Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

by Tyler, Steven

  The Cenacle, a reference to the upper room where the Last Supper was held. Holy shit! I held court in my own mind up there. I was judge, jury, and instigator of all the lunacy that took place within the dysfunctional band family paradigm and the prayers left by the nuns unanswered. The silence was deafening, not even a face in a jar by the door. Just my own mind trying desperately to decipher the leftover realities of an abandoned nunnery. Quick—see if you can find some rhyme and reason to that, Steven.

  I fantasized about being Keith Richards in the south of France playing slide with a freshly broken-off bottleneck from a slammin’ vintage Lafite Rothschild that I’d just guzzled in homage to a vibe that I so fucking badly needed—to intimately feel like I was recording at Chopin’s mansion where Elton John birthed his classic Honky Chateau. I needed to get drunk on the placentic creative juices of my own musical imagination. A paradox of Creation—with delicious contradictions to create a fertile mind-set that I needed to embrace in order to occupy my own mental Cenacle and make this record real.

  A stoned-out rock star in his tattered satin rags lying on the ancient stone floor of a castle—slightly mad, but still capable of conjuring up a revolutionary album that would astound the ears of the ones who heard it and make the critics cringe. Still, that medieval fantasy must have seeped into my subconscious one enchanted evening when I wrote “Kings And Queens”. . .

  Oh I know I

  Lived this life before

  Somehow know now

  Truths I must be sure

  Tossin’, turnin’, nightmares burnin’

  Dreams of swords in hand

  Sailing ships, the viking spits

  The blood of father’s land

  Only to deceive

  The Cenacle was Aerosmith at its most extreme in its high middle period—it was just over the top! We mentally and physically took the place over. Long before cellulars, we hard-wired phones in every room. We had a huge kitchen, a dining room, a place for the crew to sleep and work, and our massive Studio A along with smaller rooms for Jack to get sounds in. We ran a hundred feet of barbed wire to microphones in the chapel, where Joey’s drums were set up on the altar. And Jack Douglas exorcised Joey’s ass into the middle of next week working on drum parts to, of all things, a song called “Critical Mass.”

  Some of us lived and breathed the Cenacle, and some of us simply went home at the end of the day. That never sat well with me. So if the recording day started at 4:00 P.M., Joey wasn’t done till six in the morning anyway. To snort or not to snort? That wasn’t even a question. Blow and more blow to the point of krell meltdown. Joey achieved critical mass the night he hit a guardrail at 4:00 A.M. in his black 308 GTB Ferrari, foolishly passing up the blow we had offered him so he could stay awake. He was still totally burned, totally stoned, and when he totaled his car—by some miracle—he was all right.

  It was an incredibly creepy place . . . very poorly lit. There wasn’t much to whatever lighting was left in the place, so it was a lot of big dark living rooms and a lot of long hallways—a cavernous, grim place, especially at night. And then there were the little tiny rooms where the nuns had slept. I would walk into each room and go, “Rrrrrrright,” ’cause there was a bed, a chair, a window—and that’s it. Methinks frequent visits were made to one’s next-door cubicle. Fast and quickly in the wee hours of the morning, methinks. And the freakquent flier miles the sisters ran up . . . God only knows! If you marry divinity and deny your humanity, something’s gonna give. They were there before us and I waited patiently for divine intervention so I could tap into some of their sacred ether. And I thought to myself, THE THINGS THAT COME TO THOSE THAT WAIT MAY BE THE THINGS LEFT BY THOSE WHO GOT THEIRS FIRST.

  If you ever had to go get something in the kitchen in the middle of the night, it was a trip across the Sahara, never mind finding your way back. So we put little fridges in each guy’s room, but to go to the kitchen to get something, you had to go into this dark, dank basement. It was like the setting for a Roger Corman movie . . . and then the vampires settled in. All in our minds, of course, but what an hors d’oeuvre for the main course to come.

  It’s always interesting the way other people—those outside our coven—see us in times of extremes. The cartoonist Al Hirschfeld came up while we were there and drew the caricature of the group that’s on the cover of Draw the Line. He really nailed us. We look like freakish botanical specimens pinned under glass. Draw the Line—it was the perfect title for the way we were living. I always went too far and was often reminded that I never knew where to draw the line. I hated to hear that, but that’s how it was. Say “Don’t do it,” and we would do it. ’Cause I knew that if you don’t know where to draw the line, then your choices become infinite.

