Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (10 page)

T
he Chain: me, Don Solomon, and Frankie Ray, 1968. (Ernie Tallarico)

In the summer of 1967 I found myself up in Sunapee with no band and wondering what to do next. I’d been a local star with records on the jukebox, but now kids were asking me, “Where you guys playin’?” Later on that summer I formed another band called William Proud, with Twitty Farren on lead guitar. Twitty used to play acoustic guitar and sing at the Anchorage with a guy named Smitty. Twitty and Smitty were a major thing in New Hampshire. They covered Simon and Garfunkel to the T, nailing uncanny versions of “Sounds of Silence.” We played out in Southampton for the summer, and while we were there wrote “Somebody,” which is on the first Aerosmith album. I collaborated with Don Solomon on most of the early Chain Reaction songs, but with the song “Somebody” (which I cowrote with Steve Emsback), I realized I could truly compose a good song. The inner voice was wailing, “Let’s get cracking here!”

“When I Needed You,” the flip side of the first Chain Reaction single, had a Yardbirdish tinge to it, but “Somebody” was straight Yardbirds. The Yardbirds were so strange and unpredictable. They could make a pop song like “For Your Love” (with its minor key) sound dirgelike and ominous. We’re talkin’ fucked-up time-traveling R&B monks. Gregorian chants! Outlandish Australian wobble-board percussion! Harpsichords and bongos!
They virtually invented the rock solo as an end unto itself
. The Yardbirds used minor thirds and fourths like alchemists. They were really the first progressive rock band, with their use of Eastern melodies on “Over Under Sideways Down,” the howling sirens on “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.” I loved their weirdness and their mystery.

When Henry Smith was working for Zeppelin, Jimmy Page would blow his speakers and Henry would send them to me. I had two huge deer antlers I got from New Hampshire from eight-point bucks, and I put one on the left headboard post of my bed and the other on the right. I’d put my speakers there and painted them with thick phosphorescent paint—five or six coats—so that when you held a lamp to them, they would glow forever . . . well for at least ten or fifteen minutes, but if you smoked pot or took hallucinogens, as we did in high school, that was enough.

I’d draw mustaches on the Beatles and Stones posters and put phosphorescent paint all along the drawers and the knobs of the dressers, so when I went to bed at night, the room was a psychedelic cave! I put
dots,
like, all along the edge of the chest of drawers and the molding. Dot, dot, dot (maybe
that’s
where my . . . thing started), then a nice big fat one, and I did it all over the room with phosphorescent paint, six coats, so it was that thick—to hold the light.

In the middle of the room at the end of my bed, I had a twelve-foot span (from the door to the window) of fifteen thick rubber bands knotted together—which could really stretch out—and in the middle I attached a five-ounce sinker dipped ten times in phosphorescent paint, so it glowed like a fucking red-hot poker. When you let go of the sinker, the linked rubber bands would bounce like crazy . . . swinging in slo-mo, back and forth across the room . . . and you’d be
Star Trek
-trippin’. By the time I was done, when I was, like, seventeen or eighteen and getting ready to move out, my room was a masterpiece. You were in this realm of pulsing phosphorescent light between the speakers. I would smoke a joint, bring the linked rubber bands all the way over to one side of the room, and let it go back and forth, right? ’Cause it was right in the middle.

Then I’d crank up the Association, Pretty Things, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Boy Williamson, and all this weird early German electronica stuff. I’d invite my friends over and they’d get wrapped up in my phosphorescent audio wonderland.

I
went up to the Woodstock Festival with Don Solomon and Ray Tabano a day or so early. We told them we were Ten Years After—you never know when that Brit accent is going to come in handy—and they let us in. We made our way through the woods to the Hog Farm. The Hog Farm was the name of Wavy Gravy’s commune in Tujunga, California—the longest-running hippie commune of the sixties. It eventually became what they called “a mobile hallucinatory extended family”—now that’s the kind of extended family I wanted to join. The Hog Farm got involved in the Woodstock Festival to make trails, dig fire pits, and provide a food kitchen. The trail through the woods was called Groovy Way, a quarter-mile path hung with Christmas lights.

When I went to Woodstock, I was tripping my brains out. Everyone always says, “Woodstock, Woodstock—were you there?” but the funny thing is . . . half the people who were there didn’t know
where
they were. I walked over to the stage area from the Hog Farm through a strip of woods with multicolored holiday bulbs running through them. I was so high they were like the mother ship zinging messages to me. And we wouldn’t just do
one
tab . . . I’d already snorted another.
Can
you snort acid? My friend Ray knew Owsley. He would call him on the phone with advice on how to improve the product: “Dude, more colors! More colors!” As high as I was, I could’ve met the Buddha, Murf the Surf, and the Tooth Fairy, and I wouldn’t have turned a hair.

Now, who I
really
would have liked to bump into walking down Groovy Way making her merry way down the path was Janis fuckin’ Joplin! But it was enough just knowing she was there at Woodstock. When I saw Janis sing she blew my mind. Everybody used to think Mick was my real hero, but I’ll confess now (’cause that’s what a memoir is for, right?),
it was Janis.
The scarves on the mic, the howl . . . inspired and perspired by pure 180-proof Joplin. She’s bone deep and still makes me weep. Cole Porter, Nat King Cole . . . the divine vibratos of my youth . . . but none finer nor more sacred than Saint Janis.

