Hit Hard

by Joey Kramer

  During the first few years of our sobriety, Tim created a kind of twelve-step recovery cult, and we all drank the Kool-Aid. He monitored everything, and just about any behavior could trigger the call for more therapy, including residential treatment. But he was also good-hearted about it. He’d say not only, “you have to go,” but, “I’ll pay for it.”

  One day Steven said to me, “Tim and I think you should go to this place called Sierra Tucson for this thirty-day codependency program.” Steven had gone through the same program a few months earlier.

  A little later, Lou said, “Who the fuck are these guys to tell you to go away for some thirty-day therapy program? Are you supposed to do it just because they tell you to?” His point, of course, was that going off to a codependency program because my partners tell me to is about as codependent as you can get.

  I went back and forth about it, and I finally decided, partly owing to the fact that I kept going back and forth about it, that I would go. To not do something just because a particular person suggested it would also be pretty sick. So I took their advice, and the program helped me a lot, but the fact that I went still felt kind of suspect.

  Maybe some of my willingness to go along with them had to do with codependency, but there was also my openness to learning more about myself and improving myself.

  Lou Cox, the band’s therapist, told me that codependency is all about not knowing where you stop and start and where the other people in your life begin. But it also comes up in terms of having your own will and recognizing what belongs to you—and what is the other person’s shit. In other words, having healthy boundaries.

  Comin’ back—August 1988

  Courtesy of Gene Kirkland

  When I got down to Arizona to start the program, they began working me over about sex addiction, probably assuming I had to be a sex addict because I was in Aerosmith, but I wasn’t a sex addict. When I showed up, they said, “Well, you’re in a band with Steven Tyler, so you must have the same problem.” This is when I had to say to them, “Hey, you got a lot of balls to lay this on me. Fuck you.”

  It turned out that this is what they wanted me to do. They were pushing for me to fight back. It had been amply demonstrated that standing up for myself in the face of authority figures had always been one of my big issues, and they wanted to see if I could do it. So I passed the test this time.

  My mother came out to Arizona for Family Week, and part of the deal during those times was to have what they call “When you…, I feel…” sessions. She had come there to support me, and in this supervised setting it was amazing how open and insightful she was. She also told me some things that she said she’d always wanted me to know—experiences from my early childhood, like the story about my catching hell for playing in my dad’s desk when I was two. She helped me bring my memories of these experiences, such as they were, up to the surface. She also apologized to me for letting those things happen.

  But most importantly, she gave me a clearer picture of my dad than I’d ever had before. She told me about his childhood—about how he’d never been allowed to have pets, how there were never any hugs or even kind words as part of his upbringing. Apparently, my dad had grown up with the knowledge that his mother had tried to abort him. She jumped off a table again and again. So it wasn’t just D-day, being badly wounded, and all his dead buddies that had come between him and me. He was an angry guy, with a lot to be angry about.

  The thing that surprised me most was when she said she believed he was actually jealous of me. This was hard for me to figure, but then she mentioned times when I was little and I’d skin my knee or whatever and she’d try to comfort me. He’d always try to get her to knock it off. He always told her she was babying me. But she felt that witnessing that kind of mothering just upset him because he’d never gotten any tenderness himself as a kid. He was able to indulge the girls, but never me. She said that, although he would never admit it in a million years, there was this edge of envy and resentment and sadness to it.

  She also said I’d grown up jealous of my sisters. I’d never thought about my sisters one way or another, but she said that I knew I was being treated differently and that it pissed me off and confused me that much more. The point is—what goes around comes around, and I know I have these ingrained, irrational hurts. The trick is to find some way to feel them, identify them for what they are, express them and resolve them in the moment. Most of all, the trick is to not pass the damage along to the next generation.

  After Sierra Tucson, we were up in Vancouver at Little Mountain again, and everybody was excited and psyched about what we were producing. This was the first time we’d ever recorded with all five of us clean and sober. It was amazing how fast we got things done, and how well. Kalodner said it was going to be the best record of our careers.

  But I was still second-guessing myself. Had I played as well as I thought I had? Was the record as good as everybody thought it was? Early on, the people involved in a project are always too close to it to have much judgment. So you always have these grandiose thoughts that it’s the best ever, but then you pull away a bit and go to the other extreme, thinking that it’s all shit. But my self-consciousness was complicated by the fact that this was the first record I’d done with any “consciousness” at all.

  Tom and I wrapped up first, as usual, and as I was getting into the car to begin the trip home, he handed me an envelope and said, “Don’t open this till you get on the plane.”

  It’s about a forty-five-minute ride to the Vancouver airport, and the whole time I was thinking, What’s up with Tom? What’s this letter all about? He and I were the last two to get sober, so there was this special bond, and I was dying to know what he had to say, but I’d given my word.

  So I waited until I was in my seat on the plane, and as soon as I settled in, I ripped open that envelope. The note he’d written said: “I’m proud to be a soldier in the same army fighting alongside another soldier of your quality. I’d do it all again in a minute.”

