Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

by Tyler, Steven

  I’d be in the Midwest and call home and say, “Guess who’s here tonight? Jimmy Page!”

  “Yeah? And I’m here alone. Hope you’re having fun!” I’d kick the phone and go, “Fuck!”

  They say that the female brain is different from the male brain and I can fucking believe it. Sometimes I’m ashamed to be a male around women. Men are FM—fucking and money—and women are, you know, psychosexually multitracked. We’re still in mono—that’s why they’re all confusing to us. I mean, we’re just sort of, like, “Hey, I like that, I want that!” But they can be both sides of the same question within two seconds. It’s like David “Honeyboy” Edwards, the old Mississippi blues singer, used to say that you can’t ever win an argument with a woman.

  Dogs don’t remember, they act by rote, they don’t even know why they’re doing it. When we’re in a roomful of pussy, do guys instinctively go “Ugghh” like the Neanderthals we were? Do we? I mean, I don’t know.

  I want to talk about women, I want to sing to them. I’ll do my lounge lizard act, anything to get through. To her, the one, the girl that I’ve missed: decipher this, baby!

  Ridin’ into town alone

  By the light of the moon

  I’m looking for ol’ Sukie Jones

  She crazy horse saloon

  Barkeep gimme a drink

  That’s why she’s caught my eye

  She turned to give me a wink

  That make a grown man cry

  I feel the vertigo of being alone. I’ll be working a room, talking to people, joking, telling them stories—they’re looking at me, and what they see is this Steven Tyler entity. I began to think of myself in the third person—which is a kind of existential hell. And everybody I know said the same thing except the one person that I wanted to say it to me, and she left me. So it’s really lonely being who the fuck I am.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Trouble in Paradise

  (Losing Your Grip

  on the Life Fantastic)

  By the fall of ’91 I had six years’ sobriety, but, for whatever reason, I wasn’t getting along with my band. I’m Italian, I really look at what’s going on. So I thought I better go check in someplace and get this sorted out.

  Around that time, Marko Hudson was working on a Ringo album and put me on the phone with him—never mind the fact that it was the first time I’d ever spoken with Ringo, one of my heroes (an actual Beatle), and to say the least I was beside myself. Mark had told me the day before that Ringo had just come out of rehab and was sober. So, I got on the phone.

  “Richard,” I said, “I’ve been butting heads with my band for just about every fucking album we’ve done.”

  “I can relate to that,” he said.

  I thought to myself, if I’m having problems with my bandmates and you’re in the Beatles, I can only imagine what you went through. The funny part is that we spoke for almost an hour about all this stuff and he ends by saying, “Well, good luck man . . . enjoy your sobriety.”

  “What do you mean, ‘sobriety,’ ” I said to him. “I’ve been sober for six years—I thought you knew. Didn’t Marko tell you?”

  “Well, what the fuck are you going there for?” he said, meaning rehab.

  “I want to make peace with my bandmates,” I said, “so we can write like we did in the old days. I’m following the old adage that you can attract more flies with honey than vinegar. The only problem is who is the honey and who is the vinegar?”

  So off I trekked to Arizon-i-a and checked into Sierra fucking Tucson (for codependency) to try and find out what the problem was. Now then, how to juggle band and family at the same time? Mmmmmnh! I wanted to see why my relationship with the band was so fucked . . . so up and down . . . and not in a good way. In part it was because of something I hadn’t yet grasped—and wouldn’t for many years to come: that Tim Collins and Joe Perry had been in bed together micromanaging the band since Day One. I would tell Joe something and he would tell Tim, and in many instances by the time it got back to me, it was the exact opposite. It was a triangulated version of the telephone game. Say Tim had it in his head for some reason to want to do something, but instead of working it out between us he would call Joe and tell him I was out of control—and then call me and tell me Joe was out of control. Since Joe and I were now not speaking to each other Tim could tell the band that Joe and I were fighting. All this happened in the middle of a yearlong world tour for the album Get a Grip—talk about “Livin’ on the Edge” . . . WTF! But that’s how it was—and obviously not just in this band. How about Keith and Mick, Dave and Ray Davies, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, and John and Paul. How is it that the best of us can be so manipulated? Fuck, we did turn out like our heroes, but not in the way we thought. Joe and Tim were to Aerosmith what the world percieved John and Yoko to be to the Beatles—without a doubt. What with the band members, the wives, and the managers . . . all in bed together. Talk about fucked. That’s the heroin of it all! To find out that we’d spent years turning reality into a dream and watching it turn into a nightmare. That’s death by heroin.

