Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

by Tyler, Steven

  Richie also wrote “Lightning Strikes,” our first MTV video. Then later on there was “Amazing” and “Pink.” He was my ally when shit would jump off in the band and I was fighting with Joe Perry. I always had Richie to collaborate with. After the band broke up in July ’78, he came up to Sunapee that fall and helped me with lyrics. He was also my sounding board and played some guitar tracks on the album.

  Richie Supa had been in the Rich Kids. He came out with me on my first tour without Joe, along with Joey, Tom, and Brad—just before Jimmy Crespo came in. Richie played guitar and keyboards because he knew the material so well. Given all the drugs on the road, it was incredibly insane.

  “No Surprize,” the opening track on Night in the Ruts, was a miniautobiography of the band inspired by the night we were signed by Columbia that I rambled on about earlier. A brief encore . . .

  Nineteen seventy-one

  We all heard the starter’s gun

  New York is such a pity but at Max’s Kansas City we won

  We all shot the shit at the bar

  With Johnny O’Toole and his scar

  And rolling on into Aerosmith’s spectacular autodestruction . . . our headlong highway to hell (cheers, Angus!). . .

  Midnight lady

  Situation fetal

  Vaccinate your ass with your phonograph needle . . .

  Ridin’ on the wheels of hell

  Smokin’ up our axle grease

  and concluding with a wish for the acid rain to stop . . .

  Rock and roll

  Junkie whore

  Got my foot inside the door

  Knock knock, knock knock, knock

  Nobody’s keepin’ score

  Bad times go away

  Come again some other day

  Side two—remember when albums had two sides?—had some great songs on it: “Three Mile Smile,” “Reefer-Headed Woman,” and “Bone to Bone.” The last track, “Mia,” I wrote about my daughter, because I missed her and I was missing in action most of the time.

  Rock-a-bye sweet lady gypsy blue

  Ooh, the nightingale’s singin’ her song in the rain

  Hush-a-bye sweet lady soft and new

  Ooh don’t you cry, the wind she’s a-screamin’ your name

  There was a little room onstage behind the amps, behind the curtains, off limits to crew, where no one except the band was allowed. That was where drugs were laid out on the table so that we could step behind the curtain during the show and get a snort of cocaine or heroin . . . whatever flavor of ice cream we wanted.

  We’d run out of blow a lot and we’d be writhing! What a great fucking word, w-r-i-t-h-i-n-g. A snakelike word, sounds like what it is. Like the word sheath. Sheath your weapon! Ooh, it’s sexy! Sheeeaaaaaa-th! It’s a delicious word, it’s like eating a grape and eating a cherry, a nice hard one, just ripe, and making sure you bite down just enough to break through the skin, but not to hurt your teeth on the pit inside.

  Drugs were just part of being in rock ’n’ roll then. Nobody knew the downside of years and years of cocaine abuse and we could care less. It was the thing to do. Everybody laying it out for you, even the cops.

  Oh the backstage is rockin’ and we’re coppin’ from the local police

  That’s right the local police

  Or the justice of peace

  Promoters would have it backstage. There would be a deli platter and a mound of coke. So even if you didn’t want to get high that night, even if your nose was falling off because it was raw and bloody from all the snorting, you ran into it at the next gig. Boo-hoo! That was just the climate. I never flew without having some blow on me.

  By the end of the seventies, some nights I was so out of it our road manager, Joe Baptista, would have to carry me onstage. The promoter would be sitting there in the dressing room with a look of horror on his face. I’m almost comatose, he’s hyperventilating. He thinks he’s presenting the legendary cash cow Aerosmith, and now he’s going to lose his shirt because the lead singer’s down for the count. Is he dead or alive? What am I going to do? “You’d better get him on that stage. I don’t know how he’s going to do this show, but we’ve got too many kids out there.”

  Not to worry. The minute my feet hit the stage, I’m off and running. I don’t know how it happens, but hey, you get up there in front of twenty thousand people and it’s a high in itself, it’s a charged space.

  Still, the train kept a-rollin’ and we kept getting high until one night in late ’78, I don’t know where we were, maybe in Springfield, Illinois, I blacked out in the middle of “Reefer Headed Woman.”

