And the media, my darling . . .
Bitchy Female Fan: Jaysus! He’s not going to play that tired old number, too!
Bitchy Female Fan’s Best Friend: Shut up! They all have to bitch about the press, while at night they pray on bended knee to the Whore of Babble-on that they’ll be mentioned on Page Six.
Me: Ninety percent of everything you read about me in the press was made up. Every rag in England disseminates utter bullshit. “Look,” I say, as sweetly as possible, “before we start, do me a favor, let’s not talk about drugs this time.”
Montage of Announcer’s Voices: The drug-addicted Tyler Perry gave us an interview the other night. . . . The ex-drug-addicted rock star . . . The sixty-year-old Tyler . . . The Jaggeresque Tyler . . . The just-divorced Tyler . . .
Me: It all has to be that or they wouldn’t have their jobs. It’s the oldest game in the book.
But wait, why have I never been on the cover of Wonderland magazine? I’ll dial my press agent. Evan Dando and Rachel Wood get themselves cover stories. I mean, darling, if they can make the cover of Wonderland, why can’t I? So many choices! Should I suck cock or should I suck pussy? Dando or Evan Rachel Wood? I just don’t know . . . maybe I’ll not suck cock and instead I’ll write a song with Evan Dando and I’ll just stick with Julianne Moore and Evan Rachel Wood as far as pussy goes. Yeeeeessss. I mean, really, darling, if they can make the cover of Wonderland—is it worth my tongue on their gynies?
Well, of course, absolutely.
Female fan: Hey, are you Steven Tyler?
Me: I think so.
Oh, fuck the book, you have no idea what movie this is! Get the picture?
STEVEN TYLER, an aging but well-preserved rock star moodily stares into space, wistfully looking out at his twelve-room tree house from the terrace of his eccentric compound in Marshfield, Massachusetts. He’s talking into a digital tape recorder, which he barely knows how to operate.
STEVEN TYLER: (anxious but defiant) “I know you’re not going to have a lot of sympathy for what I’m about to tell you, but it’s my fucking book and I can say what the hell I want, can’t I?” [Click!]
He shuts off the tape recorder and begins again.
STEVEN TYLER: (Cont.) “It’s never again going to be the same way for me as it was before I was twenty-five . . . fuck, is this just too self-indulgent?” [Click!]
But if I’m too self-deprecating it’s gonna sound just like all those other fucking candy-ass autobiographies out there.
(He resumes dictating into the tape recorder.)
“I sometimes have to put myself back in that head space of when I was twenty-two just for my own sanity, because it really sucks. I can’t tell you why, but it doesn’t feel good knowing that people already know all about me. They know my cat’s name, my father’s name, they know where I grew up. I’ll be with people, and after a couple of hours of hanging out they’ll ask me out of the blue, ‘Oh, so do you still have that cat?’ That’s what it’s like for me to be with a girl in a club. I never have to bring up my ex-wife, or my last girlfriend; they know my story; and I’m as tired of it as they are.
“People like to tell stories; they’ll tell me stories about myself . . . they’ll tell me stories about Joe. ‘Joe Perry, he’s outta control, man. Yeah, I was with him the day he shot himself in the foot.’ ‘Oh, yeah?’ You ask, ‘Joe shot himself in the foot? When was that?’ And at the end the story is that he almost shot himself in the foot.”
“I go to people’s houses who work for me and the guy will take me aside and go, ‘Hey, tell the kids that I was your backstage guy, ’cause that’s what I told them.’ And I do it! ‘Your dad, he was the guy . . . Without your dad, Aerosmith woulda . . .’ ’’
“I know all about this because I did it myself. Like when I told that story about Mick, that I was his brother. And imagine! I said we played with the Yardbirds, too. This is when we all carried each other’s equipment from the cars. We drove up to the stage at Staples High School in 1966 with the Chain Reaction. So now people do this stuff about me.
(Reading a poem from his notebook, “Famous Stains.” Clears throat.)
You’re born then you die, do you think that’s what life gets?
Then you’re cheating yourself if the sun never sets.
