Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

by Tyler, Steven

  When I first blew a tire, so to speak, in my throat, people started saying, “Steven Tyler has cancer!” What I actually had was a broken blood vessel in my throat. When I had throat surgery the doctor said, “No talking for three weeks.” Now how was I supposed to do that? I went back to see him and he said, “You talked!” I got deep with it, I said, “What are you talking about, Doc? There isn’t a soul on this planet who can shut up for a day, never mind three weeks. Unless I tape my mouth up, there’s no way. We’re humans, we’re primates—we talk—and talking is my life. People talk in their sleep, they talk to themselves, and personally I suffer from being vaccinated with a phonograph needle!” “Steven, another week!” he told me and he did that three times. It went on for five weeks—it was a fucking nightmare.

  The way they treat a broken blood vessel in the throat is just astounding. They put a tiny camera down my throat with a laser attached to it. On a computer they draw a line around the spot with the green laser beam and then they delete it the way you would a sentence in a word-processing program. They tap on the spot and it gets rid of it. Dr. Zeitels is in there with a green laser and he’s going, “Gone, gone, gone, gone—” The green laser eats the blood under the skin, evaporates it, it’s gone! Star Trek. I watched it back on a monitor, it was un-fucking-believable.

  While Dr. Zeitels was working on my throat I told him, “I have an idea. We’re playing in Minneapolis. Why don’t you fly to the gig with me, bring your gear, that way you can film me before a show, during Joe’s solo, and after the show. You’ll get to see what it’s like to be me.” Flew him out, he did it. All the way, I’m going, “Doc, I mean, what if we went public with this?” “Well, you see, no one’s really done this operation on film before.” “So, let’s do it. I’m a lead singer—what more dramatic candidate for this operation could you get?” We thought about it for six or seven years and then we simply took the film footage of him zapping the blood vessels with a laser, some performance stuff, and they began to put the sequence together.

  I thought they should get me singing “Dream On.” As he was going down my throat, I said, “Oh, shit! If you’re going to film me singing ‘Dream On’ while I’m in the chair, I wanna caterwaul the chorus, ‘Dream o-on!’ I couldn’t do that if he went down my throat, so he went down my nose instead. He put the microcamera in and I really slammed it out, ‘DRE-am o-ONNNN . . . YEee-AH!’ ”

  The footage ended up on National Geographic’s The Human Body. When they did the show you heard me singing in the chair, the doctor talking, and all that stuff, and when I sang that, they could cut to me onstage singing it for real.

  While I was at MIT Dr. Zeitels give me a tour of the lab. They put me in a red jumpsuit and took me down to the lab to see rats growing human ears. What they’re doing there is pure science fiction. They paint organic webbing with human skin on it and attach it to the rat, so now it’s getting a blood supply, it’s absorbing it—it’s called osmosis.

  The whole National Geographic special was interesting because it was about the physics of singing, how your throat functions as a musical instrument, and how that instrument can bend, melt, twist, and wring emotions out of words. Sung words are mutations of written words. You come to a phrase in a song, your brain gets altered—words behave very strangely when they’re fused with music. What is music anyway? And how does it go from bom-da-bom-bom into a song? When we sing we convey emotion by raising the pitch; the notes change the form of the words. Tone determines emotion: praise, stop, pay attention, comfort. A melody with a rising tone keeps a child calm; a minor second is jarring. Music literally touches you. Sound is touch at a distance; it touches your brain.

  Monotone speech is robotic. In tone languages, words take on meanings from different pitches. In English we don’t depend on tone for meaning, but in Mandarin Chinese, for instance, tone determines the meaning. Depending on the tone you use, ma can mean “mother,” “hemp,” “horse,” or “reproach.” The Chinese are very adept at using different pitches to indicate meaning, but perfect pitch is very rare: like having a tuning fork in your brain. Everything has a voice and a key: a car horn is an F, bells are between D flat and B. One person in ten thousand has perfect pitch. Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven all had perfect pitch.