  I got a reefer headed woman

  She fell right down from the sky

  Well, I gots to drink me two fifths of whiskey

  Just to get half as high

  When the—

  and then I hit the stage like a fish out of water.

  I rarely went that far, but the few times I did, it was due to a little matter of not having the right combination of rocket fuel and booze. You drink something and you go onstage on an empty stomach and because you’re jumping around and sweating and the lights are hot, you get fucked-up fast. When you’re sitting there, it usually takes twelve, fifteen minutes for a skin pop in your ass to get in your system. But a runner doing a marathon, because he’s inhaling and exhaling so hard, ah-huh-uh-huh-uh-huh-uh-huh, and his blood pressure’s rising rapidly, he’ll get off probably in three minutes flat after you stick a needle in his ass because his metabolism is racing.

  What happened is this. . . . I was up in Portland, Maine, got drunk. This was around Christmas 1980 and I was waiting for Bebe to come. She was living up there and it was very emotional seeing her again. She’d gotten pregnant in Germany and we’d somehow broken up after the tour. I guess I was in denial about it being my child, and she’d had just about enough of me and decided Todd Rundgren would be a better father. Bebe showed me pictures of baby Liv and we both cried before I went on. And, like all nights, I would order two double Beefeater martinis. I would down them in five, and chew up the olive really quick as I could, swallow it and not throw up. That is kind of where I was at in January 1980. I would drink two of those and if I had enough blow, I’d be good onstage, but on this particular night I didn’t have any blow. Happened twice in my career that I was so soused and so dizzy that I became a fall-down drunk. Well, rather than fall down drunk in front of the audience and act like a pathetic idiot for an hour while they throw apples at me, I said, “Fuck this! Please, let’s fold the show, man, and get me offstage!” But I knew they’d never stop the show just because I was drunk, so I lay down and didn’t move, as if I’d fainted. And to make it look convincing I twitched my foot spastically so they’d look at the twitch and go, “Look, he’s twitching! Holy shit! He’s having a seizure!”

  I really did it good, and Joe Baptista dragged me offstage. Now, on my children’s life, this is the truth of what happened. The band all said, “He fainted and we took him offstage.” The official account. But don’t mind me just because it happened to me. I recovered in the dressing room, slept it off at Tom Hamilton’s house, and the tour got postponed for a week.

  After Joe left he formed the Joe Perry Project. Brad played with us for a while, then he, too, took off in ’82 to form Bradford St. Holmes with Derek St. Holmes, Ted Nugent’s ex-vocalist. Fuckin’ great! If you were to ask Brad, he’d probably tell you he had to leave, he couldn’t take it. He’ll tell you he had to wheel me out and prop me up and hope something would happen.

  I replaced Joe with Jimmy Crespo because he looked just like Joe, and played really good, too. Nice long hair, skinny fucking guy, I thought, hey, bingo! What do I need fucking Joe Perry for? But then, think again.

  The other Aerosmith in the 1980s: Tom Hamilton, Barry Gibb Kramer, me, Rick Dufay, and Jimmy Crespo. (Aerosmith)

  Our producer, Jack Douglas, found Rick Dufay to fill in Brad’s spot. Rick was a big tall guy, long hair, great ch
aracter but a little out of his mind. I asked him, “How did you get in the business? What did you do?” and he said, “Well, once I got out of the loony bin. . . .” Turns out the windows had that metal lattice over it, so he took his shirt and kept sticking it in the keyhole of the lock on the window and turning it and it finally just opened the window and he jumped three stories down, broke both his legs. That kind of stuff.

  He’d walk into the Leber-Krebs office and say, “Come on, hit me real hard!” He’d lie down on the floor and say, “Come on, give me a boot right in the face!” And I’d say, “Get outta here, Rick! What the fuck are you doing?” He would want you to beat him up. Jack Douglas would smack him. Rick used to wrestle with me, and one day he knocked me down and to this day my elbow is still puffed up. He knocked me down and I landed on the floor of my apartment and I said, “Fuck, get the fuck out of here!” And that was it. Within a year or so he was gone.

