Hit Hard

by Joey Kramer

  Mitch was very jazzy, with a lot of emphasis on the high hat. Bonham played with the kind of feel that was just so overwhelming that you thought everything was going to explode, but then somehow he kept it right on the edge so that it still held together. He did this by playing behind the beat, which accentuates the “heavy” feeling that gave rise to heavy metal.

  A drummer can be exactly right on the beat so that he’s perfectly on time. Or he can be in front of it, and it feels like everything’s being pushed, which gives it this anxious feeling. Or he can lay back on the beat, which means playing behind it. If you listen to “You Shook Me” or “The Bonton Song” or “Trampled Under Foot” or “The Crunge,” you hear Bonham hitting the drum at the last possible millisecond on every beat. Nobody could do it like him, and that’s why when he died, he simply couldn’t be replaced. A lot of his genius was also all the stuff that he didn’t play, which is to say the places where he left holes, and where he stopped.

  Steven was influenced by several different drummers, including some that I didn’t care for, but he taught me to appreciate them all for what they were doing. That’s how I got hooked on the idea of bringing it all together and reshaping it in my own unique way.

  Any musician, to really stand out, has to have his own signature, the distinctive things that mark the way he plays. Otherwise, he’s just the same as the next pretty good musician, or the next really accomplished, technically adept musician. Steven helped me find my own signature. One small example of what I mean is this little thing on the high hat that I do, like on every two and four. I raise my left foot a little bit to let the cymbals up, and along with that I make the snare drum pop on every two and four, so the high hat comes up a little bit, and just goes tsch…tsch…tsch…along with the snare drum. Nobody else was doing that kind of stuff.

  With my great dane, Tiger, early ’70s

  Courtesy of Doris or Joey Kramer.

  By working so closely together, Steven and I created this real, musical synergy. Even today, when we do tracks, because of the way I listen to the vocal and the way he listens to the drums, I can create spaces for a vocal line, giving him places to hang his hat. And if he does the vocal first, he’ll give me places where I can go off and do little diddlies that coordinate with the vocal.

  Steven was really out to shape all of us, both individually and as a band. He says that when he first heard Joe and Tom, what he loved the most was their intensity. He said he wanted to bottle it and refine it and apply some of his classical training and create something that was both tight and really disciplined, funky and loose at the same time. These guys had raw passion, yet it had to be channeled and molded and he was the one to do it. Steven would do whatever had to be done to get the best out of everyone. With me, one of the things I needed was to strengthen my muscles to work the foot pedal, so I’d hang my foot off the edge of the bed, and he’d help me exercise it, working the side of my leg and the top of my foot until the muscles turned to fire. I kept at it, though, doing this flex, and then letting it relax, and then doing it again, with Steven working with me like a personal trainer. It worked.

  Courtesy of Doris or Joey Kramer.

  Steven and I had been the last to move into the apartment, so the two of us—plus his girlfriend Lisa—were crammed into this tiny back bedroom that was about the size of a sponge. There were two single beds, which barely fit, with no room to move around between them. So for the first nine months the band was together, I used to have to listen to them sloshing around at night, fucking, sucking and doing the mambo. Steven also had his special little ways. For instance, he’d lock all his food in the fridge—private stash, do not touch. And we had to take our shoes off before we went into the bedroom so as not to track in the shit off the streets. He was obsessively clean, and yet he was a real pack rat. He still collects all kinds of shit like skulls and voodoo dolls.

  I was over there all alone in my little corner still recuperating from hepatitis and jaundice. I still had many months’ worth of taking care of myself to go. So for that first year, at least for me, it was no sex, no pot, no booze, no pills, no speed, no nothing. I would walk down the hall in the apartment, and there were Tom and Terry in Tom’s room, smoking joints and getting fucked up. And Joe would have whatever girl he was with. But I had to get my ten hours of sleep every night if I was going to have any hope of shaking this thing.

