I came up with the second album title, Get Your Wings, after reading a book on the Hells Angels. Getting your wings is a Hells Angels thing. If you give a girl head when she has her period, you are definitely one of the guys and, my friend, you’ve got your wings. The album came out in March 1974—and we were on the road again. We toured like gypsy possessed. We opened for Mott the Hoople, Black Sabbath, Blue Öyster Cult, the Guess Who, and Kiss. We were on tour continually and endlessly. We made as little as five hundred dollars a night in places where they didn’t know us and almost four grand where they did. Get Your Wings was bubbling in the Hot 100. And as a result of our never-ending road juggernaut, it got us our first gold record the following year.
Me at the Record Plant recording our second album, 1973. (Joe Perry)
That spring we opened for Hawkwind (the Brit sci fi rockers) at Alex Cooley’s Electric Ballroom in Atlanta. Every night there’d be a girl in the front row, very scantily clad, silver glitter spray all over her body, and little nipple cups. And really hot. Stone gorgeous. She was the Glitter Queen and she came to every show we ever played in Atlanta.
We did a great show at Cooley’s one night. I was up in the dressing room afterward . . . the backstage was full of people, along with a couple of girls in the dressing room, naked. My old childhood friend Ray was there. He was working his ass off with the band and had a bag of blow. Ray had the greatest connections—the red Lebanese hash with a camel embossed on the bag, same as the stuff he’d scored for Led Zeppelin—oh how they loved that shit!
One of my band mates took a look at the Glitter Queen and he was gone! She disappeared and so did he. I think she swallowed him up a couple of times.
The girl standing there in front of me was hot, not to mention very ambidextrous. She could bend over backward—my kinda girl—and she had a flat head where I could rest my beer. A little-known quality in those who bend. Later, Ray had this same girl in the toilet stall, she’s standing on her head with her feet up against the wall, and he’s pretending to pour Jack Daniel’s into her ’gynie . . . but actually pouring it into a shot glass and sticking the shot glass into her coo-ha and drinking out of it with a straw. When Ray was done, he poured Jack on his schvantz ’cause he thought it would kill the herpes he was about to get. One snort leads to another, and pretty soon it’s two hours later.
My band mate—who will remain nameless—is hiding backstage, ramming the Glitter Queen with the silver paint all over her body, while we’re getting gacked to the nines on blow (which we called “krell”) in the dressing room. Mötley Crüe says they coined that term for coke in the eighties after the Krell, the people who lived on the Forbidden Planet.
“Hey, where were you?” I inquire, when said band mate returns. But when he gets close enough, we know. We all fall down laughing because his face and shirt are covered with silver glitter paint. There’s silver paint in his hair, glitter all over his mouth—his penis looks like the Tin Man. And up behind him comes the Glitter Queen herself with all the silver paint rubbed off her breasts and her pussy. Oh, man!
We’d come offstage just shy of midnight. They’d shooed everybody out of the club and closed up. By now it’s 3:00 A.M. I go downstairs and I can’t get out so I run back up. “Omigod, you guys, we’re chained in! There are chains across every door.” What were we going to do! Locked in with a pile of blow, Jack Daniel’s, and a bunch of hot naked chicks? The only way to get out was to force open the door a crack and then you could climb up and over—which I did. I got out, made a phone call to Alex Cooley, and it took an hour before anybody came . . . for the fifth time. I know, I know. We were younger then.
Upon returning to the hotel I recited my nightly prayer . . .
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep
You keep my soul, I know it’s taken
Hope you don’t mind if I stab my bacon.
All these girls had to do was look on the back of the album and see what the tour manager’s name was—and if you’re in Chicago, call up every hotel that Aerosmith might be staying at, which would whittle it down to maybe four, call the front desk and say, “I’m looking for Kelly, he’s my cousin, he’ll be coming with Aerosmith.” It took the fans twenty years to get hip to this and me twenty-five years to figure it out.
That is assuming, and it’s quite a lot to assume, that the tour manager would have even been available or would have given a fuck about my aching needs. Tour managers, I found out later, had other things on their mind, such as hobnobbing all night long with people they knew from the last time we’d played there, people with primo blow.
