Somewhere there’s a picture of a firecracker going off at the exact moment it hit the stage. A fan mailed the photo in. The flash was going off right between Joe and me at the exact second the M-80 blew up. It was as we were just coming back onto the stage for the encore. I got a singed cornea from that one and Joe cut his hand. The wound on Joe’s hand was the shape of a smile, so Joe drew a face on his hand and he would wiggle it and make it talk. There was the smashed glass bottle at the Spectrum in 1978, which stopped the show. Fans get excited, they get demented. They don’t believe we’re entirely human and do this stuff to find out if we bleed the same way they would. One time we found a shuriken—a fucking ninja throwing star—on the stage.
These are war stories. When you’re on tour, short of loss of life and limb—or actual death—you have no time to get sick like a normal person. There are no days off. You’re working yourself to death. The only thing that got us through was the cocaine.
For the whole of the seventies we were all nicely fucked-up and deep-fried. There’s a photo of me somewhere snorting a huge rail of blow off a picture of myself in a Japanese magazine. What a great way to get high; I snorted my own face.
Blow was our rocket fuel. In the end it takes you down, but it’s probably one of the reasons we got as far as we did. We never stopped. We would just blaze through it and fall apart when we got home. You’re going home, you hit the ground, your mind tells your body what to do. It knows it’s off duty and then chooses to get sick. Bands just don’t get sick on the road in general—you’re not allowed to.
After a while our off-tour lives became “At Home with the Draculas.” We were zombied out on Tuinals and smack. Kelly used to send the security guards to wake us up, one to Joe’s house, one to mine. Knock on our doors and if we didn’t answer break them down. If we’d been up all night or up all week, okay, go in. If there’s no clean clothes, scoop up all the ones on the floor, throw them into a bag, throw us over their shoulders, and put us into the limos and out to the airport . . . that’s how we used to get Joe and me on the road in the bad old days.
Kelly’d be out there at the airport waiting. “Oh, shit! Where are they now? I don’t see them on the horizon!” One time when Henry was trying to delay the flight, he told the rest of the crew, “Look, do whatever you’ve got to do . . . start a fight, tell them there’s a bomb on the plane, anything you’ve got to do, because the band’s not here yet and this is the last flight leaving today” for wherever we were going.
All the ticket agent heard was the word bomb and he alerted the authorities. We all get on the plane and the door closes. Henry had an ounce of blow on him. It was Allegheny Airlines—they used to have tables on their planes, and we were just about to move up to the front and do the blow on the table. We would snort blow right in front of people back then because no one knew what it was yet. But just then the plane door opens again and airport security, FBI, CIA, everybody else with a badge in the world comes on the plane with this ticket agent and hauls Henry off the plane. Henry also happened to have a suitcase with an ounce of pot in it. Kelly claimed it was his and they never searched it.
They took Henry into custody. The day he went to court we had the band’s lawyer, Norman Jacobs, there to represent him. Henry shows up in court early in the morning. The judge looks down at the docket, he’s going down the list of cases, and when he comes to Henry’s he goes, “Case is dismissed.” Turns out the cop who was in charge of the case got shot the night before. He was murdered by a Harvard football player. For a while Henry looked like a desperado who’d had this cop knocked off so he wouldn’t go to jail.
By 1978 we’d gone from being nobodies to being a multiplatinum band with four albums in the space of three years. We’d played to as many as half a million people at one time. And we had addictions to match. In the early days we were seen as cash cows—we were worked to death. We did three shows a week, and we were kept going on blow. Do you know what a treadmill is? Well, we spent the whole of the 1970s on one. It was tour—album—tour—album—tour—album. No breaks. Everybody knew what we were doing, and we were a mess. No one ever said, “You guys had better take a break.” I was having seizures and passing out on stage. At any time I could’ve had a heart attack, and people would’ve looked away and said, “Well, we didn’t know what they were doing.” Bullshit! There was so much money floating around that no one cared.
