Aerosmith: Is There Trouble in Paradise?

What's going on with Aerosmith? It's the question fans of the Bad Boys of Boston have been asking for months now, since the band's summer tour was cut short on Aug. 5, after frontman Steven Tyler fell from the stage at a concert in Sturgis, S.D., sustaining a broken shoulder and head and neck injuries. Since Tyler's tumble, guitarist Joe Perry has been hinting that Aerosmith's days are numbered. Now comes word that the studio sessions for the band's 15th LP have been pushed back indefinitely.

Perry thinks Tyler wants out.

"Steven really wants to go off and do some other projects," Perry says. "But if Aerosmith want to be viable and deliver to the fans what should be delivered, we need to do a studio record with some new material and do a tour behind it. That would have been standard operating procedure until about six years ago. I know he loves to play live in front of Aerosmith, or at least I know that's what he used to love to do. But I guess now he wants to do other things, which is fine as long as it's planned out, so the rest of the band can plan their lives around it."

Perry is obviously frustrated with the current state of Aerosmith, who were forced to nix a number of dates this summer because of Tyler's injury, but the band has been performing. Over the weekend, the band closed out the 2009 Formula 1 Etihad Airways Abu Dhabi Grand Prix with a concert on Yas Island. The band's set included the hit songs 'Eat the Rich,' 'Rag Doll' and 'I Don't Want to Miss a Thing.'

Last month, Perry aired his frustrations over Tyler. "The thing that bothers me the most is how it affects the fans," he said. "The only reason you're there is because of the fans. You owe them a lot, and when you start taking them for granted, it's just wrong. I think that a lot of what happened with Aerosmith over the last two or three years has been a case of that. And I'm not talking about everybody in the band. I think at this point the four band members are willing to not play for a while until the fifth member gets together and decides to come and join us again."