Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

by Tyler, Steven

  “Painted on My Heart” was going to be taken by Johnny Hallyday, the French rock star. I gave him the stem mixes, I gave him my vocal, but at the last minute he didn’t do it. A stem mix is the basic track. You put your vocal on it so the band can play behind it. It’s a little like Guitar Hero, where you have the backing tracks and you leave space for the kid to play Joe Perry.

  Some time in 1997 I got a call from Jerry Bruckheimer saying he’d like to put four or five Aerosmith songs in an upcoming movie. We were all for it and that’s when John Kalodner played me Diane’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.” Little did I know that Kathy Nelson, who was picking the music, would put it in the same Jerry Bruckheimer movie, Armageddon, that Liv was talking about.

  Okay, let’s get into the what-it-is-ness of Diane Warren. Diane had written the song already and got a Celine Dion sing-a-like to make a demo. Diane put it on a cassette with her band doing it on synthesizers, all done in her studio. I listened to it in the car with John Kalodner and said, “It’s fuckin’ great, but where’s the chorus? It’s a hit single without a doubt, but there’s no chorus.”

  A couple days went by, and Diane comes to the Sunset Marquis to my room where there was a grand piano. She sits down and starts playing “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.” And because of the way she was singing it, I finally heard the chorus and I went, “Oh, my god,” and I started to tear up. It was just that tonal difference between the Celine Dion wannabe version—and the way she sold it—and the way Diane sang it, forget about it. It was a perfect example of it’s the singer, not the song. The way she sang “I don’t want to close my eyes” made a believer out of me and the rest is history.

  In Diane’s office, a room that she’s used for the last twenty-three years, there’s the same piano, cassettes from thirty years ago, and thirty number one singles on the wall. She walks around with that little green African parrot on her arm, Buttwing, and never leaves home without it. That little fucker will live a hundred years and it’ll be singing “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” on the space shuttle to Mars. Damn if Buttwing doesn’t get there before me!

  “Hey, Diane, everyone’s fucking to your songs,” I said. “Do you ever get laid?” She laughed shyly. “I get it,” I said, “you take all the angst from not getting it—and put it in a song.” She goes: “You got it! I’m just a frustrated romantic.”

  Okay, I was hitting them out of the ballpark, but unbeknownst to me I was cursed, cursed as Cain, doomed as Captain Ahab. The seven plagues of Egypt . . . all fell on me! What did I do to bring this on myself? Did I desecrate the Pharaoh’s tomb? Did I violate some dire taboo? Is there someone somewhere putting pins in a voodoo doll?

  Or . . . was it the Faustian bargain I made with the Bitch Goddess of Billboard, when she whispered in my ear, “Steven, baby, how would you like a hit record?”

  “That’d be sweet.”

  “How about a number one hit record?”

  “Fuck, yeah! Honey, I’d do anything to get a number one record.”

  “Anything? Are you sure, Steven, because, you know there may be a price to pay. . . .”

  “Hell, bring it on!” said I recklessly. “Whatever it is, I can handle it.”

  Oh, yeah? Did I really say that? I shoulda gone to see the gypsy, because before too long I found myself in a world of trouble and pain. Nobody knows the trouble I seen. Gimme an E! Heavy is the head that wears the motherfucking Mad Hatter’s hat. Thank you, God, may I have another?

  We would soon get our hit with “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”—came out in August 1998, stayed number one on Billboard’s Hot 100 for four weeks—but before that happened the price to pay prophesied by the Bitch Goddess of Billboard came horribly true.

  My litany of maladies, misfortunes, and woes began in the Year of the Rat. It started out uneventfully enough. The band had a day off, we were in the Allegheny Mountains. I called Joe’s room and told him I wanted to lease a llama and fill our backpacks with crunchy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and climb to the top of Pikes Peak. We hiked five miles up. Unbeknownst to Joe, I had a copy of “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” the version with the strings on it. So I brought my CD player—and two sets of batteries, because I’m on to Murphy.

