Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

by Tyler, Steven

  Wait! I know what they’ll say: Salieri was integral—if it hadn’t been for Salieri making Mozart mad, he wouldn’t have written his Requiem. And they would have a point. Whenever somebody said, “You can’t do that!” it just made me want to sing it even louder! Because that’s what the sixties were all about: hatred of rules, regulations, the accepted way of doing things. Now it’s all fucked. Now it’s nothing but mock rebellions, it’s all “Why, I’ll show you! I’ll do a reality show and . . . shit on the table! Yeah! That’s it.”

  Give me the freaks, the geniuses, the confused, the Daltons, the great unwashed, and the ones in doubt. All great art will tip the cart—and I’m not, by the way, claiming Aerosmith is the fucking Sistine Chapel—why no . . . no great art was ever created by playing it safe. Now, in the new gigabyte, iPod apps, 2.0 U.S. of A.’s, they’re all cloned, certified, and convinceified. There are automatons out there! It’s like a Universal horror movie except instead of giant ants oozing nuclear snot, it’s the professionals, lawyers, doctors, shrinks—and A&R men!—with their learned, conditioned responses, their stock answers to every fucking thing. A little-known secret? Listen to the things they’re not saying and you’ll find out what they are really saying. “Well, you see, if I were in your situation, given the parameters of the . . .” “Professionally speaking, if you were to ask my canned opinion . . .” Shut the front door.

  Lawyers were brought into the folds of the band to advise us how to handle ourselves in the case of stalkers and how to talk to female employees. For example, if we ever get stalked by a twisted fan, what not to do. Never talk to the person. And since no one in the band ever does talk to fans, what’s the problem?

  “Just don’t talk to that person if you sense they’re stalking you.” That was their blanket statement. Thank you—and bye! “How much was that, Mr. Manager, sir?” “Oh, well, that was only fifteen grand to bring in the lawyers again.” The band looks at me and says, “It’s all your fault. You talk to everyone!”

  And then Joe and Billie started having stalkers, and then came the beginning of the end.

  Here’s a case in point: I’m vacationing at my summer home with all my kids for the first time. I’m cooking breakfast, and I see someone jump over my fence. My ex-wife, Teresa, says, “I’ll take care of this,” and starts walking toward the door. And I say, “No, you don’t, I got this one.” So, this guy is standing at my backdoor pushing the doorbell. I said, “Ehh, what’s going on here? What are you doing jumping over my fence? This is the last place I can go to get away from people like you. You could get shot jumping over my fence like that. What are you doing here?”

  “Well, my mother said you wrote a song about me.” Looking in his eyes, I could tell he was on something or off his meds. I was standing close enough to see his hands so I’d be able to stop him if he went to grab for something.

  I said, “I write a lot of songs about a lot of people. How do you know this one’s to you?”

  “Well, you sang, Tommy now it’s untrue.”

  And I went blank. “Tommy? No, no, it’s actually ‘tell me,’ but it could be Tommy. Yeah, if you want it to be Tommy, it could be Tommy.” I didn’t correct him. I asked him, “Where’s your mom?”

  “Well, she died when I was three. She left a note to me in a letter.” So that was his connection with the mother—I’m not going to take that away from him.

  So, I said, “As far as I’m concerned, it’s ‘Tommy.’ From here on out, I’m gonna sing it like that. Now get outta here!” with a wink, “and don’t ever climb over the fence again.”

  I could have called the cops, but I diffused it myself. Half the people in the world who hear your music own it anyway. And it’s exactly what you want them to do.

  Marko Hudson told me a story about when he was hanging out with John Lennon and the Hollywood Vampires during the Walls and Bridges/May Pang Kotex-on-the-head moment in 1973. You gotta see this picture: Marko buzzing around Lennon’s hive (me thinks a bit too much). Lennon let Marko ask him ONE question about the Beatles, so he asks John about the lyric from “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” “The image of the velvet hand and the lizard—it meant so much to me,” said Marko. “Can you tell me where it came from and what it means?” Lennon, Marko’s greatest hero in life, replies (imagine thick Liverpudlian accent), “Doesn’t mean nothin’. Sounds good comin’ off me tongue. I just write the words . . . you make up the meaning.” My best friend was both crushed and liberated. But it points back to interpretation. . . .

