That was my introduction to recording, and I knew if they could do it, I could do it. They were drunk all the time, fer chrissakes. I hung out with the bass player, Tommy Finn, at his apartment. So here’s me, a kid from Yonkers, hanging out with a bunch of guys that have hit singles and have great pot. I was beyond impressed—I was in seventh heaven.
Hendrix had been at Apostolic not long before. God himself. “Hendrix was here two months ago . . . and he used this mic,” the engineer said. “Which one?” I begged. “This Sennheiser pencil mic.” And then, casually, he adds, “Yeah, he put it in this girl’s pussy in the bathroom. He was fuckin’ her with it!” And I went, “Whaaattt? Hendrix used that mic?” When the engineer turned his back, I sniffed it . . . which gave new meaning to the term purple haze. I guess I looked a little incredulous because he then said, “Yeah, listen to this tape! You’re not gonna believe this!” Whereupon he claps a pair of headphones to my melon and . . .
You could hear the squishing noise as Jimi inserts the mic into her gynie. And you could hear him going, “Oh, that’s gooooood, man, that’s cool.” And you could hear the girl moaning, “Oh-ohhhh, ohhhhhhh, ohhh, ohhhh. . . .” Then it shifts into an orgasmic octave higher, “O-ohhhhhh, o-oh-oh, oh-ooooooooh!” And he’s done. That’s when the Electric Lady’s man says (no shit), “Hey, baby, what’s your name again?” “Kathy,” she purrs. I mean, talk about urban legends. With a gearshift! I was in a new league now.
The Strangeurs were the opening act for every kind of gig from the Fugs at the Café Wha? to the Lovin’ Spoonful at the Westchester County Center to an uptown New York discotheque like Cheetah. Then, on July 24, 1966, the Strangeurs opened for the Beach Boys at Iona College. Pet Sounds had come out in May and blown everybody’s minds. It was sublime and subliminal and saturated your brain. After you heard it you were in a different space. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” with “God Only Knows” on the flip side, had been out only a week before our performance and it was all over the radio. They had a competition to choose the band that would be the opening act. We played “Paint It Black” and sealed the deal. We got to hang out with the Beach Boys. Brian, even in those days, was on another sphere, vibrating his Buddha vibe.
I had my first out-of-body religious experience that day singing along with the Beach Boys. It was me and six thousand kids from Iona College, all singing “California Girls.”
The promoter Pete Bennett (a pretty heavy guy in the business) knew me and my bands from watching us play around New York City. And I must have been radiating that glow of Sufi—I know I felt like one when he was done talking to me. He asked if we wouldn’t mind opening up for the Beach Boys for the next four shows, there and around New York City. I said to him, “Let me think for a minute,” and slam-dunked him a big fat “YES!”
Through Peter Agosta we got our first recording contract. Agosta knew Bennett, who eventually became promotional manager for the Beatles at Apple and worked with Elvis, Frank Sinatra, the Stones, and Dylan. Pete Bennett arranged for us to audition for executives at Date Records, which was a division of CBS. Back in those days you brought your equipment up in the freight elevator and set up in the boardroom and played. We did a couple of numbers, and then they went and got one of their producers, Richard Gottehrer, who eventually ran Sire Records with Seymour Stein. Gottehrer offered us a deal: six thousand dollars. Okay, we’ll take it.
We did a song called “The Sun,” kind of Lennon-McCartney pop. It came out in ’66 and got a little play, but didn’t do that great here. It was a big hit in Europe: “Le Soleil,” they called it. It was about staying up all night and watching the sun come up in the morning.
It comes once a day through the shade of my window
It shines on my bed, my rug, and my floor
It shines once a day through the shade of my window
It comes once a day and not more.
It was definitely one of Don Solomon’s finest moments. The flip side was “When I Needed You,” a little harder rock, a little more experimental . . . our version of the Yardbirds. At this point we had to change our name again—CBS was concerned that our weird spelling, the Strangeurs, wasn’t different enough from the other Strangers and we might get sued. So we became the Chain Reaction, which is a continuous, unstoppable flow of energy.
