Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (16 page)

Father Frank was a brilliant promoter and a visionary—he understood us—but he didn’t have the connections we needed to get a record contract, so he became partners with two guys from New York, David Krebs and Steve Leber, who knew the record business. They managed the New York Dolls, the hippest, most outrageous band around, so we were thrilled—initially, anyway. They would arrange for us to perform at a showcase for the major record companies at Max’s Kansas City. They also helped us out of a few jams. Frank died from cancer some years later and the voices inside me said he knew something was going on . . . so he passed us over to Leber and Krebs.

Probably through some other-world connection of Father Frank’s, we occasionally played seedy joints like Scarborough Fair, a Boston bar where you could get shot for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. One New Year’s Eve we were playing a gig there. The place was packed with bikers and local thugs. A great hairy biker chick came up to us and gave the band a nasty arm’s-length
fuck you.
“Hey,” I said, “I can see your string hangin’.” A gasp went up from the crowd in the bar, and right then I knew we were in serious fucking trouble. She was the girlfriend of the president of the Trampers, a gang of bikers that were too lame to make it into the Hells Angels . . . a “menstrual cycle gang” I called them. The guys in the crew told us that I’d insulted the biker babe’s honor and the Trampers were lined up outside and were going to stomp us all to death. I am, I admit, a foul-mouthed individual. None other than Chuck Berry dubbed us “full of soul—and full of filth.” I was forced to make a groveling apology to the girl; then we called the cops and got the hell out of there.

We started out doing tours of clubs and colleges around the Northeast in an Olds Delta 88, amply fortified with drugs. Which makes the highway a little hairy. It was just around the beginning of Aerosmith, ’71, ’72, playing a gig in some godforsaken place, we were on the New Jersey Turnpike and the fucking cops pulled us over. They found some pot in someone’s bag in the trunk. I had put a bag of pot down my pants. Brad had two ounces of pot stuffed in his right pocket, Tom had a couple of roaches in a film canister, and my hash coffin—that infamous tiny metal box—had some hash dust and a Nembutal in it. The cops saw us throw the pot out the window of the car.

So off to the police station. We were handcuffed to this bar that ran along a wall that looked like a dance bar. I still have the pot down my pants and am handcuffed to Joe, but I had one free hand. When the cops went to go book us they said, “You know, that’s the Aerosmith guy.” “Oh, really?” came the echo. We were kind of known, but not that well known. They left us in the hallway, and as soon as there was a moment where no one was around, I took the pot out really quick and threw it across the room. We wound up in Booking. They let us go one at a time. “What’s your name? Stand there. Your weight?” And as they were taking a picture I looked up, and
right
on his desk is where the bag of pot had landed. The cop never saw it!

I thought,
that
is it! I went, “Hey, you guys, look!” And they went, “Shut up!” all nervous and shit. That’s my band. Beavis and Butthead would have gone, “Heh-heh-heh, that’s so fucking cool!” But my band was, “Shut up! You’re gonna get us busted!” I think Joey had it down his pants. By some miracle . . .
misplaced evidence . . .
and help from our managers, Leber-Krebs, who got us the heavy-hitting lawyers—we were all slapped with misdemeanors and then released. Back on the road to ruin!

Early tours were very simple affairs. We had the two Joes—limousine drivers from Buffalo who drove us around the Midwest—plus a station wagon for the bags. Both drivers were Italian and pretty dumb, but one of them was way dumber. Joe the Dumber won the Golden Sow Award for pulling this girl backstage in Terra Haute; she had a little sailor outfit on, white pleated skirt and the whole bit, a big healthy corn-fed State Fair girl.

One of the best things the band did early on was to use that billboard in Copley Square. Raymond came up with the idea. The billboard had had nothing on it for a while, so we worked out a deal with them to put the Aerosmith wings up. This was after we got the wings redesigned. The first Aerosmith backdrop cloth had the A logo with wings on it, but they look like bat wings, little stubby things.

The deal with the billboard company was that we could put our logo up and then when somebody wanted to come and rent it, fine, they could just cover it over. It was up there for a long time. Anybody that came in or out of Boston saw those wings before they even knew who we were. That was ’72, ’73. It was above New England Music City. Fenway Park is right there. You go over that little footbridge and you’re in the park.

Those were the days. New England Music City was a record store; it was about the size of probably the bathroom of a hotel suite. A tiny little corner store. It’s probably a Cumberland Farms franchise or a Store 24 now. But that was where you’d go and flip through the records back in the day; you could read all about the bands on the back of the album.

After 1325 Com. Ave. we rented a house at 39 Kent Street in Boston with all these sailors. Back then we were lowlifes who didn’t live anywhere and were just barely getting by. We made our first tapes at my friend Rick Smith’s house—he’s now a manager. Rick had a rich college friend who had tape recorders, so we got a chance to record things like “Walkin’ the Dog” and shit like that before we made our first album. And that’s where we began to start thinking seriously about making a record and saw that we could. They had a room that was all lined with cork so you could laugh and sing and play late at night, and no one would hear you.