And then—this is so amazing!—who do I run into on Groovy Way but Joey Kramer! Joey had been in a band called the King Bees, which was a younger version of the Dantes. Something I’ll never forget, ever, colliding at Woodstock . . . both tripping our asses off. I
loved
the hallucinations; I loved that vibrating, molecular trance. The molecules that are dancing through your body, your hands giving off sparks. Altered states?
Please!
Psychedelics take you places you can’t go on the natch.

One of my literary gurus was Aldous Huxley, who wrote
The Doors of Perception
based on his experimentations with mescaline. He was hip to the whole cosmological, folktale realm that is under the radar of the, um, mundane world. Ah, how did spots get on trout? The Raven did it! Coyote laughed and it rained for twelve years. Those stories. As a youth, it was, “Wow, what a brilliant mind!” Some of those fuckin’ guys—Coleridge, de Quincey—were on laudanum (Victorian smack), too! But really, any of these seekers and freakers, because their thoughts are out of the box, out of their heads . . . you know there had to be something wrong with them. There’s always been something wrong with me, too. I’ve always been the designated patient, clinically speaking, and therefore the bad boy, even in fucking Aerosmith!
Especially
in fucking Aerosmith! But we’ll get into deeper
diagnosis
of my condition later.

If there’s a fifth, sixth dimension. . . .
If?
Oh, come
on
! Anyway, it must be something like what you see on acid. Things would vibrate differently. . . . No kidding! What acid did for me was made me think about other planes and possibilities, contemplate things that I see and feel that aren’t there. I’ve gone to the wall with that stuff, straight and stoned. When I got my new house, I went in, turned all the lights off, sat in a chair in the black, infinite not-wisdom, and said, “Bring it on, motherfucker! Come on! Come on! Where are you? I’m waiting. ’Cause if you’re here . . .
be
here. And if you do show up later, I’m gonna kick your ectoplasmic ass!” You gotta talk tough to demons . . . you can’t shilly-shally or they’ll pounce.

After a couple of days tripping my brains out I was crashing into the deep dark pit of apocalyptic blackness. I didn’t know anything about dope back then. How great would it have been to snort some heroin while you’re coming down from LSD? You’re going into a tailspin, the alien pods have drained your synapses, you’re wildly thinking about the deaths of stars. Everything is profound and meaningless at the same time. The micros of the lysergic acid shrinking the whole universe to the size of a pea—that’s when you need a Valium! “T
AKE ONE OR TWO OR THREE
. . .
AFTER COMING DOWN FROM AN ACID TRIP
.” That’s what it should say on the label.

The morning Hendrix played, Woodstock had become a war zone. We were walking about aimlessly, and then I heard
baa-baw-baw-ba-ba-ba,
the first notes of the Jimified national anthem. It was about three in the morning when he went on. Hendrix was so smart . . . he’d been up all night. I saw him walking around like a visitor from Xanadu. He played “The Star Spangled Banner”
knowing
he’d wake everyone up. That was brilliant! It was like an X-ray report from Alpha Centauri to the third stone from the sun.

After three days of peace, love, music, and massive amounts of drugs, Woodstock looked like Vietnam on acid. People were eating watermelon rinds; the helicopters were thrumming and hovering everywhere. After everybody else had left, the fields all around looked like there’d been a war but with no bodies—sleeping bags instead of corpses.

Somebody stole the gas cap to Don Solomon’s car, and since it rained for two days, the gas tank got full of water and we couldn’t leave. I still have a Coca-Cola cooler that I’d stolen, and I went around picking up everybody’s pipes. There’s a banner that hung behind us at Woodstock with a stick figure holding a cornucopia and with a dick, or a tail, between his legs. I stole that, too. I had Aerosmith’s seamstress, Francine Larness, and her sister duplicate it and I still have them.

At Woodstock I sat and watched Hendrix and Joe Cocker and the Who especially. I had those deranged thoughts watching them up onstage: “Someday I could be that spectacular.” The experience of the first Woodstock totally outweighed the second one that we played at in 1994. We had all those people backstage, and the press is coming to you. Every time I went out of my trailer there were millions of flash cubes in my face. It wasn’t my idea of Woodstock. I would rather have been out there rolling around in the mud. Had I been there as a spectator, I’d have been fucked-up and had that experience again.

At the original Woodstock I was in a tent, and suddenly the tent was making this warping noise from the helicopter blades—it was shivering—it was
alive
! I went outside, my brain on LSD. I was tripping my ass off. I was atomized, sparks were flying off me like a Roman candle, and fuck me if it wasn’t raining frankfurters!
Incoming
! The helicopter was talking to me: “GET OUT OF THE WAY!” it said, like Jehovah out of a cloud, except it was army helicopters dropping six hundred pounds of hot dogs (and pots and pans to cook them) in huge nets. They would hover ten feet off the ground and let their payload drop. I went over and I picked up a pot . . . and started drumming. Then another guy came over and he did the same. Pretty soon, a dozen people banging on pots, then two dozen . . . three. Ken Kesey was there banging on a pot! The original bona fide hippie drum circle. And the beat would change as people dropped out and came in and dropped out and came in again. This went on for days . . . or at least hours that
seemed
like days.

The Vietnam War was terrible, but we made peace by smoking pot. That’s something that we don’t have today. It’s all fucking Ecstasy and clubs and, er, fucking. Back then you passed a joint, and it was “make love, not war.” Everybody was your friend. You’d make eye contact with someone and end up smoking a joint with them. You started talking sweet and beautiful shit. In the sixties everyone had a common ground . . . and pot and the drugs were a big fuckin’ part of it. There’s your triangulation: Pot, Rock, Vietnam (and civil rights).