During this time, I moved out of my house in Yonkers to West Twenty-first Street, the only blue building on the block. There I lived with Lynn Collins, a gorgeous blonde whom I stole away from my guitar player, Marvin Patacki. In ’69 I saw Zeppelin at the Tea Party. When the band came offstage, I went back to say hello to the guys, ’cause Henry Smith was working for Bonzo, and who do you think comes walking out of the dressing room on Jimmy Page’s arm? Lynn Collins. She was a genuine, high-class girl-about-rock-’n’-roll-town. I thought to myself, “If I was gonna lose her, might as well be to a legend like Page.”
Eventually, Henry became our first roadie (whom we could pay), and because he lived in Westport, Connecticut, a richer side of the tracks than I came from, he could get us better-class gigs. Henry would book the Chain Reaction into these gigs we could have never booked ourselves, like opening for Sly and the Family Stone, opening for the Byrds, and the coup de grâce, opening for the Yardbirds. Jimmy Page was on bass, Jeff Beck was on lead guitar, and we were in seventh heaven. We drove up in my mother’s station wagon with our equipment. The Yardbirds had a van. We pulled out our gear and put it on the sidewalk while they took theirs out. They had some fantastic equipment, so I made this little joke, like “Let’s not get it mixed up.” I saw Jimmy Page struggling with his amp and I said, “I’ll help you with that.” Hence: “I was a roadie for the Yardbirds.” At least it gave me something to talk about while Aerosmith was getting its wings in the early days.
The Chain Reaction opening up for The Byrds in 1967 at County Court, Yonkers, White Plains, New York. Me, Alan Stohmayer, and Peter Stahl. (Not pictured: Barry Shapiro and Don Solomon.) (Ernie Tallarico)
Oddly enough, three years later, Henry Smith, still working for us as a full-time roadie this time, gets a phone call from his old-time buddy Brad Condliff at the front door to the club in Greenwich Village called Salvation, asking Henry if he wanted to help out his old buddy Jimmy Page with his recently formed band, the New Yardbirds (always respect the guy at the door). Henry grabbed a ticket to London and his only possession at that time, a large toolbox covered with stickers with only enough room for a pair of underwear, which he stuffed in behind his ounce of pot, and headed off to Europe to help his friend with this new band that over that summer became Led Zeppelin.
Everybody likes to overblow their past, including me—to squeeze out the relevance of what may or may not have really taken place. And when you’re just starting out, any story will do. Beck was on guitar, Jimmy Page on bass—it was the Yardbirds’ second incarnation (after Eric Clapton left), an unbelievable, unstoppable, funky, overamped R&B machine. “Train Kept a-Rollin’ ” was bone-rattling . . . there was steam and flames coming out of it, and the whole place quaked like a Mississippi boxcar on methadrine.
Every morning before school I’d fill a plastic cup with Dewar’s whiskey or vodka and down it. I used to dry my hair before school to “Think About It,” the last single the Yardbirds did. I’d get the vacuum cleaner, take the hose, and stick it in the exhaust socket so it blew out . . . turn it on, go upstairs, and eat breakfast. By the time I got back downstairs, the vacuum cleaner was warm and I could blow-dry my wet hair to look like a Brian Jones bubblehead. Got to have good ha-air! I used to sew buttons to the sides of my cowboy boots, and at the bottom of the inside leg of my pants I would tie three or four loops of dental floss and attach those to the buttons on the boots so that my pants would never ride up. I loved doing that sort of thing! I was a rabid rock fashion dog. So I went to school, spending an hour getting ready every morning, and ended up getting shit for it. I wound up in the principal’s office every day. “Tallarico, you look like a girl,” the man would
say. I’d tried to explain, “It’s part of my job . . . rock musician, sir.” That got me absolutely nowhere.
