In live performance, before I go and sing that high note in “Dream On,” I do a little hyperventilating. I look down (like this—use your imagination) and I breathe in and out, in and out, rapidly . . . then I go, “yeaahhh,” and I hold my breath where anyone else if they were underwater would be going, “I gotta come up for air!” I learned how to go past that in part by making those treks around the lake . . . for the sake of holding the note.
Over the last ten years, as the condition of my feet has deteriorated from stomping stages since the seventies, the loop has become more and more challenging, but more on the wounded rock warrior later.
One night, during a nonaerobic stroll on the loop, I passed a house that was glistening with a flickering flame inside. The house was called “Witch Way.” Outside there were gargoyles and mannequins and twisty limbs from trees. I’d seen this house many times before, and every time I went past it I’d go, “I’d love to meet the person who lives there.” I’d stop out front and yell, “Hello, I love you in there!”
This time I shouted a little louder, and a sweet middle-aged couple, Sherry and Philip, invited me in. Philip’s a contractor; Sherry is a sculptor. Amazing bizarre stuff she’s made is all over the house. “Oh, my god,” I say, “can I look around?” A sculpture made out of a cello, another one—I can barely describe it—made out of gourds. And dried sunflowers. It looked like The Wizard of Oz. Meanwhile, on a huge flat-screen TV, America’s Got Talent is on the tube. Twenty girls that any guy would love to do.
In the front room, there’s an old organ, just like the one on which I’d written “Dream On.” I began playing and I felt like I was levitating. The organ felt very familiar. I was transported back to Trow-Rico all those years ago when I grabbed a few chords out of the air. Turns out, it was an Este pump organ made in Vermont in 1863—the exact type we had up at Trow-Rico.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
“There was an old antiques store down at the harbor right across from the community store and the organ was sitting out on the porch,” she explained.
So they’d bought it in the eighties, which would have been about the time my dad sold Trow-Rico. Talk about serendipity! I’m called by my muse into a house that I’d never been inside, and there’s my old friend, the “Dream On” pump organ. Was it possible? I sat down, laid my hands upon the keys, and pulled out all the F-stops as I did thirty-five years ago. As I started pumping the organ, I could feel her start to breathe. We made musical love right then and there.
Sherry said she bought the organ at an auction in Sunapee the fall after my parents sold Trow-Rico and that it’s most likely the same organ. “I think the organ has a poltergeist in it that’s somehow attached to the crystal vase,” she told us. “I’d always kept this little crystal vase on top of the organ, but after we moved I decided to put it on the bookshelf. One night I was sitting on the floor drawing when this vase came off the shelf and hit me in the back, you know, but since I put it back on the organ, it hasn’t done it in nine years.”
I made Sherry promise me that if she ever sells that organ, she’ll let me make the first offer. It’s the shit. It really truly is a pump organ with all the stops. A strange thing about antiques— they had another life before we get introduced to them. It’s like an ancient string of beads that you might find in Mesopotamia. You don’t know who they could have belonged to. They tell you only “These are beads from the ancient lands, found in the ruins.” Or they were found in a barnacle-encrusted chest off the coast of the Holy Land. Did they once hang around Mary Magdalene’s neck?
When a song comes to you and you write it in ten minutes, you think, There it is. Dropped in our laps like a stork dropping a baby. It was always there. The song. On the inside. . . I just had to get rid of the placental crap that was around it. Because at the end of the day, who really wrote that? If Dylan were here, he would tell you in his laid-back Bobness, “Well, now where would it come from?” Out of the blue, lines come to you . . .
You think you’re in love like it’s a real sure thing
But every time you fall, you get your ass in a sling
You say you’re in love, but now it’s “Oooh, baby, please,”
‘Cause fallin’ in love is so hard on the knees
You see it floating there and say, “This should be caught.” It’s like those Native American dream catchers. I look at those and go, “Oh, my god, that’s my fuckin’ brain!” I would see something or hear Joe playing, I’d yell, “Whoa, whoa! What was that?” Or a passage in a Beach Boys song where they go to the bridge and I’ll hear an entire song in there.