  That really meant a lot to me, because we had gone up against the odds. It wasn’t just hanging in through all the bullshit for nearly twenty years, toiling in the background to make the music work and never getting much credit for it, but also just this week, facing down the pressure of a recording session, newly sober, and then coming shining through.

  Aerosmith released Pump in September 1989. “Love in an Elevator” reached number 5; “Janie’s Got a Gun” reached number 4. But the job wasn’t over. For the next eighteen months we were on the road, pumping up Pump to keep it on the charts for 110 weeks.

  That November we went to England. When we played the Hammersmith Odeon in London, I got to talking backstage with Robert Plant. I mentioned how I felt a huge loss that John Bonham, one of my drum heroes, was already long gone and that I’d never been able to see him play. Bonham had been the same sort of abuser that I’d been, but I was still alive and he was dead. I told Plant that there were things I’d like to say to Bonham if I could—that he was one of my mentors and that it was ironic that he was under the ground and I wasn’t there with him after all of the abuse. Plant said, “Well, I can tell you where his grave is.” The next day I hired a car and drove for three hours into the English Midlands. I found an old weathered church with these crooked headstones, and I found Bonham’s grave and stood there in the drizzly gray English November weather and said my piece. Then I got in the car and went back to London.

  Courtesy of Todd Kaplan.

  By this time, my dad was in a pretty serious state of decline. Parkinson’s had robbed him of more and more of his abilities, and once he started to get sick, he really didn’t have any interest in anything. First he couldn’t play tennis, and then he couldn’t drive, and then he had trouble talking. Finally he reached the point where his whole body was frozen, and he pretty much lived in a chair in our living room back in Eastchester.

  The little bit of understanding we’d gained of each other during that summer of ’78 in
L.A. had never really come to anything and didn’t provide the breakthrough in our relationship that I needed to heal. I’d gone back on the road—and back to the drugs—and he’d gone back to being a hard-driving businessman. But clean and sober now, and after all the work I’d done with Lou Cox and April and Steven, I realized I did not want to be angry anymore, not at anything or anyone, not even my father. To free myself of that burden, I made a commitment to go to my father’s house, to be in his presence, and to forgive him in my own words. I’d heard from Lou that resentments destroy the container they’re kept in, and I was starting to believe it. Talking with my mother in Sierra Tucson had given me a new perspective, and I wanted to let my dad know that I understood what he’d been through and that I no longer held him responsible. I wanted to tell him that I forgave him. And maybe then I could begin to forgive myself for playing the role of the victim for so long.

  April and I got in my car and drove south, heading down I-95 toward Eastchester. All the way down I was still thinking about my dad and about what I was going to say. I was also thinking about all the waste, about how much he loved music, but that we never talked about music. He’d never even seen me play. I had carried this huge block in my chest and in my gut for over forty years, and all the way down I felt it choking me. How was I going to put this huge thing into words and then get rid of it? I didn’t really know. I couldn’t just lay it on him, especially with his being so sick with Parkinson’s. But I was sick too, sick in my heart. After a while I had to pull over and get April to drive.

  We got to the house, my mom was there, and my dad was sitting in the living room in the chair that by now was pretty much his whole world. April took my mom into the kitchen, and now it was just me and Mickey, my dad. Immediately my eyes started to well up—just to see him like that. His face was like a mask. The disease had taken everything, even his ability to smile or talk. This big strong guy, this soldier who had stormed the beaches at Normandy to fight the Nazis was now helpless, stiff and hunched over, his muscles wasted away from not being used. It broke my heart, and I thought, This is the raging monster who had terrorized me when I was growing up?

  1998—“Nine Lives”

  Courtesy of William Hames.

  I sat down in a chair in front of him and pulled in close. His head was tilted forward. He couldn’t move it to look at me, so I had to get down on my knees to look up at him. I positioned myself so that my eyes met his; tears were rolling down my face.

  I said, “Dad, you know why I came here today? The reason is that I want you to know in your heart that I forgive you, Dad—that I forgive you for everything that happened when I was a kid.”

  Through the tears I said, “I know that you feel bad and you’ve probably beaten yourself up for that, haven’t you?”

  He could hardly move. He sat there, staring back at me. But after a few seconds I realized that he was whimpering, trying to respond.

  I said, “And you carry that around with you all the time, don’t you?”

  His body trembled, and he whimpered again, trying to make his mouth form the words.

  I told him, “Dad, you don’t have to carry that anymore. Because I forgive you from the bottom of my heart. I love you, Dad.”

  I took his arms in my hands and put them around my shoulders. I knew he was too weak to do anything, but I told him, “Come on, Mickey, give me a hug.”

  He could barely summon the strength to squeeze his arms around me, but I could feel him trying with everything he had, and he was crying, but the disease had taken so much from him he just couldn’t speak. This was the best he could do to let me know what he would never be able to put into words.