  We were on the edge of a cliff. Joe’s sitting on top of the mountain eating his sandwich, and I walk off, about a hundred feet away. I looked over, found a little place to sit down, and listened to “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” under the headphones, with that orchestra welling up and me watching eagles soar for the first time in my life, and I wept like a baby. And then I knew that we really had something. Just like the time I listened to “Love in an Elevator,” going “Whoops! This is gonna be a hit!” I knew. The crying part of “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”—duh-da-duh-DAHN-N-N!—it was, like, fuck, wait’ll they hear this! Never mind “Is it gonna be?” I don’t want to jinx anything, but guess what? I know what’s on the radio—this is better!

  The first Demon of Excruciating Pain visited me a week later. We were on tour in Alaska playing the Sullivan Arena in Anchorage on April 29, 1998. We’d never done Alaska, so I said to management, “If that’s the only state in America that we haven’t played, we’ve gotta do it.” So we’re up there in Anchorage, and we’re doin’ “Train Kept a-Rollin’.” At the end of the song, during Joey’s drum bit, I do this thing where I jump in the air, do a spread eagle split, and at the same time swing my scarf-festooned mic stand around. The bottom of the mic stand weighs around four pounds, and as I go up in the air I accidentally whack the inside of my left knee with it. It’s like hitting your funny bone with a four-pound hammer—your knee will go all tingly with electricity, so for a moment you can’t feel your leg. And that’s what happened to me. I landed, but because my knee was tingling and numb, I didn’t have any sensation in that leg when I hit the stage and the ACL in my left knee shredded, ripped right out. Your ACL is a ligament inside the knee. Anterior crutiate ligament—it’s what holds your knee on.

  And this happened not in midconcert or midsong but right at the end of the show, “Train Kept a-Rollin’, ” our encore song. In other words, I fell down at the conclusion of our show, providing an unintended climax. I’m lying there, writhing in pain, going, “Aaaaaaagggh!” No one realizes what’s just happened to me. I played it like it was part of the show. And I looked back at my tour manager and I mouthed the word ambulance.

  He went, “What?” He didn’t understand yet. But I knew that I’d hurt myself beyond any pain I’d ever felt before. I could tell something really bad had happened. The ambulance came, they gave me a shot of what I love—I didn’t know what it was, but I could hear the opening line of “Strawberry Fields” floating through my head.

  At the hospital, they said, “Here’s what you did: you tore your ACL. It’s going to take two weeks for the swelling to go down before we can go in arthroscopically to look around and see what the damage is and take care of it. Two weeks. And here’s what you’ve got to do: ice it every day and get that swelling down.” Fuck! End of the tour. Wrong time to make the doughnuts—and right into the video of “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.”

  After that we went somewhere in the Midwest to do the video for “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.” I’m still in a cast, packed in ice, and if you watch that video, you’ll see that they only shoot me from the waist up—just like Elvis. The director created a futuristic scenario using two hundred cones, geodesic shapes and stuff. The stylist had Betsey Johnson make me a very freaky coat, as I found out later, out of human hair—I instinctively knew what to do with it, so I fucked with it, used it as a prop just like I did with the mask at the beginning of “Cryin’.”

  Right after that video we had a number one single. What are the fucking chances? Well, I kinda sorta knew we would. Later that fall I ran into the Bitch Goddess of Billboard at a convention in the Bahamas. “What are you looking so glum for, baby?” she asked with a crooked smile. “Didn’t you get your numb
er one with a bullet?”

  “Are you kidding? That stuff with the ACL, that wasn’t funny,” I said.

  “Ah, well, honey, we all gotta pay our dues,” said she. “And by the way, baby, there just might be a little more of that to come.” Before I got a chance to ask her what she meant, she’d vanished.

  Got home, had to ice my knee another week before I went in for the operation. And when I came out of that wormhole, it was pretty fucking paralyzing—even though they did it arthroscopically. That means they drill a little hole in your knee and go in with a scope so they can see inside. They fill the inside of your knee with water, then flush it out so they can observe what’s going on in there with a miniature camera. On the camera are little scissors and they cut the ends of the ACL off—it looks just like spaghetti.

  They take out your torn ACL and put in someone else’s; it’s called an allograft. When they take the ligament out of your other leg, that’s called an autograft. I said, “Fuck that, pass the cadaver, doc. I’m a creature who lives onstage, I need both legs, and I need all the help I can get.” He said, “Well, we got a freezer in the other room full of knuckles from people who died, and we can use ligament from one of those, because knuckles are like ACLs, they take little blood supply, and you don’t have to worry about rejection.” So they cut a ligament from this sixteen-year-old kid’s knuckle and used that to replace the ACL in my knee. Every night when I say my prayers, I say them twice and I thank that kid who gave me the ligament for my knee.

