Anyway, we went to the club, they got hammered—I didn’t—and that was that. A couple of months later, the dude thing was ingrained, imprinted on my brain.
I’d be writing songs with people and they’d say, “But that doesn’t rhyme.” But there are all kinds of rhymes; there’s soft rhymes, like “share” and “Fairport Convention.” Now, that rhymes. I would also try things like “All I want is a room somewhere / in a bra and my underwear.” That works, because there’s a picture being painted: the bra and my underwear jolts.
I’d written with the band and I’d written with Richie Supa, but Richie and I were best friends. Desmond Child was another matter altogether. He was a songwriter brought in by the record label. John Kalodner, the A&R man from Geffen Records, loved the band, so he threw everybody he could at us. Desmond was from Cuba, so dapper and with a mustache—he’d been in Desmond, Child & Rouge. And so began a long and involved songwriting career with other people.
I loved writing with Desmond Child because we always got into arguments. When I first met him, I’d written all the lyrics to “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” except the first verse. I got kind of annoyed at myself for not finishing it. I could not find that first verse. I did not have an in. I said, “Hey, Desmond, I just don’t know how to get into this.” There were a couple of words here and there he threw in, but he got me into that first verse. He said, “Pull into a bar by the shore,” and I went, “Oh, god! Here we go!” I never started a song like that. And I said, “Well, now, I’ll give it a try, how about ‘Her picture graced the grime on the door.’ ” And he goes, “Oh, that’s great!” And “she was a long-lost love at first bite” rather than “sight.” And then he wanted me to sing, “I threw my money down on the stage / and, well, I didn’t care.” “Are you serious, you want me to say that ?” I didn’t want to say, “Oh, that’s too fey for me to say,” so I said, “Well, that doesn’t rhyme.”
“Dude looks like a—” why would you sing that? Do you know a transvestite? I’ve actually met quite a few. “Dude looks like a lady” means nothing OR it means SOMETHING. I go, all right, in a commercial world, it’s good, and not only is it good, but it gets under the hood of what everyone hides: the gay thing.
When Desmond started throwing things at me that I didn’t know how to use, I should’ve said, “Nah! I can’t sing that.” But it took me a couple years before I could voice my objections that strongly. Just like when I got sober, I could not go into a bar and order a soda. The bartender would ask, “You want a beer? Can I get you a drink?” I couldn’t say, “I’ll take a ginger ale!” Could not say it. Because there was so much shame behind it—why would I be ordering a ginger ale? “Gimme a Jack on the Coke.” Now that was my natural mode of bar talk—I drank a bottle of Jack with my eggs! It was the norm.
At my first AA meeting, I looked around and felt right at home. I got in touch with whatever me had been there back then. I got to meet this fantastic woman who conducted guided imageries. The sessions took about an hour. And in that place you would learn to slither like a snake or—if you couldn’t swim—project yourself swimming across a lake, or saying good night to a child that died years ago. You sit there quietly and the therapists talk to you: “Okay, imagine the sun is going down, you smell the warm summer air. Where are you right now? You’re at your back door, you’re in a chair by your back door.” There’s a whole room full of people tuned in—guided imagery. “Here comes your dog, bend down and pet your dog.” And in your mind you’re petting your dog. Some of the guided images were so beautiful, so heart-rending, people would begin crying. “Picture your mom, can you hear her calling you for dinner.” After ten minutes of doing that with your eyes closed you are in a very vulnerable state.
How sweet is that! Envision a cat that you loved so much, or get on a boat that once sank. Now you’re on the boat again, go out to your favorite fishing spot, you’re rowing. People would actually sway back and forth while envisioning the images. In their mind they were rowing. The therapist might talk to you about your first sexual experience, and you’d get an erection but the erection would be in your mind.
How would you describe purple—grape juice maybe. What does black taste like? Licorice, I guess. I’m trying to think of a color that you can’t associate with something that tastes good. Orange—oranges. Yellow banana. How would you describe what pink tastes like? Pink . . . pussy!
And that’s what I do with songs. I navigate through images.
Sometimes I feel like I’m so fucking boring in sobriety, but you’ve got to remember, when you take drugs you’re just spinning in your own head . . . so up in your own Kool-Aid, you know? Up in da Kool-Aid, mon, but you do not know de fla-vah.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Getting Lost
on Your Way to
the Middle
A day in the life on the road—Oh yeaaah! The Permanent Vacation Tour’s going to last seven months, easy . . . more likely a year. You wake up, you leave Boston, you’re going on fucking tour, baby. This is the first true (more or less) clean and sober tour, 1989–1990—and Joe and I have gone from the Toxic Twins to the Detox Twins.