  Because everybody went to bed after me and got up before me in the morning, they used to do all sorts of shit to torment me. One day Raymond was over there, and he had a pack of firecrackers. When you walked into our room, the door was right by my bed, which meant that my head was practically in the hallway. Raymond slipped the firecrackers under the door with a cigarette fuse, and when these little bombs started to explode, so did I. They opened the door to see me jumping around like a maniac.

  As soon as my year of recuperation was up, I could really get down to business, so once again I started pushing the limits. I had a cup of water on my nightstand, and when I woke up in the morning, I took two or three hits of speed—small white pills called Crossroads. Then I went back to sleep and let the speed in the pills hit me and wake me up with this wham! Tom and I would take the trolley or hitch down to the rehearsal space at BU. Then the two of us would drill and practice all day on stuff that Steven had shown us, and with all the chemical enhancement we could really focus. The hard thing was not to simply go with the speed, playing a mile a minute. Tom and I stayed with it, just bass and drums, playing for eight, ten hours a day. Then we’d come home at night, get stoned, and watch The Three Stooges.

  I had absorbed the influence of Earth, Wind & Fire, and Stubblefield and Jabo from James Brown’s Famous Flames, but I wanted to get into more complex patterns like Dave Garibaldi, the drummer in Tower of Power. One thing Steven emphasized was the need to hear the beat, never stopping, endlessly, relentlessly. I realized that what I needed to do was to become part of the music, not something that distracted from the music. When you hear a drummer playing a beat, every time he gets off that beat, no matter how much you like all the little extras he’s adding, all you’re doing is waiting for him to come back to the beat. That relentless beat is a lot of what Aerosmith music is about.

  Eventually, all the rhythm and blues bands I’d listened to, and all the rock bands I’d listened to—Zeppelin and the Rascals; the Beatles and Earth, Wind & Fire; Tower of Power and James Brown—blended into my playing. After a lot of work, I realized that I had created something new, my own sound, even though it was really sort of a mutt.

  Steven wasn’t the only voice I listened to. One day we were working on “Milk Cow Blues,” and I was hitting the accent with my cymbal and my kick drum, the way most any drummer would. But Joe asked me to play the accent of that phrase with my cymbal, but with my foot instead of hitting it along with the cymbal, to keep it going, to keep the beat on time and not having it trip up.

  I said to him, “Well, you know, that’s not how you play it.”

  And he said, “Why not?”

  I didn’t really have an answer for him, and for an instant I was thinking, Who the hell is this guy, who doesn’t know anything about the drums, to suggest things to me, when I’m the drummer?

  But then I realized that the only reason I was resistant was because I couldn’t quite nail it right away. As soon as he made the suggestion, I had to sit there and figure it out. And while I was sitting there figuring it out, the rest of the band would be standing around, and I’d feel like I was under the microscope. I could imagine everyone else standing there saying, “Okay, let’s see you do your shit. Let’s see how good you really are, Joey.”

  Then it hit me that what’s going to make me a better drummer is to be able to be open to suggestions from other people, including suggestions that don’t come from a drummer’s point of view. And suddenly Joe’s “Why not?” sort of sunk in. Right. Exactly. Why the fuck not?

  Being open to suggestions improved my style. Other drummers starte
d complimenting me, and it was a really cool thing. Eventually, I hooked into being able to think differently myself. It just made playing music a lot more interesting for me when I opened up to what my partners had to say. I also started suggesting guitar rhythms, or even licks for Joe on lead, and he would pick it up and run with it. That’s how the band became a band, by listening to one another and sharing each other’s ideas and throwing the ball back and forth.

  I don’t know that I was specifically conscious of it at the time, but what I did know was that when I was able to open myself up to it, this kind of exchange felt really liberating. I didn’t have to put on any kind of front anymore or feel like I had all the answers. The safety of the collaboration allowed me to be myself.

  Outside the Boston University student union

  Courtesy of Terry Hamilton.