  I’ve spent my life listening to singers and realizing which ones could sing really well and are still lousy. It has nothing to do with perfect pitch or music lessons. Thousands of people sing great, with well-trained voices. The ones that have character in their voices are rare. Fucked-up voices with a ton of character—that’s my idea of a great voice. My first album, people were going, “Steven, I know that’s you singing, but how come it doesn’t sound like you?” “Well,” I tell them, “I didn’t like my angelic voice so I did it in my fake ghetto voice.” It was then I realized that I needed to fuck it up good. Like the great ones, like Janis: “Whoa Lor-ord woncha buy me-eh a Merrrcedees Benz!” That rusty, ornery, bar-at-closing-time voice. She could fuck up a song brilliantly. She had a raspy, croaky voice, she was born with a raspy voice. She had vocal chops that no other singer had. She wasn’t the perfect American girl. She was skinny, had long fucking thick-ass hair, R. Crumb running out of the pages. You know Angel Food McSpade? She was her fucking white counterpart.

  That was Janis! And don’t I know that! I’ve been around people who break into a tremulous vibrato: “Ha-a-a-a-a-a-a-a to-o-o-o-o dre-e-e-e-am the-e-e-e impossible dre-e-e-e-e-m.” They’ve learned that shit. They’ve spent thousands of dollars to be able to do that fucking vibrato that doesn’t belong in any fucking song. There’s a few who know how to bend it. Robert Plant would do a little bendy thing at the end of a song, but it was all from feeling. You go to Broadway and a guy looks up at the lights and goes,“Hmmmm-hmmm-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-M-M-M-M-M-M-M-M-M-M-NNNN-NNN-NNN-NNNNNNNN!” His fucking head goes bobbing back. It’s all a learned, conditioned thing; it’s dead as a doornail and stale as a stranded whale.

  What about:

  I got a reefer headed woman

  She fell right down from the sky

  Lord, I gots to drink me two fifths of whisky

  Just to get half as high?

  How epiphanous is that to a camp song? You know

  Froggie went a walking one fine day a-woo, a-woo

  Froggie went a walking one fine day

  Met Miss Mousie on the way a-woo, a-woo

  Ridin’ into town alone

  By the light of the moon

  . . . “a-woo” is the same fucking, happy, in-your-face yelp as the chorus to “She Loves You.”

  With Aerosmith we do so many different flavors: “Game On,” “Shank After Rollin’,” “Seasons of Wither,” “Nine Lives,” “Taste of India,” “Ain’t That a Bitch.” We do down-home Delta blues, sleaze boogie, anthems, mandolins, steel-drum calypso, wailing sirens, cat-in-heat yelps, sentimental ballads, metal, Beatles covers, mooing killer whales, and the Shangri Las. You can’t put your finger on what we do, because we do a lot of different kinds of music, unlike Metallica, which does only one genre. Have you ever heard a slow Metallica song? Is there one that you could dance to at a prom? If you asked them, they’d go, “Why would we?”

  You can know all the technical stuff of singing, but it doesn’t matter in the end because it’s too over the heads of the audience anyway. Once you learn the nuances of music, you’ve got to take it somewhere else. There comes a point in most great musicians’ evolution where they no longer hear all that underpinning. They only know the words that are thrown over the music: “Every time that I look in the mirror . . .” You take off from that. You don’t know what you’re singing or what chord it is.

  Animals don’t have brains like ours and are easily impressed by big fake-outs. If you hold a blanket up to a bear, it’ll run away. They tell you, “Lay down.” Yeah, so it eats your ass?! No, you should go “Arhhhh!,” jump up and down, scream, grab a blanket, a big branch. Because an animal doesn’t know the branch isn’t you. Long ago hu
mans found out how to extend their egos: If I build a building, it will be an extension of meeeee. People know it’s not you, but in some way it is you. Just like a song—that’s my feathers, my proud plumage.

  It was March 2001 and I was on a quest for the Grand Pashmina—otherwise known as how a European tour almost got canceled on account of a six-hundred-pound garden ornament. I was up in Sunapee closing up the house. We had a week before going on to Europe to begin a tour. I was trying to lift a six-foot black feather lawn ornament made out of wrought iron. There was still permafrost in the ground, and in trying to move the fucker I pulled both sides of my back out. I couldn’t get out of bed without excruciating pain, and the thought was looming in my mind that we might have to cancel. The gear’s already on its way over there on a steamship. Just to get out of the bed, I’d have to roll on my side and then get on my hands and knees and then slowly get up. It is the worst pain on earth—the muscles were ruptured. I was under a cloud, just a looming sense of doom reawakening my fear of abandonment, the overwhelming feeling of I-know-not-what.

