After a couple of days tripping my brains out I was crashing into the deep dark pit of apocalyptic blackness. I didn’t know anything about dope back then. How great would it have been to snort some heroin while you’re coming down from LSD? You’re going into a tailspin, the alien pods have drained your synapses, you’re wildly thinking about the deaths of stars. Everything is profound and meaningless at the same time. The micros of the lysergic acid shrinking the whole universe to the size of a pea—that’s when you need a Valium! “TAKE ONE OR TWO OR THREE . . . AFTER COMING DOWN FROM AN ACID TRIP.” That’s what it should say on the label.
The morning Hendrix played, Woodstock had become a war zone. We were walking about aimlessly, and then I heard baa-baw-baw-ba-ba-ba, the first notes of the Jimified national anthem. It was about three in the morning when he went on. Hendrix was so smart . . . he’d been up all night. I saw him walking around like a visitor from Xanadu. He played “The Star Spangled Banner” knowing he’d wake everyone up. That was brilliant! It was like an X-ray report from Alpha Centauri to the third stone from the sun.
After three days of peace, love, music, and massive amounts of drugs, Woodstock looked like Vietnam on acid. People were eating watermelon rinds; the helicopters were thrumming and hovering everywhere. After everybody else had left, the fields all around looked like there’d been a war but with no bodies—sleeping bags instead of corpses.
Somebody stole the gas cap to Don Solomon’s car, and since it rained for two days, the gas tank got full of water and we couldn’t leave. I still have a Coca-Cola cooler that I’d stolen, and I went around picking up everybody’s pipes. There’s a banner that hung behind us at Woodstock with a stick figure holding a cornucopia and with a dick, or a tail, between his legs. I stole that, too. I had Aerosmith’s seamstress, Francine Larness, and her sister duplicate it and I still have them.
At Woodstock I sat and watched Hendrix and Joe Cocker and the Who especially. I had those deranged thoughts watching them up onstage: “Someday I could be that spectacular.” The experience of the first Woodstock totally outweighed the second one that we played at in 1994. We had all those people backstage, and the press is coming to you. Every time I went out of my trailer there were millions of flash cubes in my face. It wasn’t my idea of Woodstock. I would rather have been out there rolling around in the mud. Had I been there as a spectator, I’d have been fucked-up and had that experience again.
At the original Woodstock I was in a tent, and suddenly the tent was making this warping noise from the helicopter blades—it was shivering—it was alive! I went outside, my brain on LSD. I was tripping my ass off. I was atomized, sparks were flying off me like a Roman candle, and fuck me if it wasn’t raining frankfurters! Incoming! The helicopter was talking to me: “GET OUT OF THE WAY!” it said, like Jehovah out of a cloud, except it was army helicopters dropping six hundred pounds of hot dogs (and pots and pans to cook them) in huge nets. They would hover ten feet off the ground and let their payload drop. I went over and I picked up a pot . . . and started drumming. Then another guy came over and he did the same. Pretty soon, a dozen people banging on pots, then two dozen . . . three. Ken Kesey was there banging on a pot! The original bona fide hippie drum circle. And the beat would change as people dropped out and came in and dropped out and came in again. This went on for days . . . or at least hours that seemed like days.
The Vietnam War was terrible, but we made peace by smoking pot. That’s something that we don’t have today. It’s all fucking Ecstasy and clubs and, er, fucking. Back then you passed a joint, and it was “make love, not war.” Everybody was your friend. You’d make eye contact with someone and end up smoking a joint with them. You started talking sweet and beautiful shit. In the sixties everyone had a common ground . . . and pot and the drugs were a big fuckin’ part of it. There’s your triangulation: Pot, Rock, Vietnam (and civil rights).
We used to give the peace sign, and if someone nodded, you’d say, “Wanna get high, man? You got a joint?” And it was lovely. Today you don’t know what somebody’s thinking. Today, I see people in the street and don’t know if they’re going to hug me or mug me. You know, I don’t really care if you get on the Internet, text, or Twitter . . . we were accessing the fucking cosmos! Okay, now I do sound like a character out of a Crumb comic—or Oscar the Grouch. But I just figured out why guys like me turn into curmudgeons . . . the world’s going to hell in a handbasket, everybody has rolled over and given up, and there’s no more afternoon baseball.