  People ask me all these questions about “Dream On.” “What does it mean?” What do you mean, “What does it mean?” It means Dream On. You figure it out. You’re the one listening to it . . . make up your own meaning.

  While I was working on Nine Lives I was clean and sober, I was high on life, but Tim Collins was convinced I was using. How could I be that jacked and on the natch? I think Tim wanted to catch me doing drugs in the worst way.

  I went to Tim Collins’s office. I could tell by the smell of sulfur in the room that he was working on something diabolical, the monster. Dark deeds were afoot. “Steven, we’re going to send you to a retreat in Big Sur for a week, we think it’ll do you good.” Whenever I hear that something’s for my own good—brrraaaannnng!—alarms go off in my brain.

  “I’m gonna go to a retreat in Big Sur? With who?”

  “A men’s group from New York—all professional guys, captains of industry—you’ll get on with them famously,” Bob Timmons, Tim’s weaselly minion, chimed in.

  “Oh, that sounds like Fun,” I said. “It’ll be five minutes of silence and the rest of the week it’s going be, ‘Uh, dude, man, what was it like singing “Dream On,” man?’ Or, ‘I gotta tell ya something, man, I got laid to your fucking records last week.’ ”

  You know what that would be like for me at sixty with another bunch of sixty-fucking-year-olds? “Do you know that my wife and I made love to your song and we got seven good children out of it.”

  That marked the beginning of my communication breakdown with Tim Collins. In my head I was going, Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-dun-da-DA-na-na-na-na-na. Ha! I was covering my ears so I couldn’t hear this crap. There was no way in hell I was going. Taj was four and Chelsea was eight. And it was hard enough being away from them for so long, but to come back from making a record and go to a fucking men’s club in Big Sur! With a bunch of, you know, sober testosterones? Bad enough going to a fucking bar and talking to those guys! Sober it’s ten times worse! They’re going to remember every epiphanous moment they had in their teenage years when they were watching porn, getting stoned, and listening to “Sweet Emotion” while fingering the girl next door.

  “I’m not going, you fucks!” I said. “I just got back from finishing a fucking record—and it turned out great, by the way, thanks for asking.” They’ll tell you they were only suggesting I go, but it’s like the Pope suggesting to the Boston cardinal that he better change the subject matter of his sermons or he’s going to go away for a year to a retreat in the Azores! Because when I objected, Bob Timmons said, “No, you have to go, we’ve already booked it.” And the sleazy duo started trying to talk me into it. I got really angry. “I haven’t seen my wife in over two months. What are you guys thinking of? Enough of your fucking control issues! Wait a fucking minute—it wasn’t all that long ago, back when I was in Tucson, Arizona, that you were telling me I could get a blow job. And now you’re telling me that I should go away? For what?” I said, “Fuck you! I’m not going there.” I walked out and slammed the door.

  Now, keep in mind, this is a guy that helped massage and facilitate our sobriety. He was a strong advocate for us, but all along he was taking sleeping pills, anxiety medication (necessary apparently because he’s managing Aerosmith!), and binge eating. He’s up in his hotel room eating cheeseburgers, there’s three main entrees on the room service trolley. That’s a drug, too.

  Still, I intended never to return. The era was over. He knew it. S
o he gathered the band to Boston, in the basement situation room, for an emergency meeting and told them, “Steven’s out of his mind. We gotta get his wife on the phone.”

  He went upstairs and proceeded to call my wife. Pure vindictive crap. Joe was shocked that he’d actually done it. He said, “You did what ? What the fuck?!?!”

  Actually I was almost a year sexually sober, so if they told me to go fuck myself I couldn’t even have done that. All this while Sly Stallone was trying to hook me up with the most lascivious, sweetly sweaty, Floridian pulchritude known to man. I would go to clubs three times a week with him. Girls all over the place, boobs and thongs just like in Girls Gone Wild. Everywhere. The most I would do is say good night to them. “You’re leavin’ us, baby?” “Well, ladies, you can walk me back to the hotel if you like.” “Okay!” And three or four of them would walk me to the corner across the street from the main entrance of the Marlin Hotel. I would say, “Okay, girls, you have to stay here. I’m going in there alone. So I can get back to writing lyrics to stories yet untold.” A saint, I tell you.