  Joe had this lick he wrote on a six-string bass that was so definitive, the song just about wrote itself. It reached down my neck and grabbed the lyrics out of my throat. The way the band played that track was off the Richter scale as the energy of that song defined our very existence at that time.

  Checkmate, honey, beat you at your own damn game

  No dice, honey, I’m livin’ on an astral plane

  Feet’s on the ground, and your head’s goin’ down the drain

  Oh, heads I win, tails you lose, to the never mind

  When to draw the line

  All this and the Grateful Dead’s cooks in the kitchen! There were two or three girls crafting midnight munchies on the big old stove while growing pot in the basement. That’s all we knew about them—that they had cooked for the Dead. It wasn’t very good food . . . and it was dosed. They’d put assorted drugs in our dinners. We never knew what was coming. One time they made pot brownies and Joey got so stoned he couldn’t record that night. We started buying our own food. Man must choose his poison . . . not be surprised by it in his soup.

  Every other day Henry would take my Porsche and go to Happy Town, New York City, or Westport, pick up an ounce of blow, drive back, split it up among the gang. And when our vials got to the bottom, everybody hit on Tom, ’cause he always had some stashed in his sock. The next day, it was, “Fuck, we need more.” One of the road crew would borrow a car, go back to Let’s Make a Deal, cop the shit, and come back to the Cenacle. Ground Hog Day kind of defined our lives, minus the alarm clock and Sonny and Cher. Every now and then we’d have a guy deliver. Room service personified. I’ll have a cheeseburger and a side o’ blow, please. He’d show up, we’d play him a track to wow him, snort a Buick, and send him on his way.

  We were all on different floors to keep each of our self-indulgent secrets to ourselves, wrapped in the shroud of “I need my privacy.” In the attic of the mansion, Joe had set up a shooting gallery, but this one was with guns. Joe had a single-action .22 rifle and I had the sister pistol, a Walther PPK 380; I’d given the brother gun to Keith Richards in New York in the guest bedroom of Freddie Sessler’s apartment on Keef’s thirty-sixth birthday . . . along with a giant gratuitous four-way horse tab of methadone.

  I would hide lines under ashtrays and various places in the room so nobody would find them. Rabbit and Henry Smith, our two trusted roadies, knew that Ray would sneak into my room and vacuum the floor with his schnoz. He could snort a jockey off a horse and suck the Formica off my kitchen table. So one day, after finding that even my bed had been Hoovered, I laid a line of Ajax on the kitchen sink under a doily left behind by one of the sisters. I was downstairs recording a vocal of “Draw the Line” when he screamed loud enough to be heard all the way back in Peru. We left it on the album, it was such a shriek; we comped it and mixed it into one of the guitar player’s feedback tracks. It was E to the Z . . . EW TWEEDLE-E-DEE.

  And then there was cocaine’s nasty stepsister—BOREDOM. In my more crazed phase at the Cenacle—in the space between my mind and where rumors lived—I began to secretly tape people who were saying shit about me behind my back. Fuck looking through the peephole of your apartment and seeing the CIA, aliens, and J. Edgar H
oover in drag (HOLY SHIT, THEY’RE OUT THERE!), they were talking about me. I had bought some wireless bugging devices in Japan with transmitters that had voice-activated microphones. I’d strategically strewn them everywhere and soon was listening to them talking about how she’d screamed the night before (instead of me on “Milk Cow Blues”). The crew called them Tokyo Spiders; they would find them all over the place—they were usually pretty obvious. I thought I was paranoid thinking they were talking about me. Just imagine how paranoid I felt when I heard that story. Well, it’s a he-said-she-said kinda story, because I never planted anything! And the only time I saw Tokyo Spider, she was blowing Ping-Pong balls out of her gynie in a strip club.

  Just how shattered we got lives in the tracks of “Bright Light Fright”. . .