If truth is the truth and you make it your friend
Then there’ll always be a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The truth that went on that some like to squash
Of the dirt that went into what came out of the wash.
Because Aerosmith, we’re the dirt, we go through the ringer and we come out of the wash!
My line used to be “I snorted half of Peru.” Don’t know where I got that from. Zircon-encrusted tweezers—that’s got to be Zappa. We all get little bits and pieces from the ether, so you got to grab on to something and hold on to it. ’Cuz if you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for the anything, and to me Aerosmith always stood for something. In my book, it would be the three M’s: money, music, and mmmm (pussy). Did I just say that?
I sleep with one eye open. I’m hypervigilant. I overfocus and overanalyze things. I’ve always been that way. That’s part of the insanity of being me. I’ll walk along the sand and will not leave until I have turned over every stone on the beach. I’m obsessed to a fault, and so you couple that with being ADD and we’re off! I’ll start with A, D, C, then I jump to Z. . . . Oh, and by the way:
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gamble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogroves.
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Uh, what was that again?”
“What do you mean? WHAT DO I MEAN?!”
If I quit Aerosmith tomorrow, I’ll just go paddle my own canoe. I love canoing so much that I brought mine to Maui and married it. It’s the only place they let you marry an inanimate object as long as you do the sacred kiawe (kee-ah-way) dance.
Steven’s Secrets of Life #9: Get Nekkid. I’ll tell you, this year Erin and I got back from a ride from Sturgis one night. Took a shower and walked nekkid out in the backyard, as it was 92 degrees, while smoking a cigarette. I said, “Oh, my god! This must be what it’s like in paradise, to be walking around naked outside this house, as Donovan must have imagined when he wrote ‘Wear Your Love Like Heaven’ . . . he just called me to say hi. Adam and Eve, man, they knew.”
Even Eve in Eden
Voices try deceiving
With lies to show the lady the way
At first I stopped and stared and tried to walk away . . .
Yeah, she ate it
Lordy, it was love at first bite
Yeah, she ate it
Never knowing wrong from right
Most of what happens in life is based on electromagnetism. Each of us generates a specific type of electricity, our own frequency. We each have a unique aura, and auras are connected to each other by the electromagnetism that comes out of your personality. If you’re a sex addict and you walk into a room full of people, without saying a word to them, you can make contact, they know who you are. “They smell ya!” as my friend Ray Tabano would say.
Energy is an almost psychic property. I remember Mouse McElroy and his girlfriend when we lived in the old gray clapboard house in Sunapee. Mouse was a keyboard player, and right out of the blue—vrrrr-vrr-vrt—he would go into seizures. Grand mals! And right before this guy would go off, go out, you could feel it thirty seconds before. He’d be still looking around the room, but you’d feel this surge of energy emitting from him like silent lightning.
I’m, what, sixty-three now? I’ve been to Maine, Spain, Spokane, seen goats fuck in the marketplace, but it’s taken me sixty years to realize I don’t know anything. I’ve come to find that out after going around and through all this—I really don’t know what the hell it’s all about . . . and I like that.
Wait! Stop! I’m not finished! Are you crazy, this i
sn’t the end of the book! I have more to say, you fucks! Turn the fucking page!
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
To Zanzibar and Back
The man said, “Why do you think you here?”
I said, “I got no idea.”
AMY WINEHOUSE, “REHAB”
The press are always there, like jackals, hanging around at the gates as the latest celebrity drug addict drags his sorry ass into a waiting limo. When I came out of the Chit Chat rehab in Wernersville, Pennsylvania, in 1989, it was for the last time—I’d hoped. The press asked, with their fake sympathy, “So, how was it, Steve, getting through all that?”
The thirty days? Or the forty years it took me to get here? I think thirty days is a small price to pay for the rest of my life. “If it helped you find your soul again,” I said, “then how can you not owe it your life?”
And then I began to explain, in the way the recovering addict is expected to do, with the required contrition and shame. And then you give them the promised fairy-tale ending, renewed faith in life after the nightmare of addiction and willful self-destruction. All true—I wasn’t just mouthing pieties about my road to recovery—but there was something I wasn’t saying, not because I was hiding anything but just because it was so weird and intimate and ultimately unexplainable. Some of it I missed, some of it I got. The fairy-tale links I understood.
