Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

by Tyler, Steven

  Wake up, baby, what you in for

  Start the day upon your knees

  What you pissin’ in the wind for

  You musta snorted too much bleez

  East House pinball wizard

  Full tilt bozo plague

  Second floor trekkie makin’ warp speed out the door

  Julio Afrokeluchie

  He the only one who stayed

  Counting up the days

  Please, no more

  Naturally, I wasn’t exactly ready to give everything up on the spot, either. While I was in there, Teresa went to get me some blow from the only dealer she knew, a place in Queens. Now, as it happened, a friend of Tim Collins’s was there at the same time getting blow for Tim. Joe heard about it, called Teresa up, and said, “I’ll break your fucking legs if you give Steven any cocaine!” Meanwhile, Joe had gotten the okay from the Vatican master, Tim Collins, to carry on, drink, do whatever he wanted.

  They figured as long as they got me sober, the band would be fine. I had to be straight in order for Aerosmith to work. Gotta get Steven straight! So it was back into East House at McLean a second time in the fall that same year. At McClean I met a therapist named Bob Hearne and for the first time I began to think about another path to enlightenment other than drugs and booze. The problem is that rock ’n’ roll is a fantasy life and part of that fantasy is being high. Like most rock stars I suffer from Terminal Adolescence. I’ll never grow up. The animated twelve-year-old thing—without that you wouldn’t get up onstage in the first place. In rock you never have to grow up because you’re so insulated, you never have to deal with anything. Everything’s done for you . . . you’re surrounded by staff and crew and managers and promoters and PR yentas. How do you rent a car, buy a plane ticket, reserve a hotel room? Oh, you’ve got to call them first?

  In rehab they have all these theories: “No, no, no, Steven, don’t paint with your right hand! Paint with your nondominant hand!” “Why? Because I don’t know how to play with my left hand?” “Yes, that way you may come up with something that you don’t know was in there!” Rrrrr-ight.

  And even if I—through prayer, abstinence, and superhuman strength of character—were able to forswear the demons of dope and alcohol—what about my mates? Of course I’d call Tim from rehab from time to time and say, “Where’s Joe? When is Joe coming here?” “Oh, Joe’s down in the islands.” Tim let Joe go to an island, where he was drinking paregoric, that baby for the gums, and he’d dip a cigarette in it, smoke it, or drink the bottle, and you can get so stoned on a bottle of paregoric. Trouble with me, the Designated Patient, was that everyone else in the band and all the people around us were still using—massive amounts—so naturally, it didn’t take.

  Tim’s theory of keeping the band straight on the road was farcical. Basically, Therapy 411 . . . He would have his secretary dial information for AA meetings in the towns where we were playing. Dial tone. Start counting . . . one chimpanzee, two chimpanzee, three chimpanzee, four chimpanzee, five chimpanzee. CUE Lily Tomlin switchboard operator: “How-may-I-direct-your-call?” “Yes, L.A., downtown Los Angeles, AA, please? Thank you, I’ll wait.” Nasal Directory Assistance Operator’s voice: “The number is . . .” I mean, that would take one minute, wouldn’t you say? Two? You dial the number for AA in L.A.: “Hello. What’s the address there? Do you have meetings? What days?” That was Tim Collins’s plan for keeping Aerosmith clean on tour.

  Tim Collins found an apartment for Teresa and me in Beacon Hill, Boston, and another one for Joey. Then we moved from that apartment to a better one in Brookline. Teresa and I started going to a methadone clinic in Kenmore Square to try and get clean ourselves. This is fall 1986. I got down to five milligrams a day at the methadone clinic, because I didn’t like the way things were going. There was too much blow and too much heroin and I knew if I didn’t do something it was going to be The End. Who knows if I’d have made it on my own, but I was on my way down. No one told me to go to the methadone clinic. Teresa and I just did it. We were going to get married, we were going to have kids; we needed to change our lives.

