Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

by Tyler, Steven

  With songwriters, when one of you comes up with a line, a riff, the other guy doesn’t go, “Oh, shit, he’s getting all the credit for this.” Someone picks a little bit of inflection that you said and says something that you would have never thought of, and that propels you, the song builds, you climb up another rung. You’re a man possessed! You can’t even stop to wee-wee! Writing “Jaded”—was it out of anger?

  When you write a song with somebody you’re evoking the spirits of a moment in time, flecks of words, tunes, riffs hovering in the air, trip wire, seconds where you sing. When I heard Joe play that riff, I knew where to hang my hat.

  Hey j-j-jaded, you got your mama’s style

  But you’re yesterday’s child to me

  So jaded

  You think that’s where it’s at

  But is that where it’s supposed to be

  You’re gettin’ it all over me X-rated

  My my baby blue

  Yeah I been thinkin’ about you

  My my baby blue

  Yeah you’re so jaded

  And I’m the one that jaded you

  Cyrinda died on September 7, 2002. Let a song go out of my heart.

  When bad things happen, people tend to go, “God. It’s God. God did everything. There are no coincidences, and everything that happens happens for a reason.” Well, I sure don’t think Cyrinda should have died from a brain tumor! Was it me? Should I have made my first marriage last, no matter what, till death do us part? Should I have made that work? Well, sad to say I’m not a good candidate for saving a bad marriage. I could barely keep my head above water myself in those days. Or should I have, when I was in rehab, forced her to go into rehab with me? “Your toothbrush is packed and you’re leaving tomorrow.” That one really haunts me. I told her, “I’ll send the plane,” but Cyrinda did not want to go. Who does? I should have gone and gotten her myself. That might have worked, but I don’t know. Until people are ready to stop, it doesn’t work. And even then it rarely works.

  When I found out she had cancer, I tried to help, but it was too little too late. I got my doctors together at Sloan-Kettering to check her out, a room at the Grammercy Park Hotel, and bah-be-dah-bah. Such a sad end, so unfair for someone who had to put up with me for too much of her life.

  In 2006 I was at the clinic at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and Dr. Sanjiv Chopra (he’s Deepak Chopra’s brother) said to me in his the-monkey-knowest-not-the-taste-of-ginger voice: “It is time, Steven. Go in for your hepatitis C treatment now; neither time nor the Ganges waits for critical matters such as this. You know what I am telling you: if this bad business is happening all the time to you, only worse will come of it.”

  Me and Lynda at Christmas, 2006. (Melissa Mahoney © Steven Tallarico)

  I’d known I had hep C for years, because a few years before this a doctor had told me, “You know, Steven, you’ve got something weird in your blood.” I would do blood tests three times a year and see my viral levels. I was asymptomatic, meaning no symptoms, so who gives a shit? People who have hep C are usually lethargic and tired. But I never get sick on tour, because on the road my subconscious functions on another level from that of other humans. It’s as if when I’m about to get sick, the flu, or whatever, it goes, “Oh, shit, you’re going onstage? I’m fucking outta here!” I had hep C for four years and it never stopped me.

  “Now, Steven,” Dr. Chopra said, “I am very pleased your subconscious is so obliging and you are asymptomatic and so on and so forth, but veritably, it is time.”

  “Time? For what, Dr. Chopra?”

  “Time the band took a year off.”

  I went, “Oh, shit!” But wait, it gets worse. . . .

  I was staying at my brother-in-law Mark Derico’s house because at the time we were in the process of fixing my house, rebuilding Taj’s and Chelsea’s rooms, and a lot of other stuff. Teresa would be over at the site during the day, and occasionally so would I. The main part of the house was cordoned off with tarps. Mark is not only my brother-in-law, but when he’s not bulding houses in the New England area, he’s my partner in crime in Dirico motorcycles. But later for that. He’s been building houses for the last thirty years—some of the finest homes in all of New England, the kind of houses that will still be standing two hundred years from now—double insulation, commercial standard heating and plumbing, all that stuff. Mark had a troop of twelve guys doing major reconstruction, when one of them caught Teresa’s eye.

