“I go, ‘Hey, Steve, how you doing?’ He goes, ‘My f**king lips are killing me!’”: Pat Travers on the hilarious first time he met Steven Tyler
Pat Travers has recalled meeting Aerosmith‘s Steven Tyler when he played at Day on the Green, a gig he describes as the “best show I ever did”.
Day on the Green was a recurring concert in Oakland, California which ran from 1973 to 1999. 1978 saw five separate Day on the Green events, with the third taking place on 23 July, and featuring a stacked lineup of the Pat Travers Band, Aerosmith, Foreigner, Van Halen and AC/DC.
READ MORE: Didn’t get tickets to Black Sabbath’s final show? You can livestream it – here’s how
The event, hosted by promoter Bill Graham, regularly drew crowds of around 65,000, according to Guitar World.
And it was backstage during the event that Travers met the Aerosmith singer for the first time, and the interaction sounded humorous, to say the least.
“That was the first time I met Steven Tyler, and that’s so funny,” he recalls in a new interview with Rick Beato. “Somebody from my record company says, ‘Pat, you got to meet Steven Tyler.’ And I went, ‘Yeah, I’ve just got to meet Steven Tyler.’
“So [the record label] walk me over. He’s sitting in a chair underneath an umbrella with a frozen daiquiri, and he’s got big mirrored aviators and the biggest dive watch I ever saw, and he’s just sitting there, and someone goes, ‘Hey, Steven, this is Pat – Pat, this is Steve.’ And I go, ‘Hey, Steve, how you doing?’”
Tyler responded: “My fucking lips are killing me!” Travers continues: “I liked him, just loved him immediately. I went, ‘That’s my kind.’ He just didn’t get it. I mean, he had chapped lips because it was so dry out there, yeah, but he [had] forgotten that.”
Travers also commends promoter Bill Graham for his work organising Day on the Green, adding: “The backstage area has Astroturf and tables and umbrellas, trailers – and everybody’s hanging out together.”
With Pat Travers known for his raw bluesy sound and tracks like Rock ‘N’ Roll Susie, Heat in the Street and Stevie, he and his band served as a perfect complement for the other hard rock giants on the bill.
In other news, Pat Travers release Statesboro Blues (Live in Baltimore 1982) from his archive back in April. He told Melodic at the time: “It sounds live… I’ve found that people often prefer a rougher sounding live mix, even if they don’t know it. They’re not conscious of it, ‘this one’s too high fidelity’, but when it’s a little trashy, it has more energy and sounds more urgent.
“Rock ‘n’ roll is not supposed to be clean and slick live. It’s got to have an edginess to it, and not be too predictable. There should always be surprises. Especially unintentional ones.”
The post “I go, ‘Hey, Steve, how you doing?’ He goes, ‘My f**king lips are killing me!’”: Pat Travers on the hilarious first time he met Steven Tyler appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