  Livin’ on Gucci wearing Yves St. Laurent

  Barely stay on ’cause I’m so fucking gaunt

  Best lyric Joe Perry ever wrote. It was the truth, it was clever, and it described us to a tee.

  We had a hard time making Draw the Line because of all the mountains of blow we had climbed with backpacks full of heroin and Tuinals. And when that becomes more important than the music, that’s when I should have drawn the line. I was up to four or five Tuinals a day, and David Johansen was bringing the Mexican black tar for Joe. It was all for one, one for all . . . and me for myself. Everybody was waking up at different times. We were told to get to the studio at noon, but the band wouldn’t show up till seven or eight in the evening. Sometimes I wouldn’t get there until much later. I might show up at five in the morning and want to start recording just as Joe was leaving. For the crew it was a tag team—and someone always got the graveyard shift. That’s when I did my best vocals with Jack. There was no sense to me being there for Joe’s recording hours. He never wanted to record his tracks until I was finished with my vocals anyway. And they called my shit LSD! Talk about Lead Singer Disorder? Joe, knowing it would take me weeks to write the lyrics and sing the vocals, would use that time to get lost in Elyssa.

  Me? I did my fair share of Houdini. I would disappear into my Bela Lugosi boudoir, like Boris Karloff and the bride of Frankenstein. I wouldn’t come out until an angry mob arrived with pitchforks and burning torches. I didn’t realize until ten years later that it was Brad, Tom, and Joey. Days went by without anybody recording, or even playing. I was used to writing to riffs, but now there weren’t any riffs to write to.

  With Draw the Line we were trying to do the album we started at the Cenacle and tour at the same time. It took six months to do and cost half a million dollars. We’d go to, like, AIR Studios in London and do a session and then we’d go to Germany and do a concert. The crew would drive all night to a session at some other studio and we’d show up burned to a crisp in the wee wee hours of the yawn. “Hurry up and wait,” it seemed.

  All the big worms in the Big Apple came out to help us Draw the Line . . . from Johnny Thunders to John Belushi to John Lennon. One night, looking for some rock in a hard place, Belushi and I went panning for gold after a twelve-hour session. We were so obsessed with copping that night, when the cab-driver asked Belushi, “Where ya headin’?” he answered simply (and loudly), “Cocaine!” I’d get in the cab with him and the drivers would say, “Hey, aren’t you—?” Belushi was beyond famous for being the Samurai guy on Saturday Night Live. But all we wanted to do was chop out lines with that sword.

  Me and John Belushi, 1975, at Studio 54. (Susan B. Tallarico)

  The negativity and the drama sucked the creativity out of the marrow of my bones. I was down and Jack knew it. What drugs couldn’t fix, maybe a change of scenery would. “Come stay at my house and we’ll finish the album together.” Even that was like pulling teeth—when you don’t have any. When you’re that high, inspiration can be like standing in the middle of a rainbow, writing lyrics you never thought you could write, and blaming it all on the buzz. But then the day comes when you come to realize that even rainbows get the blues.

  You wake up in a dead-end alley having committed the ultimate sin, letting the right ones out and the wrong ones in, and even with a royal flush, you can’t win.

  Going on the road with an unfinished album. Oh, it must be my fault. So now I’m on tour with people I Don’t Even Like (including myself).

  So how could someone so broken not fall so in love with David Johansen’s main doll, Cyrinda? What a beautiful name, Cyrinda Foxe, and what a fox she was. I was on the chase for four months after we met in the Village in ’76. I was wounded and beaten from the band, the drugs, and the road, and in a hopeless romantic moment, I borrowed from Humphrey Bogart . . . “Are you guys getting along? Are you two really in love? Do you think you could fall for a guy that doesn’t wear lipstick? If I told you you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?” What a grouch I was. She looked at me and blushed. “David’s a different kind of guy. Heee’s &#^^@^)@&%@$!*&, and not only that, he’s #&^#!%^& up. . . .” My “in” was that Cyrinda was really close with Elyssa and Joe. The triangulation between those three was like playing hockey in a sandbox, but once Elyssa invited Cyrinda on tour, I was on the road to Casablanca. Joe was against it, Elyssa was all for Cyrinda’s cock teasing.