  One day Tim called me and said, “There’s a conference call to Japan tomorrow morning, so you gotta be over early. Be at the office no later than seven A.M.” Drag myself out of bed, get down there, and what do I see but the entire band, on time (suspicious in itself), and all looking very serious, all sitting at a round table, and presiding over the round table is High Lord Doodle Dum . . . the therapist Lou Cox. He singles me out and points his finger at me! What’d I do now? Or, let’s rephrase that: what’d I do that everyfuckingbody in this band hasn’t been doing up until this morning—and I’m not even sure about that. But they’re all looking fucking smug, because it’s Steven that’s to be burned at the stake. It’s pretty intimidating when your band members, your manager, and this self-important authority on mental health are sitting there in judgment, and I’m shaking and jonesing. Your own band the firing squad! Aerosmith & Wesson. Big-shot doctor from New York tells me this is an intervention, which turns out to mean I have to listen to all the fucking complaints about my behavior from everybody in the band and I can’t speak.

  “Steven, just listen to the guys in the band; they want to address some of the issues of your behavior. Is that okay?” Fuck no! But what am I going to say? He starts going around the room, from Joey to Brad to Tom to Joe. It was all that “when you did that . . . I felt” shit.

  “Steven,” Joe says somberly, “I felt betrayed when I was playing my guitar and you nodded out at the keyboard at rehearsal yesterday—”

  “What are you talkin’ about? You gave me the dope! We both did the same shit. We crushed up a Dilaudid and shared it—and you fell asleep right after me!”

  Therapist: “No talking, Steven.”

  Next up is Tom: “When you yelled at me last week I could tell you were doing too much blow. I got really angry with you—”

  “What—? The fucking blow came out of your sock, you fuck!”

  “Uh-uh, Steven, you can’t speak.”

  Then Joey pipes up: “I got really upset when you started throwing stuff around at sound check the other day and I suspected you were doing blow.”

  “Joey,” I said, “why would you need to speculate about that? We both did a line right before that!”

  “That’s what I mean, you’ve just become so blatant about it. Like when you did blow off my drums yesterday.”

  “What are you talkin’ about? You gave me . . . it was your blow and you laid it out for me!”

  “Steven, please! Let them talk.”

  Jesus, I’ve unknowingly slipped into Ratology 101! The study of “Why-is-the-rat-behaving-like-that?” First you shoot the rat up with adrenaline . . . then it runs into a wall and breaks its neck. Conclusion: that rat’s behavior was clearly deviant—we must do something about this!

  The big-shot psychiatrist is getting theoretical! He’s got a thesis! He’s the authority (us lowly drug addicts know nothing). He’s doing this whole examination of behaviors, but no one’s allowed to know why the rat behaved like that. I go, “Excuse me, professor, do you think it had anything to do with shooting that rat up with adrenaline?” “Oh, no, no, no, it couldn’t be that; don’t you understand, it’s that rat’s behaviors we’re studying here.” Revive that rat and kill him again! That was me, I was the Experimental Rat, the deviant rodent whose behavior must be modified.

  “Well, it’s a big band and we figured we’d have you go one at a time. We thought if Steven got sober, the rest of the group would also get clean.” How reasonable! How rational! But then they said, “Steven, if you don’t go away, we’re throwing you out of the band.” What?! You’re throwing me out of my band? I had to swallow that and suck it up.

  Anyway, they allowed you to make one phone call—just like the cops—so I called Teresa and she said, “Don’t let them do it.” She goes, “They can’t do that to you! What are you talkin’ about? You did methadone.
What do they want from you? I’m comin’ right over!” And just then, I thought, You know what? I get it. So off I went . . . away to the bins.

  But wait! You didn’t think I was going to slink away from this farce without a peep, did you? Let’s go into the Special Features of the Intervention Movie and listen to Steven’s commentary, shall we? I could have gone . . . “Okay, now I get to talk. Well, fuck you, fuck your therapist, I’m leaving. Find another lead singer, and by the way, before I leave I’d like to ask this High Doodle Dum therapist of yours a few questions: ‘Let me ask you, Dr. Cox, where’d you stay last night? You slept over at Tim’s house? You stayed the night before this meeting at the manager’s house?’ ” When I tell this to professional therapists they go, “What? That therapist stayed with the manager? Enmeshment! Wrong! Could have lost his license for that.” Ha-ha! Bye! Ding-ding-ding-ding.

