I slept with the world’s biggest rock stars – Steven Tyler was the best, but I turned down a famous Brit singer
CLOTHES had been flung across the room with reckless abandon after a night of passion with womanising Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler.
But songwriter-to-the stars Holly Knight’s romp with rock royalty would soon come to a shuddering halt after she accidentally set off her home’s panic alarm.
New Yorker Holly, 66, who wrote Eighties hits including Tina Turner’s The Best, Pat Benatar’s Love Is A Battlefield, Patty Smyth’s The Warrior, Bon Jovi’s Stick To Your Guns and Aerosmith’s Rag Doll, is now releasing tell-all memoir I Am The Warrior about her years of sex and rock ’n’ roll in the music industry.
She also reveals trysts with Kiss singer Gene Simmons, Every Time You Go Away heart-throb Paul Young and rocker Daryl Hall, tells how she rebuffed a Rod Stewart chat-up line and recalls what it was like to tour with What’s Love Got To Do With It diva Tina — for whom she wrote nine songs.
Laughing, she tells The Sun: “My whole life is surreal, I have to pinch myself and realise it wasn’t someone else. The Eighties was one of the last decades of excess before consequences.
“I wasn’t just a groupie putting another notch on my belt, I was living, and you’re supposed to do crazy things when you’re young.
“I don’t feel embarrassed, I own it. It was fun. All of my close girlfriends love hearing about this stuff and said they would have done the same.”
‘Uneventful threesome’
Detailing her months of flirting with Aerosmith’s infamous ladykiller Steven, Holly tells The Sun about “forgetting he was a rock star” during four-hour phone calls and thinking of him as just “an interesting and sweet guy”. But things turned sexual, she writes in her book, after he revealed a dream where she had “shaved a certain part” of her body, leaving it as “bald as an eagle”.
While working on Aerosmith’s 1987 hit Rag Doll, Holly was shocked when the US rockers hired strippers to “play bongos on their bare asses” for the recording, she writes. The unknown ladies got a nod on the album sleeve with the note “Thanks to the Flesh Bongos”.
After taking Holly out one night then walking her back to her hotel, she tells The Sun, Steven planted “a big, fat, juicy kiss” on her lips but she pulled away, fearing damage to her career. She says: “It was not so much his technique that made him a good kisser but physical attributes. He has big, fat lips. While I turned him down that night, months later I initiated things.”
The fling happened at her home in LA, when a jam session ended with them heading upstairs. Holly writes: “The truth is that at some point when we were making music in my studio I knew we would end up on my bedroom floor. It was inevitable, given our intense like for one another. Steven is a delicious kisser. As for the rest, you’ll have to use your imagination.”
But while leading Steven up to her room, Holly accidentally kicked a box containing her panic alarm, which then silently sent out a distress signal for 45 minutes. She writes: “Suddenly, through my open bedroom door, I saw beams of flashlights bouncing on my walls.”
It is one of the “surreal, pinch-me moments” of her life she loves to recount to girlfriends. But after that night, she tells The Sun, she would not see Steven for 20 years, and while she wonders what might have been, she “trusts the universe’s plan”. She adds: “If I had got with him maybe I would have wanted to drive a stake through his heart? He was notoriously promiscuous.”
She writes that it was one of many adventures after finding her “tribe” as a songwriter and musician. She also sang in Eighties pop rock group Device, played keyboards with Spider and released her own self-titled album in 1988.
Her career choice worried her parents, both hospital workers, and her grandparents, both surgeons, Jews who fled Nazi Germany in 1935. Holly first played piano at age four and found rock ’n’ roll music an escape from her “volatile” mum. By 15, she ran away from home with a 20-year-old musician.
After years on the road, that relationship ended and it was through attending gigs that she fell into the musical crowd, before joining bands.
She writes that her big break came after being introduced to Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley — with whom she had a “pretty uneventful” threesome — and she later played keyboard with the band during a recording session. She writes of celebrity trysts: “I was curious if sex with a rock star felt any different than with mere mortals. Truth be told, it wasn’t better and it wasn’t worse.”
She also had run-ins with Gene Simmons, who had an “annoying way of staring up and down my body” and reusing a chat-up line after trying it on her, she writes. She describes him as “Dracula”. They bonded when Holly “stumped” him with a question about 1977 Italian horror film Suspiria after he said he knew everything and was a “human encyclopedia”.
One night, their friendship become something more when she hung out in his high-rise Manhattan apartment and they slept together.
She writes: “We both wanted what we wanted in the moment and, without much forethought, ended up in his giant bed.
“It was fairly lacking for me and I’m sure for him. It’s something I laugh and cringe about now because I’d already slept with Ace. Rock ’n’ roll. Lust. Opportunity. Stupid young puppies.”
The Eighties were an era of big hairstyles, bigger egos, and the mantra was “work hard, play harder” — but with some musicians, the work rarely began.
While writing lyrics for Rod Stewart’s 1986 hit Love Touch, Holly recalls being unable to get the singer to focus and help.
She writes: “Instead of contributing ideas, Rod kept cracking jokes and announcing it was time to take another break. The kind that involved your nose.”
Thankless and poorly paid
As they got “higher and higher” in Holly’s home studio, she writes, she grew frustrated and ended the collab because he hadn’t contributed anything.
She tells The Sun: “It was the Eighties, it was either sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll — and it wasn’t two of them, we were all putting stuff up our nose. I wanted him to stop horsing around and I’m surprised I had the balls to tell him I would finish it on my own.”
But drugs were not Rod’s only distraction — Holly later spurned his flirty advances. While with her in his limo, he asked, “Do ya think I’m sexy?” — the name of his 1978 song. Holly writes how she replied: “You’re not my type and I’m not yours. I’m not blonde and I don’t have long enough legs.”
They never did sleep together and their friendship soured when Rod said his 1986 track Love Touch, which Holly co-wrote, was “one of the silliest” he had sung. She replied it was his most successful in six years, making No6 in the US.
She tells The Sun that years later, at the premiere of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical in London’s West End, they made up, with Holly describing him as “just as fun and mischievous” as ever.
But her work was often thankless and poorly paid, while some of her artists went on to win Grammy Awards.
Among her hit songs were Tina Turner tracks (Simply) The Best, Invincible and Better Be Good To Me, which led to a long friendship — born in an aptly rock ’n’ roll way.
Moments after the pair met, in a limo near Heathrow Airport, she writes, Holly flashed her “bodacious tat-tas” at the singer — after being asked: “Holly, do you have nice tits?” In a foreword for Holly’s memoir, Tina acknowledged The Best was a “song that carried me around the world” and was “a rare treasure — a universal anthem”. She wrote: “Holly, I’ve said it to you before, and say it again, you are simply the best.”
In 1988 Holly was voted Best Songwriter in a Rolling Stone magazine poll, and by 2013 made the Songwriters Hall Of Fame.
Holly feels pride hearing her songs played but is disappointed her dream of solo success never materialised.
She tells The Sun: “Mine is one of the best jobs in the world but being thanked is a rare thing. Singers often deliberately perpetuate the myth that they wrote a song. I’ve got used to it and instead, smile to myself whenever I hear a song I wrote playing in the grocery store.
“I take pleasure in the writing, I would have done it whether I made a living from it or not, so in many ways I’m lucky.”
Indeed, Holly tells The Sun she always preferred “the doing and the journey” to “the final destination” — and it is clear her journey is unlike any other.
- Holly Knight’s book, I Am The Warrior: My Crazy Life Writing The Hits and Rocking the MTV Eighties, is published by Permuted Press and available to pre-order for £19.99.