So many nights I went to sleep dreaming that two gorgeous, nasty twins were going to knock on my door, cover me in rose petals, and perform an after-midnight rectal examination. . . . But no way, they never arrived. Perhaps they didn’t know I sometimes used the name I. K. Malone when I checked in. The chick at the front desk had a field day with that. “I’ll be right up,” she would say.
You get into a hotel elevator in a place you played the night before, and you know the last fucking person you want to meet is someone going, “Oh! My god! It’s you!” in that Valley Girl accent. This person in the Hyatt House elevator is having a God experience and you haven’t had coffee yet. By the time you’re through your fifteenth or twentieth person having a religious experience, you wish you were a gasket salesman from Omaha.
You get home that night, the next day you wake up—it’s your day off!—and step outside and what do you see but the three-hundred-pound guy in sweatpants you’d run into in the elevator the day before. He’s camped outside your door and he’s drying his clothes on your lawn. Perfect!
CHAPTER SEVEN
Noise in the Attic
(Snow Days)
The buzz that you’re gettin’
From the crack don’t last
I’d rather be ODin’ in the crack of her ass
STEVEN TYLER AND JOE PERRY, “FEVER”
Those were the days when AIDS was not yet in the world. You couldn’t die from getting laid. Those were different days. And cocaine! Doctors said it was not addictive . . . it was habituating. They didn’t know at the time that the drug would eventually take a sharp turn after a certain day. Blow, once the life of the party, became the stuff of fear and loathing, the source of devious and secretive behavior, and the mother of all lies. “What, me? No, I don’t have any!” “Sorry, ran out, bummer, man!” “Nope. Hey, I gotta go to the bathroom.” And that’s where the rock ’n’ roll bathroom came from. That’s when people started keeping stuff in two pockets—you had your courtesy bindle you’d share, so people didn’t do too much, and you had your main stash in your sock. And thus sin and doubt entered our happy world.
Fame derails people—not to mention the drugs. But drugs were nothing new to me. I’d had a lot of practice with drugs; I’d been getting high since I was sixteen. I was getting high all the time back then. It was part of my education. Ray and I would set our alarm for four o’clock, drop acid, go back to sleep, and then wake up at five thirty or six just slammin’. It really started before that with speed, so much so that I wrote a poem . . .
Set your alarm, it’ll do you no harm to get off while you’re asleep
You’ll get off so fast, with the next hit you blast
You’ll do in a day what you could in a week
With speed your brain knew you took it and you were up. But acid, you could take it and go back to sleep. We’d get up and go to high school tripping our brains out. I used to smoke pot and listen to the Beatles, trying to decipher their lyrics. With grass you could read between the lines . . . with acid there was nothing but between the lines—both essential talents of the times. “Norwegian Wood,” now what could that possibly mean? Today, it would be as obvious as the balls on a tall dog. Smoking pot was so much better than drinking—which I also did, of course. God, a couple of drinks and you go to that same old place, but smokin’ the good stuff and yo
u’re up in your fucking way-out-o-sphere.
The great red hash was hard to come by, as were Thai sticks and Nepalese temple balls . . . real round ones. It had such a sticky, resiny, sweet, tangy taste. It’s a real dream-inducing high. People would tell you it was laced with opium, but why would anyone lace a common drug like hash with something as expensive and rare as opium? Another urban legend gone wild. Not too different from the one where the girl supposedly fucked herself to death on the gearshift knob. That one we wanted to believe.
My mom used to ask me, “If you’re already on such a high from finally having made it, why do you need to get any higher?” But I did, anyway. When you grow up doin’ drugs, chances are you’re gonna spend the rest of your life doing drugs. They were never to put out the pain. I would drop acid and run up the hill to the ski lodge. I’d drop and go to Bash Bish Falls, upstate New York, and stay in the woods all day. I would drop acid and go from Friday to Sunday night trippin’ on the aqueduct, riding my minibike with Tommy Tabano, Ray’s brother, who just passed away last year. Bless his heart. He was a big part of my yesterday.
So we were all off and running, all in bed with the same girl . . . Mary Jane. I was good onstage so why not be high, too? I was already addicted to adrenaline, so why not get higher, as Sly Stone preached? Using in spite of adverse consequences. Certain things happened in this band that weren’t drug induced, although there haven’t been many. I’ve always felt that we couldn’t take one step forward without two or three back.