Still, it’s hardly the Goody Two-Shoes Tour, so you’ve got to watch your step when temptation beckons—and trust me, it beckons. Why the need for caution? Because there’s wives and girlfriends on this tour; you fuck someone, and even if your wife isn’t on this leg of the trip, you know only too well, one of those bitches will be the first to get on her cell phone to your wife or significant other and tell all. “That Steven! He’s incorrigible! Will he never grow up?” “My dear, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but . . . what was he doing backstage to that slutty piece of jailbait? The silly boy tried to explain the bizarre pose he’d got himself into—‘She’s interviewing me for her high school newspaper.’ Yeah, right.”
If you’re on tour for a year, you’re not fantasizing about drugs and booze and hot chicks so much as you’re dreaming about falling into a comfortable bed at the end of that endless day. If you stay at the best hotels, then just scrape a million dollars off a tour because that’s what you end up paying for eight guys in the fucking Four Seasons, deal or no. The tour manager is wheeling and dealing so he can stay in there for free because he brought Aerosmith. A-heh. Oh, yeah!
We stopped staying at the Days Inn in 1977 because we’d wake up in the morning with our backs twisted, thinking about feather beds. It was the era of enough! Plus there were fucking fans next door banging on the wall, bam-bam-bam-bam-bam! “You’re the fucking BALLS! You’re the FUCKIN’ BALLS!!!” At the Four Seasons you had security, and who gives a shit if it’s a million dollars off the top.
The best tours are the ones that are propelled by hit singles, like the Pump and Permanent Vacation Tours. Pump had “Love in an Elevator” and “Janie’s Got a Gun.” Permanent Vacation had “Angel” and “Rag Doll.” So when we went out on tour I knew we were four deep in hits. I knew it, oh, I so knew it! The tour’s the surfboard, the wave is your popularity, how you’re getting played, and if you are, you’re going to go through the tunnel. It’s a wave from the backside of Hawaii twenty feet tall and you’re riding that fucker as long as you can ride it.
Pre-production for Pump, Vancouver, B.C., 1989. Writing the lyrics for “Love in an Elevator.” (Gene Kirkland for Aerosmith)
Writing “The Other Side” on the floor at Little Mountain Studios, Vancouver, B.C., 1989. (Gene Kirkland for Aerosmith)
You leave Boston with a wistful heart. “Bye! Uh, we’re going! Sniff!”
We’ll be back in Boston in four months, and that’s when the family comes to see the show and they start getting their guest list together: the doctors, the lawyers, and the candlestick makers, the fucking guy that gave me my canoe, the schoolteachers, the pharmacist, the caterer, the manicurist, the yoga teacher.
You get on the plane, the first gig’s in Dallas. You get to your room, you lay out your clothes. You’re going to stay in Dallas and do that hu
b thing, so imagine we’re in the middle of a wooden wheel with these big spokes leading to the different cities we’re going to play. We were there for a week, Four Seasons. You wake up the next morning around nine, eat a little something by ten. At eleven you go to the gym, take a shower, you’re back in the room by twelve, get your room in order and have a little lunch. By one, one thirty, there’s a lobby call.
Anything for a good shot . . . 2010. Out of the closet, but still in the drawer. (Erin Brady)
Your assistant says, “You know what? I was just downstairs, there are a bunch of people outside, so I talked to the manager, he says we can go to the second floor, we can walk down a set of stairs and go out the back way, or you can go out front. Either way, there’ll be a car waiting, whatever you choose. There’s about twelve people out front right now.” I know if I want to sign autographs, say hello, and run real quick it’ll take me about six minutes; that’s what I want. Signing autographs for twelve people, you’re talking six minutes, twenty people, ten minutes. But security has to know what I know. What if someone has a gun there? John Lennon got blown away by a psychotic fan. What if? And I walk into those situations all the time. I’ve got five bulletproof vests at home.