I’d drop acid and go into the city. You’d look down at the sidewalk and it was melting. I was walking on a great gray, sparkling snake. It shivered when you stepped on it. The sidewalk was alive! And then there was the Electric Circus in the East Village with the Rubber Room. I’d take acid and go in there. I lived there! The Rubber Room was this padded space made for people who were tripping, because they were going “YEE-HAA!” and they didn’t want anybody to hurt themselves.
One Sheridan Square in the West Village—the Stones and the Animals would go there. I’d sit there listening to that song “Judy in Disguise (with Glasses)” by John Fred and His Playboy Band.
It was the beginning of the disco era, and in that club they would play the music so fucking loud, and we were in there going, “Fuck, this is fucking great!” Clubs with bone-jangling loud music! That was the beginning of all of it. And no one sold T-shirts to the revolution. Think about that! No one was selling T-shirts in 1971! What were we thinking?
By the late sixties I was seriously into Haight-Ashbury. I’d way got over my Mod Mick phase—so had Mick. I was into—I don’t want to say my feminine side, but the hipper women’s stuff, the way Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg dressed those guys! They really had that motley, tatterdemalion medieval troubadour thing down. Eventually the hip King’s Road shops began exporting that stuff, like the New York branch of Granny Takes a Trip. As soon as I began to refine my own personal style, I was immediately attracted to the Anita Pallenberg/Keith Richards gypsy look. But after I saw Janis—she became my fashion idol.
Eventually Anita and I became good friends. When I go over to England I always try to see her. Last time I met her where she works, at the designer Vivienne Westwood’s boutique. Vivienne Westwood, now Dame Vivienne, designed clothes for the Sex Pistols and then brought her eccentric clothing into the mainstream—if you can call her wildlife outfits mainstream. I was looking around at the bizarre clothes in the shop when a woman came up behind me, covered my eyes, then put her hands around my neck, almost snapped my fucking neck off, and said, “Who is this?” “Uh, I give up.” “Your best English fucking cunt!” It was Anita in her broken-English Cockney accent.
A few years ago, when Keith and Anita still lived in Bing Crosby’s old house out on Long Island, I went to spend a couple of days with them. I’d bought this rare book in a weird little bookstore in New York. The guy kept it in the back room; it was about black magic and shit. I took it with me. A little light satanic reading for a weekend in the country. It was about the derivation of the Seven Sacred Sins and all that dark stuff. When Anita found it under my bed, she had a fucking fit. She ripped the book up. When I asked her why she did it, she screamed at me in front of Keith, “How dare you bring this into my house? Are you here to cast spells on us?” Meanwhile we were all gacked to the nines on coke.
The sixties and us, we got away with it. And now, “fuck-all” lives on! You’d read R. Crumb and then these characters would be there right before your eyes. You’d go, hey, he’s from R. Crumb. Oh, that was so great! A little lame and filthy, but what the hell, R. Crumb had Mr. Natural and, you know, Flakey Funt and Angelfood McSpade. Oh, it was just so good.
At the end of the sixties I lived at Sleepy Hollow Restorations, right before the Tappan Zee Bridge. I’d be so high coming from New York or Yonkers in my car, in my Volkswagen, from eating hash brownies and recording records, I would wind up missing the exit and drive over the bridge. Whoops! Forgot cash! I’
d go over the bridge with no money! Problem is, there’s a toll on the way back into New York. I’d drive up and go, “I just don’t got—!” But I was scared to death. That happened quite a few times. I remember there was a tree there that had such a beautiful face against the sky at sunset.
At eighteen most kids think about becoming a man. Never did! The guy you went to high school with figured it out. Got a job, went to work every day. He became a man. But here I was at twenty-two. I was at a loss. What was I going to do? Tune pianos like my uncle Ernie or teach music like my dad did at Cardinal Spellman High School? I had that moment of angst.
“Perplexity,” sayeth my man Kahlil Gibran, “is the beginning of knowledge.”
Yeah, but he wasn’t living in Sunapee and doing crystal meth. I loved speed, man! Remember the speed that burned when you snorted it and you had to keep it in the freezer? It was blue and it had that terrible smell? “Oh! That tastes terrible!” It was an acquired taste, one that I acquired without too much difficulty. You could eat the paper it was wrapped in and you were fuckin’ forget-about-it.