As a child I lived in the woods and I saw where the sap to make maple syrup came from, and later on I sought it out. I went and got some heroin because I wanted to feel what it was like not just to taste the sap from the tree, but to feel it coursing through my veins, opium from Mother Earth, the resin of the poppy plant. The gooey nectar of the earth—roots, tendrils growing out of the damp, humid soil. Unconsciously I connected the pine trees, the unearthly silence of the woods I had played in, with the opium I numbed myself with—as if the two linked a secret passage back to my childhood.
But my romance with opium and heroin and drugs of all kinds was over. Or so I thought. Though I lived on the tail of a comet and though I came from a town called Euphoria. In 2007 I left my home for a world tour. Everything was fine. I was feeling no pain. Why? After twelve years of being straight, I’d started using painkillers again because I was in terrible pain from my feet.
On May 31, 2007, we played to forty thousand people at the Dubai Exiles Rugby Club stadium in Dubai, Saudi Arabia. It was so hot there we couldn’t play until eleven o’clock at night when the temperature had gone down to eighty, eighty-five degrees. I greeted the crowd in Arabic. Okay, one word, marhaba! (welcome), but still . . .
Me and Billie Perry raising the bar . . . the band and Bar Rafaeli, 2007. (Steve Erle/Sports Illustrated/Contour by Getty Images)
The day of the concert, Erin and I went out into the desert with Sand Dune Explorers, camelback tour rides. We rented five trucks and took along a bunch of people from the hotel, security, and a truckload full of camera gear and stuff for a photo shoot. The SUVs were flying up and down the dunes, some thirty feet high, like we were surfing great sand waves. They have to let the air out of the tires to get traction on the sand. We drove for twenty minutes into the great unknown of sand and sand and more sand. It was 110 degrees out there. If I’d been left out there I wouldn’t know where in hell I was. It’s just a sea of sand, like being in the middle of the ocean. Sandstorms in the desert come up out of nowhere and hit so fast, they’re tsunamis of sand, and when that happens you’re not only lost, you’re blinded.
A group of Bedouins was crossing the dunes on camels. I was curious about how they found their way around out there, so we drove over to talk to them. Some of these camels cost more than a Lamborghini. One of the Bedouins told me that the camel he was riding on was a dromedary of a very high strain and worth two hundred thousand dollars. There are racing camels worth over a million dollars. I asked him, “How do you know where you’re going out here, with no landmarks, no signs?” And he goes, “Well, the camels know—if you’re lost the camel will take you back.” “Ah, no wonder the price!” I’d pay it, too; it’s fucking life-threatening out there.
And not only do camels have their own GPS sensors, they also invented butter. Yeah, they did. When the Bedouins carried milk across the desert in goatskin bags, they found that it had turned into a solid—butter—when they got to the other side. But I prefer the account of the invention of butter in Little Black Sambo, a book my mother read to me (it wasn’t as politically incorrect when I was growing up as it is today). They were fantastic tales and great fun. Sambo was a little boy from India. Four hungry tigers are pursuing him, and in order to avoid being eaten by them he has to give them his colorful new clothes, his shoes, and his umbrella. Each one of the jealous, conceited tigers wants the clothes and umbrella for itself, and they begin to chase each other around a tree, going faster and faster until their orange and white stripes begin to blend and they end up a pool of delicious butter.
I’ve often wondered if I could be turned into something like that when I pass away. Instead of burying me in a family plot somewhere they could scatter my ashes all over the sand of Big Beach in Maui. That way after I’m dead I’d still be getting into girls’ bikini bottoms.
We came offstage around two in the morning—all I wanted to do was decompress. I was looking forward to walking around the town, going to the marketplace in Dubai, just being somewhere I’d never been before. I get back to the room and go to bed. The next morning I wake up and I hurt like hell. I’m in excruciating pain from my feet. My feet are screaming at me, “What the hell were you thinking last night? You trashed us!” The night before I’d been running, leaping, levitating onstage for two hours as the pointman for Aerosmith—but the point was I trashed my feet, and now, the day after, I’m paying the price. And we still had concerts to play in Sweden, Germany, England, Ireland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and Russia—not to mention twelve dates in Canada and the U.S.