  Chelsea, me, Taj, and Mia backstage in Boston, 2006. (Ross Halfin for Aerosmith)

  So the band took the year off. We’re rebuilding the house and there’s these roofers and sheetrockers from hell with no shirts and pierced nipples and they’re climbing all over the house like red ants fixing it up. Chelsea and Teresa would be over there checking on the progress—but little did I think that they were looking at these construction workers like that. Teresa had told me that there were some hotties over there and Chelsea was buzzing around—she was fourteen, fifteen—but stupidly it didn’t occur to me that my wife had her eye on one of the guys, too, and that he was making eyes at her—just as I do on the road with hotties in the front row.

  I said to Sanjiv Chopra, “You know what? Send a couple of nurses out and show me how to do it.” So they came out with a month’s supply of needles, which come in a box. There’s four in a box, they look like darts and they’re filled with interferon and you keep them in the refrigerator. The ampoules are loaded, you pinch the fat on your side, which everyone calls love handles, but I don’t have, stick in the needle, and go pkkkkt! into your skin. Pkkkkt! Monday Pkkkkt! Tuesday. Pkkkkt! Wednesday. My joints ached. I tossed and turned . . . I couldn’t sleep.

  The nurses gave me a month’s supply of interferon and a bottle of ribavirin pills—that’s this system called Pegasus for treating hep C. I’d been put on interferon ten years ago, and my viral levels actually went up—and that’s not good. But I was reassured that that had frequently happened in the past but that the FDA had done new tests and released it as effective, mixed with the pills. They claimed this new regimen would kick hep C’s ass 70 to 80 percent of the time.

  Dr. Chopra told me to do it for nine months—I did it for a year. I walked the distance. But the interferon not only kicks hep C’s ass, it kicks your ass. You take three pills in the morning and two at night. Your muscles ache, you can’t get out of bed, you hurt all over, your hair starts falling out, your fingernails turn yellow, your toes turn orange and purple. You feel like you’re dying, and that’s what it is meant to do: trick your body into thinking it’s dying. Your immune system goes, “Oh, shit! I’ve gotta get it together and knock this thing out of my system or we’re both gonna croak!” If there’s anything threatening your body, your immune system revs up, kicks ass, and kills it. The hep C virus lives primarily in the liver. But you can’t inject the liver; whatever you put in there doesn’t stay, it gets pissed out. So how else to deal with problems connected with the liver than by putting your whole immune system in jeopardy?

  Several times in the night, I would have to move over to the other side of the king-size bed because there would be a huge wet spot—and not from the reasons I would have loved. I’d go through four T-shirts a night, I’d wake up all clammy and wring them out. Your body’s sweating, thinking it’s dying. I did the whole process for a year, but after the third month, I said, “Fuck this, I can’t stand the pain,” so I went to the doctor. I told him, “I’m not taking anything. I’m a drug addict and alcoholic and proud of it, and I’m not gonna!” And Dr. Chopra in his all-knowing-all-seeing voice, says, “Well, I don’t want you to suffer.” At which time the addict in me responded, “All right, Doc, give me whatever ya got.” I’m on half a Vicodin in the morning and half at night. This could be a litmus test for addicts: if you give five people Vicodin, four will fall asleep and one will stay up and clean his room. That would be the addict—and that would be me. So now I need a sleeping pill t
o get me outta my room. Oooh, my addict loves that!

  So it’s the third month into the hep C treatment, and I’m back on the drugs. My wife decides to leave me (let another song go out of my heart!), I’ve got both the kids in the house. I’ve been diagnosed with a brain tumor, and on top of it all, the doctors say I’m in a clinical depression. Ya think? I’m a fuckin’ mess (who wouldn’t be). Oh, God! What next?

  What the hell! Was there a snaggle-toothed witch somewhere cackling over a Steven Tyler doll made of wax?

  Where shall I stick this pin next, my pet?

  In the heart or better yet,

  Liver, knee, toe, or spleen?

  For Steven Tyler shall not rise again.

  Is that my phone beeping or is it my brain? Does the noise in my head bother you?

  For five months I was a weeping, crying mess living in the other side of my house, sleeping in a room with my son, Taj, who at the time was eight. He’s worried about what’s going to happen to his mom.

