Hit Hard

by Joey Kramer

  When I was at Chit Chat, I wrote a good-bye letter to cocaine. At Steps I wrote a good-bye letter to my father. That one letter provided a great deal of relief for me, like a pressure valve being opened. It started a process for me of recognizing a lot of the shit I was going through—I finally got it that I needed to acknowledge that I had feelings, become aware of what those feelings were, accept my feelings, and take the action to express them—if I was ever going to really heal emotionally.

  I accessed the feelings I had about my dad, organized them, and wrote him this letter; then I read the letter aloud to a group of human beings—and so the process of healing began…

  Mickey, Joey, and Jesse

  Courtesy of Doris or Joey Kramer.

  Courtesy of Ross Halfin.

  NOTHING SO BAD THERE AIN’T SOME GOOD IN IT

  9

  While I was at Steps in 1995, only a few people came to see me. One was Jimmy Eyers, our road manager, whom I love dearly. Another was my friend Sandy Jossen, my best man and my buddy from Hebrew school. But then two guys showed up to take me out for a meal and fuckin’ make my ass laugh—Rick Dufay, who had been in the band for a little while, and Jack Douglas, our producer on four albums.

  As much as I enjoyed these visits, something was missing. After a while I spoke to Tim, our manager, saying, “Wow, man, you know I can’t believe none of my partners have called me.”

  Tim said, “You see? What’d I tell you, man. They don’t care about you. They’re scumbags. They’re really not your friends.”

  Something about that just didn’t feel right. Maybe I should have been a little more perceptive, but I still had a long way to go on this idea of being fully conscious and aware of the interactions around me.

  As a manager, Tim’s initial idea had been to get Joe Perry back on his feet, which he achieved by reuniting Joe and Steven and then by getting Joe clean and sober. Once he helped engineer the “kiss and make up” between Joe and Steven, his highest aspiration after Joe was back in the band was to remain as Joe’s manager. When he got control of the whole megillah, I think he couldn’t believe his good luck—he’d really hit the jackpot. We all had our own version of the same kind of insanity, Tim included. In all fairness, I say with compassion and understanding, Tim had good reason to be haunted by his own special demons. As Tim had described it, he was the youngest son of a big, alcoholic, Irish family from a New England working-class town, and a mama’s boy with a weight problem. I figure it’s likely that he must have taken a lot of shit at home from his alcoholic father, a lawyer, and his older brothers and had a tough time in the schoolyard on a fairly regular basis. Then there was the whole Catholic punishing God and the rigid, shaming, and physically abusive nun thing that he had to deal with growing up. And as if that wasn’t enough to fuck him up, he had to bear the shame and the guilt he must have felt as a guy growing up in the sixties with an ambiguous sexual identity.

  Like the rest of us, Tim’s insecurities ran deep. My read—he compensated with a vengeance by protecting himself with money, food, sex, drugs, and a sense of self-importance that hung on and was inflated by his relationship with Aerosmith. Tim was also a control addict with an insatiable appetite for ruling the world and people around him, using fear, shame, and what felt like a twisted version of the principles of twelve-step recovery as his tools for manipulation. The band had become not just a major source of his identity but was tantamount to having turned into his drug of choice. There was also what I believed to be his attraction to Joe and Steven—sort of like Brian Epstein being in love with John and Paul.

  “There’s nothing so good, there ain’t some bad in it; and there’s nothing so bad, there ain’t some good in it,” a friend of mine once told me. Tim had been an invaluable force in our lives, and also very generous. The folks at Chit Chat, the Caron Foundation, loved him, not just for raising their profile as “the place where Aerosmith goes to get clean,” but for also making substantial financial contributions that supported a lot of therapy and recovery for a lot of people over a very meaningful period of time. We owed him a lot for getting us clean and sober and for keeping the pressure on us to stay with the program and, it has to be said, for putting together an amazing team that helped to bring us back and drive our career to an unprecedented level of success. All the same, this first inkling of his driving a wedge between me and the other guys stuck with me—a little red flag lodged somewhere in my brain.

  Courtesy of Gene Kirkland

  A few days later, after April came back from her trip to India, she came to Steps for Family Week. I remember sitting with her out in the courtyard at one of those picnic tables when Chatoff dropped by to tell me the news. My partners were going ahead down in Miami. They were going to record the basic tracks without me.

  Tim had the ability to convince the band to do lots of weird things, but this really freaked me out. I couldn’t believe it. I was trying to figure out—given that I was already in treatment for depression—if they ever thought about how that decision was going to affect me. Maybe they didn’t realize how bad off I was. Had anybody told them, “he’s already got enough to deal with, and now we’re going to lay this on him?”

  It was only later that I fully realized how Tim’s mind worked, which was like this: a band needs a new record in order to have a successful tour. A successful tour means more money, all commissionable by Tim Collins. Tim would let nothing stand in the way of achieving that healthy percentage for himself. It was feeling more and more as though we were just tools for Tim to achieve his brand of “success,” and for Tim I was a replaceable tool.