But let me don the Devil’s Drug Advocate hat for a minute . . . a sociocultural rant, if you will. Why are drugs eternally attached to unpleasant hippie references? For those who OD’d . . . drugs are bad! Yes. But some of us could do them. Great seekers—writers like Carlos Castaneda and Aldous Huxley. Did they take trips (like I did) up the side of a mountain to a ski lodge in the summer just to smell the wildflowers and watch the foxes run and stare as the clouds hypnotically floated by? Are all drugs bad just because some of them took over my life from time to time? I wrote some beautiful songs under the influence, just as jimson weed inspired Carlos Castaneda when he was writing his Don Juan iconic novels. By the way, I was getting the cues when I was eight years old. Sinatra’s “Come Fly with Me.” Even then, I didn’t interpret those lyrics as come fly with me on a big old jet airliner. It was metaphorical, and guess what? A lot of us kids back then picked up on those things. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Alice in Wonderland. If anyone has ever tipped on acid, in their heart of hearts and mind of minds they have experienced what it’s like to truly fall down the Rabbit Hole. And when the drugs hit full on, you are in Wonderland.
Life is something to be reckoned with. Winter has to be reckoned with. For the cold, find something warm. Baby’s birthing? A shot of Jack Daniel’s to celebrate. Wine . . . Christ’s blood. But to me, it’s always been EUPHORIC. Why? Euphoric recall isn’t just drug based. It’s thinking back to your childhood and the best memories of those times—that’s euphoric recall. It’s wonderful. Aerosmith did drugs . . . drugs, drugs, and more drugs. Can it take you down? Yes. Did it take me (us) down? Well, we’re still here. But it’s also what life is all about. Watching whales breech; holding a baby bunny; getting a new puppy for Christmas . . . that feeling of GREAT. It’s all humans really want. They say in every moment, you have a choice to make between fear and love. I believe that. But all we really need at the end of the long and winding day is to be petted, to climax, to make love, and to be happy. And that is euphoric . . . with or without the hash coffin.
By the time we were getting ready to make the second album, we all flew solo. We didn’t share drugs anymore; everyone had his own godlike, capable-of-anything-we-put-our-minds-to attitude. We storm trooped across America—three shows in a row—meet-and-greets every night (where the band quick-chats and shakes hands with fans who’ve managed an after-show pass thanks to a local radio station promotion), doing TV and radio interviews in every town we passed through. It was around this time that things started to get seriously out of control, but no one noticed because we were having too much fun. In the beginning, drugs seemed positively essential. We had to get high to get by, because no human had that kind of unworldly stamina and enthusiasm.
When it came time to start recording our second album, Get Your Wings, in 1973, Bob Ezrin, Alice Cooper’s producer, was going to be our producer—which meant we were now in the big leagues—as the title of the album implied. So we were about to get ours. . . . Then Bob Ezrin came and saw the band and wrote, “They’re not ready.” I saw the note; I’ve got it somewhere. I take it out every once in a while and look at it and a little steam comes out of my ears. But Jack Douglas, who was then Ezrin’s assistant, also saw us and loved the band. He told Ezrin we were the long-foretold Great American Band. Jack Douglas, a fucking visionary!
So Ezrin said, “Well, Jack, you want to do ’em, you do ’em.” That’s how Jack Douglas got the job—us—isn’t that great! Naturally we were a little resentful at first when we met Jack. I was thinking, “Ezrin doesn’t think we’re ready, well, fuck you guys!” I knew we were because I knew what we had. Actually, who knew back then, right? But when you win in the end, you can always go, “You know? I knew.”
We relied on the drugs for recording, touring, partying, fucking—anything at all, really. But we already knew there was a dark side to all this, as in the lyrics to “Same Old Song and Dance.”
Gotcha with the cocaine they found with your gun
No smoothy face lawyer to getcha undone
Say love ain’t the same on the south side of town
You could look, but you ain’t gonna find it around
It’s the same old story, same old song and dance, my friend
It’s the same old story, same old story
same old song and dance
Fate comes a-knockin’, doors start lockin’
Your old-time connection, change your direction
Ain’t gonna change it, can’t rearrange it
Can’t stand the pain when it’s all the same to you, my friend
“Seasons of Wither” was a song that had been germinating in my head for a long time, but the other more sinister tracks, like “Lord of the Thighs,” came from the seedy area where we recorded the album. “Lord of the Thighs” was about a pimp and the wildlife out on the street . . .