  I went over to Europe anyway—to do a tour promotion. There I am in Munich, freaking fucking out. We get to the hotel and there’s the classic promoter’s assistant. They’re always a hoot. Sometimes you can play them like an old 45—right before the chorus, you lift off the needle because you know what it’s going to be: the thieving, lying voice of the promoter. You try to weasel under the thread of their spiel and get into whatever is actually going on. But on this trip it wasn’t drugs I was after—I was in search of the Grand Pashmina.

  It’s a soft, woven cloth made from the underbelly of goats up in the Himalayas. Every night when the stars shine, their fur glistens with tiny sparks of light. I bought one for six hundred bucks. It was about three feet wide and six feet long, so it could cover me completely, and when I pulled up on it, it was like empress chinchilla, softer than the folds of a clit. And that took my pain away for a minute, and then it all came back horribly, gruesomely, and I finally broke down and said to the promoter’s assistant, “Look, I’m in agony, I can’t move, I won’t be able to perform. My back is fucking killing me.” And she goes, “Ah! Shtop right zere!” She knows about everything in München: legal, illegal, hookers, drugs, record albums, Americanisch food. “Ach, geh scheiss in deinen hut!” she said. Literally, “Oh, go shit in your hat!” But basically, fuck off! And I said, “Really? Thank you!” But then she took me to this doctor who took care of the Munich football team, huge guys who play in the games against England’s Chelsea Arsenal and all that. I walk in and there are six blondes from hell, German blondes. I went, Fuck! In the doctor’s office I’m lying down on the operating table and I say, “Doc, are you fuckin’ kidding with these nurses? How do you work with these gorgeous women?” He goes, “Vell, you should see my vife.” “No, but really, what’s goin’ on with them? Is this—? Are you—? If you’re not careful I’m going to throw ’em in the back room in a few minutes and—” “Nein, das ist not so good to do,” he says. “Dis is vat I got here for you.” And he shows me this concoction that he’s going to use to take care of my pulled back. “I deal vith dis all za time. In two ho-wars it vill be all ofer.” I said, “What?” “Yah, two ho-wars. I just came from America doink the seminar and I showed zem za procedure but zer insurances wouldn’t allow it, because ve do injections in your backbone. Zere, zere, zere, zere, zere, und zere.”

  He’s pointing to the bottom of the spine, on each side of the spine, close to the spine itself. You put a needle in a quarter inch, because the spinal cord’s inside the bone. There’s a little divot there before it goes to your rib cage, a little bit of meat. I’m a little scared and I say, “Can you show me the bottle?” “All right. Read zis.” So he goes out and takes care of another patient, and ten minutes later I’ve read the whole back and it’s a bizarre concoction, a mixture of ground-up liquid rooster comb, shark cartilage, stuff like that and another chemical, butopinexopropophine or something. Shark cartilage, rooster, whatever, but that fleshy substance—that’s the shit! People swear by shark cartilage here in America. Buto-whatever had helped me out for a while, it’s a supplement for cartilage, for back pain, knee pain, joint pain, basically a joint pain supplement. But now I’m getting the great kahuna of all supplements: the cockrilcombsharkcartilegebutoprophine shot. I was scared shitless.

  I was very much in the middle of should-I-do-it-or-not, and just at that moment I said, “All right, fuck it, do it!” He comes in and he gives me a series of twelve shots, on either side of the backbone, like L–9, L–10, whatever. A shot of Novocain first, then the injections after. Then they brought me into another room that was like a closet with a really soft doctor’s table and a bottle hanging from the ceiling. “What’s this?” “Oh, don’t worry. It’s amino acids. It helps in healing.” Well, that’s another thing America doesn’t do. A half hour, forty-five minutes later, I’m peeing in the bathroom and I noticed my back was still a little tight, but it didn’t hurt. Back to the hotel room, watched some TV, went to bed, woke up the next morning . . . pain gone. I’m telling you, gone.

  Back problems seem mild compared to our days of yore, the Aerosmith days of rape and pillage through Europe. I remember one time in the late seventies when we so destroyed a hotel in Germany that Interpol was waiting for us in the next country. We were in Rotterdam and it was “What seems to be the problem, officers?” “Us, international fugitives? What do you mean?” Send lawyers, guns, and money. . . .