  After leaving Tim’s office I stomped out the door and drove to Sunapee to open up the house for my kids, wipe the flies out of the windows—my favorite thing to do. On the way back to Boston I stopped at a tollbooth, pulled over, and called Teresa. She was crying hysterically. “Baby, tell me.” I said, “Why are you crying?” “Well, I’ll tell you why,” she said. “Tim called and told me you were fucking other girls and you’re still on drugs, and that’s why you went up to New Hampshire alone.” That’s how good he was—those devious little details! She just freaked. He had her on the phone for twenty minutes, screaming at Teresa. I had been married to her for eighteen years by then.

  When I hung up the phone with Teresa, I called Bobby Hearn (my sponsor in AA). I said, “Bobby, you better meet me at my house in Marshfield and get rid of all the guns or I’m gonna fucking get my gun and shoot Tim Collins. I am so fucking furious!” I mean, I totally went off! I don’t allow myself to get into that state anymore ’cause there’s no one in my life I let do that to me.

  Now I had to deal with my wife. It took me two weeks, every day, to get rid of the anger.

  Tim called the band into the office after I said it was over. Joe and I had been writing songs without them, so the guys in the band were already angry at me and this gave Tim the power to get the rest of the band on his side.

  The next day, I walked into our rehearsal space and said to my partner, Joe, “You fuck! Why didn’t you ask me if I was high? Like we used to talk in the early days.” Oh! See how angry I get now just thinking about it? Wait, it gets better!

  When I saw the guys in the band again, I asked them, “What were you guys thinking when you let Tim call my wife? All this stuff he told you, it’s all just fucking hearsay from some friend of Tim’s.” And it was all particularly galling because it was one of the few times in my life that I was not drinking, was drug free, and sexually abstinent.

  When I asked the band why they believed I was fucking everything that moved they said. “Oh, Steven! What did we know? Tim convinced us. . . .”

  “Fuck you! What if I called up your wife and said, ‘He’s fucking this chick in his tiki hut?’ ”

  Tim Collins would get people going with his insinuating little sayings like, “There’s trouble in paradise.” That’s the fucking letter he wrote to my wife. Trouble in Paradise. Tim Collins was famous for starting rumors, stuff that he made up himself. He was the fireman who sets the fires. He would go to Joe Perry’s house, light a fire at night when no one was looking, go back to the firehouse, wait for the alarm, rush over there, really quick, quicker than any other fireman, and put the fire out. So he could be a hero. He did that time and time again. And then when the fire was out, he’d say, “I saved your life.”

  The very next day he went up to Sony with Bob Timmons to see the president. “So, Tim,” Donnie Ienner asks, “you’re telling me Steven’s back on heroin?”

  No hesitation. “Yup. But don’t worry, sir, I’m gonna get him back into rehab, and in a month or two, he’ll be all right again. I’ll get him in the studio, do an album, and everything’ll be fine. Goddamn him! I tried!”

  Oh, and it doesn’t stop there! Then he went to Time magazine and People and Rolling Stone. “Aerosmith Lead Singer Back on Heroin!”

  Joe Perry, Tony Bennett, me, and Tommy Mottola the day we signed with Sony, 1991. (Kevin Mazur/WireImage/Getty Images)

  Shortly after this I’m out to dinner with Ienner at an Italian restaurant eating capozzelli di agnelli. Capozzelli, that’s a dish of lamb’s head. They bring the whole head out after it’s been in the oven. I’m sitting at the table and I said, “Did Tim and fuckin’ Bob Timmons come down here and tell you I was on heroin?” And he got quiet and he goes, “That’s exactly what they said.” “And you believed him?” “Well, now, Steven, I don’t want to cause any trouble here.” I said, “Don’t worry about that. We just fired him.” “Well, to be honest with you, I was thinking this was a little fucked.” “Oh, really? A minute ago you wouldn’t say anything because you didn’t want to start any trouble.” “Well, Stevie, ya see, I’m one of those people that—” Oh, fuck you and the horse you rode in on!

