Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

by Tyler, Steven

  Speaking of meat, I found out years later (through a crew member confessional) that when the techs would get pissed off at the band, they’d wipe their ass with the bologna and put it back on the deli tray. Come to think of it, I always thought the bologna on tour had an anal tinge.

  Being on tour with Jeff Beck was one of the highlights of my career. One time we were performing in Chicago at Comiskey Park and Jeff Beck came out and played “Train Kept a-Rollin’ ” with us. It was incredible. Then the stage manager comes running right out onstage and yells, “You’re burning the building down!” We thought he meant that the band was on fire. Joe and Brad have been known to rip some pretty hot leads. But the building was really burning. The asphalt and tar on the roof caught fire and the place was going up in flames. That night, we burned the house down . . . twice.

  We always knew that our old manager, Frank Connally, was hooked up with some shady characters. But now Frank’s old business partners were coming home to roost. A big boxing promoter (we’ll call him “Tony Marooka”) claimed he wasn’t getting his share and came to collect. “Frank told me I’d be taken care of,” he said. “I’ll break fuckin’ Steven Tyler’s legs if you don’t do right by me.” David Krebs went into the Celtics dressing room with Marooka and there was a powwow. Krebs took care of it by laying some dead presidents on him. I had no idea this was going on; one of those rare transactions where I was glad to be out of the loop.

  January 1975 . . . in the midst of a spine-chilling, ball-freezing New York winter, we began work on our third album, Toys in the Attic. I came up with the title because of its obvious meanings and since people thought we were fucking crazy anyway, what did it matter? I wasn’t hip to the 1960 Tony Award–nominated Broadway play of the same name or its 1963 Oscar-nominated film adaptation. Didn’t matter if I had been. This was Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic . . . singular, sexy, and psychosensational.

  My creative chi ebbed and flowed from tongue in puss to tongue in cheek. I’ve always been tactile and oral. Maybe too much love from my mother? But it became obvious to me in later years that the passion I had was unlike that of other males, and unfortunately, on various occasions, that passion wasn’t shared by other members of the band.

  I’ve been misquoted as saying that I’m more female than male. Let me set the record straight—it’s more half and half, and I love the fact that my feelings are akin to puella eternis (Latin for “the eternal girl”). What better to be like than the stronger of the species? I mean, women are the superior beings, are they not? Sure the male brings the food home, but can they birth children and feed them from their breast? Woman has compassion, which man lacks. I feel I was born with those same feminine compassions.

  People wind up stashing their memories in the attic, a traditionally nostalgic place—your old teddy bear, Archie comic books, Slinkys, family heirlooms, a favorite moth-eaten sweater, photos of childhood, your old roller skates, tickets to a Stones concert, Mia’s crib. . . .

  The other reason I came up with Toys in the Attic was that I knew we’d made it. I was the kid who put my initials in the rock ’cause I wanted the aliens to know I was there. It’s a statement of longevity. The record will be played long after you’re dead. Our records would be up there in the attic, too, with the things that you loved and never wanted to forget. And to me, Aerosmith was becoming that. I knew how the Beatles, the Animals, and the Kinks did it—with lyrics and titles. I saw reason and rhyme in all the lunacy that we were concocting.

  Leaving the things that are real behind

  Leaving the things that you loved remind

  All of the things that you learned from fears

  Nothing is left but the years

  Joe was jamming a riff and I started yelling, “Toys, toys toys. . . .” Organic, immediate, infectious . . . fucking amazing. Once again, the Toxic Twins ride off into the sunset . . . this time, the sunset of the attic. Joe’s been my inspiration on more songs than I would ever tell him. Sometimes, just his presence in the room is enough to inspire lyrics to the greatest melody. It’s proved itself on every record we’ve ever done. I’m friends with some of the best . . . but I’m partners with almost none. He’s so much more than the real thing. Coke has nothing on Joe Perry. Like leaves on an artichoke, the more layers you peel off, the closer you get to the heart. Guitar players jam

  Toys, toys, toys . . . in the attic!