  I spent three weeks at Sierra Tucson, a multipurpose attitude-reconditioning facility or whatever. First day I’m there the therapist asks me, “So, uh, Steven, we start with some questions: Ever had an outside affair?” “Well, yes I—” “Okay, send him to sexual therapy. Next, have you ever had a member of your family die when you weren’t there?” “Well, you see, my grandmother—” “Grief counseling!’’ “Have you ever had problems at home with your wife and children?” “Well, see, I’m often on the road for months at a time and don’t see—” “Family orientation group.” After I left there, I had six or seven isms hung around my neck: drug addict, alcoholic, sex addict, codependent, family concerns, anger management, rhino clit, dwarf cock, whale watcher, bee keeper, oh, and did I mentin compulsive narcissism? Oh yeah, I had a full range of life issues. The bad news: how did they know? The good news: the last week of any stint in rehab, you have what’s called family week, and as I have two families—my biological family and that other one . . . the band . . . guess who came to dinner?

  Of course, there’s all these therapists with their fucking theories. John and Yoko went to Arthur Janov for scream therapy. Let’s see, if people scream when they’re really scared, what if . . . No, no, wait! What if we get them to scream indoors when they’re not scared? That way, maybe they won’t scream when they do get scared—and we’ll have invented a new emotion! Yes! That’s it! Hungry, angry, lonely, and Janov!

  It took me a good three weeks to get any love from the counselors who were constantly trying to label me and figure me out . . . to make me recognize shame—feel bad about my bad self. They said leave Steven Tyler outside and bring Steven Tallarico inside. And never the twain shall meet? As fucking if ! They tried to make me wear my clothes—in disarray as they said—inside out and put a patch on me that said “No talking to females.” All that did was attract the freaks. He was a bold man who ate the first oyster, and they were about to get to know him real well. Meanwhile I’m still waiting for that counselor to tell it like it is. So, on family day we (the band, plus management) go around the room and then they get to Bob Dowd, who was hired by management primarily as a “drug cop” to keep the band sober (imagine that). This guy was a real Nevada trooper who knew little about human interaction and nothing about rock stars’ evil ways. And Tim goes and makes him Aerosmith’s fucking tour manager? Bob would sit with us, keeping an eye on us while Joe and I were trying to write songs. I’d say, “You know, Bob, we don’t write so good with people watching us. You’re blowing the vibe.” Of course, that would be translated into, “Steven’s causing trouble; he wants me out—he must want to do drugs.”

  So at the session I laid into him, “I don’t appreciate you following us around like a cop. Stay out of it. Besides,” I mumbled to myself, “your arm’s too short to box with God, and you don’t know anything about addiction!” Tim, in Bob’s defense, lo
oked at the counselors, and said, “I hired him to make sure no one was using, leave him alone. And, by the way, that’s the way it’s gonna be.” The counselors looked at Tim in astonishment and said, “You may be the sickest one here.” The tension was beyond belief. That’s when I screamed, “Halle-fuckin-lullah!” I took some boxes and pushed ’em together in the middle of the floor of this room of mucho agidacion. I grabbed my giant scarf from the corner of the room and threw it over the boxes and said, “From here on out I dub thee the Shroud of Touring, and we shall take it with us as a good luck sign to never forget this moment.” And with that, I grabbed my coffee cup, poured it into a goblet, and made a toast to the band: “Here’s to hell . . . may we have as much fun there as we had getting there.”