Well, well, Lordie my God,
What do we got here?
She’s flashin’ cross the floor,
Make it perfectly clear.
You’re the bait, and you’re the hook,
Someone’s bound to take a look.
I’m your man, child, Lord of the Thighs.
You must have come here to find it,
You’ve got the look in your eyes.
Although you really don’t mind it—
I am the Lord of your Thighs!
Get Your Wings came out in 1974 and got us a couple of hits on rock radio—“Same Old Song and Dance” and “Train Kept a-Rollin’ ”—and it was back on the road again.
I love going out on that stage. You come out of your dressing room, head down that gray cinder-block corridor with bodyguards and road manager flanking you, up a ramp, onto the stage, and there you are—twenty-five thousand Blue Army Aerosmith faithful out there waiting for you to light the fuse. It’s a high that I’m not sure ever goes away. After some doot da doot started waving that .45 around during a Ted Nugent set, the threat of some moron taking a shot had me worried I’d be next. But if I keep moving, no way they can hit me. That’s when I adopted a Tigger mentality and I’ve been dancing my ass off ever since.
Ray Davies knew how to work a stage. The Kinks are the most underrated band of the sixties British rock invasion and to this day everyone knows who they are. Never mind the Bible, that one song, “You Really Got Me,” it was the Bible! Oh, my god, it was the shit! And then they were smart enough to follow it up with “All Day and All of the Night,” which was “Yo
u Really Got Me” on steroids.
You know why they sang it like that? Shel Talmey, their producer, thought that Ray Davies couldn’t sing, so he told him to blurt it out in short little telegraphic outbursts. That way you don’t have to sing the melody. Fucking genius, because every word hammers at you, every word is percussion in that song. I love that. If you can’t think, don’t speak in long sentences. . . . And if you can’t sing, don’t try to carry a long melody! But of course the Kinks did all these other things, too. What a ballad, “Waterloo Sunset.” Then they went off into all those crazy operas and concept records: Lola vs. the Powerman & the Money-Go-Round Pt. 1, Preservation: Act 1 and Preservation: Act 2 . . . 100-amp fuse-blowing arena rock.
Shit happens between bands on the road. We played a show one time at Harrisburg Arena in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—it was one of those places where they usually sell horses and cattle, so the place stunk of manure—and Queen would not go on because we were the headliners. They refused to open for us and the show was canceled.
Another time we were opening for Bachman-Turner Overdrive and they sabotaged the scrim that would fly the Aerosmith wings. Their roadies rigged the cables holding up the flag of the Blue Army so that when Kelly pulled on them, the fucking pipe bent and the wings crashed. We learned that the best way to beat sabotage on the road was to just kick ass every night . . . and that’s just what we did.
Marko Hudson told me a great story about David Coverdale when Whitesnake was opening for Ozzy Osbourne. Coverdale supposedly showed up at the venue on more than one occasion with a pair of hookers wearing white fur coats and toting two Afghan dogs. Ozzy hated it. He called him a “prat.” The crew was instructed to lay down silver duct tape that would lead Coverdale to his dressing room. One night, before Sir David arrived, Ozzy took the tape up himself and redirected the trail—to the boiler room.
We were playing in Lincoln, Nebraska, one time. That’s where Joey and I got busted for throwing firecrackers out the window of a Holiday Inn. The bill was Aerosmith, Kansas, and the Elvin Bishop Group. Elvin Bishop had that hit single “I Fooled Around and Fell in Love.” Crazy Raymond or “Ray Gourmet” as we called him at the time, had it in our contract rider that we had to have a turkey-on-the-bone dinner every fucking night backstage after the show. Not turkey loaf, not turkey roll, not pressed turkey, but a fresh fucking turkey-on-the-bone dinner, even though we never ate it because everybody was so out there all the time and just wanted to get out of the venue and back to the hotel. Nine out of ten shows, we’d get turkey roll with bubbles in the meat or some mystery meat that looked like hockey pucks and tasted like a Frye boot. And that’s just what we got in Lincoln. I lost it. We gave the stuff to Kansas. They ate it and loved it. I guess that futuristic meat was one of the reasons why they were a great prog band.
Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? Page 16