Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

by Tyler, Steven

  The Beatles, come on, and what the fuck! It wasn’t because they were all such great musicians. They knew. They knew. They were English and they had long hair when nobody else did and they said funny things, but it wasn’t that, either. It was the alchemy they cooked up—Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Chuck Berry—and music hall numbers.

  And they evolved, as did the Stones, the Who. Many groups came out, had a hit, and then took the ferry back across the Mersey. The Beatles went from “She Loves You” to “Help” within a year. In one year. Not ten. In two years they were at the trippy Rubber Soul. “Norwegian Wood,” how great is that? So you can say what you want, but in one year they started out recording in a room where Paul and John sang together on one mic, took that vocal and dumped it down to one track, and added it to the next vocals. You know what that means? It means you can’t go back. They had to be so sure of themselves. Plus, of course, they had George Martin as a producer.

  We needed a name, so we all got together and tossed names around the table, like Stit Jane. I came up with the Hookers. No one liked that. “How about Arrowsmith,” Joey suggested. “Arrowsmith? You mean like the Sinclair Lewis novel we had to read in high school?” And then, a minute later, I went “Aero: a-e-r-o, right?” And he goes, “Yeah.” Now that was cool. The name evoked space—aerodynamics, supersonic thrust, Mach II, the sound barrier. I thought if we could stay together, that name would always work because we had nothing to look forward to except the future. I always imagined that when I was fifty, there’d be robots already, skateboards that floated and you could jump on. Everything that happened to me since I was ten came out of comic books anyway. All the superheroes had that shit. Every bit of it—lasers, light sabers, phones that you could talk into. Dick Tracy had that watch on his arm. He was talking to it all the time. Watching Dick Tracy I used to think, “What if we all had one of those watches?”—but it was just a crazy kid thought. Now everyone has one with all the apps—check your e-mail, blog, Twitter me . . . and please, sit on my Facebook.

  I’d thought of calling us the Hookers because I considered playing clubs a form of prostitution—I’d spent six years playing clubs in New York and knew how exhausting and frustrating it was. So with Aerosmith we avoided the club scene like the plague. It’s a trap. The money’s okay—a thousand a week would be a nice payday—but doing four sets a night (for forty-five minutes each, even if the club was empty) for a two-week stretch playing other people’s material will grind you down. No time to rehearse, write, develop new material. People shouting “Play ‘Maggie May’!” “Hey, you fucks, know any Credence songs?” In any case we were too rowdy for most clubs and bars. We got kicked out of Bunratty’s Bar in Boston because we started to incorporate original material and the club owners didn’t like that.

  Instead we focused on colleges, high school dances, ski lodges. We played around a lot, mostly weekends, rehearsing during the week. Playing high school dances out in the country, getting maybe three hundred dollars a night.

  We played absolutely anywhere that fifty people would come see us. As the keeper of our gig calendar, I had to make sure we had at least three dates a month for around three hundred dollars to cover our rent and basic nut. We functioned like a guerrilla band: play a small town, establish a beachhead, develop a small fan base, next time through there’d be more kids and more and more enthusiastic fans.

  Our set list was our Brit blues catechism. Real heavy metal to me is Led Zeppelin playing “Dazed and Confused.” We got our roots the same place Zeppelin got theirs—and I don’t mean from Jake Holmes, the guy who inspired Jimmy Page—I mean de blooze.

  When we started out, there must have been five thousand rock ’n’ roll bands in the Boston area alone trying to make it. But if you are going to separate yourself from the pack you have to develop your own identity and you aren’t going to do that by playing other people’s songs. In the very beginning we, too, did cover versions (we only had a couple of our own songs).

  We never played in our street clothes. We always dressed up . . . put on a show. You’re in a band, lads, we’ve got to get flash. The look is the hook. I got the band to strut their stuff, dress up, get their sartorial swagger on. I’d walk into Caprice, an antiques store on Newberry Street owned by my friend Barbara Brown. She said to come down to her store and she’d give us some clothes for our first album photo shoot. I had to ease the guys into the fashion thing. I was already having my leather pants done in flames from the girl who lived upstairs at Number 5, Kent Street. I brought the band to Caprice and told ’em to rummage around, pick their own stuff out. It was a free-for-all.

