Steven Tyler Isn't 'Sure' If Farewell Tour Is End of Aerosmith: 'We Have Our Differences' But the 'Passion Is Still There'

On Sunday, the band will headline the Capital One JamFest at the NCAA Men's Final Four in Phoenix

Aerosmith In Concert At Arena Ciudad de Mexico
Photo: Victor Chavez/WireImage

Steven Tyler and the Aerosmith crew are “Getting Back in the Saddle.”

On Sunday, the band will headline the Capital One JamFest at the NCAA Men’s Final Four in Phoenix. And in this summer, they’ll kick off their farewell tour.

“The feeling I get playing those songs that I’ve written, that became a mainstay for billions of people over the planet for 40 years, it’s unreal,” Tyler, who recently celebrated his 69th birthday at Disneyland, told PEOPLE exclusively.

Tyler and his bandmates — guitarist Joe Perry, bassists Tom Hamilton, drummer Joey Kramer and guitarist Brad Whitford — have had their public ups and downs, but the frontman says the music brings them together.

“At rehearsal the other day, I haven’t seen the guys in a long time, and we have our differences — it’s outrageous, the s— that sometimes gets in the way,” he adds. “But once we start playing, I get as emotional as people in the audience when they hear a song like “Love in an Elevator’ or ‘Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing’ or ‘Walk This Way’: It triggers their remembrances of way back when.

Aerosmith Performs On NBC's "Today"
Kevin Mazur/WireImage

“The feeling you get playing, there’s nothing else like it. It’s like sex, it’s like an orgasm — what music can make you feel like … It’s the best friend you have, times 50. So I’m really looking forward to being on tour with them. Performing for two hours, my body wakes up, so it’s totally aerobic, and it just turns into the way it was when I was 18, so it feels great.”

And Tyler says he “can’t say for sure” whether the farewell tour the end of Aerosmith, which launched in 1970.

“We’ve gone through trying to get a job in a club that we thought was the only way we could pay our rent and having nobody there and asking the owner of the club, ‘Can we please leave? There’s no one here’ and the guy saying no — to being in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and everything in between: rehabs and arguments and children being born and marriages coming and going and ups and downs and different managers and lawsuits and record labels. We’ve done so much; one thing we’ve never done is a farewell tour, so you never know — it may wipe the slate clean of some of the problems, things that happen with each other.”

Adds Tyler: “The band’s been together for 40 years. Can you imagine? There are no marriages together for 40 years where the passion still runs as deep as it did the first 10 years, in my humble opinion … But the passion is still there.”

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