I loved Quaaludes, too. Especially when you got too high on speed or blow. Whenever I’d go to rehab, they’d say, “Well, you’re always chasing the drug.” And I go, “Yu-uh!” It’s like having a fast car and you go really fast, but then occasionally you’ve got to stop and go get gas, but while you’re getting gas all you want to do is get back in that fast car. It’s like that time again! You have no blow, you run out, you go to your dealer and get some more, and then you’re in the car breaking the sound barrier and your brains are pouring out of your ears and then someone goes, “Here, check this out!” It’s like ethyl alcohol and you hit this button and your mind chills down.
The wildest places we played were fraternities. With Fox Chase I played Bones Gate—it was a famous raunchy fraternity at Dartmouth they based Animal House on. At those parties I used to sit under the keg, they’d turn the keg on, and I’d beat everybody out.
Fox Chase was the last band I was in before Aerosmith. Right before that, in 1969, William Proud went out to Long Island and I was with them there until that fell apart and I went back up to Sunapee.
I had no money. I was desperate, defeated, doomed. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. William Proud had played every nightclub, grotto, union hall, gym, bar mitzvah, and VFW hall for a fifty-mile radius. We were burned out on the trail. Nowhere left to play. It all came to a head one night at the last incarnation of Salvation in the Village, way out in Southampton on Long Island.
At the Hampton gig, I practically strangled our lead guitar player, Twitty Farren, to death during a rehearsal. Top that, Alice Cooper! Midrehearsal, I look up and see Twitty—who was a fuckin’ great guitar player, by the way—yawning. I asked myself, “Is it the heat or is it that his heart isn’t in it anymore?” I was high as a kite, and I jumped over the drum set to try and choke his raggedy ass, but I fell over my high hat and cracked my leg instead.
I ran out of the club, stuck out my thumb, and hitchhiked all the way back to New Hampshire . . . drumless, bandless, hopeless. But still telling my mom, “Mom, I’m going to be such a big star there’s gonna be girls hanging off the rafters, kids coming through the windows, battering down the doors. We gotta batten the place down, put up six-foot fences, put shutters on the windows. We’ll need an intercom and electric gates to keep out the rabid fans. Or else we’ll have to move.” “Of course, Steven.” My mom always believed in me, she was a stone romantic.
William Proud—Peter Bover, Twitty Farren, Mouse McElroy, and Eddie Kisler—wasn’t really working out. It was still fun, we still got gigs, but it was small potatoes and wasn’t leading to anything. No road to destiny! I grew up in a family where we were all very close, and I was probably homesick or whatever they call that today.
Summer ended, the town was cold. No one to cop from, no drugs, nothing up here—everyone had left. Oil lamps, candles, winter, the wind whistling through the pines. No band, no plans, no future, and they were starting to roll the sidewalks up. It was my first season of wither. And then, on the seventh hour of the seventh day I heard Joe Perry play. . . .
CHAPTER THREE
The Pipe That
Was Never Played
Before we get started, you’re probably asking yourself, “Is this about that famous pied piper from that children’s story or just another clever drug reference?” Read on . . . seek and ye shall find. . . .
I’m a great believer in moments arising. You’ll miss the boat, man, if you’re not ready for star time. Then at least you need a brother like the Kinks, Everly Brothers, and of course the Stones. And I was ready, ready as anybody could be. “Keith, gimme an E!” And the emcee is saying, “Let’s hear a big hand for old Whatsisname and the Miscellaneous Wankers.” Yeah, yeah, yeah . . . but I always thought I needed a brother to rock the world—and FATE would take care of the rest.
I’d been a rock star ever since I could remember. I came out of my mother’s womb screaming for more than nipple and nurture. I was born to strut and fret my hour upon the stage, fill stadiums, do massive amounts of drugs, sleep with three nubile groupies at a time . . . AND endorse my own brand of barbecue sauce (oh no, that’s Joe). All I needed was for the rest of the world to see who I truly was—Steven Tyler, the Demon of Screamin’, the Terror (or tenor) of tin pan time and space. Recipe demanded a cookin’ band, a few hit records, and, as alluded to a moment ago, my mutant twin. Was that too much to ask?