  Courtesy of Gene Kirkland

  DEAR DAD

  8

  By 1992 we’d all been sober for five or six years, and we were back in L.A. to record Get a Grip. The record company had set us up in these residential suites at Sunset Plaza, and for the first time my partners and I were spending a lot of time together. It was sort of like it was back at the beginning when we shared an apartment on Commonwealth avenue, only we didn’t have to live on brown rice and carrots. And, of course, none of us were drinking or using.

  We were now a bunch of forty-year-old guys, settled in to the good life, which in some cases meant new marriages with new little kids on the way. For April and me, this brought up a lot of emotional stuff that we didn’t even know we had going on.

  During my active addiction, two years after Jesse was born, I underwent a vasectomy. The decision to have that procedure really wasn’t about drugs or life being out of control. It was simply that we had Jesse and Asia and things were good, and having another kid just wasn’t part of the program. The fact is, of course, with my being so out of control at the time, it would’ve been a disaster to have another kid.

  But now that things were settled and pretty mellow, it was difficult to sort out my feelings when I saw these bulging bellies and proud papas-to-be. I found myself noodling it around—wouldn’t it be amazing to have a two-year-old? Especially now that I had my head together and knew what I was doing. Or wouldn’t it be amazing to have a four-year-old? And then wouldn’t it be amazing to have a six-year-old or an eight-year-old or a ten-year-old? I was even to the point where I was thinking about asking April if she’d consider adopting a kid.

  All the various forms of therapy we’d been through included some further codependency work for April and me at Sierra Tucson. Once when she and I were in a group session, we were each supposed to bring up something about our self that our spouse didn’t know. I mentioned kids, and this bit of second-guessing that had been going on in my head, and one of the therapists picked up on it. “Well, Joey, are you so sure you didn’t want to have more children?” she said. I told her, “Well, you know, I’m not sure. I think maybe I would have.”

  Right then and there April broke down in tears. She said she’d been feeling the same way. We both knew that, physically, it just wasn’t going to happen, but obviously neither of us had resolved this, so we had to take a moment to let it go.

  The therapist asked us to write a letter to our unborn child. We were to tell him why he wasn’t born, what kind of life he would have had, and what kind of father and mother he would have had. And we were to tell him that we were sorry, and then we were to say good-bye.

  We wrote the letter, and then we had to sit in the middle of the group and read it aloud. When we were done, everyone in the room was yelling and clapping for us. The therapist hadn’t admitted it beforehand, but this was the first time she’d ever tried doing something like that. For me, writing that letter brought an incredible amount of closure. Even though we had made the “no more kids” decision during the course of our active addictions, we made it very consciously, and we gave ourselves credit for that. I had already fathered one son, and I knew what that was about. And writing that letter allowed me to get a lot of mixed feelings out and manageable.

  Me and ST doing our thing in the studio, PowerStation, 1996

  Courtesy of Kevin Mazur.

  A few years later, when all my partners were in their mid-forties and had three-year-olds crawling around on the coffee table, April and I were saying to each other, “Hey, not bad!” In other words, we realized that there was something to be said for having our kids further along and for having our lives back after the diaper and daycare phase.

  While Get a Grip was still in the can, I was back on Pudding Hill Lane in Marshfield, in the house that we built on the site of the one that burned down. It was now eight or nine years since the fire, and the Aerosmith paychecks were considerably bigger, so April and I were thinking about putting an addition onto the house. A real estate guy we talked to said we’d be better off just buying a new one and moving on. So we started to look around, and then we saw this new place that we fell in love with. It sounds pretentious, but I have to admit this was like “an estate.” The band was back on top, so I felt pretty confident that the money would be there. But the fact is, I
had inherited a good deal of financial insecurity from my father, and I didn’t want to commit to something that I might not to be able to afford. Then again, my reluctance was also just another instance of insecurity in general. Even so, I made a deal with the owner of the big place with a handshake and a check. I gave him $100,000 and said that if I bought the house, he was to apply the money toward the purchase price. If I didn’t buy the house within a year’s time, he could keep the money for his troubles.

  Somewhere in Europe

  Courtesy of George Chin.

  Before the year was out, Get a Grip was released, and we were on the road. The tour was a huge success, and the record sold 14 million copies, so I bought the house. And yet I remember, when we were getting ready to move, sitting out on the dock by the pond at the old place, the smaller house at 282 Pudding Hill Lane, looking at the water and saying to myself, “Why am I doing this? Why is this house not good enough anymore? Why do I have to move up and on and into a bigger place that is going to keep my nose to the grindstone to make the bigger payments?”

  I talked to April about it, and she told me, “Well, you know, this is part of what happens when you allow yourself to indulge in what you’ve worked so hard for.” And that answer was fine for me at the time. What she was saying was that I deserved it even though in order to pay for it, “deserving it” would mean being on the road more than I was home. So was I really going to enjoy it? Was I really going to get to experience it as much as I wanted to? Not really.

  In the spring of 1994, right in the middle of the Get a Grip tour, we had a ten-day rest back home before going to Japan, and it was on the second or third day of that rest that the phone rang. I picked it up; it was my sister Amy.