When I was a kid, my mom would read me all these stories and poems, Dickens and Tennyson and Emily Dickinson. That’s where I got my rhyming from. I’m a rhyme-a-holic. It made me curious in life to wonder why, when you look out the back window of your car and you stop for a red light, the world seems to be coming back at you. Everything you pass catches up to you; poems from the past can turn into songs in the present through curiosity and imagination.
But it catches up to you, like when I had dreams about flying or floating up to the ceiling and then out the window and over a city. I’d have a piece of wood, be on a hill, slap it to my chest, and I’d catch winds like a sled does snow and start lifting up and I’d fall and roll down the hill and I’d grab it again and catch the winds and be afraid I’d fall down again and get back up and those winds would blow me out to sea. I’d go so high and find myself in a tree. And I’d wake up going, “Are there cars that levitate?” I’d feel that sensation in my chest like when you fall. The stories inspired the dreams, so thank you, Mom, for the stories.
I was twizzling the little skull I have twined in my braid and went, hmmm, hmmm. I started off with something that everyone’s familiar with, like a line from “Dream On.”
Every time I look in the mirror
All these lines on my face getting clearer
Sing with me, sing for the ye-ears.
I’ll grab a little of that and throw it in like yeast. It’s 2010, and if I was to connect the dots from “Dream On” till now, I would say:
All the lines on my face as I sang for the years
was the skull in my braid barely down to my ears?
I could deal with the screamin, you know how that goes
when the skull in my braid hung down to my nose.
And you get the rhythm going and in no time at all it’s writing itself.
I’ll have had me a pint and be hanging with Keith
when the skull in my braid’s grown down to my teeth.
If I’m not on tour, well, you’ll know where I’ve been
when the skull in my braid’s grown down to my chin.
When the agents and labels get round to a check,
that old skull on my braid will be down to my neck.
And I’ll take that old check and I’ll rip it to bits
by the time my old skull has grown down to my tits.
With my girl in the sun and I’ll maybe get faced
when the skull in my braid’s grown down to my waist.
I’ll be rippin it up with a mouth full of sass
when the skull in my braid’s lookin down at my ass.
And life’ll be good and life will be sweet
if that skull in my braid makes it down to my feet.
It’s been second to none, that no life can compare,
when that skull in my braid gets cut out of my hair.
Yesterday and today I was thinking about the timelines between the verse and the curse (chorus) and how it all works together. There are four elements to writing a song, or as they say in comic book land . . . the Fantastic Four. If you break it down, there’s melody, words, chords, and rhythm—put those down in any order and you’ve got something you can play to piss your parents off.
When I was married, I used to think of myself in the third person. I would say to my wife, “Well, I can’t belie
ve you’re married to this guy in a band,” you know. “How could you do that?” Then a couple of years ago my daughter Liv called me up and said she was marrying Royston, another guy in a band. There it was again, like a shadow, you know.
My ex-wife called me last night and I thought, Well, you know what? I love her, and she’s picking up my son and I’m thinking about my girlfriend Erin and the girlfriends I’ve had in life, where I’ve been, two divorces and stuff. All fodder for the passionate pen. If you have a child with a woman you’ll understand that when you write a song with somebody it’s like having a child with them. You’re birthing, you’re evoking the spirits of a moment in time, specific moments, seconds, so for better or worse I’d come up with a scat. Trying to make sense of it all. . . . First it’s “Hey, jaded!” which later on in a magic moment turns into “Hey, ja-ja-jaded,” which puts it in a very rhythmic meter with a four-four time signature. It’s a picture of my temperament set to music.
Once you have a melody, that’s your hat rack, a hat rack that can hold many hats—the hats are the words you throw on top of it. Or you can scat and by scatting, summon up lyrics. Once you have lyrics, you can let the words come up with melody. Those lines “back when Cain was able way before the stable” from “Adam’s Apple,” you know where those came out of? Scatting.