  I just started singing and it fit like chocolate and peanut butter. Joe plays his ass off on that song. He used to sprawl across the couch with the TV on and play guitar at the same time. I’d come in and say, “What are you doing?” and he’d say, “I’m just watching TV.” “No you’re not. You’re writing a song,” I’d fire back. And all I can say is, Thank you, Thomas Edison for inventing the tape recorder. Joe played stuff unconsciously. It didn’t matter what key or tempo. That came later. Just playing; just feeling; just being Joe fuckin’ Perry.

  Tom Hamilton—same thing. He’s come up with these slippery, slimy, melodically delicious out-of-the-blue bass lines from practice. He’d play stuff so down and dirty just from warming up, and it would turn into a song. Like “Uncle Salty,” actually written on his guitar. Movie stars wanna be rock stars; guitar players wanna be lead singers; bass players wanna be guitar players.

  Now she’s doin’ any for money and a penny

  A sailor with a penny or two or three

  Hers is the cunning for men who come a-runnin’

  They all come for fun and it seems to me

  That when she cried at night, no one came

  And when she cried at night, went insane

  Here I was thinking about an orphanage when I wrote those lyrics. I’d try and make the melody weep from the sadness felt when a child is abandoned. I pretended to know the headmaster to get inside his head and what I heard was

  Uncle Salty told me stories of a lonely

  Baby with a lonely kind of life to lead

  Her mammy was lusted, Daddy he was busted

  They left her to be trusted till the orphan bleeds

  Inside was hell or barely tolerable, but she sang, “It’s a sunny day outside my window . . .” because I’m a sucker for a happy ending.

  The song title “Walk This Way” came from the Mel Brooks film Young Frankenstein . . . secondhand. Jack Douglas was discussing how Marty Feldman’s scene went, where he utters the (now) immortal line. It was hilarious and it stuck. I’d actually finished the song the night before our recording session and kept it in a bag that had all the other lyrics I’d written for the Attic LP. Arriving that day at the studio at 4:00 P.M., I got out of the cab and realized that I’d left the bag in the car! Gone. Two hours later, I went upstairs. I sat down on the steps with my pen and wrote the words to “Walk This Way” on the wall. As I rewrote each line, the words all came back to me. Never saw the bag again.

  Backstroke lover always hidin’ neath the covers

  Till I talked to your daddy, he say

  He said, “You ain’t seen nothin’ till you’re down on a muffin

  Then you’re sure to be changin’ your ways”

  I met a cheerleader, was a real young bleeder

  Oh the times I could reminisce

  ’Cause the best things of lovin’ with her sister and her cousin

  Only started with a little kiss

  Like this!

  Walk this way!!!

  Toys in the Attic came out in April 1975 and went gold. The rest of the year we spent on the road. This was the year it all changed for us. The album got good reviews and people started taking us more seriously—about fucking time! We toured with Rod Stewart and Ted Nugent. Ted is the definitive Paul Bunyan with an SG guitar—a man’s man. His music is in tune with the times, but his values are as old-fashioned as Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap. He’s so far to the right, he runs over his left! And if looks could kill, his wife would slay us all.

  Tour managers had it good back then. We didn’t know
it, but every person they let in the back door, they got a gram of blow from. “You wanna come in? Cost you a gram, man! Ounce of coke! An ounce of coke’ll get you up close and personal! Yup! I’ll give you all the tickets you want. But make sure you got an ounce. And dude, it’s gotta be just like that last shipment.”

  The Aerosmith crew were ruthless extorters of blow. I met these guys later on—we’d go back to the same cities ten more times and they would all come out of the woodwork and go, “You know, when I used to come here, Kelly would charge me in coke. The last time I saw you it cost me a fucking eight-ball just to get me in!” First it was a gram. Then it went up. Even among hustlers and dope fiends, there’s inflation. And that’s what they did; that’s why Jimmy, Kelly—whoever—were nowhere to be found. And the more famous a band got, the more blow. And who did we buy our blow from? Kelly!

  We drank a lot because of the blow and we got blown a lot because we drank a lot. My favorite cocktail was a Rusty Nail . . . Drambuie mixed with the finest Scotch and a twist of lemon. I found out later on that Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr were fellow Rusty Nailers. It’s a good thing we set that glass down or it would have been the rusty nail in all our coffins.

