Steven Tyler Gives Away His Secret to Cocaine

It wasn't a skin-baring top or a hip-hugging dress that won Steven Tyler over when he met his fiancée.


When the American Idol judge first fell for Erin Brady, it was a hair accessory that caught his eye.


"She had on this hair band on around her head," he says on Tuesday's The Ellen DeGeneres Show. "She looked really old-fashioned, so I took her back in the room and she tied me up with it and I thought, 'I'm marrying this girl.' "


He adds of the attraction: It was "the imagery" of the scarf-like wrap – "and how deep one can get into it."


Despite that physical connection, it wasn't love at first sight for Tyler, 63, whose engagement news was revealed in December when Brady, 38, was photographed with some new bling. After all, the very first time he saw Brady, just before her hair band piqued his interest, she was a Clear Channel Communications employee paying the band.


"I didn't notice her," he tells Ellen DeGeneres. Before Brady, his wife was clothing designer Teresa Barrick; their marriage ended in 2006. (He was also married to Cyrinda Foxe, an ex-Warhol model, from 1978 to 1987.)


Now, after five years of dating Brady and two years of sobriety, the once-troubled Aerosmith frontman says he's not living his life for drugs anymore. He's been to rehab five or six times, he says – and he doesn't want to go back.


To tell you the truth, he makes it sound, well, rock and roll... But, that’s not the message he wants to put out there. Rockers, listen up: He reels it back in saying, “It’s what we did, but you know there is no end to that. It’s death, jail, or insanity for real reals.”


He says that he initially went sober in 1988 (one of the first for rock and roll stars at the time, he points out), but he apparently relapsed. Yet now, he has two years of sobriety to celebrate.
“I want to be in touch with what it means to be in this band and stand for something in the rock and roll community or you fall for anything,” he says. “I don’t want to do drugs anymore for that reason… That place lost me my kids, a marriage, a band, a lot of things and it’s for real. That’s how dangerous that is. So, I take it serious.”
Tyler says he’s working on a new album from his sober view on life. American Idol returns to Fox on Wednesday.