Two o’clock, you’re down in the lobby. You ride back to the airport. Two thirty you get on the plane, a plane you rented—that’s going to cost you another two million dollars by the end of the run, scrape that off the top. You get in that beautiful plane of yours, you claim your seat—mine’s on the right, up in front. I put my pens and papers there and scrawl my initials on the table with a Sharpie. To the left of me is a five-foot bench along the side of the plane. There’s one seat across from me where my significant other will sit. Joe is to my left, and then Joey, Brad, and Tom are back there behind me. It’s a ten-seater: five of us plus tour manager, security, the stewardess, girlfriends, etc. Stuff it all in, luggage stowed, we leave at three and head off to the first venue.The tour manager books it so we fly for an hour; sometimes it’s an hour and a half, sometimes two, but not often. Generally an hour and fifteen minutes. It’s the tour manager’s job to set a tour up around a hub. You’re flying at four hundred miles an hour. An hour and a half gets you to, say, Omaha.
You get out of the plane at four thirty. At the FBO (Flight Base Operations), you ask if there’s a bathroom. You hope that your tour manager has enough brains to have called ahead and checked this out. We don’t get in the cars and go right away—we take five to ten minutes, say hello to the cops, talk about guns, the tour manager can talk to the guy at the venue. “Do you have a shower there?” No. Okay, now you have to figure out some other way to take a shower before the show. As you’re leaving the airport, you see a motel. The tour manager says, “Hold on!” and you pull the motorcade over. You stop at the motel and say, “Look, can we get a day room?”
By five o’clock you’re in your dressing room at the venue. The place holds twenty thousand people. You’re ready for tonight. You shoot the shit and bullshit for a while. It’s six o’clock, time for your meet ’n’ greet, shaking hands with people from the radio station, fans who have won tickets by being the fifth caller or the dude looks like a lady or whatever they do to get their tickets. They’re all there in the room with you, asking you questions they already know the answers to. Backstage nepotism runs wild. Deejays and their kin. It’s the announcer, it’s the morning jock, it’s the nighttime jock, it’s the five jocks gacked on coffee in the morning, the morning-show guys, the night show, the five o’clock sideshow—they’re all there with their wives and their best friends—so it’s a room full of fifty to sixty people. You meet ’n’ greet till seven. Around seven you ask the girls that do the backstage, “What time’r we goin’ on?” “Nine fifteen!” I have to eat two hours before I go onstage, so at seven o’clock I get the cook to come in. He makes me salmon. I have salmon every night—it’s got to be wild—and steamed broccoli. I eat that at seven, I’m done by seven thirty or so.
People are still walking in and out, guys from the opening band. Shooting the shit with Kid Rock. “Where’s your girlfriend?” Pamela Anderson comes walking in, “How goes it?” I said. I remember the first time I saw her at the MTV Europe Music Awards at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. She was going out with that guy in Poison, Bret Michaels. She was hot so I lied and said, “What the fuck are you doin’ with that jerk, you knew I was going to be here.” So pretentious, so rock star, but then again I’d drink a gallon of her piss just to see where it comes from.
Backstage with the gorgeous Pamela Anderson in Detroit, 2007. (Gene Kirkland for Aerosmith)
It’s now, like, seven thirty, my assistant goes, “ST” and she points to her watch. “Come on!” Nine fifteen we go on, so eight o’clock’s the lockdown in the dressing room, lock it out, no one comes in. I set my timer for an hour—when it stops, it goes Brrr-RRRR-rrrr-RRRR-rrrr-RRRRRR! It’s my fucking time, because I can’t keep time to save my life. Pamela comes in again. We’re shooting the shit! Some people are still pulling on me, going, “Steven!” I sit down and do makeup. Makeup takes twenty minutes. Hair I do myself. After that I do a little exercising, get on my StretchMate, get on the floor and do a little yoga, stretch those muscles out—if I don’t, I know I’m going to feel it later on. Work out with my twenty-pound weights on my board. Now it’s getting around eight fifteen and I’ve gotta warm up, singing, so it’s Ay-aay E-eeee I-iiiii O-oooo Ay-aay E-eeee I-iiiii O-oooo Ewwww Ay-aay E-eeee I-iiiii O-oooo Ay-aay E-eeee I-iiiii O-oooo, all the way up to the top, so you can’t go any further, then all the way down to the bottom. Just watch that episode of Two and a Half Men and you’ll know what I do. I’m the one the guy next door is complaining about when I practice my scales.