  The manipulation never stopped with personal management, money management, and the addiction counselors. One day after the Tucson incident, and neck deep in the Get a Grip album, they all came to my house (and wouldn’t you know these cretins all came from the Malibu Home for the Recently Alright). Apparently they had concerns about the way the album process was going. They said, “Look, we feel you’re really not writing the way you did before. So, we think, you know, it would really be all right to get a blow job once in a while.” These were words of wisdom coming from the total Aerosmith management package.

  And I said, “Wow! That’s great, you guys. So, does that mean you’ll bring me a beer once in a while, too—and which one of you guys are gonna blow me right now? Don’t you know one drink is much too many . . . and a million’s not enough? Let’s see, do I want to be a dancing bear here? Do I want to give up that easy? Do I really want to keep the right ones out and the wrong ones in? Or do I want the world to think that I’m mysterious and dark and that I get my lyrics from the De-vil’s Den? Hmmm, let me think.”

  In 1992 we were recording Get a Grip with the band. I was working on “Fever” with Joe when I hit on one of the best lyrics I think I’ve ever written. I was so proud of it and thought it was so funny that I brought it to the band with such a frog-eating grin that Tom said, “What’s the matter? What do ya got?” And so I said, “Check that shit out.”

  The buzz that you be gettin’ from the crack don’t last

  I’d rather be O’Din’ on the crack o’ your ass.

  Yeah, we’re all here, ’cause we’re not all there tonight

  Silence . . . crickets . . . a blank look and then Tom turns to me and says, “Are you gonna sing that lyric on the song?” “Excuse me?” I knew where he was going with that because he’s hit me with that same type of sideways getting-into-something shit before.

  “Steven, I was just, um, wondering . . .”

  “What, man, what?” Knowing the other shoe was going to drop. “Well, just fucking say it, will ya?”

  And Tom says, “That’s not going on my album.”

  “That’s one of my favorite lines of all time, Tom. And by the fucking way, what do you mean ‘that’s not going on my album’? I wrote the fucking song, not you. If it wasn’t for this internal mental fucking backwash I wouldn’t have the inspiration to write the next song,” I said.

  If I could have bottled the anger I felt in that moment I would have quit the band and bought Madrid, and hung out with the lemurs for the rest of my life.

  Oh well, and speaking of anger, when you get into bed with A&R men . . . that all-time adage is so true: can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em! Or maybe it’s, “If you lie down with dogs . . .” Nah . . . but do they really do a band good? Did the infamous A&R diva, John Kalodner John Kalodner, really help us out? He insisted that every time his name was put on the back of an album it be written twice. I guess he subscribed to my point of view that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Actually it was a good luck thing in the end. And so I think the best thing John Kalodner John Kalodner ever did was to challenge us, to bring us around as real songwriters. The truth to the secret success of our marriage was that we let him in to begin with. Saying fuck it, just try it, that was my credo (okay, maybe some Tibetan monk living in a cave with yak butter in his hair said it first).

  Kalodner’s input as far as what a song should be and where songs should go was antiquated but all the same very effective. But his instincts were godlike. What he did do, however, was say in his nasal whine, “Steven, that’s great! Don’t bore us—get to the chorus. And it’ll be a hit single if you put strings on it.” Kind-a-like, if a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one there to hear it, does it still make a sound? And would that hit be a single? Or if a man has an opinion and a woman’s not there to hear it, is he still wrong? Yeah, I like that better.

  Sometimes Kalodner would hear different choruses after songs were already written. Once, when we were out of songs for Permanent Vacation, I grabbed the guitar and started playing the riff to “St. John,” which at the time was a shell just waiting to be filled in. “That’s fucking great,” Kalodner says, “your instincts are right. You always write the best songs under last minute pressure.”

  Of course, I hated hearing him say that, but it was true.

