy ballad that I hate?” Tyler asks. “No, I like the song. My daughter was in the movie, and it was a great ******** movie.”

30. Aerosmith helped invent rap-rock.
“We were a big piece of it,” says Tyler of the band’s 1986 collaboration with Run-DMC on “Walk This Way.” “We owe a lot to Rick Rubin for turning them on to us, because they were about as much into Aerosmith as we were into rap back then.”

31. The band just says no to plastic surgery.
“You start getting weird-looking,” says Tyler. “I color my hair, and I’ve got a couple of capped teeth, but that’s the extent of it.”

32. Aerosmith are not afraid to “play the game.”
In addition to recording a song for the new Spider-Man movie and preparing new material for a greatest-hits package, the band recently was the subject of an mtvICON special, in which Kid Rock, Pink and Nelly covered Aerosmith standards. “I think MTV offered it to U2, but they were busy,” Tyler quips. “If you’re a band like Aerosmith and you’re trying to stay relevant, you have to play the game.”

33. Aerosmith are indestructible.
Despite the best efforts of drug dealers and “various bastards,” Tyler says, Aerosmith have somehow avoided bankruptcy and/or death. “You know, you meet all kinds,” he says. “If Aerosmith is a comet ripping through the sky, there’s a tail of carrion and roadkill. But we’re still here, so what does that say?”