The promoters at our concerts were awash in cash; they had trunks full of money. We sold tickets like crazy. As a present, our accountants framed all the tickets we sold. We must have grossed at least 140 mil, but the members of the band ended up walking away with no more than 3 mil each. I have no hard feelings, but may they roll over in their graves a billion million years from now! That’s all I have to say. I look back and I think, “God, man, all we were doing was writing songs, making records, touring.” I have a pirate’s chest of horror stories of things they’ve done to my brethren and my band. Unconscionable shit! I look back at that and, in front of Jesus Christ above at Heaven’s Gate, I say, “Thank you and fuck you!”
All our tours had official names—and our names for them. The Aerosmith Express Tour became the WTB Tour—for Where’s the Blow? But as things got worse the crew began giving dire names to the tours: the Grab Your Ankles tour, the Lick the Boots That Kick You tour. Kelly made up a T-shirt with “Why Can’t I Fart Anymore?” on it—meaning we’d all been royally fucked in the ass.
By the time we got to late ’78 we were all a little burned. And things started to go awry. We were so fried, we could hear our synapses crackling when we went to sleep. The band fell apart when the crew fell apart. The crew fell apart first and then the band began to unravel. The core rock road dogs began slobbering and howling at the moon. The crew had everything to do with keeping us together. Everyone knew everyone’s personalities and how we functioned in our own quirky, dysfunctional way. The sky darkened and we prayed for rain but no rain came—it just all worsened. We were a complex mix of utterly unreasonable people, and the momentum revolved around Kelly, who had left after Cal Jam. That’s when I began to wonder, Why does my house have wheels and my car doesn’t? Aerosmith’s core group—Kelly, Rabbit, Henry, Night Bob—kept the band rolling during those crazy times. Rabbit left in ’78 and Henry left in 1980.
The roadies started leaving Aerosmith’s interstellar probe like rats leaving a sinking ship. Henry Smith said he had to leave the band to keep being friends. Night Bob left to keep his sanity. It was better to step away and remain friends than to stay and work in that infernal mix. It ended up being the better choice, because otherwise I think some of them would have been dead by now.
But we never canceled dates. I’d be in the dressing room freaking out, throwing shit around, and Kelly—designated point guy—would be asking, “What the hell is going on now, you fuck?” I’d be screaming at him, “I want to charter a helicopter right now! Call David.” David Krebs would be at home making his 15 or 20 percent asleep in his penthouse. He didn’t have a clue what was going on while we were banging our heads against the wall, losing our minds. Everybody needed time off. But it never occurred to me to cancel. I was Captain Ahab in a mad quest for the Great White Quark. So the gears just kept grinding on.
It just got worse and worse. Too much money. If you want to control people and you know they’re weak, you give them money! Trust me when I tell you that. Then drugs took everybody down. It was real bad. Nick the roadie died of cirrhosis, another crew guy hung himself, our dealers were being garroted, stabbed, and given hot shots. I was the crazed lead singer . . . too high for my own good. There were car accidents every day. I broke a Porsche in half up in New Hampshire. Drug demons got inside everything and wrecked everything. Drugs even speeded up the band’s rhythm.
And then one night . . .
Between Joe and me there had always been a certain amount of friction due to the biological fact that we’re such different personalities. But whatever stories you’ve
read or Joe and everyone else has told—the eighty-thousand-dollar room service bill, the spilt milk, the solo album—the truth of the matter is that after nine years of playing, writing, and recording together I still couldn’t get through to Joe. He was in his bubble and I couldn’t reach him. He was insulated—by heroin, by Elyssa, by his own fucked-up lack of self-confidence, his inability to see that the band was bigger than his girlfriend, more important than his problems, his drugs. He has a great front, Joe . . . he seems so cool—but then don’t we all. He needed his woman, Elyssa, who was cool and gorgeous and poisonous.
Elyssa was very caught up in that whole fashion thing, a model wannabe kind of girl, coming back from England with beavers and the black nail polish and all that kind of stuff. Joe was into role-playing as well, and they fed off of each other, they were always into each other’s games.
She was so into herself and was easy to provoke. Once we were flying from New York to L.A., we’re all sitting in first class, and there’s a guy behind us. He leans over, taps Elyssa on the shoulder, and goes, “Are you what they call a ‘groupie’?” She took a glass of wine and threw it on this guy, and that was before the plane even took off.