  Got home the first day after they screwed my new ACL in and iced it. Second day, I get into this machine. You Velcro your foot into it, it has a slow-moving motor that moves your foot straight out, and then it goes up to a bend while the ice bag is on. It goes mmmmmmmmmmnnnnnnnnnn, moving your leg up s-l-o-w-l-y and then back down. That’s the first two weeks. Did that hurt? Oh, fuck, yeah!

  I was on painkillers, but still . . . it’s what you have to do to get out—the only way out is through. It took four months, but after that I was in pretty good shape. It still hurt, but my knee was well enough for me to go on the next Aerosmith tour. We had to go right out, because by that time “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” was number one, and all these opportunities came up. We played Madison Square Garden again.

  I brought a girl out on tour with me, she massaged me three times a day: iced it, massaged it, iced it. When they massage a scar, it goes away. That’s why I don’t have any scars. I wore a leg brace onstage for six months after that. When I first got it, it was mummy white. I said, “Paint it black!” I cut all my pants off at the knee and it looked pretty cool. Steven, the bionic man. We had to tour, so that was that.

  In December 1998, I went to the White House with the band, and fuck me if President Clinton wasn’t being impeached that day. The Senate broke, they called him up, and said, “Mr. President, you’re going to be impeached; we’re on our way over.” So all the trucks were there from the news media (as you can only imagine). We were all at the Secret Service shop in the basement. There’s a firing range down there and a major tunnel with a train that’s propelled through a pneumatic tube. You strap yourself in and it goes ptchoooo-oooo! to some DUM (Deep Underground Military) facility. America’s full of DUMs. But enough about our managers.

  We’re getting walked around, given little gifts—Secret Service golf balls! Clinton’s press secretary comes down and goes, “Steven, do me a favor, can you come upstairs, please?” I said, “That’s fine with me, but we’re playing tonight.” “What time do you need to be there?” “Six, and the gig is three hours away.” “No problem, we’ll get you there.” They took us upstairs to a waiting room to hang out till Bill Clinton could come meet us. And where do you think they put us? The Situation Room—I’m sitting in the president’s chair looking around at all the monitors. We met with Bill (briefly—he was kinda busy that day, ya think?). Then we were escorted quietly out of the White House. We were walked out to a police escort—off to Quantico, FBI headquarters to stroll down a street with full-on machine guns. They let me shoot dummies at a practice range there that’s mocked up to look like a city block. Animatronic figures pop out at you as you walk around. The head of a terrorist leans out and you shoot at it, then an animatronic little girl leans out with her doll—ooops!

  “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” was nominated for an Oscar for best original song—it was the theme song for Armageddon—which was especially sweet since Liv was one of the stars of the movie. I was going to perform it at the Academy Awards. I peeked through the curtain and looked down and there’s Eric Clapton and Sting and Madonna and all the people from my era, sitting in the front row. Just before the curtain opened my keyboard player kicked a cord out and it took out my ears so I couldn’t hear the mix. When the performance starts I’m supposed to be up front with the guy playing the cello for the opening line of the song. They went “Sixty seconds!” “But, wait,” I said, “I can’t hear anything! Is that mic on?” I walked back to my production man and told him, “Don’t let them open the fucking curtain yet, I have no ears. Do not open—” They did it anyway. And so the song started and I was twenty feet from the cello player. I wasn’t about to run up to the front of the stage; everyone in the place would have laughed, “A-HA-HA-HA! Look at Steven, he lost his mark!” I’m a little more professional than that. I walked up real slowly. But by the time I got to the cello player—probably thirty feet away—the first verse was gone. I blew the first verse. Live TV at the Oscars! Oh, man.

  We’d got our number one hit record, been at the Grammys, and still had a half-a-Grammy left, sung at the Academy Awards. So I had to go through a few rough periods—but it was all worth it. Aerosmith was at full tilt. I was happily married to Teresa with two beautiful children, Chelsea and Taj, plus my Liv and Mia. Life was good and I had nothing to worry about. Or so I thought. . . .