I would listen back, along with the rough of the song, and I would hear lyrics. Every time. Tapped right into my own subcontinent. It would jump right out at me from the scat. I could play you scats and if you listened close enough, you would hear the lyrics that I wrote. Not unlike psychoacoustics. If two people are playing, you hear things in the middle. If two notes are played or people are singing . . . there is a tone on the in-between. Ham-onics-slash-psychoacoustics-slash-vibe. The scat kink became Pink. The scat to the Beatles’ classic “Yesterday” was scrambled eggs. Fucking magic.
You take off from there. . . . You don’t know what you’re singing or what chord it is. It’s all done as if you’re in the middle of a desert with two long poles and a lot of little sticks. The people from the town come out and they’re wondering how you got up there, how you climbed up the palm tree on the rungs of your own voice and the lyrics you wrote. “Oh, my god, look at that! He’s singing! How’d he get up there?” You build a ladder. A song is a kind of ladder, too, but that you’ve got to build without little sticks. Never mind the melody, never mind the chords—no, no, no. You start with infatuation, obsession, passion, anger, zeal, craze, then take a handful of notes, sew them into a chord structure, create a melody over that, and then come up with words that fit it perfectly. “Oh, my god, what is that? He’s up there singing and he climbed up on air, on his vocal chords.” Well, yeah, I got up there on my own nasty scat . . . O-uh-OH-EEE-uh-ee-yeehn! O-uh-OH-EEE-uh-ee-yeehn! It’s a deep-dish apple pie, baby.
You know right away if a song has that magic. It has to have those extremes—the one thing it can’t be is okay. Okay is death. Okay is a jingle or a ring tone—not even that! You look at the person you’re writing with and say to yourself, God, this is gonna be either great or suck. Dare ya! Those are the only two possible choices you got! There are a lot of musicians that are schooled and learned and playing piano in the bar at the Four Seasons or Days Inn, and they’re really good. Their problem is they never learned how to be really bad. See, when I go and sing a song with an artist like Pink, I say, “Oh, man, I can fuck that song up good.” It’s a figure of speech for me . . . kinda my mantra. Because that’s what I do. I know I’m going to rip it a new asshole and I’m going to take it big into the passionate pool. That’s what I know how to do.
Tom Hamilton (bless his fat strings and good heart) wasn’t sitting in a room with the insight and forethought of going, “Fuck! WHO wrote those Kinks albums?” I had that thought because I knew that they—he—Ray fucking Davies—wrote those records. Where did the invention come from, the flash from wherever to write a song and get together a bunch of guys to just start playing and maybe make a mistake and take that mistake, save it, and turn it into something you’re proud of? Own your mistakes! Write something, sing something—as bad or good as it is—that no one has come up with. I sat with Joe and went, “OH, MY GOD”; we wrote a song after that riff he was playing and I jumped on it and it naturally became “Movin’ Out.” And that’s how “Dream On” came to me . . . natural. The voice inside never stops asking, What am I gonna sing about? Questions upon questions. Why has Janie got a gun? What’s my first verse? What’s the third verse? What’s the chorus and the prechorus gonna sound like? How will the end go?
What did her daddy do? It’s Janie’s last IOU
She’s gonna take him down easy and put a bullet in his head
Oh, my god! Now’s she’s done it! Now it makes sense from the beginning. Sometimes I think I’ve given more forethought to that than to getting married, having kids, getting a driver’s license, going to school, college. It transcends the Everything because it is the Everything.
Songs are never in plain sight, they’re under your skin; if anything, the best are peripheral and then they pop out like a baby. Did I want to get that song out with its head crowning out of the vagina of the music? YES! And in some cases, like “Jaded,” those breech-birth songbabies caused so big a disruption in my life that I endangered my marriage, squandered the time I should have spent with my children, just to get that song out.
CHAPTER SIX
Little Bo Peep,
the Glitter Queen,
and the Girl in the
Yellow Corvette
Did women get backstage and offer themselves to us on our altar of lust? Take off their clothes, do tricks, satisfy our aching needs? Not in the beginning. Stuff like that doesn’t happen on a regular basis until you become really, really famous. But still, were there ass-shakin’ trollops in the audience who defined our existence and made our minds go into Glory Hallelujah mode? Absafuckinlootley! Hell, that’s what it’s all about!