The coup de grâce came when I began to confront Joe about the wall he’d built around himself. I’d had enough: “Joe, do you know who you are?” “Yuh,” he mumbled. “There’s a hundred girls tonight that would have sucked your cock until a million o’clock! Are you kidding?” I said. “Well, Elyssa loves me,” he mumbled back. “Okay, okay, okay, and no one else does?” “But Elyssa I can trust.” “Wow. All right. Okay. And that’s it? That’s the end of the story?” Joe didn’t know his own self-worth. He didn’t get how strong a personality he was onstage, a character right out of rock mythology—the electric god who wants his guitar to sound like a dinosaur eating cars. How great is that? And together we were the Terrible, Toxic Twins. But he could never see that—so in the end he left with her.
The straw that broke the camel’s back came on July 28, 1979, at the World Series of Rock at the Cleveland Stadium. We were the headliners on a bill with Ted Nugent, Journey, Thin Lizzy, and AC/DC. Backstage in the trailer Elyssa and Terri Hamilton got into a flaming fight. Elyssa took a glass of milk and chucked it all over Terri. I wasn’t there. I heard about it after the show. “What’s going on?” I said. Then I got into a fight with Joe.
Joe and I weren’t there when the Big Bang occurred . . . we didn’t physically see it. We came offstage into this Winnebago parked in the back of this hall. I walked in, panting and dripping, soaking wet, and Elyssa and Terri were screaming at each other. “Get the fuck out of here,” I yelled. “Can’t you see we’re working in here?” That’s when I found out that Elyssa had thrown milk at Terri and Terri just wouldn’t have it. Elyssa would take no shit from anybody and got off on being that way. And neither would Terri. Tom was spewing.
Joe walked in and started stickin’ up for Elyssa, but when I saw Terri’s clothes all soaked, I got into it with Joe. “Man, can’t you come over here and control your woman?” Why does it always have to be like this? Worse than me, and I’m the KING of that. Always startin’ fights and bullshitting, but she did that and it’s what broke up the band that night. Joe was acting like it was Elyssa’s right to do what she did . . . and he’s saying as much while Terri’s still in the room. Didn’t care. He liked that his wife was a troublemaker; he got off knowing that Elyssa could morph into a flaming bitch at the drop of a Mad Hat.
I was so drunk (as I was every night after a show), but I remember clearly being on the steps of the trailer, walking down and yelling at Joe, “You’re fucking fired!” I don’t even know where that Chairman of the Board voice came from. Never spouted off like I was the leader of this band! We were a gang, a unit. But I was just so angry! That was the only way I knew how to get Elyssa to stop it. “You’re fucking fired, Joe!” You can get into a crazy head space where all you want to say is “Fuck you!” I could have just said, “I’m outta here,” but I didn’t; instead I said, “You’re fired!” Those were the words! I’ve never actually punched Joe, but that night I came really close.
It was a mess. So much of this is just so radically true. We completely fried ourselves. But again, unlike Sid Vicious or the Dolls and other bands that were systematically sabotaging their careers and lives, if one was to spell it out clinically—we were going down that road unconsciously, we were just getting fucked-up and, incidentally, sabotaging ourselves. Joe and I had that mulish Italian strain of stick-to-itiveness; Joe’s not actually Italian, but he’s from that island off the coast of Italy, or is it Portugal? With the exception of his guitar volume, he sure the hell doesn’t know how to be loud . . . and who the fuck knows how happy he was that night? I sure wasn’t.
And thus ended Aerosmith Mach I. It was an insane thing to do after all we’d done to make it. But I had gotten so enraged I’d now destroyed the one thing that had made Aerosmith so powerful, that fine tension that created Aerosmith’s feral howl. It didn’t matter to Joe that he and I were a team. He didn’t care that we’d been together for almost ten years! All he cared about was getting high and being with her.
I was that angry with him, so I went, “Fuck you! You’re fired. I’m gonna find a new guitar player.” And I did. Jimmy Crespo. At least he wasn’t Joe Perry . . . the cocksucker.
CHAPTER TEN
Food Poisoning at
a Family Picnic
It’s the fall of 1979—just after the Fall of Aerosmith Mach 1, the departure of Joe fucking Perry. I’m ready to time travel with my carry-on bag of goodies. Into the great unknown, baby. Yep, we’re gonna get under the hood. I’m going to tell you the way it was: unexpurgated—that means nothing censored, nothing gained!