  While all this was going on my daughter Mia called me up crying. She goes, “Daddy, I’m so scared! Are you on drugs again?” I was stunned to hear her so upset; Mia never cries. I took her out and told her, “Mia, I’m not on drugs and I’m not hiding. I haven’t gotten high in nine years.” We hugged, and she’s crying in my arms. We turn the corner and I open my eyes for a second and there’s that motherfucking paparazzi with a lens from here to Connecticut. I thought, God, does it never stop? “Mia, here’s what we’re going to do. Hold on a minute.” I went into a hardware store we happened to be walking past, and asked, “Do you have an umbrella and a can of spray paint—in white, preferably?” I took the can, shook it up, and wrote FUCK YOU! on the umbrella, opened it up, put it behind us, and we walked down the street! Let ’em get a shot of that—all day! I did see it in a few stupid rags, but that was all right.

  Tim Collins put a spell on me. Svengali, that’s who Tim Collins was. He would deliberately say whatever was on his agenda in front of groups of people to intimidate them, that way nobody would dare contradict him. It’s like if you had been sitting around with a friend of yours the night before and the next morning you’re reading the newspaper and you go, “Oh, my god, a woman’s decapitated body was found in the woods,” and just then your best friend walks in with a shrunken head. Now you’re going to be real fucking careful what you say about that best friend of yours, not to mention he ain’t your best friend no more.

  As I walked out of Tim Collins’s office for the last time, I could see and feel the waves receding like the backwash of a speedboat on a calm lake. I turned around and said, “This is the last fucking time I’m coming here or I’m ever gonna utter your name.” I fell into the wormhole of consuming anger. I could feel the weight of hatred welling behind me. It was like standing at the back of the Queen Mary and watching the waves that it throws off.

  I didn’t talk to him again until three years ago in the elevator at the Mile High stadium in Denver.

  “Mr. Tyler,” he said, “so good to see you. There’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you for a long time.”

  “I know what it is. You want to ask my forgiveness for that remark.”

  “How did you know?”

  Oh, I knew. When I had last confronted him with all the outrageous things he’s done, he simply said, “I’m sorry, you must have mistaken me for someone who gives a shit.”

  I had been devastated. I loved Tim, I trusted him, believed in him, and he let me down. Abandonment and betrayal by managers has been an ongoing thorn in my side my whole career. But why should I be any different from any other performer?

  CHAPTER 13.5

  The Bitch Goddess

  of Billboard

  Liv ca
lled me and said she got offered a part in a movie with Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck. And she wasn’t sure if she wanted to take it because it was too commercial. “In what way?” I said. Her taste in movie roles was more off-beat and indie, like Stealing Beauty and That Thing You Do, which she had already done. So she says, “In the opening scene Bruce Willis is teeing off an oil rig and trying to hit the Green Peace boats. And then they go up in space to shoot down an asteroid.” I said, “Are you kidding me?” She said, “I think it’s too mainstream and commercial, Daddy.” “Take it,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with being a household name, baby.”

  Meanwhile, Nine Lives came out in ’97—that was such a fucking great album. I remember walking around with the finished cassette in my back pocket—felt like a bar of gold. But look at the goop around it! We all got sober. Looking back, I think if we’d have stayed stoned, the band would never have come back and gotten its grip again. I was sober for twelve years. Joe had four. Brad maybe had eight. If he was drinking wine, doesn’t matter. Tom, who knows what he was doing? Joey’s the only one that stayed sober through the whole thing. He’s the only guy in the band who stayed the course.

  Some of the lyrics I wrote on the Nine Lives album was my rant, my rage. Maybe Tim Collins, Bob Timmons, and all the other sonsofbitches stuck in my craw had to come out.

  How can a good thing

  7 come 11

  Slip into a fare-thee-well

  And how can one man’s

  Little bit o’ heaven

  Turn into another man’s hell

  But in the end I came through all the turmoil philosophical and with eyes wide open:

  In the old game of life, best play it smart,

  with love in your eyes and a song in your heart,

  and if you’ve had problems since way back when,

  did the noise in your head bother you then?

  You know, I hope you see it as clear as I do.