Taj and Ranger, fall 2010. (Chris O’Brien)
On June 2 we played India! We had always wanted to play India, and in 2007 we got to do a concert in Bangalore. India has been a huge part of my life. I named my son, Taj, in part for the Taj Mahal. I wrote “Taste of India” in 1997, simply because . . .
It’s like your first taste love of vindaloo
That sets your heart on fire
And if you let her stuff get into you
It will be all that you desire
When you make love to the sweet Tantric priestess
You drink in the bliss of delight
But I’m not afraid when I dance with her shadow
This time I’m gonna get it right
She’s gonna whet my appetite
Just lookin’ for a little taste, taste of India
She’ll steal the smile right off your face
I love Indian food, Indian incense, Indian printed fabrics—onstage at Bangalore I wrapped myself in yards of batik print shawls (leather pants and a black ganji top, for the fashionistas).
One of my favorite books is Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. Snake charmers, levitating yogis, many-armed blue gods and goddesses, roaming elephants with silk towers on which maharajas ride, temples covered with statues of couples caressing, copulating, doing the wild thing in a thousand yoni positions. And the Kama Sutra—the bible of sex! And in honor of Shakti, Hindu goddess of love and the unknowable feminine, I stripped halfway through the show to bare my stomach, on which I’d written “LICK ME!” in Hindi. I think it meant more to me than it did them.
I discovered the erotic origin of yoga while reading about Tantric sex some fifteen years ago when I was into meditation. And it turns out that yoga was originally created so that the maharaja could stay harder for a longer period of time so as not to let any of the harem girls down. He had seven or eight beautiful girls in his harem. The first girl, whom he’d got when he was younger . . . was now the taskmaster to the other girls, and with a gold-braided whip she trained them to do things to excite the maharaja’s pleas
ure. They had to adopt ways for the marahaja to exercise. He had to stand on his head for hours in the hot sun just to be able to meet them adequately with his manliness. His temple guards saw him doing this and thought there is an easier way. They knew just what the maharaja liked: the perfect plump ass, nice firm breasts, a tight sweet yoni—but as we know, it goes deeper than that. All is good in the palace, but after five or ten years of this life, with all these women at his beck and call, his back is killing him from servicing all the palace punani . . . and what is he to do? Well, one day, the maharaja was sitting under a palm tree eating a date when his old teacher, a wise and horny old sage appeared, a Sufi master bringing some hash and the special dates with the almonds in the middle—whatever exquisite treats it takes to get through to the maharaja and not get your head chopped off. “Ah, Babu,” he says, “just the man I want to see!” “I hear you, oh great panjandrum, and I have just the thing: yoga. If you follow my practical asana exercisings—the Cat-Cow stretch, the Downward-Facing Dog pose, the Awkward Chair pose, and the Half Lord of Fishes pose—you will be able to fuck all the girls till kingdom come and you will not have a single twinge in your spine.” And the maharaja was well pleased with this advice and said, “We could have a chain of yoga centers in the United States of America and make a fortune with this silly business and the confused seekings of the baby boomers!”
We arrived at the Bengaluru International Airport in Bangalore, India, and were greeted by a thousand Indian fans who took us by surprise. We were whisked into limousines and headed off to the hotel. But as we were to find out it was much more than a hotel. When we arrived, a ten-foot gate opened to reveal a full-on hundred-piece Indian marching band complete with giant elephant for us to ride to our rooms.
The elephants dropped us off, and Erin and I walked into our room. There was a big bowl of mangoes and papayas and anything your heart desires awaiting us. Beautiful arrangements of tropical flowers, a prince of a man is standing outside our door to be ready at our beck and call to fulfill our slightest whim. “Steven” is embroidered on the pillowcases, I kid you not. “God,” I said to Erin, “pinch me. When are we gonna wake up?” She said, “The way things are I hope we never do.”
Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? Page 34