Then I get the countdown—they call out to me to give me the time I have left till I have to go on: “Fifteen minutes!” That’s when I first get that “Oh, shit! I gotta go onstage!” jolt. Any bug that I got flies out of my body ’cause it knows deep down inside it’s going to be two hours of insanity. I’m throwing a party for twenty thousand people. I love it, I’m addicted to adrenaline. “Five minutes!” someone calls out. We walk down the side of the stage and the tape rolls—it’s a five-minute film. I got my big burly friend K. C. Tibo and his wife to take pictures of us that we could project on the screens in the back during the show. K.C. made an Aerosmith film with a voice-over in the style of the old newsreels: “And defending the nation is. . . .” We found the reporter that used to do them, got his voice, and put it on the tape. It shows us at various places on tour. “And we stopped in Berlin!” We could be in Berlin on the European tour, we could be in Prague, we’re going to France. It’s projected behind us on an LED screen.
The LED screen is forty by sixty feet. When you hear LED you think a flat screen, but this thing is five inches thick. It’s set up every night, hi-def Aerosmith. We used to have a camera showing us coming out of our dressing room and walking up to the stage. Bor-ing! Been there, done that. Not cool. This new montage of scenes K.C. came up with out of his head—he’s brilliant, great cinematographer. He did the whole European tour with us, but because he stayed with me and filmed me, some people in the band got a little jealous and knew that I was doing a movie. If I die, K.C. has explicit orders to make all these clips into a movie and put the thing out, so the world can see what goes on with me.
My ex-wife Teresa is there, my girlfriend Erin is there in the dressing room. Dan Neer is interviewing me on a boom for XM Radio, I’m getting my face done by the makeup girl, the pitcher from the Red Sox is there with his wife. There I am ogling girls, philosophizing, chewing people out, hanging out with the Make-A-Wish Foundation kids. I go around the corner real quick because I have to pee. Dan says, “Do you mind if I come?” I haven’t warmed up yet, and my cell phone rings, it’s Al Gore! So there’s all this stuff going on while I’m taking a leak. I tell the makeup girl, “You can look if you want.” When you’re not married, there’s all sorts of things you can do, stuff I could never do
when my wife was around. I can’t tell you what joy that is. Because with wives you can’t joke! That’s part of the bargain. It’s all on film, a day in the life. . . .
Curtain drops, Aerosmith’s on, two-hour show. The show takes us from nine fifteen to eleven fifteen. We’re supposed to be off at eleven fifteen—that’s a state curfew. If we go over it, we gotta pay them a couple of thousand dollars a minute; sometimes it’s five thousand dollars a minute if you’re in New York at Madison Square Garden; it’s ten thousand dollars every five minutes in L.A. And we always go over it. Makes you wonder what Axl Rose paid on his tour. Okay, so we get offstage at eleven, eleven fifteen, an hour backstage taking showers, meeting people, talking to girls, twelve thirty we’re at the plane, we fly back, an hour-and-a-half flight.
Like they say, the woman has to be in the mood, the guy just has to be in the room—and that—being in the mood—goes for the lead singer, too. You have to get it up, you have to get up there onstage and flaunt your petals. (You’re asking yourself, What is he saying? Where is he going with this? Is he on drugs again? Better call Tim Collins.) Onstage, who takes the brunt in Aerosmith? ME! When your audience doesn’t respond to a song, who feels worse about it, who owns it the most, the guitar player or the lead singer? No wonder I got Lead Singer Disorder.
And what is the leading cause of LSD? Guitar players! They drive lead singers crazy! Guitar players can put their amps on 10 and have a roadie change their strings.
Thank you! Onstage, no one’s going to hear if Joe’s guitar is out of tune—it’s been out for years, it was out for most of the seventies. Now we have really good guitar techs. Still, it slips. Stuff happens. Joe plays so hard, his guitar still goes out of tune. I always wondered, Is it just me? How come only I notice it? It bothers the hell out of me onstage, but the audience doesn’t hear a thing. They’re stuck on the image of Joe being there, the cool cat they saw on the back of the album. Oh my god, it’s him and it’s live and there he is! Steven Tyler—live and in person. Well, I got news for ya, if I for a second sang flat “I could lie awake just to hear you breathin’,” Oh, whoops! In the press, in the paper: “His voice was all right, but he kind of missed a couple notes.” And they would put their finger on what note it was. “Steven Tyler looks good, but his voice is slipping. Maybe old age and years of drugs, maybe drug rehab—” Oh, they’ll look for anything! They speculate like crazy. That’s why, in my Italian mind, that lawn’s got to be mowed and good. It’s got to be raked—or I ain’t going to the beach! So if I don’t sing really good and be all I can be in the Aero Army (ha-ha) they’ll be on my case like white on rice.
Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? Page 26