  No back problems among the savage roadies in those days, either. Once when we were in Paris the crew were caught in a traffic jam with a bus full of gear. A Citroën had overheated and was smoking in the middle of Rue Foche or some such froggy place, so the roadies just lifted the car up bodily, put it on the sidewalk, and proceeded to the concert site without missing a beat.

  Of course in those days they were superhuman, fortified by chutzpah, lust, and pharmaceuticals. When a doctor came backstage at an Aerosmith concert in those days, they’d say, “Trapper’s here!” And a handful of the crew guys would go over to him, get their teeth taken out quick, and go, “Oh, man, my tooth fell out yesterday!” Bloody their mouth up a little and get OxyContin prescriptions! They’re a fucking bunch of carneys, me included. But I’d get the bill and it would be for six hundred bucks.

  What’s right down from Russia? Ukraine? No, Keep going. Toward England. Yeah, Finland. “Hello Finland!” We played Helsinki and a bunch of other provinces around there. In the Eastern Bloc, I’m looking around and it’s like girls from hell. High cheekbones, blond hair, natural blondes—dirty, but not sewn in and not stripperlike. Real dirty blond hair with rug to match and you just wanted to get down and root for taters. These girls were gothic.

  There’s a name for a girl that shaves her puss because she’s that sexually active and it’s called “Please, Will You Marry Me.” It’s the ones with the tattoo down there, the tramp stamp, the Aerosmith logo with the wings, that are really hot to trot. Or else that have a tattoo with Chinese characters that you don’t know what the fuck it says. Harder, maybe?

  If someone did a study of rock stars . . . Perhaps I should create a chair of Rock Star Sexual Studies at some university. Have them write papers on the sexuality of Keith Richards, Slash, Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, Janis. The boys that Janis loved—and the girls. You’d find that all these rock types have a certain kind of overzealous DNA, a bug-eyed hairy monster gene that leers out of their mom’s pussy the moment they’re born. Hey, we grew up on R. Crumb. We have that head space.

  Everyone wants to see other people naked. I just don’t want to see my schlong on YouTube. I have a guy, Juan, do my dressing rooms because there’s a camera in the wall somewhere waiting till I take my pants off. Fuck yeah!

  Okay, put on our next CD . . . Just Push Play.

  It’s 2001—the new millennium, the New! Improved! Aerosmith! I’m writing “Jaded” with Joe. I’m in Joe’s basement, recording, and I ask him, “What’re we doin’
this weekend?” Now, Joe, because he doesn’t get thick into lyrics and write melody, says, “I’m taking a break. My wife and I are going to the movies.” And I think, well, shit, Teresa is going to be fucking furious with me because we’re not going to the movies. I can’t just stop writing lyrics in the middle of a song. I can’t sing, “Hey, jaded, you got your mother’s smi-ile, but your”—and then answer the phone and just resume what I was writing: “You’ve got your mother’s style, but you’re yesterday’s child to-o me-e, so jaded. . . .” It’s like climbing a rope out of a well—do you stop halfway to answer your cell phone with your foot?

  When you’re in a train of thought like that, you want to keep going. So I went up to Sunapee with my friend the songwriter Marti Frederiksen and left Joe and Billie at home to go to the movies. Then I have to deal with Teresa yelling at me about if they’re taking the weekend off, why don’t you? There’s a little bit of that sideways anger I have toward Joe and his wife leaking out. But it’s just what I have to walk through to get that song out.

  I’m with Marti Frederiksen, we’re out on the lake in a canoe, and we’re writing “Jaded.” Monday we come back, we start in with the band again, and Joe realizes that I’ve written the song without him. Marti was staying at his house and someone in the family read Marti the riot act for being a traitor and writing a song when Joe wasn’t there. But, you know, behaviors can be forgiven and you got to forgive them, they were high.

  Little did I know at the time that Aerosmith’s fate depended on that song. According to Donny Ienner, if we hadn’t come up with that hit, Sony was getting ready to drop us. Period. He said those words to me: “If you hadn’t had that song on Just Push Play, we would have dropped you.” That’s pretty heavy. Shit. But stop me! I can’t write from anger. I’m trying to be the lovely sober Stevie that’s glowing, the placenta waters pouring over me.