  There’s your movie! Ooh, it would have gone a little differently. But I didn’t. I didn’t know how to say that back then. And, folks, that’s why I’m angry today! What would Spock have done here? How would Spock have dealt with this? Or any respectable drug counselor, like, say, Dr. Steve Chatoff? Oh, you know what he’d have said: “Excuse me, Joe, so you’re telling him you’re angry at him for falling asleep, but wasn’t it your Dilaudid?” “Well, yuh . . . but I thought you said that we were to come here and this is about Steven.” “Well, you see, I can’t really point the finger at Steven if you gave him the drugs, so hold on here . . . are all you guys still using?” And the band in one noble, rousing cry would have said, “Hey, let’s all go to a rehab. Maybe we shouldn’t all go to the same rehab, but here’s what we should do . . . we should all get clean.” Now, that could have happened and, by the way, would have worked. A good, strong mental health worker—who saw my point of view—would have insisted on that.

  Well, I came back from rehab and I said, “You know what, you guys? Therapists at the rehab said I’m gonna use if I’m around you, so you guys, if you don’t get sober, I’m leavin’ and I’m gonna start another band and use the name.” I’d gone away to rehab, but none of the rest of the band did at that time. Brad never went. Joey never went. Tom never went. Joe carried on as usual. Tim Collins was afraid to come down too hard on Joe, and besides, he’d been in bed with Joe from Day One, because Joe and his girlfriends know how to makey-makey with the manager-manager. Tim Collins, because he’d become tight with Joe while Joe was broken up from Aerosmith, let him stay at his apartment, and Joe proceeded to empty his entire bar. Eventually Joe did go into rehab at Bournwood Hospital in Brookline, Massachusetts, after his son Tony was born in October of ’86.

  Another notable fucked-up onstage incident happened in Springfield, Illinois, on the Back in the Saddle Tour in the late summer of 1986 when partway through the show I just stopped singing and then sat on the edge of the stage and tried to tell jokes to the audience for about an hour until the show got canceled. It was the end of the line. Again.

  I went into detox at Chit Chat in Wernersville, Pennsylvania—a fabulous rehab—in the fall of 1986. No mood-altering drugs to come down, they give you Clonidine. Cloni-fucking-dine lowers your blood pressure. You don’t want to move; you’re so lethargic that you’re never going to stroke out, which is a major concern with people coming off drugs. Benzos—Valium, Xanax, etc.—are the absolute worst to come off. I never even told anybody I was on benzos. I thought it was the heroin I was doing before I went in there. I’d got myself down to five milligrams at the methadone clinic in Boston, but I was still doing the benzos, massive amounts, snorting them, filling a Coke bottle full. I didn’t tell them what I’d been doing and I was tweaking out, but with the Clonidine I was chilled. They give you a patch of Clonidine. I was just mrrr-vrree-mrrr, in a hypnotic state. I couldn’t wake up, I couldn’t sleep, I had no energy, I would bang into the wall just trying to walk through a doorway. They also gave me Seroquel and Neurontin, which are nonnarcotic antipsychotic meds for people that are coming off drugs. I put a blanket on me and cocooned. There still was the Steven Tyler factor in there, but I didn’t care if the other patients stared at me. Fuck you! Fuck off!

  Coming out of that din with an absence of feelings and emotion, your periphery opens up more and more. They said, “No food in your room.” But of course I’ve got to break every rule. I brought an apple, a pear, a banana, and a peach and I put them by the side of my bed. Your smeller goes away when you’re doing hard drugs. The deeper, innermost things abandon you. How can you smell when you’ve got a snout full of drugs? When I noticed my sense of smell coming back, the musty, sweet aroma of the apple and the pear and the peach and the banana, it made me cry.

  While you’re going through detox, you’ve got to believe in something other than a pill craving and fuck me and fuck you and I’ve got to have it. You can knock the idea of some Higher Power, but you’ve got to believe in something or you’re just going to sink back into the muck. You’ve got to try and see things from a different place. I’m now thirty light years away from that person I was then, yet twelve years later I still had to get tweaked again.

  Drug addiction, therapy, relapse . . . going through the hell of detox. “God, please take this pain away, I’ll do fucking anything, God, please, no more!” I was in rehab with all the shit that entails, the great epiphanous moments. We’re back in the superior vena cava, heading to the heart. We’re heading to the ocean!