Now, I’m not saying these girls didn’t come backstage after performances—of course they did. Isn’t that why they showed up to begin with? Music was one thing, but my thing was the other. I’d run back and get Kelly . . .
“Kelly—the girl with the red dress in the front row—have her shaved and oiled and brought to my tent!” And she’d be there. As dirty as my mind is, my body’s pretty clean. Kelly always made sure the girls were in the shower when I got in the room. I liked my pulchritude pristine! I can’t kiss a girl that’s been stage diving with five hundred other guys. I’m very oral and I like clean. Back then, sure, you could’ve gotten gonorrhea, but with one shot of penicillin . . . see ya. Unlike today, STDs were a dime store a dozen in those days. How do you avoid ’em? Screw ’em through Saran Wrap? Nah, if they washed, they were clean. As someone once said, “You ain’t seen nuthin’ till you’re down on a muffin”—and I’m no different.
After we became more famous, girls began coming backstage without having to be coaxed. Soon they started getting inventive, printing their own backstage passes for the price of a little backstage ass!
But early on, there were no girls doing backflips, no limos, no private jets—just the occasional girlfriend of a band member who acted like the only thing they ever blew out was their hair. Of course, there were other pleasures of the road. Like . . . the girl in the yellow Corvette.
Rewind to the summer of 1972 when we used to drive to our gigs in this truck that Mark Lehman owned, our original roadie and road manager all wrapped up in one. These days it’s probably moldering in the woods with vines growing through it. Anyway, that’s how we got to the gigs in the early days. And who wants to ride in a fucking van with the guys in the band? Sure, it’s okay to ride together when you’re on your way from Connecticut to New York to do a show. That’s a mere two hours, you’re all in the van together, and you’re psyched. You’re getting buzzed from breathing in the “eau de low tide” of the night before mixed with the sweet smell of sensimilla, stale cigarettes, a
nd flat beer. To this day, it’s an aphrodisiac like no other to me. But the long, endless road trips in that van with guys farting, telling lame jokes, pissing in pop bottles . . . that was murder.
Somewhere in the grain belt between Indianapolis down to who knows where, I fell asleep on the top of the amps in the back of the van with my head staring out the window and my mind on Mars. I woke as the wheels rolled over half a deer that’d been sliced in two the night before by a semi. We were doing fifty-five in our International Harvester truck, christened the Good Ship Aerosmith, when I spied something yellow—it looked like a giant sour lemon drop—moving in retrograde in the next lane. My curiosity was instantly tweaked. I shouted to the driver, “Mark, slow down, and let that car we just passed catch up to us!”
Suddenly, I’m staring at a yellow Corvette bearing a blonde with gigantic orbs and a smile from heaven. I crawled up over the top of the amps like an infantryman on the beach at Iwo Jima and landed on Joe’s lap in the front seat. Joe goes, “What the fuck are you doing, Tyler?” “I’m just lookin’ for a kiss,” I say. “You ain’t gettin’ that from me,” said Joe. “That’s not what you said last night,” I quipped. You can’t ever really get back at a guitar player. They’ll just crank their amp up to a million and drown you out.
She worked at the motel we’d stayed at the night before and was out on the highway doing a bit of her own randy reconnaissance. You can’t always get what you want, but she knew if she tried hard enough she could get her heart’s desire—and that was lucky me! She took me to a room and fucked my brains out. It was like three in the morning and she rolls over and caresses my back. What, again? Oh, baby, I thought, but what I said was “You know what? I could do this all night and the next day but I gotta get up really early to catch this goddamn flight.”
“Well we can take my Corvette,” she says. “And tell ya what . . . I’ll sit on your lap and grind you till the middle of next week or you can ride my face all the way to Chicago or wherever the hell we’re going!” It didn’t matter. Time becomes meaningless in the face of creativity. Was I dreaming? Or the luckiest guy on earth? “That sounds okay to me,” I said with all the casualness I could muster.
Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? Page 14