  At Barbara Brown’s store with Joe Perry. . . . I brought the band here for clothes for the first album in 1972. (Robert Agriopoulos)

  The store was opposite Intermedia Sound where we would record our first album. “Here, put this on!” I said. “Hell, no, I’m not gonna wear that.” “Aw, c’mon, man, just do it for the pictures! Look at the Brit art school flash! Look at Jimmy Page! Look at Mick! Look at Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck! Look at Pete Townshend! The Union Jack jacket is the shit. Are they wearing jeans and army surplus? I don’t think so.” After a lot of yacking they got into the clothes that made the picture on the first LP cover explode . . . and they looked fucking great.

  That photo was taken on the stoop in front of Barbara’s store. Brad had one of her shirts on, Joey’s got her jacket, I wore the hat and the belt. That’s it, baby. We got the shot, and then some brain-dead police working at Columbia shrank it down and put clouds behind it—the beginning of my corporate hell.

  We raided the closets of the hipoisie. A mad mix of King’s Road medieval motley, pimp swagger, Stones gypsy gear and Carnaby Street kitsch. Janis’s Haight-Ashbury scarf-draped bordello exotica (god, I’m getting off just saying this!) and a touch of titillating androgyny for shits and wiggles. Anything startling, garish, glam, and over-the-top: jewelry, earrings, black lace, feathers, metal flake, eyeliner. All the stuff we need to look cool and out there. Whatever it takes to spark that outlandish rock star impudence. Anything that denotes snotty, defiant arrogance and beyond-the-pale chic. Let your freak flag fly! And a few Aerosmith tattoos just to underline the outlaw element. Find out where they are, folks!

  We were perfect for the dandified Brit look. We weren’t pumped . . . on the contrary, we were skinny and weedy, just like the English musicians. Anyway, our outfits paled beside those of the New York Dolls: hot pants, fake leopard skin, black nail polish, panty hose, bouffant hairdos, feather boas, and six-inch platforms.

  Most of this band’s early career had been spent making fun of me for what I wore—clothes and shoes—and then they’d wind up wearing it themselves. I’d put jewelry on the guys in the band and there would be a comment. Joe has said to me more than once about my style or what I was wearing, “Wow, I love those pants. Do they make ’em for guys?” At first—and for a very long time thereafter—Joe was aloof. When I’d point out that this is the stuff Mick, Keith, and Jimmy Page wore, he’d say, “What do I want to look like him for? I’m me.” I just wanted to be a gypsy. Interestingly enough, whatever Joe’s own thing is, your thing, anyone’s thing, that’s it. That’s where the song “Make It” came from.

  You know that history just repeats itself

  Whatchoo just done so has somebody else

  You know you do, you gotta think the past

  You got to think of what’s it gonna take to make it last

  I lifted those lyrics out of the creative ether . . . my inner voice. I live and stand by it. You’ve got to make up your own shit out of what’s already there. I always figured, “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I know I’m doing it!”

  I kind of got offended when Madonna came out with her thrift shop chic like she’d invented it. That’s the way everyone dressed from 1966 to Woodstock. And then in the eighties, Madonna came out with “Material Girl” and her bangles and stuff and I went, “Yes!” Wow, what a fickle, fucki
n’ mass media! Because nowadays, everything’s recycled. There’s nothing new. Everything’s in quotation marks. What wasn’t before? Gypsy Boots, he was the first nature boy, living in a tree and dressing like it’s 1969.

  My dream had come true, but the second I said, “It’s so great that we’re all living together,” Joey moved in with his girlfriend, Nina Lausch, and Joe moved out with Elyssa. Was it my breath? We were a unit, watching the sparks fly, day or night. Didn’t they know that some of the best creative shit came in the midnight hour? In my other bands I’d seen how women led to a breakup—look at the Beatles—and I didn’t want that to happen to us. I pleaded with my brother. “Joe! You’re Joe fuckin’ Perry . . . you’re the ultimate, the beyond-which-there-is-nothing—when I met you, I knew I’d found my guy. Come on now, man . . . you gotta stay. We gotta write together . . . that’s the whole reason I moved to Boston.” But to no avail.