At that time I was hanging out with Buddy Miles. He had this giant silver skull full of cocaine. The night I met the
skull,
David Hull and Charlie Farren (Buddy’s guitar and bass player) joined us in the living room, where the drummer told all these wild tales. Buddy had been in a lot of famous bands. He’d played with Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Wilson Pickett, Mike Bloomfield’s Electric Flag, and had been the drummer in Jimi Hendrix’s last group, Band of Gypsys. I asked Buddy questions about what it was like to go on tour. “Where do you stay? What do you do? The girls, do they come to your room? Oh, you go down to the bar and find them there? Oh yeah!” I had never actually gone on tour yet. What we did in the early days was do one-offs. He told us what it was like to be on the road, the perks, so to speak, and I was flabbergasted. It was my first taste of what I wanted.

In my room on Kent Street I created my psychedelic cave. I went to the Army and Navy Store and bought a parachute, a big fucker, it would drape an entire ceiling. Then in the middle where there was a hole, I tacked it up around the light and draped the sides. The parachute was white, so I took four boxes of red dye, put it in the washing machine on hot, and when it came out, it was a nice blood red. Then I strung Christmas lights, tacked them up along the sides, so my room resembled a big tent. I’d open the door and pull the parachute silk up and over. When you went in there, it was like being in the womb. It was like a
red cave,
a safe place . . . and the Christmas lights behind the parachute were on and blinking and you felt
hmm-hmm
. I’d pull the plug for the lights out and go to sleep.

M
y room at Kent Street in Brookline, Massachusetts, 1971, with my red parachute and our original backdrop that I stole from Woodstock. It was the original Shroud of Tourin’. (Joe Perry)

I lived in black orchid oil—that intoxicating aroma. It’s now illegal to make it because of how many orchids they have to smush to make the oil. At first I got the orchids from a friend, and then in the seventies I began to grow orchids myself. It has to be really hot and steamy for orchids to thrive, so I always had two vaporizers going in my room. Oh, it was sticky sweet and she’s my girl. Everything was wet and dense like the Amazon . . . the Matto Grosso.

That room inspired my singing and writing because when I went in there, nothing else existed. I guess normal people can do that without creating an Amazonian rain forest in their bedroom. They can go to the library and write their essays and stories, bury their face in a book, they’re so into it. But I was pretty much so ADD that I had to live in a psychedelic cocoon. Not that I minded distractions from appliances. If the TV was on when I was studying, I loved it. And all the kids today, every one of them can study with the TV. I look at my daughters Mia and Chelsea and they can cram for finals to Pharrell while applying nail polish at the same time.
Holy multitasking, Batman!
But that orchid-oil drenched parachute cave was for me a really safe, warm womb to work in . . . a sanctuary so hot and humid, seeds would sprout in there, spontaneously evoking the demons I danced with to write my lyrics.

N
ineteen seventy-two was a much better year for us. We played Max’s Kansas City, the legendary New York club, three times that year.

M
e in the macramé shirt I wore until it rotted off and I hung it from my mic stand, 1972. (Ron Pownall for Aerosmith)

I spent the hour before the gig looking out the window thinking,
My god, what are all those limousines doing out there?
And then a mad thought came to me:
Oh, my god, John Lennon’s here!
But of course he wasn’t. It was a paper house, which means it was all corporate, all executives. People in the business coming to see us. I didn’t know that David Krebs had called up record company executives and stirred up a competitive frenzy. Clive Davis, the president of Columbia, and Ahmet Ertegun, the head of Atlantic, were there to go Monster to Monster. Godzilla vs. Mothra! They all came, so we knew that however well we did, there was going to be some serious bidding . . . and there was.

I told a couple of jokes, introduced the band, made the audience laugh, and we played our set. I couldn’t hear my voice—no monitors—so I had to scream out, “You got the love,” over the din of the band. But I’d learned how to do that by playing the clubs in New York all those years. There was Clive Davis clapping enthusiastically after every song. We’d unfortunately run through all our numbers when he shouted, “Encore!”

We finished the set and ran offstage. Frank came running backstage. “Get back up there and play something,” he said, and I said, “But we don’t know anything else,” and he said, “Just do a jam!” And I said, “Okay, we’ll do a thing called ‘Wit’s Tip,’ ” which was a jam we’d do every night at the end of a set . . . something I could get cute with: “We’re Aerosmith, ladies and genitals. We’ll be back in fifteen minutes . . . and don’t forget to try the beef tips.”

Frank goes, “Just tell ’em the name of the song is ‘We Don’t Want to Fuck You, Lady, We Just Want to Eat Your Sandwiches
.
’ ” The room roared and the band played hot . . . I made up the lyrics as I went along. Clive Davis lost it—he just
lost
it. After the gig he came backstage and said, “You guys were great. You’re going to make it big. And you, son,” he said, putting his arm around me and looking me straight in the eye, “are gonna be the
biggest
star in America.” And then
I
lost it.

Clive inspired me to write the lyrics to “No Surprize.”

Nineteen seventy-one, we all heard the starter’s gun