  I was in Vancouver in a hotel room by myself, gnawing the furniture, trying to come up with songs for Get a Grip. John Kalodner didn’t like the lyrics to “Cryin’ ” and for a month the walls of my room were covered with Scotch tape and scraps of paper—covered. I rewrote the lyrics to that song till I tore a hole in my brain—three, four times—and after the month I went, “Fuck it! I’m singing the original lyrics.”

  There was a time

  When I was so brokenhearted

  Love wasn’t much of a friend of mine

  The tables have turned, yeah

  ’Cause me and them ways have parted

  That kind of love was the killin’ kind

  Now listen

  All I want is someone I can’t resist

  I know all I need to know by the way that I got kissed

  That’s the first verse and it sets up a beautiful story.

  And it sang so good. That’s what Kalodner was leaving out of his equation: sing-ing. He was hearing it literally and I was singing between the notes. He didn’t understand that it doesn’t matter what the fuck I sing if it ain’t got that thing. I would be scatting, which sticks to your soul:

  It’s down on me

  Yeah I got to tell you one thing

  It’s been on my mind

  Girl, I gotta say

  We’re partners in crime

  You got that certain something

  What you give to me

  Takes my breath away

  Now the word out on the street

  Is the devil’s in your kiss

  If our love goes up in flames

  It’s a fire I can’t resist

  . . . but he was looking for meaning and understanding, which you ain’t gonna find in that verse ’cause I didn’t write it that way. It just sings so good with the melody I wrote that it’s irrefutable.

  When he called me unreasonable, I always rubbed it in his face. What was written on the subway walls. . . . John, there’s a very famous saying by George Bernard Shaw that goes something like this: Reasonable people adapt themselves to the situations they find themselves in. But the unreasonable man insists on trying to make the world see things his way—therefore, it’s the unreasonable sons of bitches who are always the catalysts for progress.

  I was cryin’ when I met you

  Now I’m tryin’ to forget you

  Love is sweet misery

  I was cryin’ just to get you

  Now I’m dyin’ ’cause I let you

  Do what you do—down on me

  Now there’s not even breathin’ room

  Between pleasure and pain

  Yeah you cry when we’re makin’ love

  Must be one and the same

  You can ruin anything by overintellectualizing it. I want my lyrics coming straight at you—I don’t want everything explained, rationalized, sanit
ized, and homogenized. I’m writing “Deuces Are Wild” and Kalodner the fucking momaluke says, “What are deuces? No one plays cards anymore.” He was right (back then, before TV poker became all the rage in the 2000s) . . . but deuces, when I’m done with them, are sonic dice. I’ll make those bones dance.

  I love you ’cause your deuces are wild, girl,

  Yeah, a double shot at love is so fi-i-yine!

  I been lovin’ you since you was a child, girl,

  ’cause you an’ me is two of a kind!

  It had nothing to do with deuces . . . it had everything to do with gambling as a metaphor for love, betting everything on the hand you’re dealt. Love, gambling, romance, games of chance. And by the way, “Deuces Are Wild” is on the side of the fastest funny car in the world. Do they look at it and go, “Huh? What does that mean?” They’d know what it means: deuces are wild, the car’s fucking fast. So what? If a girl came out naked and she had e = mc2 on her tits, do you think no one would lust after her because they didn’t understand it?

  Salieri in the film Amadeus—that fucking prick! You know who he really was? Mozart’s A&R man! Salieri the sycophant . . . who agrees with Emperor Joseph II, who agrees with the Music Director that there are “just too many notes” in Mozart’s opera. A&R men, that’s the way they talk: “Start with this. . . .” “Put that in there!” The critics, too, can drive me crazy.

  Their style of dissecting things rubs me the wrong way. However, remaining open to criticism can take you to places you may never have gone to on your own. Thank you, John Kalodner, you’re a genius and I love you . . . no one can wear a dress better than you, including me. Dude looks like the bearded lady.

  Can you sing? Can you dance? Tim Collins couldn’t clap twos and fours to a click track to save his life—but he saved ours.