  When I got a suggestion from Joe, it was always in the spirit of “try this,” and I could feel that he was saying whatever he was saying strictly because he thought it might make the music better. There was no emotion or feeling attached to it really, on either side. He wasn’t trying to intimidate me; he wasn’t trying to make me feel one way or the other, which made it really easy for me to be open to his ideas, because there was no sense that I was under the gun. There was no sense that I’d better get it right pretty quick or I was going to look like an asshole.

  With Steven, feedback was always different, in part because Steven speaks the drum language. He could say to me, “You know, it’s like this…” and he would go “ching-ching-kaching,” and I could understand what he was saying and try and replicate it on the drums, and it would make the communication really immediate. The trouble was, his suggestions or criticism always came with an edge, a large dose of him telling me how much I sucked and how much I should be able to do this and that I should be thinking of this on my own and that he shouldn’t be having to tell me.

  “Come on, man. Why can’t you do that?” was his comment of choice.

  The whole routine felt way too familiar. Here I was again with my dad whacking me in the back of the head and it was very fucked up. I thought I’d escaped the abusive relationship I’d suffered for nearly twenty years, yet here I was in another relationship, very much like the one I left back in Eastchester.

  One day Steven lectured me in the backseat of a car all the way to a gig from Boston to New Hampshire because I couldn’t do a drum solo. That led to a rant about how I didn’t put in enough time practicing and about how everything was distracting me, and on and on. And that was supposed to inspire me?

  Even with all the negative blast in my direction, I still had great respect for the musician that Steven was. With that respect also came a lot of affection. I was convinced that he knew better than I did about the drums, about music, and that his suggestions were going to make me better, so I listened to whatever he said, no matter how it came at me. No matter how harsh and degrading it felt to me. I’d come away from one of those sessions with Steven convincing myself that as shitty as it felt, Steven’s intentions were right—that he loved this band, and me, and he just wanted it to be as good as it could be—but it was still really hard to take. I just buried the pain that came with the territory because, I would justify and rationalize that Steven just wanted it all to be as good as it could be—right?

  Sometimes when we played, I would get complaints from my partners that they couldn’t get in touch with me on stage. I would be so into what I was doing that I was on a totally different planet. As blissful as it is to be in that zone, musicians have to be able to feed off one another.

  Anyone who observes us on stage will notice that Joe spends a lot of time around the drum riser. His guitar playing, just in and of itself, is very much about the rhythmic quality of drumming, and so he and I have always maintained a lot of eye contact. We lock up all the time when we’re playing, because that’s where the musical energy of this band is being generated, from down in the engine room, and that’s the space between Joe and me.

  Obviously the musical connection is critical, but for me, being in a band is also about the camaraderie and the shared commitment. I need that, and it is what gives me a kind of real joy. But it’s not always easy to get that—even if you want it.

  One day I was walking down Newbury Street with Joe, and we’d had a great day rehearsing, and I don’t know—I was just feeling hopped up on everything. I said, “This is just so fucking great. All my life I’ve been looking to work with a bunch of guys who are this into it. It’s like we’re a band of brothers, you know? Friends for life.”

  Joe looked at me and said, “Why do we have to be friends to play together in a band?”

  In that moment it became painfully obvious, that the connection I’d been looking for, that I’d hoped I had with my partners, was not there—not by a long shot. With Joe, especially, it would take another thirty years for the acknowledgment that, more than musically, we were the kind of brothers I always wanted us to be.

  Courtesy of Ron Pownall.