Aeromythology was built on the glamour of self-destruction. Self-destruction was great fun—still, I wouldn’t want to do it again. Like the old joke about the Viking: “Fuck, not another night of rape and pillage, mate!” Of course, in rock ’n’ roll we don’t classify debauchery as bad behavior—that comes with the territory. Bad, shameful behavior would be turning up for shows in no fit state to play . . . and there was plenty of that, too. Don’t worry, with this band there was at least another ten years of wretched excess, drug abuse, and hell-bent self-destruction to come.
Every once in a while, I’ll hit on something useful to tell you, especially if I’m talking about a subject that I’m kind of an expert on, like roasting marshmallows. How long the stick should be and how long to leave it in the fire. See, I come from a long line of fact-based, overbearing people.
I was living with Cyrinda in that gray house up in Sunapee, had my Porsche and the Jeep. Mia was a brand-new baby. Scoring drugs had become our principal activity. Cyrinda, my friend Rick, and I would all drive down to Marshfield outside of Boston to get dope. Joe Perry had thrown me onto this dealer before he split the band. Back then in ’79, ’80, two blocks from Joe’s house lived this guy named John we got all our dope from. A three-hour drive! I now live in Marshfield, I moved there in ’88. When I go home I get off at the same exit—Exit 12—the same one I used to take when I was scoring dope. Ironic or just moronic?
Alas, I had kicked Joe out of the band in the middle of Night in the Ruts, our new album due out fall 1979, and Leber-Krebs were putting pressure on me to finish it. Joe played on “No Surprize,” “Chiquita,” “Cheesecake,” “Three Mile Smile,” and “Bone to Bone (Coney Island Whitefish Boy)”—the song I wrote about Joe. A Coney Island whitefish is a rubber. Brad Whitford, Neil Thompson, Jimmy Crespo, and Richie Supa handled guitars on the remaining tracks.
Even before we started I knew what I wanted the title to be: Night in the Ruts. I was into switching the initial letters of names and words, like Johnny Ringo into Ronny Jingo, so Night in the Ruts is code for Right in the Nuts. Back then you couldn’t have an album title like that, the censors were all over you. You’d get blipped no matter what . . . you couldn’t even sing “Goddammit!” For the cover I�
�d thought of filling a room with nuts. Twenty or thirty big burlap bags of nuts would cost you, what, eighteen dollars a bag? We’d be standing there up to our waists in nuts. And nobody could argue about the title because we were nuts. It was a takeoff on the cover of The Who Sell Out, where Roger Daltrey is sitting in a bathtub filled with beans and a surprised look on his face. I ran into Roger later on and asked him, “Were you really sitting in a tub full of beans? What was it like in there? Was it really full to the top or—?” “Nah, they, like, filled it with cloth,” he said, “and then the beans on top. I didn’t have to sit in all that.” Damn.
But in the end we shot the cover in the entrance to a coal mine. It was black with coal dust. I rolled in it for a couple of minutes. And then I went over and rubbed the coal dust on everyone’s face. It was a dark and gloomy cover, but we were in a bleak and doomy state.
Writing songs had gotten harder and harder, and now I had to write them without Joe. Joe’s riffs were the engine . . . and the engine had stalled. I had tried writing with a bunch of different people. In the spring of ’78 I flew up to Sunapee with Bobby Womack (who’d written “It’s All Over Now”) to work on songs, but nothing came of it. Just a lot of blow and blowing lines.
Sometime in the midseventies, David Krebs had introduced me to Richie Supa. He was a singer-songwriter signed to Columbia, also managed by Leber-Krebs. I was coming out of a meeting one day and he was going in and Krebs said, “You guys should hook up! Richie’s a great songwriter, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.” We started talking and one thing led to another, as it always does. Richie told me he had a studio at his house and all kinds of instruments, so naturally I had to go over and check it out. I think David gave me a copy of some of his songs, and I thought, “Yeah, this shit ain’t bad!” When I was in L.A. I dropped in on Richie’s session and sang harmony on a song called “Chip Away the Stone,” which wound up going on the Cal Jam album.
Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? Page 22