  I was angry at Elyssa because she stole my boyfriend, my significant other, my partner in crime! It was like losing a brother. So now there was jealousy, this dark undercurrent humming along. I felt that Joe abandoned me—that he cared more about Elyssa than he did about the band. After all these years, it’s okay to admit it. I was really hurt that he would rather be with Elyssa than be with me, especially after we started writing songs together. Like I said earlier with “Movin’ Out,” Joe’s sitting on the water bed and I hear him strumming this thing and I go, “Hold on . . . whoa, what’s that?” and a minute later, Joe’s riffing and I’m scribbling . . .

  We all live on the edge of town

  Where we all live there ain’t a soul around

  And it was in the afternoon, and that song wouldn’t have happened unless we’d been living together. Writing songs was fucking. I took my anger and jealousy and eventually put it into “Sweet Emotion,” which I pointed at Elyssa directly . . .

  You talk about things that nobody cares,

  You’re wearing out things that nobody wears

  Calling my name but I gotta make clear

  I can’t tell ya honey where I’ll be in a year

  I used my jealousy and anger for lyrical inspiration. Looking back, I’m actually grateful that Joe moved out with Elyssa. It gave me something to sing about, a bittersweet emotion. My relationship with Joe is fraught to say the least. Even in the best of times we sometimes don’t speak for months. On tour we’re brothers, soul mates, but there’s always an underlying tension broken up by moments of ecstasy and periods of pure rage.

  Mutual animosity is a necessary part of a band’s chemistry. It’s all egos in a band, anyway. Would you want to be in a group who were all clones of yourself? Pretty much anyone who wants to be a rock star is by definition a raging narcissist—then just add drugs! It may be one for all and all for one, but each one of us is an egomaniac, we’re all in it for gain and glory and showing the world how fucking great we are. It’s me! And when you have five me’s . . .

  They say, “As long as you can keep that competition healthy, it’s all good, dog. . . .” But just try to be that reasonable when you’re eighteen or even twenty-six. The only way this actually works in a positive way is also out of ego, when, say, Joe or Brad comes up with a riff and I think, fuck, that’s great, and I want to try and top it by reversing the melody or writing a lyric that will blow everybody away.

  Joe and I are opposites in many ways . . . and that’s what fueled our creativity. So I knew if we were going to run like that, it would inevitably cause a lot of tension. The friction between us started almost immediately—when Aerosmith played their first gig, at Boston’s Nipmuc Regional High School, on November 6, 1970. We’d barely gotten through the first number when I began shouting at him. “Turn your fucking amp the fuck down! You don’t need to be so fuckin’ loud!” I couldn’t hear myself singing. I can’t sing in the key of the band if I can’t hear my voice. I need to hear my voice over the music to know if I’m in tune. Truth is, the energy was so there with the band, it didn’t matter whether I heard myself or not. That was a private inside joke between me, myself, and I. I came from the club days before monitors and held my finger in my ear so I could hear myself. Like my dad says: “If you have bad ears . . . I sound pretty good.”

  I’ve had constant blowups with Joe about how loud his amp is. Remember in Spinal Tap when Nigel Tufnel shows the rockumentary director the 11 setting on his amp? Well, my guitar player definitely had his amp turned up to 12! I tuned Joe’s guitar for him way back then because his ears were already damaged by the volume. They’re still shot. Joe’s had tinnitus for years. What he hears most of the time is a high-pitched whine.

  You want opposites in a band, that’s what makes the big wheel turn and the sparks fly . . . but when you have such widely differing personalities there are going to be some upsetting exchanges. Joey told me about the time we were on Newbury Street at Intermedia Studio. Joey was on one side of the street and Joe was walking on the other side. Joey crossed the street to be next to Joe and said, “Hey, Joe, how ya doin’? Can I walk with ya?” He was full of that wow and wonder of recording our first album and just plain being Joey Kramer, who happens to have the biggest heart in the band. And Joe says, “Yeah, sure.” Pause. “So, Joe,” Joey asks him, “why can’t we be friends?” And Joe doesn’t even pause before he fires back, “Why? Just because we’re in a band, we gotta be friends?” Which was pretty harsh. Now, Joe may say today, “Well, I was just fuckin’ with him!” Really? Well, there was a lot of wounded silence hanging there as Joey walked away. He never forgot it.