  Kelly had a monstrous appetite for coke, and I say that from the point of view of one who had a pretty ferocious appetite himself. He was a human vacuum cleaner. Fort Wayne, Indiana, we got into town and the crew would introduce the infamous Kelly to the local stagehands. “Listen, sons . . .” Kelly could snort a week’s worth of their blow a foot from the baggie through midair. The guy would go, “What the fuck, man?” And Kelly would look at me and go, “Aaaahh—coke etiquette, Jack.” He had so much residue in his nostrils, he made it into Ripley’s Believe It or Snot !

  I once owned a Cessna Riley Conversion turbo, bought it in New Hampshire—twin-engine turboprop, safest plane in the air. My friend Zunk would fly it with his father. I’d be at the house and call him up, “Let’s go flying, Zunk,” and I’d swing over, pick up a gram, and we’d go up and do parabolics . . . where we’d pretend to go up around (and over) a clock: 10–11–12 (woeeee) . . . 1–2–3 and between 11–12–1–2 and 3, you are truly weightless. There’s nothing on the planet Earth like this. You can simulate it, but up there—flying around the clock—that’s the real deal.

  So one day our flight was canceled and the band had to get to Indiana. We’re flying from New Hampshire . . . just me, Zunk, and Joey. Zunk wants to show off for Joey so he goes into a parabolic. And I’ve got an ice chest in there. The ice chest goes up in the air and it’s hovering in front of Joey’s face. “What the fuck?” He’s freakin’ out. But even better, another time, we’re on the band plane and we happen to hit some nasty turbulence. I whip out my vial of coke, put a line on my thumb, grab a straw, and start to snort. Just then, the blow begins to float up in the air . . . hovering like fairy dust in front of my face. I shove the straw up my nose and snifffff the powder right out of the air! A gram of coke floated out of my bindle and into the air! I was known from then on as the human DustBuster—which turned into Dirt Devil, which turned into demon of screamin’. And then at one point, the demon o’ semen—but that’s another chapter.

  For a while we had a guy in the crew who was an ex-cop. Having worn a badge himself, he’d get friendly with the local cops in the towns we played, hang out with them, and they’d give us the stuff that they had taken off the kids. Fucking cops in uniform! They’d say, “Put your hands out,” and they’d put bags of weed and little dime bags of whatever in tinfoil in them. He could also buy guns from various people. So one time he goes, “Come here,” and pulls the bay down from the bottom of the bus. I look inside and there’s what I thought was an AK-16 and this shotgun with a huge clip. The clip was round. I’d never seen anything like it. You can’t even get one anymore. It’s known now as a weapon of mass destruction.

  I took the AR-16 up to Henry’s house, went into his backyard, loaded it up, and said, “You know, this doesn’t look right.” I walked into his woods, pulled the trigger, and it went, rattttatttatttttt. . . . I had never shot a machine gun up till that point. I freaked! Then I ran back to Henry’s house, rolled it up in a blanket, went back to my house, took my boat out to the middle of Lake Sunapee, and threw it in the water. Rambo, I am not.

  Whenever we wanted to snort blow together backstage, we’d say, “Let’s go have a production meeting,” and disappear into some little room and pack our beaks. There wasn’t anything subtle about it. It was, like, “Production meeting!” We’d take over an office and have a cop stand guard for us outside. We called it the “money room.”

  We were all gacked to the gills back then. Gacked is when you’ve done too much blow and your jaw starts moving like a robot, there’s white on the side of your lips—you’re babbling, speaking in tongues . . . rattling on about nothing. It doesn’t matter what it is. You’d get to the end of some insane rant and go, “Wait a minute, did I just say that?” That was the norm back then. You’re so stoned and speeding, thinking about what to say while the other person’s speaking. You’re just gacked. That’s the best part. The worst part is . . . nothing’s funny. You could make a joke like “What’s the difference between pink and purple? Your grip!” and the room would look like an oil painting. Not a laugh. And then you think you’re the phallic mentor on this shit, but when it comes to doing the deed, it’s like pushing a rope uphill, or stuffing an oyster in a slot machine.