  “Mom’s gonna be fine,” I’m telling him. “Don’t worry, everything’s gonna be all right,” as I hold back the tears. I never cried in front of the kids when it came to me and their mother. I loved her then as I love her today. And I would never let them think that I didn’t.

  It was the first time the band took a year off in thirty years. They went to Florida, bought cars and fucked and ate ice cream, and I went through hep C hell and lost my wife. Alleged friends of mine, people reading some crackpot book, would say to me, “Steven, dude, it’s your karma, you had it coming.” I-don’t-think-so. After the hep C treatment, I was doing half a Vicodin twice a day and all that. I had twelve years’ sobriety when all that shit hit the fan.

  And so the hep C treatment went for a year of that, and then I doubled up on the pills: I took three in the morning and three at night. I locked myself in my uncle Ernie’s room in the back part of my house and lived there. I was off and running with the drugs. Most people stop the hep C treatment. They start doing it and they go, “Fuck this, I can’t go to work!” Luckily I didn’t have to go to work. Killing the hep C was my job. I persisted. And now I’m durn near down with the flu. . . . My toe got sick and my liver too. Oh, man, I’m beginning to sound like a Luke the Drifter song:

  The hogs took the cholera and they’ve all done died

  The bees got mad and they left the hive

  The weevils got the corn and the rain rotted the hay

  But we’re still a-livin’, so everything’s okay

  And ten months, twelve months later, nondetectable in my bloodstream! Done! Ding! Over. I did it. Wife’s still gone, but we go back on tour. I was lucky for the diversion but still brokenhearted.

  Teresa left me for this young guy with pierced nipples who was building our house. Why she did it I don’t know. Everyone’s got their reasons—even Hitler had his reasons! “You were gone for ten years,” she told me. It killed me. I may have cheated on her, but I was home every night I wasn’t touring. You have a marriage, you got kids, you bring millions of dollars home. It doesn’t make any difference. You had an affair! You cheating, adulterous, sonofabitch! And to her I was that guy.

  If a woman marries a rock star, doesn’t she know that women are constantly throwing themselves at him, and being a man, what is he meant to do? How about if I was married to Pam Anderson? Would I be surprised if last time she visited Kid Rock they slept together that night? Fuck no! I could be completely wrong here . . . but she’s a sex symbol and I’d have to understand that. Sex symbols attract sex and they get off on the interplay. It’s the drama of it, and that’s how they derive their sense of power. True or false? I’ve heard this over and over and I tend to agree. But in the end I hurt her and I so regret what I did.

  We could’ve worked it out. “You’d rather leave me than work through it!” I said. Of course, I made the mistake of going to her and telling her I’d had an affair. My friends would say, “What’d you tell her for? You goddamn fool!” And they’d be fuckin’ right. When I was younger, for guys it was “Lie till you die.” There is no telling a woman. Especially if she says to you, “Just tell me the truth, I won’t be mad.”

  In August 2008, my daughter Mia had a book out called Creating Myself: How I Learned That Beauty Comes in All Shapes, Sizes, and Packages, Including Me. She called me up: “Daddy, I’m going to be on Good Morning America with Matt Lauer and talk about the book. I just wanted you to know.” When I saw her talk about her problems I was mortified. She was telling the world that she’s a cutter—still cuts herself when she’s stressed. It really hit me hard, because I wasn’t there for her when she was growing up. Oprah and everybody watching who gets the big picture is going to go: “What a bitch of a father! She must have been crying in the empty house and in a desperate state and turned to cutting herself.” And that’s what I knew when I read her book.

  Like father like daughter. Mia had drug problems as a teenager—drinking, diet pills—but I didn’t know about her cutting herself. At one point I tricked her into going to rehab, saying I was sending her to a spa in California. My heart broke thinking that I had anything to do with her drug addiction. In the end I told her about this old AA slogan that I’d heard in the halls, where a lot of people vent their woes: “A lot of your problems have my name on them, but most of the solutions will have your name on them.”