  Our first tour book. . . . I put this together from this show in 1972. (Ernie Tallarico)

  In a group it’s always about “who the fuck you think I am” because it’s all mental, it’s all attitude. If you’re scared of the dark, then the devil’s going to come out of that blackness. If you’re afraid of the ocean, you’re going to feel like something bit you on the toe. That isn’t to say that if you’re not afraid of the ocean, you won’t get eaten by a shark.

  At the beginning of December 1971 we got booked into the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street in New York, third on the bill with Humble Pie and Edgar Winter’s band. We packed all our gear in a bus and headed down there. We had no bass amps—we borrowed some to get on that stage and play. Steve Paul was the promoter. He managed the Winter Brothers, the two albino blues musicians from Texas, Johnny and Edgar. Johnny had just got out of rehab that night, but at that time Edgar was the bigger Winter. The Academy of Music was the biggest gig we’d had, where I’d seen the Stones some years before.

  Right before the Stones came onstage, I could see Keith’s boots and the high heels and I knew it was them and I just about fucking wet my pants. I was freaking, the audience was screaming, the lights were down, but you could see those boots. Then, years later, I’m sitting with Keith, shortly after his father died, at Dick Friedman’s house (he owns the Charles Hotel on Martha’s Vineyard) and we’re smoking cigars, discussing life and shit. Talk about surreal, I felt my mind going back to that very Stones show and the image of those boots.

  Anyway, I’m backstage at the Academy going, “Oh, my god!” On top of which Steve Paul was considering managing us. I knew Steve from his club, the Scene, on Forty-sixth Street. I played at the Scene with the McCoys, Rick Derringer’s band. Derringer was backstage at the Academy of Music tuning his own guitar by doing a method called “Octaves.” You hit an E octave up and you get a harmonic, and when it stops waving, then you’re in tune. I called the guys over. “Joe, Brad—you gotta see this! It’s a way of tuning without me using the harmonica.” I’d spent the last two years tuning the guys onstage with an E harmonica in my mouth. I would tune Joe’s E string and they’d try and take it from there. Now the guys could tune their own guitars. Bloody hell! Genius. I saw Derringer play live at Klein’s department store in Yonkers in like ’67 or ’68 doing “Hang On Sloopy.” He had to have been sixteen years old. I was dazzled to death.

  Me and Rick Derringer b
ackstage at the Academy of Music, 1973. “Hang on, Sloopy.” (Joe Perry)

  That night we were an opening act. We were meant to play three songs and get off. We did all originals: “Make It,” “One Way Street,” and “Major Barbara.” For whatever reason, on “Major Barbara” Joe and I decided to sit down and play.

  We weren’t sure of really anything except making an impression and getting our songs right. The audience started chanting, “We want Edgar!” so I butted the songs up so close together; that way the crowd didn’t have time to heckle us. We shouldered on and jammed. If we stopped playing for twenty seconds, we’d get a loud “BOOO” from the crowd. It didn’t feel good. “Major Barbara,” a song we’ve never released, had gone over quite well—no boos, just a couple of shouts. Under that kind of pressure you don’t know what you’re doing . . . you just go with whatever you have and try not to give a shit, which we did. So we just launched into “Walkin’ the Dog.”

  We could see Steve Paul in the wings getting apoplectic. “Get them off!” But we continued on and finished our set. As we got off the stage, Steve Paul pulled me to the side of the stage and gave me a lobe full. “Don’t you ever sit down at a show that I book!”

  Years later I was out at Steve Paul’s house with my first wife, Cyrinda. “I have to tell you something, Steven,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for that stupid stunt where you and Joe sat down on the stage during ‘Major Barbara,’ I’d have become your manager.” Joke’s on you, Steve! Looking back, it was a ballsy thing to do . . . sitting down. Nowadays, you call that an acoustic set. Unplugged. We just sat down so Joe could play slide on his guitar. It was very ahead of its time. And Joe played a great slide.