“Is it a snake… is it a block of cocaine? I don’t know!” Cadillac Three’s Jaren Johnston on the bizarre gift Steven Tyler gave him

Cadillac Three‘s Jaren Johnston has shared a story in which Aerosmith‘s Steven Tyler gave him a particularly odd – yet generous – gift.

In a new interview with Classic Rock, Johnston recalls meeting Tyler at the Country Music Hall Of Fame, where the pair “hit it off immediately”. The following day, they met up to work on music together, and it was during this time that they wrote We’re All Somebody From Somewhere.

When the song was released, Tyler called Johnston and asked him to come by his house while he was driving home from the studio.

“He gives me this bag and says ‘Don’t open it until you get home to Evyn’ – that’s my wife,” he recalls. “He kisses me on the lips and says bye.

“So I leave, I go to my house and I’m waiting on Evyn to get home. She goes ‘What’s that?’ I tell her, ‘Steven gave it to us. He said not to open it until I get home.’ And she’s like, ‘But what is it?’ And I’m like, ‘I dunno, I’m worried it might be a snake.’ You never know with those kinds of dudes. Is it a brick of cocaine? I don’t know.

“So I open it up and it’s ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, all stacked and taped together. I think he realised I wasn’t going to make a ton of money off producing the song. That’s some rock-star shit right there. I called my dad and asked him what to do with the money and he said: ‘Either put it in a plastic bag, dig a hole in the back yard and bury it, or tape it to your sink.’ So to this day it’s still taped to the sink!”

In other Aerosmith news, Brad Whitford recently recalled the time the band’s producer replaced him and Joe Perry with session guitarists during the recording of their second album, Get Your Wings.