  But she was a strange bird, that Cyrinda. She was a Warhol girl . . . had a part in his film Bad. She could Marilyn my Monroe one minute, and the next, Cruella my Deville. And then out of that love came the sweetest love of all, Mia. The rumor mill was cranking out bullshit in overdrive. She was on the cover of Life, and I loved her to Death. She worked for Warhol; I was an ass-hole. She was always too dramatic, and I was known as a drugged-out addict. The one thing they couldn’t write—and didn’t even think of—was what we were, and that was In Love.

  I knew that because we were both on fire was why the rumors kept burning. The “I’m going to take him for all he’s worth” type shit melted by the wayside. Cyrinda was trying to be the wisecracking, gum-chewing, Lolita-type blonde—but she wasn’t born yesterday. Sometimes a lost childhood can erode your innocence. By the time Cyrinda was twelve, she was already twenty-five. She could be bittersweet, wouldn’t let you get away with anything; sharp as a tack and ferociously to the point. So to the point, they called her “Syringa.” She told me that when she was thirteen, she’d walk along the beach in L.A. with needles stashed in her bobby socks and sell them to speed freaks.

  Where do you go from there? I know I’ve developed obsessions . . . but I’m not obsessed. But I’m not obsessed. But I’m not obsessed. But I’m not obsessed. . . . I’m not sure whether I’m obsessive-compulsive, but I’m definitely obsessive-impulsive. In courting Joan Jett while on tour with her, I would strip bare naked, put on a robe, pull the chair from near the elevator all the way over to the end of the hall, pushing it to right in front of her door. I’d then take my robe off and, sitting spread-eagled, ring the doorbell and wait for her to open it. She’d open the door and her jaw would hit the floor as I said, “I hate myself for loving you.” She gave me that look that I really wanted to see and responded in her best Mae West velvety growl, “I’m not into the big ten-inch, honey,” and slammed the door.

  But as all-consuming obsessions go, Cyrinda was my greatest. Why? you ask. ’Cause she was a good bad Catholic girl. And she laid it on heavy. God knows, I thought, I wanted it so bad, but she wouldn’t let me have it. “Don’t touch me there, God is watching.” Okay. “You can’t kiss me there, I’m still married. God is watching.” Okay. “Can I put my finger in your holy water?” Smack! I guess not. Now, you guys might not believe this, but God knows that we actually held out and waited to make love until her divorce with David was finalized. The waiting was beyond worth it . . . and actually Divine. Because that was the night Mia was conceived.

  We were still working on Draw the Line when, in August of ’77, we went on tour to Germany. It was a Mudfest run by Mama Concerts. At Bilzen Jazz Festival in Belgium, the promoter showed up in a horse-drawn caravan, and as soon as the show began he took off, like the coachma
n in a Dracula movie. The backstage catering was roast pig. If you wanted cream in your coffee, they tied a goat to your table and said, “Milk away, svinehunt.” Eighty thousand people with mud up to their knees! We had to get the fire department to pull our bus out of the bogs. To make matters worse—after we were promised the world, our road crew wound up getting a stein of beer and a cold bratwurst. One of our crew guys climbed into the promoter’s trailer and took a shit on his desk. Leaving a little something for him to remember us by. It gave new meaning to the term . . . Mudfest. Holy SOURbraten.

  To make matters bratwurst, I ran out of dope, and Joe conveniently said he didn’t have any. That’s an old story that goes deep with this band, and I know you can’t always get what you want, but you’d think . . . brother, I’m fronting your band, can’t you fucking front me some dope???

  The Lorelei Festival was one of the worst gigs I’d ever done and almost put an end to the tour. Over there, it was our first introduction to a German audience, which in this case was half American servicemen. We went on at two o’clock in the morning. It’s on the banks of the Rhine—and it was cold, dark, dank, Eastern European kinda weather. The word Lorelei comes from the German river muse whose singing lured men to destruction—and destroyed just about described my voice after singing for two hours in the freezing cold rain. I started spitting up blood and damn near passed out onstage that night. Oh how I wished I had a roadie to change my strings and a fraulein to rub my gooseneck. I lost my voice, and we had to cancel our show in Sweden and go back to London. We were going to hell in a handbasket . . . without a handbasket.