  Drugs were already getting to be a problem onstage and off—but it was a problem we wanted, and there were plenty of people to help us go down the road to perdition. Sometime along the way we’d met this character Brimstone—what a perfect name for a dealer.

  We were playing the old Michigan Palace in April of ’74. One of the roadies says to Raymond, “Someone wants to talk to you.” And there he was, the devil himself. Brimstone was five feet four, big curly hair, big lips. He pulls out a bag filled with drugs. Raymond tells him, “Here’s the deal. Party afterward, if you want to come, it’ll cost you an eight-ball to get in the door. Walk in the room, don’t say a word, take the shit out, put it on the table, then we’ll talk.” With that he became the band’s regular dealer; he traveled with us, followed the tour with his own money. As we made more and more bread we bought bigger and bigger amounts until eventually we gave him twenty thousand dollars for a pound of coke. Two o’clock in the morning, there’d be Brimstone. Always had two six-foot blondes with him. Came to a bad end. Brimstone became tombstone. In fond memory, I will say this . . . that man knew more about R&B than Joe and I put together. He’d sit on the floor with us like the Beatles did with the Maharishi, talking about music. As in the rest of my life, there are no coincidences. I feel blessed for knowing him.

  Eccentric characters always found us. We’re playing the Cow Palace in San Francisco in ’93. Night before the show, we’re invited down to the O’Farrell Theater, the infamous sex club owned by the Mitchell Brothers. Rolling Stone writer Hunter S. Thompson is in command central . . . the office upstairs with the pool table. “Steven, come here!” he shouts. “I want you to see this!” He proceeds to introduce me to two blondes that were . . . no shit, 11s out of 10. The first girl has her lip pierced with a four-foot chain hanging from it that’s connected to the other girl’s pierced clit. Right through the poor thing. “Couldn’t you have done that after I got to it?” I said. “How you gonna feel my mouth?” The question was, at best, rhetorical. “Oh, I will,” she smiled. They climbed on top of the billiard table and we commenced to play. Gave new meaning to the term pocket pool. Left ball in the side pocket!

  When the drum riser starts harmonizing, you know you are either too high or some mystic Pythagorean force is at work. After the band stopped playing, the sound waves from the stage would vibrate the drum riser and out would come this perfect note. A booming E-flat. It was wild! What was that? The stage was haunted! The note would come out through the holes we’d cut into its side so that we could move it. It was feedback, but it wa
s freaky, especially on a few lines of blow, to hear this otherworldly foghorn sound emanating from it.

  Like I said earlier, I was a drummer, so I’d share all my tricks with Joey. Back when I was with Chain Reaction and no one could hear me, I put a pillow in my drum, ripped the front head off, placed a Shure 58 mic in there, and hooked that into two Colossus amps. I put ’em on either side of my drums when I played, which pissed off Don Solomon no end, but he knew it accentuated what he was playing.

  I told Joey that story later on, so he, having to outdo me, got a twelve-inch speaker that someone built for him that he stuck behind his head to enhance our show. It would get miked for sound, the bass would get miked for slap. And we were off and running. One day I look at Joey and I hear the stage talking to me, humming this note. Little did I know it was his fucking bass amp feeding back. Joey is a good drummer, but I’m the one that showed him foot foot, foot foot—high hat, high hat—foot and high hat playing the same thing . . . snare in the middle. He fuckin’ practiced that and he got it.

  I showed Joey the egg on my foot. The egg is the muscle you get on your foot from playing the foot pedal. I showed him because I was so proud of it. He looked at me and I could see in his eyes that he loved the whole thing, the romance of it. Joey became one of the greatest drummers ever, which made him two feet taller than he was when he started. Now he’s taller than me! But he still wears spandex, with a little teeny nub. You’ve no doubt heard the expression “I know it’s small but it’s fat like a beer can.” Most men dress to the left or the right; Joey dresses straight out. Far as endowments go on the other members of the band, two are hung like a Sopwith Camel, one’s got a licorice nib, and one has a big ten-inch. I won’t say who that is . . . but his first name is Steven.