Rock & Roll’s reigning duo reveals the intimacies of their love affair with cigars.

Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler can’t stand what most people do with cigars. “I watch people smoke - people that buy the best Cuban cigars - and they take in the smoke and blow it out of their mouths,” says the irrepressible, quick-talking 53-year-old singer and songwriter, who chewed Red Man and smoked corn silk as a teen. “I’m a different kind of smoker. I take the smoke in my mouth and blow it out my nose. That way I eat the cigar, I taste the cigar. ’Know what I mean? If you ate dinner and plugged your nose up, what would you be tasting? That beautiful flavor is missing. I like to become the cigar. It’s like the circular breathing that horn players do, without the smoke going into your lungs.”

Nor is it gonna shock anyone who knows Aerosmith’s history to find out that for both Tyler and Joe Perry, the band’s 50-year-old guitarist and songwriter, the Lars Tetens torpedo known as Grass is a favorite smoke. “It’s amazing how much it smells like the real thing,” says Perry, the other half of the former “Toxic Twins,” as he and Tyler were dubbed when their group was deep into a years-long rampage of substance abuse. “But that,” quips Tyler, “was the ’70s. Enough about that.”

Lars Tetens and Steven Tyler

In the summer of 1970, Tyler was hanging at a New Hampshire resort his family owned, and Perry was working in an ice cream parlor in nearby Sunapee. The two Italian-American kids hooked up in a Cream-type power trio, which grew into Aerosmith. (They decided, says Tyler, not to call themselves The Hookers.) After wowing Boston teens, they played Max’s Kansas City in New York, where legendary label head Clive Davis signed them to Columbia in 1972. Their first record didn’t make much of a splash - critics usually compared them, unfavorably, to the Rolling Stones, partly because Tyler’s big-lipped onstage prancing and shtick with Perry reminded them of Jagger-Richards. So the quintet hit the road hard, playing little towns and dives to build a cult via by their stage show; three years after they released it, “Dream On” hit the top 10. By the time they did Toys In The Attic in 1976, featuring their original proto-rap-metal take of “Walk This Way,” they were stars.

They were also riding a self-destructive spiral of drug and alcohol consumption that nearly ended both Aerosmith and their lives. By 1980, Perry split; he spent the next few years living off his girlfriend’s largesse while trying to make his own mark. Tyler got an allowance of $20 a day from his manager as he descended further into cocaine and drunken binges with an increasingly muddled, personnel-churning band. As they fell in and out of rehab, banks repo-ed their homes, drug dealers threatened them, the IRS dug into them.

Enter Tim Collins and Rick Rubin. Collins, who took over their management in the early 1980s, extricated the band from a mountain of legal and personal hassles and got them a deal with Geffen Records. Rubin, a record producer hip to the way New York rap DJs were mixing old Aerosmith discs, convinced the Toxic Twins to cut “Walk This Way” again with his clients, Run-DMC in 1986. “That,” says Tyler, “was crucial for the rebirth of the band, the very tail-end of getting high.” By then, he was an alcoholic addicted to cocaine, Valium, methadone, and Xanax. Collins and his now-detoxified bandmates confronted him; after 45 days of rehab, he came out clean. Aerosmith shifted into high commercial gear; to date, they’ve sold 100 million albums worldwide.

Fast forward to 2001, where Aerosmith started the year with a triple play. First, the band copped the International Artist Award at the American Music Awards in early January-an award given only five times in 28 years. Next was the Super Bowl, where 80-plus million viewers saw their halftime medley of “Jaded” and “Walk This Way” (as well as Britney Spears wearing an Aerosmith T-shirt). March brought induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Now it’s May, and this “dinosaur” band is gearing up for a world tour behind their latest best-selling album, Just Push Play, with the hit single “Jaded.” Says Tyler, “Last week, we were launching the tour, designing the stage, deciding whether or not to buy these giant screens for arenas, figuring out whether we want to sing ‘America the Beautiful’ at the Indy 500 - we do more per day now than any one of us did in a year for most of the 70s.”

And cigars are always with them. During the first days of tour rehearsals, Perry gripes good-naturedly, “Everybody smoked my Cubans, and emptied my stash three times.” It’s actually been over the last decade, according to Perry, that he and Tyler have gotten into cigars. Good Cubans, starting with Macanudos. Whenever he lit one, Perry says, he remembered how his grandmother threw his grandfather out of the house to smoke his White Owls-”back when they were Cuban.” Like countless other kids, he used to wear the cigar bands his grandfather gave him as rings....