  Not long after that I was walking along the beach, I dropped to my knees, I began crying because I realized that I’d gotten sober, but I hadn’t done it for my kids, or even my own health. I hadn’t thought about them when I was using, so why would I have gotten sober for them, either. Drugs robbed me of my spirituality and compassion, only later to find I’d lost Liv and Mia as well—I cried when they forgave me for my past behaviors but I’ll be working on it for the rest of my life.

  What would I say to my children? We may have picked the key but they are their own song. We don’t own them, they only pass through us, as Kahlil Gibran says in The Prophet, they don’t owe us anything, either.

  Your children are not your children,

  They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

  They come through you but not from you,

  And though they are with you yet they belong not to you . . .

  For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

  which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

  Mia mine, 2010. (Mia Tyler)

  In the end, all I could do was write a song for her.

  On na na . . . na na na na na . . .

  On na na . . . na na na na na . . . .

  Hush-a-bye my baby soft and new

  Oooh loveliness gypsy dance in the rain

  Hush-a-bye my baby what’cha do

  Oooh the baby cry

  The wind she’s callin’ your name . . . (Mia)

  Ooooh . . . (Mia) ooooh . . . (Mia)

  Ooooh . . . (Mia) ooooh . . .

  Where you came from you ain’t alone

  Live and loved from the old jawbone

  Oh don’t you cry you’re home sweet home

  Rock-a-bye sweet lady gypsy blue

  Oooh the nightingale’s singin’ her song in the rain

  Hush-a-bye sweet lady soft and new

  Oooh don’tcha cry the wind she’s a screamin’ your name . . . (Mia)

  Ooooh . . . (Mia) ooooh . . . (Mia)

  Ooooh . . . (Mia) ooooh. . .

  Come too soon that sunny day

  You give your heart away

  No divorcée or repouise’ . . . yeah . . . yeah

  (Mia)

  Ooooh . . . (Mia) ooooh . . . (Mia)

  Ooooh . . . (Mia) ooooh . . . (Mia)

  Ooooh . . . (Mia) ooooh . . . (Mia)

  (Mia)

  Last year I told the band we should call our next album 20 Summers. They all went, “Oh, 20 Summers, man, that’s so great.” Pause. “What the fuck does that mean?” “Well,” I said, “you know . . . that’s
all you got left.” And everybody gasped. People don’t like to think about it, but like the Irreverend Steven Tyler said:

  Ladies hold the aces

  And their lovers call it passion

  The men call it pleasure

  But to me it’s old-fashioned

  Times they’re a changin’

  Nothin’ ever stands still

  If I don’t stop changin’

  I’ll be writin’ my will

  It’s the same old story

  Never get a second chance

  For a dance to the top of the hill

  Me running the loop in Sunapee passing a jogger running the other way,

  Female voice: Hey, I know you.

  Me: Ya think?

  I walk off the set of Good Morning America after I’ve done another phony intimate interview. I go into a bathroom and some little shit has followed me in there. Christ! I’m pissing at the urinal, “Hey, man . . . ?” And, right there, it cuts off the flow. I mean how am I expected to pee when the guy standing next to me is hemorrhaging internally, his fucking urine flow ain’t going nowhere either. My nerves have somehow pinched it off and nothing’s come out of me, so I head off to a toilet stall to finish the job. I close the door, and it’s like Aaaaah, a shiver goes down my backbone because finally no one’s staring at me, no one’s trying to get at me. I’m alone in my wild lonesome in that room . . . and for that one blissful moment I think to myself, Finally, you’re in peace. Then, here it comes from over the top of the stall, a woman’s voice, “Can I have your autograph?” I turn whilst still in midstream and piss all over her pumps. And for one wild moment and while we’re stewing in my own juices, I realize life’s a pisser when you’re a-peeing.

  The aloneness—it’s a world in and of itself.

  Bitchy Female Fan: Boo-hoo!

  Bitchy Female Fan’s Best Friend: Let him finish. This is a riot!

  It’s the yang of yin, if I may put it like that. It’s the other side of frivolous, kinetic, sparking energy! It’s a deep void, the silent play square. In that anechoic chamber of my own brain, anything I want to come out can, because it’s not being interrupted by other ignorant motherfuckers—otherwise known as the precious children of God.