  Millenium Show at the Osaka Dome, Japan. The end of the world? My ass! (William Hames for Aerosmith)

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Holy Smoke,

  Quest for the

  Grand Pashmina,

  and the Big Chill

  of Twenty Summers

  I found myself making snorting sounds: fffueh-ffuh-fffeuh-fuh-feu-feu. Snuffling like an armadillo in search of fire ants. My nasal passages were completely clogged. No, not from the coke! Fuck, no. I stopped in 1980. I stopped smoking. I stopped everything, well, for X number of years anyway. To this day, no damage to the nasal passages. No, the snuffling was from the way I slept (I used to sleep on my back) and the fog juice. My sinuses had mutated, become an alien life form. Thirty years of breathing in the damn oil-based fog juice, that’s the stage smoke they use to enhance the beams of light. The smoke makes everything look bigger and more dramatic. It’s HOLY SMOKE! You see more colors.

  This is how it works: the guy doing the lights hits a foot switch that activates the smoke machine behind the drum riser and up comes this apocalyptic fog juice. It’s blowing out onstage and I’m inhaling it, taking a deep breath to launch into the song: “I could lie awake” . . . you know . . . “just to heh-heheh-heh-hear you bruh-breathing!” and I’m going, ah-heh-ah-hehh-ahh. It’s like being a fucking monkey in a lab experiment. A demented researcher is saying, “All right, let’s fill this room full of smoke, get the little chimp to sing at the top of his lungs for twenty years, and then we’ll run some tests.”

  If I get sick I’ve got to cancel. And when Aerosmith cancels a show it’s a million dollars! I tell you, the worst time in my life is when I’m taking a shower or sitting in my room, it’s one o’clock in the afternoon and we’ve got a gig that night, and I go, “Fuck! I can’t do it.” My voice is gone from laryngitis. Either I have a high raspy whine or a deep, bullfroggy honk, but either way I can’t sing. I hate that, I lose it, knowing that there’s twenty thousand people on their way to the concert. They’re high and happy, thinking they’re going to get laid tonight, and now they’re going to find out over the radio that the concert is
off and they’re all going to go, Awwwww shit! I feel for them. Now someone like Axl Rose, on the other hand, will handcuff himself to the toilet at the hotel and have people wait four hours for him to show. Why does he do it? That’s just how Axl is. He’ll say, “The marbles were thrown and the color red didn’t show up, so I can’t get there tonight.” Some astrologi-theosophical omen like that and he won’t move.

  We have to take out eight million dollars in insurance in case anything goes wrong with Steven the singing monkey. Anything could happen to anyone else in the band—unless they break a leg—and the show would go on. So once again Steven’s the designated patient. Rather than the band spending insurance money if I get sick, I take a shot of a type of cortisone to reduce the sinus inflammation—it’s called the Medrol Dose Pack, and it shrinks them.

  After years of inhaling fog juice I had a serious case of sinusitis. Gunk dripped down my throat like a slow-running faucet. They had to operate. Roto-Rootered my sinuses, stuffed them with cotton. I’m lying in bed that night after the operation and I wake up ’cause I’m going glllk-glkkk-gulpgm-glllk. Like I’m swallowing in my sleep, going, “What is that warm mucuslike gunk?” I reach over and turn the light on and—oh, my god!—blood is pouring out of my nose! Dripping like that thin stream of water out of the faucet when you’re trying to fill the little hole in your water gun. Except it wasn’t a faucet, it was my nose. And it wasn’t water . . . it was blood.

  I freaked out. I said to my wife, “Teresa! Quick!” She went in the other room and got a wad of toilet paper. After a minute it was soaked. More toilet paper: soaked. With blood. When a human sees that much blood, it’s “Call an ambulance!” Ambulance came, took me to the hospital. I’m lying there; nobody’s doing anything. “You guys! I’m bleeding to death here!” That hospital didn’t have the capabilities to do anything about my bleeding, so they stuffed me up with cotton and rushed me down to Mass General. They cauterized my nose at one o’clock in the morning, and the bleeding stopped. Two hours of hell! Blood all over the place! I had an operation, then everything was fine. My nose is still fine, thank you. No schmutz in my lungs, either: hhuh-hhuh-hhuh-hhuh-hhuh. Did you hear anything?