By the summer of 1970, sixties megalodons and heavy metal raptors still ruled the land—the Stones! The Who! Pink Floyd! Black Sabbath! Deep Purple! Led Zeppelin! All those poncey Brits with their bloody million-quid blues riffs, limey accents, Marshall amps, flaunting their foppish King’s Road clothes. We didn’t stand a chance, mate. Back in the USA little bands came and went. They huddled in the underbrush trampled by the passing Ledzeposaurs. If you heard a bustle in the hedgerow—that was us. I’d been in my share of these little bands, eking out a living gigging for sixty dollars a night (if we were lucky) in crummy clubs, gymnasiums, dance halls, and dives.
I was even the designated rock star of Sunapee (summer population, 5,400; winter population, 500). I had 45s on the jukebox at the Anchorage where we all hung out. I had a couple of singles out, the very pop and Brit Invasion–like ballad “When I Needed You” and the Beatlesque, Dave-Clark-Five-sounding “You Should Have Been Here Yesterday” with Chain Reaction. I was a local hero . . . a rapidly evolving legend in my own mind. But that was all. I’d burned through countless bands and come home a beaten child.
I started mowing lawns. I had a little piece of hash that I kept in my hash coffin and smoked in my hash pipe, which was labeled The Pipe That Was Never Played. A couple of tokes, get loaded in an old drafty house with little curtains that closed. I’d sit around with my friends. We’d talk about what we were going to do for a living. Maybe we’ll become cops—I actually said that! Oh, I swear! I wanted to be a local cop like my best pal, Rick Mastin, who carries a badge on the lake. I can drive around at night, I thought, at least have something to do, like Biff, the old cop in the harbor. What would we be doing when we’re sixty? That was another topic of conversation. Ah well, we’ll smoke cigars and sit on the deck. But as soon as the words came out of my mouth I heard a high-pitched bat shriek in my brain. No, I don’t think so.
Sunapee is not unlike Our Town—only smaller, a little more artificial (because it’s a vacation resort) and on a lake. Sunapee Harbor is just like the postcards of itself: quaint cottages, souvenir tchotchke shops, colorful local characters, aging rock stars. . . . The masts of sailboats sway in the harbor. It’s sooo picturesque. A perfect little stage set designed for tourists. Antique paddle-wheel boats docked next to an airbrushed little park. The crew wear Gilbert and Sullivan naval uniforms, and the captain narrates the cruise—the history, landmarks, and lore of crystal clear Lake Sunapee—as he indicates points of interest for the enlightenment and enterta
inment of the gawking visitors. “Now, over here, to your right, is the lighthouse where legend has it two star-crossed lovers would meet on moonlit nights . . . and over there is the summer home of degenerate rock star and control freak Steven Tyler [gasp!], who spent his summers here as a child mowing lawns and talking to elves. . . .”
They actually do an Our Town bit (billed as Crackerbarrel Chats) where old-timers (playing themselves) sit around an old woodstove at the Historical Society Museum and share, firsthand, their memories, experiences, and photos of days gone by. I’ve signed up for next year. My subjects will be whittling, bird-call clocks, the size of Slash’s cock, and how to throw a TV set out of a hotel window into a swimming pool so it explodes when it hits the water. (Hint: extension cords.)
Sunapee’s quaint all right, but if your aspiration in life is to be a rock star, then you’re in trouble. This isn’t the place to be. I knew that in a few weeks the town would start to close up. Like Brigadoon, every September it all evaporates. They fold up the flats, strike the set, and overnight it’s this deserted village—the kind of town you see in Stephen King movies where the place has been abandoned due to a supernatural fog. I’d stand in Sunapee Harbor all by myself and there’d be nobody there. It gave me the creeps! No wonder the town is filled with alcoholics—there’s nothing else to do.
Winters in Sunapee are brutal. Six months of howling wind and driving snow. A Siberian nightmare! And I’d spent plenty of winters in Sunapee, licking my wounds, getting high as a kite, brooding, regrouping, reassembling myself, and practicing my Jagger pout.
I’d spent too many winters up there doing that. I wasn’t going to do it again. I said, “That’s fucking it.” I prayed to the Angel of Cinder-Block Dressing Rooms and Ripped Naughahide Couches, “Deliver me from this horror!”
And then one day—like an apparition—Joe Perry! Joe pulled up to my parents’ place in Trow-Rico in his brown MG. There ought to be a plaque to mark the spot where that happened. God, I can see it in my mind’s eye—the pebble retaining wall below the big house, the steps up to the house where I used to clip the hedges—it was such a Technicolor wide-screen moment. He got out of his little Brit sports car. He was wearing black horn-rimmed specs.
Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? Page 8