  NOTHIN’ SO GOOD THERE AIN’T SOME BAD IN IT

  4

  Our first gig as Aerosmith was at Nipmuck High School in Hopkinton, out in the ’burbs west of Boston. We had a maroon fifty-two-seat Ward school bus that we bought from a theater commune, and we’d all pile into it hippie style to get to our gigs. Joe’s dad had lent us the money to buy it. There were only a few seats up front—the rest of the space was for all our gear—but it was so big that one of our roadies had to get an ICC license to qualify to drive it. There was a stove inside—the former owners had lived in this thing—and when the engine would overheat in the winter we’d fill a pan with snow and melt it on the burner, then pour the water into the radiator. One of the hippie theater guys kept the thing running his own special way, so underneath the dashboard was like forty-six miles of bizarro wiring. Whenever we’d take this monster in to be serviced, the mechanics would charge us extra for all the time it took to figure out all the wires and fuses and duct tape.

  The first few months, I was the business manager. I kept a notebook of all our expenses—food, what it took to run the bus, what we made from the gig. Then I’d subtract the expenses from the take and divide it five ways. Sometimes each guy’s take might be six bucks, so we kept it pretty close to the bone. Whenever we had a big payday—maybe twenty bucks—we’d go down to Ken’s Pub in Kenmore Square and have roast beef sandwiches to celebrate.

  We were determined, and we were ambitious, which meant not getting hung up on doing club work. We could have made a lot more money just doing four sets a night at the bars in Allston and Cambridge, but we didn’t want to get into the trap of being a cover band. Doing the freshman mixers and the high-school dances for a lot less money gave us the freedom to practice and grow. “Somebody,” “One Way Street,” “Walkin’ the Dog,” “Spaced,” “Movin’ Out”…we were doing our own material right from the beginning. As part of our deal with Jeff Green, the guy from Boston University, we played Sargent Gym, and a couple of times we set up out on Commonwealth Avenue and played for free for the BU students.

  During those first few months we still had Raymond playing second guitar, and as long as Raymond was around, there was sort of a buffer between me and Steven. He and Steven fought constantly, and not just about the music. Raymond had his leather store, and his girlfriend who he lived with, and it was pretty obvious that he wasn’t placing all his bets on the band the way the rest of us were. That hedge showed in his level of commitment. After all the yelling became relentless and it was obvious that there was a mismatch there, Raymond would set it up that it was “him or me,” meaning that we had to choose between him and Steven. Of course that was a ridiculous proposition. Raymond was a great guy, but musically…no contest.

  He knew the band was going to drop the bomb on him, so he tried to get me to weigh in on his side. We had been friends since way back, and he thought that maybe I’d speak up for him. Which left me in an awkward position, but I had to put it to him straight.
“I’m with them, man.”

  We all knew that this was our shot at the big time, but not if we hung on to weak links in the chain. It was sort of the flip side of Joe’s proposition. Maybe you don’t have to be friends to be in a band together, but you can’t keep somebody in a band just because you’re friends.

  Raymond was never one to give up easy, and he always had the entrepreneurial spirit. It occurred to him that, even if he wasn’t going to be on stage with us, there was money to be made selling Aerosmith T-shirts and the like, so he started angling to do that. And for a while there he managed our merchandising on shirts and caps and other shit.

  With Raymond moving over to marketing, we picked up an incredible guitar player named Brad Whitford, from just up the road in Reading, Massachusetts. Brad had been in a band called Just in Time, in New Hampshire, with a friend of Steven’s named Dwight Ferran, also known as Twitty.

  When Brad came on, the change in musicianship was like night and day. Brad played rhythm behind Joe’s lead, but he was so skilled that now we had, essentially, two lead guitars, with Brad’s precision playing off against Joe’s raw passion. Brad lived with his girlfriend, but the rest of us, plus our roadie, Mark Lehman, and my Great Dane, Tiger, continued to live at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue.

  Through a friend, we got to know this guy named John O’Toole, a tough Irishman who managed the Fenway Theater. During the winter of 1970–1971, he let us rehearse during off hours when the stage wasn’t being used, and we kept the curtains closed to keep the heat in. One day we were working out and, during the middle of one song, the curtains opened a bit, and we noticed two men sitting in the audience. We just kept playing, and we did a couple more songs, and then the curtains closed.