From winter ’66 into spring ’67, Chain Reaction continued to get good gigs—in part through Pete Bennett. We played record hops with the WMCA Good Guys. We opened for the Left Banke, the Soul Survivors, the Shangri-Las, Leslie West and the Vagrants, Jay and the Americans, and Frank Sinatra, Jr. Little Richard emceed one of our shows—the original possessed character always doing that crazy shit. He was so fucking out there. He could get so high and still function. I don’t know how the fuck he did it! He was doing amyl nitrate. That’s scary stuff. There aren’t a lot of drugs I’ve refused, but with that shit I was, like, “I’m outta here!”
Pete Bennett wanted to get rid of the band and just represent me, but I wouldn’t do it, even though Chain Reaction was already winding down. After three years I’d definitely had it with covering Beatles tunes. I was already thinking about a hard rock band. Our last gig was at the Brooklawn Country Club in Connecticut on June 18, 1967. We made one more single, which came out on Verve the following year: “You Should Have Been Here Yesterday” and “Ever Lovin’ Man.” And that was that—the Chain stopped a-rollin’.
The Chain: me, Don Solomon, and Frankie Ray, 1968. (Ernie Tallarico)
In the summer of 1967 I found myself up in Sunapee with no band and wondering what to do next. I’d been a local star with records on the jukebox, but now kids were asking me, “Where you guys playin’?” Later on that summer I formed another band called William Proud, with Twitty Farren on lead guitar. Twitty used to play acoustic guitar and sing at the Anchorage with a guy named Smitty. Twitty and Smitty were a major thing in New Hampshire. They covered Simon and Garfunkel to the T, nailing uncanny versions of “Sounds of Silence.” We played out in Southampton for the summer, and while we were there wrote “Somebody,” which is on the first Aerosmith album. I collaborated with Don Solomon on most of the early Chain Reaction songs, but with the song “Somebody” (which I cowrote with Steve Emsback), I realized I could truly compose a good song. The inner voice was wailing, “Let’s get cracking here!”
“When I Needed You,” the flip side of the first Chain Reaction single, had a Yardbirdish tinge to it, but “Somebody” was straight Yardbirds. The Yardbirds were so strange and unpredictable. They could make a pop song like “For Your Love” (with its minor key) sound dirgelike and ominous. We’re talkin’ fucked-up time-traveling R&B monks. Gregorian chants! Outlandish Australian wobble-board percussion! Harpsichords and bongos! They virtually invented the rock solo as an end unto itself. The Yardbirds used minor thirds and fourths like alchemists. They were really the first progressive rock band, with their use of Eastern melodies on “Over Under Sideways Down,” the howling sirens on “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.” I loved their weirdness and their mystery.
When Henry Smith was working for Zeppelin, Jimmy Page would blow his speakers and Henry would send them to me. I had two huge deer antlers I got from New Hampshire from eight-point bucks, and I put one on the left headboard post of my bed and the other on the right. I’d put my speakers there and painted them with thick phosphorescent paint—five or six coats—so that when you held a lamp to them, they would glow forever . . . well for at least ten or fifteen minutes, but if you smoked pot or took hallucinogens, as we did in high school, that was enough.
I’d draw mustaches on the Beatles and Stones posters and put phosphorescent paint all along the drawers and the knobs of the dressers, so when I went to bed at night, the room was a psychedelic cave! I put dots, like, all along the edge of the chest of drawers and the molding. Dot, dot, dot (maybe that’s where my . . . thing started), then a nice big fat one, and I did it all over the room with phosphorescent paint, six coats, so it was that thick—to hold the light.
In the middle of the room at the end of my bed, I had a twelve-foot span (from the door to the window) of fifteen thick rubber bands knotted together—which could really stretch out—and in the middle I attached a five-ounce sinker dipped ten times in phosphorescent paint, so it glowed like a fucking red-hot poker. When you let go of the sinker, the linked rubber bands would bounce like crazy . . . swinging in slo-mo, back and forth across the room . . . and you’d be Star Trek-trippin’. By the time I was done, when I was, like, seventeen or eighteen and getting ready to move out, my room was a masterpiece. You were in this realm of pulsing phosphorescent light between the speakers. I would smoke a joint, bring the linked rubber bands all the way over to one side of the room, and let it go back and forth, right? ’Cause it was right in the middle.