  The net result was that, just as I was finally dealing with all the emotional problems that had built up over a lifetime, somebody else was going to come in and take my place and do my job. But for once I didn’t just numb out and roll along. The whole thing really set me back, but I got pissed off—enough so that I decided that once I got out of treatment, I was going to tell my partners that I wasn’t going to play in the band anymore. If they were going to record without me, fuck them, they can be Aerosmith without me.

  Down in Miami, Ballard had brought in Steve Ferrone, a really top session drummer, and they were letting him do my tracks. Ferrone was an English soul guy and a great drummer but not a rock ’n’ roll guy.

  But sitting a few thousand miles away in California, I didn’t have any say in the matter. I also didn’t have any place to go with my anger and sadness, other than to the community that I was a part of at the time, which was the other patients at Steps. So I brought it up in group therapy, and that’s when the therapist asked me the big ones: “What or who are you without Aerosmith? Who is just Joey? Who is Joey without being the drummer in Aerosmith? How much of a part of that is you? How much of a part of that is your ego? How much of that are you banking on to be who you are, instead of just being your own man for yourself?”

  I really had to think hard about all that, and then as I worked it through my mind, I became even angrier. I hated those questions because they forced me to doubt what I’d been doing for the past twenty-five years. I realized just how much I had allowed my identity to be tied up with the band, and with that realization I felt angry at myself. But I was so eager to just get down to being myself that I also found it kind of exciting to face up to it that way—the all or nothing proposition—the idea of really doing the unthinkable and saying “fuck Aerosmith.”

  What I didn’t fully appreciate at that time, and what would take me probably the next five or eight years to figure out, was that my job in life was to be able to be in the band and also be separate from it. What I really wanted was to be the drummer in Aerosmith, and also my own person, and they were not mutually exclusive.

  Get a grip

  Courtesy of George Chin.

  I remember sitting in a chair, rocking back and forth because the anxiety was crawling all over me. I had this urgency and anxiety to just get normal, but by virtue of being in the band, I wouldn’t know normal if it bit m
e in the ass. Then the agitation gave way to a bit of a calm, because it was gradually dawning on me that I didn’t have to make being Aerosmith’s drummer so important. It was like somebody yanked the chain and a light bulb went on. It was sort of dim at first, but as I did more work, it became brighter. Eventually, I was in a place where I could say, “Holy shit. Maybe I don’t have to do that anymore. I’m as good as I am, and as healthy as I am, and everything else that I am, without considering what I do for a living. I’m all that other stuff first and foremost.”

  And when I reached that point, it was amazing for me. I could begin the process of letting go of a lot of what I had made so all-important but which had, in reality, become a very powerful trap for me. Being the drummer in Aerosmith was incredible, but it was not the only thing in my life. I remembered reading in one of the books they gave me: “Fame and fortune are the two greatest barriers to self actualization.” After this point I knew that being the drummer in Aerosmith is what I do and that I’d have to do a lot of work to balance that within the greater context of who I am.

  The most important thing in my life was getting well, getting emotionally healthy, and making my life come together the way it could. Having an unusually exciting and lucrative career made me a lucky guy. Now I was beginning to understand I wasn’t supposed to be living my life in order to be the drummer in Aerosmith.

  I came to realize that, no matter what happens, I have to be present and solid with myself—all the time. If I can do that, everything else around me is going to fall into place. But I’d let the foundation crack, and that’s why I was at Steps. I didn’t need a bucket of cement and a trowel to mend that crack. What I needed was to rip out all the old stuff, make sure the dirt was all nice and smooth, put in new gravel, and build a new foundation. It took forty-five years of abuse, much of it self-inflicted, to get to this point. So it would still take a lot of time and a lot of work to heal to the point of being healthy.

  Seriously thinking about letting go of the band helped me start to realize who I really was. And when I started to see that guy, I started to believe he deserved better from me. Suddenly I realized that I needed to think differently about some of the energy that this guy Joey could bring to being a friend, a husband, a father, a brother, a partner, and a son. I had been misdirecting a lot of that energy because I was focused and anxiety ridden in the effort to be what I thought I had to be in order to be in the band, and to be the “right” guy to people I let intimidate me. I was always having to be that guy in order to feel like I fit, so much so that it was hard for me to realize that I was paying a huge price for the return on the investment—especially in emotional terms. I was a tool in Aerosmith, and in that environment there’s not a lot to provide the kind of emotional support I—or anyone in and/or close to the band—might need as a human being. So I would have to change the way I saw myself in order to ensure that I got that support I deserved.

  When I came out of Steps, I knew I had to learn to live and give in a new way that was more balanced, where there would be more positive emotional “give and take” for me. If I could do that, it could also work to shift and better balance my internal chemistry, and maybe I could begin to be an example for the band so that there was a little more “give” to go around. But that was for another day. I had my own situation to get straight first.

