Steven Tyler & Aerosmith Fall Offstage in South Dakota
by MikeScholtes on Aug.07, 2009, under Steven Tyler
He may still be rocking at the age of 61 but Aerosmith lead vocalist Steven Tyler may want to tone his famous dancing down a little. While performing one of their biggest hits “Love in an Elevator” the renowned showman slipped and fell offstage at a concert in Rapid City, South Dakota and had to be airlifted to hospital.
According to a spokesman for the Buffalo Chip Campground, which hosted the outdoor event “He does a lot of dancing on the stage and he does a lot of stuff with his mic stand. He put his stand down and twirled around and stepped backwards off the stage,” Eyewitnesses said he fell onto a couple of fans.
Security guards rushed to his aid and the crowd cheered when Tyler got back up. After a few minutes guitarist Joe Perry returned to empty stage to announce that the rest of the show was cancelled.
Fans were too concerned about Tyler’s well being to care about the shortened set. One fan, Lance Yellow Robe said he was about 8 feet from the stage when Tyler fell. He told the Grand Rapid Journal that “you could kind of see it coming because he was dancing all over the stage. I hope he’s OK, I could care less about the concert being cancelled”.
Early reports indicated that Tyler had suffered only minor neck, head and shoulder injuries and that the veteran rocker was in good spirits when he was airlifted out to be treated at Rapid City Regional Hospital.
Steven Tyler’s mishap is not the first time during Aerosmith’s current tour that health problems have affected the band. In February, at the start of the tour a date in Venezuela had be cancelled when Joe Perry was forced to undergo emergency surgery when he developed an infection around the site of a previous knee replacement surgery and rhythm guitarist Brad Whitford missed a number of the tour’s early dates due to a head injury he sustained while exiting his Ferrari.
As recently as last month the problems continued. Steven Tyler missed a gig to rest a sprained leg muscle and bass player Tom Hamilton missed several dates to recuperate from an unspecified surgery.
There may be those who would claim that the tour is cursed, but it may just be that after almost forty years on the road it’s just a case of plain old age catching up with the “Boston Bad Boys”.