  I was stoned for about a year after that and not doing too much, just being a stoned, out-of-it guy, living in New York in my drugalogue. I got deeper and deeper into drugs, and conveniently Richie Supa had amazing drug connections—always useful. We had the same taste in drugs and women. I got blow from Richie for ten years, and my heroin. I’d go to Richie’s house and he would sell me a T—a tenth of a gram of heroin, a chunk, a rock—and it was so strong I could chop it in half and put it in a needle, it would just dissolve, and shoot it in my ass and then lick the spoon and I was gooood, man, for four, five, six hours. I’d be strung out and shaking at four or five in the morning so many times. I’d call him and say, “Hey, man, I’m really sick.” I’d get in a cab—I had no money, so I’d just jump out of the cab and run, run into the entrance of his building, with the cabby yelling, “Hey, come back here!” I’d knock on his door and he’d always have something for me. He was so fucking great, Richie. He always had the good stuff.

  Richie had girls, drugs, and a recording studio—everything I wanted in one place—so I would go to his apartment on First Avenue and Eightieth Street, hide from the world, and just get crazy. I’d go there, buy a hundred dollars worth of cocaine, and then snort five thousand dollars of it while I was at his house. We would stay up for days on end. Like many drug addicts, our dopey motto was “BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY.”

  We were so blatant with drugs in this period. We thought we were invisible, but all the time there were those beady little eyes watching. Richie got a phone call one night that somebody in the band was about to get busted. “You need to clean your apartment,” the voice said and hung up. I don’t remember quite how the scenario went down, but we found out that this was coming from somewhere up in Boston. Still, it’s not good politics to bust rock ’n’ roll stars. It wasn’t the thing to do. I mean, look at Keith Richards up in Montreal with pounds of heroin in a bath salts jar. I’ve been frisked years back where they actually put their hands on the package and let it go by, like, “Oh, well, no, that’s not it.”

  Richie and I were at the Coconut Grove Hotel in Florida one time. I was dope sick but I knew Richie had some stuff for me. He’d hidden the heroin in his underwear under his balls. I was jonesing, I was sick, and I got to the hotel. I banged on his door. Thank god, he’s there, I said to myself. “Richie, open the fuck up, I’m desperate.” He goes, “Wait a sec I gotta take a leak.” He went to take a piss, but he was so stoned that the thing fell in the toilet and as he flushed he saw the package go down the drain. And then we had to spend half the night going out to cop. But he knew people, so by four o’clock in the morning I got straight.

  If there was no freebase left I’d smoke just about anything—kitty litter, cottage cheese. Richie nicknamed me “Spider” because I would crawl on the floor looking for a piece of freebase that I thought I’d dropped but probably already smoked. I was always looking for things that weren’t there.

  And then the very drugs that made me ecstatic and godlike started to turn on me. I began looking for things—things that weren’t lost and people who weren’t there. Things invisible to the naked eyeball, but that you know are there. Looking, looking, looking . . . Searching under the bed, examining under the door, looking out the windows—investigating. I was convinced I was under surveillance, believed I was being watched. By whom? By the IBI, of course, the Imaginary Bureau of Investigation, my relentless paranoia-induced pursuers.

  And the IBI was not all that I hallucinated. One time we were up two or three days in a row and Richie found me standing in the doorway with a mop and a pail.

  “Where are you going?” he asked me.

  “To wash my car,” I said.

  “Give me the mop. Give me the pail.”

  “Oh, no, no, no! I gotta go clean my car.”

  “Steven, get real, we’re on the fifteenth floor of an apartment building in Manhattan.” I didn’t know where I was. Or care.

  I was stoned out of my mind on drugs almost all the time. I moved out of my house in Sunapee and into Jack Douglas’s apartment in New York in the winter of 1982. Then I got an apartment in New York and started to work on the next album, Rock in a Hard Place, with Jimmy Crespo, Rick Dufay, Tom, and Joey. Our cocaine was written into the budget—as twenty-four-track reels of tape. Even if you were out on a yacht or an island somewhere recording on a mobile unit they’d fly drugs out to you in seaplanes.

