Dude looks like Steven Tyler
By Joan Anderman, Boston Globe Staff, 6/30/2002
Every day strangers on the street stop Neill and ask him personal questions about his anatomy.
"Are those your real lips?''
They touch his face and demand to know if he's had his cheeks done.
What about those eyes?
Neill isn't a celebrity or a freak. It's just that he bears a freakish resemblance to a well-known celebrity, singer Steven Tyler of the band Aerosmith. So striking are the similarities, a member of the music media who shall remain nameless once initiated a conversation with Byrnes thinking that she was schmoozing with the actual rock star. Neill knows he could avoid some of the confusion by moving to sub-Saharan Africa or getting a crew cut. Instead he's spent the last 10 years in front of a microphone stand draped in scarves.
Neill is the frontman for Draw the Line, an Aerosmith tribute band. The Boston-based group is in fact the world's only officially sanctioned Aerosmith tribute band, which means that the guys in Aerosmith think the guys in Draw the Line are such accomplished imposters they've given them their blessing to spread the pseudo-gospel in small towns and sweaty nightclubs and all sorts of places Aerosmith wouldn't get within a hundred miles of.
In 2000, MTV honored Draw the Line as one of the Top Tribute Acts around. But that was nothing compared to the rush of pulling off the perfect screech during the tag of ''Dream On'' at the Alternate Route in Weymouth for an audience that included Steven Tyler.
''I knew he was there,'' says Neill, 32, who lives in Hingham. ''Let's just say we played the first few songs a little faster than usual.''
One can only imagine how surreal it must be for Tyler to watch Byrnes being Tyler. And vice-versa, for that matter. Their first encounter was in 1989, when Neill came in first at a Tyler look-alike contest sponsored by WAAF (107.3 FM).
''It was during the `Pump' tour. My friends gave me a few beers and convinced me to go down. I won, '' says Neill, whose looks inspired teasing in middle school and fawning in high school. By the time graduation rolled around, not a day went by without a case of mistaken identity. ''Part of the deal [at the contest] was going backstage at Great Woods and meeting the band,'' Neills says. ''Steven's jaw pretty much dropped. It was right after the whole thing about his daughter, Liv Tyler, had come out, and I think he must have been worried that another kid had shown up. I was nervous, but they were all funny and down-to-earth. Ever since we've had a good relationship.''
He has lost count of how many Aerosmith concerts he's been to; neither can he estimate the number of hours he's spent poring over video- and audiotapes, books, bootlegs, and fan collections in the effort to master his act. Needless to say, he's a fan.
''They've been working so hard for so long, and I feel like we're the No. 1 Aerosmith booster club,'' he says. ''We try to keep their image alive. It feels like this type of music is dying out a little, and there's nothing like those rock bands that came out in the '70s. People still want that.''
But isn't it profoundly weird, or at least tiresome, for a musician to spend his entire adult life pretending to be a different musician? ''To be honest, I was going to get out of this a couple of years ago,'' says Byrnes. ''How many times can I play `Sweet Emotion?' But there was such an outcry. And that's the charge, night after night. It's the reaction, the energy from the crowd. And the girls taking off their shirts and throwing their bras at you.''
Despite the thrills, Neill is eager to spread his musical wings.
''I'm starting to write some original stuff,'' he says. A solo CD is in the works. ''It's gonna be hard rock, two guitars, different sorts of melodies. Something that has that Aerosmith type of sound.''