  Then one day in the hallway I saw this poster. It told the story of a man’s going through a nightmare journey and his epiphany at the end of it. I so identified with this story. I put myself in the guy’s shoes. He’s up on a mountaintop in a blizzard, snow and hell. He keeps on walking, pushing on grimly. He thinks he’s going to die and cries out to God to save him. Somehow he gets down from the mountain and finds himself at the beach. It’s warm and sunny, he’s walking along, thanking God for saving him, but when he looks down he sees there’s only one set of footsteps. He goes, “God, why have you forsaken me?” All of a sudden God appears and tells him, “I didn’t abandon you, those are my footprints. I’m carrying you!”

  When I read that I went to my room and fucking cried. We all need something to carry us: your mother carries you, falling in love, then rock ’n’ roll. Drugs did it for me for almost twenty years, got me the fucking candy store, didn’t it? My wives did it for me . . . so did my band.

  Enough about God (for the moment)—let’s talk about another religion we don’t understand . . . Aerosmithism! Everybody cleaned up—for a couple of years, maybe three. Then certain people in the band started using again, but it wasn’t to the extent of the excesses of the past—it was often so low-key I didn’t even know they were doing it. All I know is I got twelve years out of it.

  And then in 1987 we made Permanent Vacation, the best album we’d made in ten years—and the first one we ever did sober. It had “Rag Doll,” “Angel,” “Magic Touch,” and “Dude (Looks Like a Lady).” We knew we were back, opening it up with my “Heart’s Done Time”—my Trow-Rico Indian war cry and wailing inner-city sirens on top of two real killer whales, Highach and Finna singing, recorded at the Vancouver Aquarium. Oh, yeaaah!

  We were working on Permanent Vacation and I was talking to Toby Francis, our soundman at the time, about a sampler. You hit the button, and whatever goes into it gets sampled for a few seconds, then you can truncate it, manipulate it, and do whatever you want to it. Joe and I were all for it and decided to buy one. The next day Toby brought one in and tried to show us how to use it. I hit the “record” button, and Oh, my god, it’s recording! I blew a raspberry, Blllllllt-. Stopped and saved. I played the drums, it grabbed the snare, went into my keyboard . . . played a few notes, and it grabbed that, too.

  Joe started riffing on his guitar and I grabbed another bit with the sampler by mistake. I hit “play” and it went “she-mah-mat,” and that was perfectly in time. I said, “Save that. That’s a great fuckin’ noise!” God is in the details.

  I told Tobby to save
the piece and make sure it didn’t get lost, maybe we could put it on the album somewhere. He did, we did, and the rest is history. For better or worse it sounds like “banana,” that little fun thing in the beginning of “Dude Looks Like a Lady.” I had Bruce Fairbairn assigned it hard left and right and glue it into the font of the song. It was super stereo ear candy and so beautiful when the band comes in full tilt.

  I began carving out lyrics, “cruise,” “rused,” “floozed,” to fill in the blanks. I had a phrase. It started out as “cruising for the ladies.” Yeah right, as if . . . I could never sing that in a song. I could take any scat, “here’s looking up your old address” and make it fit. Of course it works best if there’s something to hang my fuckin’ hat on, like a Joe Perry riff, some kind of a hook. I tried a few things and then, a moment went by . . . I was sitting there with Joe and I came out with, “Dude looks like a lady.” Once I tapped into the insanity, the song wrote itself.

  That was the remembrance of the time the word dude first penetrated my brain. That dudeness came from the first time I heard that word used repetitatively, percussively. “Yo, dude, yeah, dude, yeah, dude!” I was friends with MÖtley Crüe. We were all staying at the Trump International in NYC and they wanted to go down to a club. I went, “Yeah, come on, let’s go!” We piled in the limo, and we had a blast. It was 1991, the year of the Dude. The “dude” thing was just starting to take off in NYC, like a virus. It was “Dude! He-ey, dude. Duuuude.” “Dude, man, you are the fuckin’ shit!” “Dude, man, dude, I gotta tell you, dude, your clothes.” “I don’t have words for you, dude!” Everything was “dude” and I thought that is the funniest, motherfuckin’ thing! I couldn’t, you know, believe it. In my era, it was “cool” and “boss” and “groovy” and “let’s get down” and “let’s get it on.” “Dude” was really juvenile but very let’s drop in the half pipe and radical. I mean my mother at the age of sixteen wouldn’t have used such a jive expression.