  I wrote the songs on Rock in a Hard Place with Rick Dufay and Jimmy Crespo. Two of these songs—“Prelude to Joanie” and“Joanie’s Butterfly”—are about a hallucinatory horse with wings and feathers. I bought some opium from a dealer named Reinhart, a tongue of opium, black and thick, about three inches long, half an inch wide, and half an inch thick. I didn’t smoke it; I’d roll it into balls and swallow it. I’d eat it and it was like, fuck! The best high on the planet is opium. I remember being so high one night, one of those nights when you can’t sleep, you’re in this wakeless, sleepless place, and a story came over me. I was in a barn, in a stall, there was a lot of hay, and this horse gave birth—with the waters of life pouring out of her. It was a beautiful white horse, and its baby was this kick-ass rocking horse—that’s what I called it—it had wings and feathers. I couldn’t figure it out. How would a horse have feathers? But that was the fantasy. I wrote two songs around this opium vision. “Prelude to Joanie” told the story . . .

  At first we three thought

  ’Twas the biblical cord of life

  Then noticing ’twas connected

  To his head

  How strange

  Not to be believed

  I reached out to feel

  And the pony’s eyes they opened

  The cord got hard

  The head looked around

  And you know who pushed and gushed

  The waters of life

  First two hooved feet

  Then the shine of his fur

  But at first to my eyes only

  Feather—feather—wings

  The second song was “Joanie’s Butterfly,” which I named for a vibrator in the shape of a butterfly. Women strap it on and it stays right here and it goes, ZzzzzzzzzZZZZZZzzzzz! But for whatever reason, that’s what I called the song and took the dream poem into a hallucinated journey . . .

  What a stormy night, when I met the pony

  It was so dark that I could hardly see

  It smelled so sweet, you know who and Joanie

  So many butterflies, one could not see . . .

  We all could feel desire, took off in flight

  It was hotter than fire, then came the light

  I smell the heat, the dancing pony

  Unwrapped his wings, to dry off Joanie

  The pony he grew in size, the thunder and rain

  And finally realized what it was, what it does, and what it come to say

  We put some freaky effects on Rock in a Hard Place. I used a vocoder—essentially a frequency phaser or oscillator that had been used by Pink Floyd and Wendy Carlos. I was talking to one of
the recording engineers and he said, “I can create this interesting audio hallucination if you’re interested.” “Oh, yeah?” I said. “Let’s do it.” He explained that it was a bizarre effect you can create using two stereo speakers in which a third sound appears to be coming from behind you. And I thought, Wow, that is so cool. So on “Prelude to Joanie” I hit an African drum with my elbow and it made this oooouuum! sound. You can hear it on the song really loud if you put your speakers in two corners of the room facing you. Suddenly you’ll hear a sound that appears to be coming from somewhere behind your head. People listening to the track would get up from the record in the middle of the song when they heard the drum beat and go to the door behind them to see who’d knocked. We could really fuck with people with this device. I got sold on it and bought it, but little did I know that it doesn’t work unless there’s music playing as well; that’s what throws the knock out of phase.

  Brimstone, my heroin dealer, also had the best coke and weed. One day he brought over this girl he was dating—Lisa Barrick. She was gorgeous but so obviously not interested in me it kind of pissed me off, so I asked her, “Are there any more like you at home?” “Well, yeah,” she said, “I have an identical twin sister.” “Awright!” Her sister, Teresa, worked at a restaurant that served exotic dishes, like buffalo burgers. I had a hippopotamus steak the night I went there. We talked, and I told her how odd it was that I would ask Lisa this corny question and how it turned out she really did have an exact copy of herself at home. I was in love. We were making out in hallways and behind closed doors. I was still married to Cyrinda when I first met Teresa in 1978, but things between Cyrinda and me had already gotten worse and worse. The fights were horrendous.

  Cyrinda could provoke me to violent reactions more than anybody I’ve ever known—with the possible exception of Joe Perry. Cyrinda wasn’t gay, but she’d adopted the grandiose gestures of a queen. “Uhnk! Oh, what are you FUCKIN’ tawkin’ abawt?! Oh, Jesus Cher-ist! You stupid fuck! Jesus! Get him the fuck outta heah! Oh, what a cunt! Oh, Jay-sus!” That kind of high-camp verbosity. Huh-hoo-ahhh! Cyrinda’s vicious put-downs were like getting slugged. I couldn’t take it after a while, because when I’m sober I get quiet. I think I’m such a fuckin’ bore.