After 40 years with one of the biggest rock bands in the US, Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry are finally being honored for their songwriting.

The duo, dubbed the Toxic Twins in their drug-fueled early years, co-wrote many of the bands' biggest hits like "Walk This Way" and "Back in the Saddle," which catapulted Aerosmith to fame in the mid-1970s.

After winning multiple Grammys and other accolades, Tyler and Perry were honored on Wednesday with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) founders award for songwriting. Later on June 13, they will also be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Tyler and Perry missed the ASCAP ceremony because the band is on the Australian leg of its Global Warming world tour in support of their first album since 2001.

The duo told Reuters ahead of Wednesday's ceremony that they draw much of their inspiration from each other, although Perry admits the process may be a bit tamer than in the 1970s and 1980s when he and Tyler composed under the influence of drugs.

"Taking drugs can be a shortcut to that place of creativity, but it will kill you in the end because it stops working," Perry said.

Tyler, the son of a classical pianist, formed Aerosmith in Boston in 1970 after meeting Perry and bass player Tom Hamilton a year earlier.

They signed a record deal in 1971 and what followed were four often tumultuous decades filled with thousands of concerts, band breakups, well-chronicled bouts of drug abuse, glorious comebacks and sales of more than 150 million albums worldwide.

Reuters