Then I’d crank up the Association, Pretty Things, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Boy Williamson, and all this weird early German electronica stuff. I’d invite my friends over and they’d get wrapped up in my phosphorescent audio wonderland.
I went up to the Woodstock Festival with Don Solomon and Ray Tabano a day or so early. We told them we were Ten Years After—you never know when that Brit accent is going to come in handy—and they let us in. We made our way through the woods to the Hog Farm. The Hog Farm was the name of Wavy Gravy’s commune in Tujunga, California—the longest-running hippie commune of the sixties. It eventually became what they called “a mobile hallucinatory extended family”—now that’s the kind of extended family I wanted to join. The Hog Farm got involved in the Woodstock Festival to make trails, dig fire pits, and provide a food kitchen. The trail through the woods was called Groovy Way, a quarter-mile path hung with Christmas lights.
When I went to Woodstock, I was tripping my brains out. Everyone always says, “Woodstock, Woodstock—were you there?” but the funny thing is . . . half the people who were there didn’t know where they were. I walked over to the stage area from the Hog Farm through a strip of woods with multicolored holiday bulbs running through them. I was so high they were like the mother ship zinging messages to me. And we wouldn’t just do one tab . . . I’d already snorted another. Can you snort acid? My friend Ray knew Owsley. He would call him on the phone with advice on how to improve the product: “Dude, more colors! More colors!” As high as I was, I could’ve met the Buddha, Murf the Surf, and the Tooth Fairy, and I wouldn’t have turned a hair.
Now, who I really would have liked to bump into walking down Groovy Way making her merry way down the path was Janis fuckin’ Joplin! But it was enough just knowing she was there at Woodstock. When I saw Janis sing she blew my mind. Everybody used to think Mick was my real hero, but I’ll confess now (’cause that’s what a memoir is for, right?), it was Janis. The scarves on the mic, the howl . . . inspired and perspired by pure 180-proof Joplin. She’s bone deep and still makes me weep. Cole Porter, Nat King Cole . . . the divine vibratos of my youth . . . but none finer nor more sacred than Saint Janis.
And then—this is so amazing!—who do I run into on Groovy Way but Joey Kramer! Joey had been in a band called the King Bees, which was a younger version of the Dantes. Something I’ll never forget, ever, colliding at Woodstock . . . both tripping our asses off. I loved the hallucinations; I loved that vibrating, molecular trance. The molecules that are dancing through your body, your hands giving off sparks. Altered states? Please! Psychedelics take you places you can’t go on the natch.
One of my literary gurus was Aldous Huxley, who wrote The Doors of Perception based on his experimentations with mescaline. He was hip to the whole cosmological, folktale realm that is under the radar of the, um, mundane world. Ah, how did spots get on trout? The Raven did it! Coyote laughed and it rained for twelve years. Those stories. As a youth, it was, “Wow, what a brilliant mind!” Some of those fuckin’ guys—Coleridge, de Quincey—were on laudanum (Victorian smack), too! But really, any of these seekers and freakers, because their thoughts are out of the box, out of their heads . . . you know there had to be something wrong with them. There’s always been something wrong with me, too. I’ve always been the designated patient, clinically speaking, and therefore the bad boy, even in fucking Aerosmith! Especially in fucking Aero
smith! But we’ll get into deeper diagnosis of my condition later.
If there’s a fifth, sixth dimension. . . . If? Oh, come on! Anyway, it must be something like what you see on acid. Things would vibrate differently. . . . No kidding! What acid did for me was made me think about other planes and possibilities, contemplate things that I see and feel that aren’t there. I’ve gone to the wall with that stuff, straight and stoned. When I got my new house, I went in, turned all the lights off, sat in a chair in the black, infinite not-wisdom, and said, “Bring it on, motherfucker! Come on! Come on! Where are you? I’m waiting. ’Cause if you’re here . . . be here. And if you do show up later, I’m gonna kick your ectoplasmic ass!” You gotta talk tough to demons . . . you can’t shilly-shally or they’ll pounce.
Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? Page 7