  Having begun to realize all this, I was feeling like I had started to truly heal and that maybe I was ready to go home. I mentioned this to Steps director, Steve Chatoff, and he was immediately against it. Then on a conference call with the band Tom Hamilton said something to the effect of, “Man, you’ll do what we tell you to do, and that’s it!” Which felt really fucked up to me coming from Tom, because he’s very laid back. And that’s when it dawned on me that none of them, including Chatoff, were taking me seriously. I was the designated patient, which meant that other people felt entitled to take control of my life. But worse, Chatoff wouldn’t even listen to me. He wasn’t sizing me up on the basis of what he saw in front of him. He was following Tim’s lead and listening to what some of my bandmates were telling him, which is to say he was listening to Tim Collins. He was still taking direction from Tim, taking Tim’s word for everything, including the comment I made to Brad and Tom that I’d been ready to kill myself, which Tim blew way out of proportion. Tim was manipulating Chatoff about my therapy just like he had manipulated all of us for years to be in therapy.

  Chicago, 1998

  Courtesy of Todd Kaplan.

  I went to see Chatoff and said, “Don’t do this. You’ve got to realize this guy is manipulating you. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.” I even had the wherewithal to ask Kathleen Price, one of the counselors who worked there, to come with me so she could bear witness to what I was saying. “I may be the designated patient,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean my judgment is completely fucked up. You’re listening to this guy and keeping me here and ignoring the reality and what I’m trying to tell you from my heart.”

  MTV Icons, 2002

  Courtesy of Ross Halfin.

  I think I displayed a pretty clear grasp of the situation when I said, “It’s very difficult for me during this process to come and stick up for myself in front of you because that’s one of my big issues. That’s part of the reason I’m here, because doing this is such a hard thing for me. But it’s what I need to do.”

  Of course, this was a challenge to Chatoff and his professional expertise. He didn’t like what I was saying, but after thinking about it, he realized that the way I was describing the situation was, in fact, the case. Instead of going into denial and resisting it, he came back to make amends. He actually apologized to me, admitting that he had, in fact, been letting Tim influence what should have been his own professional judgment. And from that moment on, our relationship shifted into one based on mutual respect.

  “You know, you taught me a lesson,” he said. And after that, we got to be really good friends.

  Chatoff then suggested that we all do a ten-day session, the whole band and with Tim, to clear up all the power issues and the intrusions and the overstepping of boundaries.

  It was dawning on me now that Tim had held sway over every other psychologist or therapist who had dealt with us. He always had the power to insist that they did what he told them to do largely because he was the gatekeeper who could grace them with the “honor” of working with the world-renowned Aerosmith—or not. And if they had Tim’s blessing, they also had a client who would pay them a great deal of money. Tim had a lot of power, so much so that some of the therapists would routinely share our personal, confidential information with Tim under the guise that he had to have this information to be sure to continue to do that which was in our best interests. If they didn’t follow the rules, Tim would give us some reason why they were “dangerous” to have around, and they’d be gone. Some split, but the ones who stayed did so because they caved in and played along. After I clued Chatoff in, he didn’t play Tim’s game anymore. It wouldn’t be long before that shit hit the fan.

  Chatoff and I agreed that it was time for me to go home. April came out to California to pick me up, and we were driving away in a rental car when the phone rang. This was before cell phones—this phone came with the car. I answered, and it was Tim, yelling at me that I was leaving AMA—Against Medical Advice—and that I had to go back and finish my process.

  This pissed me off so much that I couldn’t even see straight. What kind of power—what kind of insane need to control—did this guy have that he could weasel my car-phone number from the rental company? And then to try to tell me what I needed, when really all he was doing was a bullshit manipulation engineered to get what he needed. It was the same old story all over again—something offered as loving concern that was actually intrusion and bullying. All my life, every time I’d tried to fight back against that kind of abuse, I’d been bowled over until finally the pressure had just gotten too much and I’d cracked and caved in. But now I had
some clarity and was able to call “bullshit” for what I believed it to be. I was getting an education on all this shit and was being told that in order to take care of myself, it was my responsibility to recognize what I was feeling, understand it, and act accordingly, and I wasn’t willing to go backward.

  Just push play, Japan, 2001

  Courtesy of Ross Halfin.

  So I told him right on the phone, I said, “Listen, man, you know, this is really difficult for me, because what I’ve just been dealing with in therapy is exactly what you’re doing to me right now. And I have to tell you—this is totally fucked.”

  I was ripshit all afternoon, and when we got to L.A. that evening, I sat up in bed in our hotel room just shaking because I was so upset. That fuckin’ phone call meant that I was still in that “one down” position with Tim, just like I’d always felt with Steven and with my dad and teachers and everyone else along the way who pulled some sort of power play with me, so Tim’s telling me what to do in a situation like this that was none of his fucking business infuriated me.

  When Tim had first come on board as our manager, I needed somebody I could trust and depend on; Tim presented himself to me as that person. I never really questioned anything he did because whenever he made a case for something, he seemed to be able to back it up. He would say that we’re doing X because Y is going to be the result of it, and it usually worked out exactly as he’d predicted.

  Looking back on it, I realized I mostly surrendered a lot of judgment to him simply because I wanted his approval, and, after all was said and done, I just wanted to play the drums. I wanted somebody else to worry about the fine print. But my codependent issues were so entangled with his that he could play me like a violin. This contributed to my blindly trusting him, even more so after all he did to get us sober and rebuild our career.