Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (19 page)

My ex-wife called me last night and I thought,
Well, you know what? I love her,
and she’s picking up my son and I’m thinking about my girlfriend Erin and the girlfriends I’ve had in life, where I’ve been, two divorces and stuff. All fodder for the passionate pen. If you have a child with a woman you’ll understand that when you write a song with somebody it’s like having a child with them. You’re birthing, you’re evoking the spirits of a moment in time, specific moments, seconds, so for better or worse I’d come up with a scat. Trying to make sense of it all. . . . First it’s
“Hey, jaded!”
which later on in a magic moment turns into
“Hey, ja-ja-jaded,”
which puts it in a very rhythmic meter with a four-four time signature. It’s a picture of my temperament set to music.

O
nce you have a melody, that’s your hat rack, a hat rack that can hold many hats—the hats are the words you throw on top of it. Or you can
scat
and by scatting, summon up lyrics. Once you have lyrics, you can let the words come up with melody. Those lines
“back when Cain was able way before the stable”
from “Adam’s Apple,” you know where those came out of? Scatting.

I would listen back, along with the rough of the song, and I would
hear
lyrics. Every time. Tapped right into my own subcontinent. It would jump right out at me from the scat. I could play you scats and if you listened close enough, you would hear the lyrics that I wrote. Not unlike psychoacoustics. If two people are playing, you hear things in the middle. If two notes are played or people are singing . . . there is a tone on the
in-between. Ham-onics-slash-psychoacoustics-slash-vibe.
The scat
kink
became
Pink.
The scat to the Beatles’ classic “Yesterday” was
scrambled eggs.
Fucking magic.

You take off from there. . . . You don’t know what you’re singing or what chord it is. It’s all done as if you’re in the middle of a desert with two long poles and a lot of little sticks. The people from the town come out and they’re wondering how you got up there, how you climbed up the palm tree on the rungs of your own voice and the lyrics you wrote. “Oh, my god, look at that! He’s singing! How’d he get up there?” You build a ladder. A song is a kind of ladder, too, but that you’ve got to build without little sticks. Never mind the melody, never mind the chords—no, no, no. You start with infatuation, obsession, passion, anger, zeal, craze, then take a handful of notes, sew them into a chord structure, create a melody over that, and then come up with words that fit it perfectly. “Oh, my god, what
is
that? He’s up there singing and he climbed up on air, on his vocal chords.” Well, yeah, I got up there on my own nasty scat . . .
O-uh-OH-EEE-uh-ee-yeehn! O-uh-OH-EEE-uh-ee-yeehn!
It’s a deep-dish apple pie, baby.

You know right away if a song has that magic. It has to have those extremes—the one thing it can’t be is
okay.
Okay is death. Okay is a jingle or a ring tone—not even that! You look at the person you’re writing with and say to yourself,
God, this is gonna be either great or suck. Dare ya!
Those are the only two possible choices you got! There are a lot of musicians that are schooled and learned and playing piano in the bar at the Four Seasons or Days Inn, and they’re
really good.
Their problem is they never learned how to be really
bad.
See, when I go and sing a song with an artist like Pink, I say, “Oh, man, I can fuck that song up
good.”
It’s a figure of speech for me . . . kinda my mantra. Because that’s what
I do.
I know I’m going to
rip
it a new asshole and I’m going to take it big into the passionate pool. That’s what I know how to do.

Tom Hamilton (bless his fat strings and good heart) wasn’t sitting in a room with the insight and forethought of going, “Fuck! WHO wrote those Kinks albums?” I had that thought because I knew that they—
he
—Ray fucking Davies—wrote those records. Where did the invention come from, the flash from wherever to write a song and get together a bunch of guys to just start playing and maybe make a mistake and take that mistake, save it, and turn it into something you’re proud of? Own your mistakes! Write something, sing something—as bad or good as it is—that no one has come up with. I sat with Joe and went, “OH, MY GOD”; we wrote a song after that riff he was playing and I jumped on it and it naturally became “Movin’ Out.” And that’s how “Dream On” came to me . . . natural. The voice inside never stops asking,
What am I gonna sing about?
Questions upon questions.
Why
has Janie got a gun? What’s my first verse? What’s the third verse? What’s the chorus and the prechorus gonna sound like? How will the end go?

What did her daddy do? It’s Janie’s last IOU

She’s gonna take him down easy and put a bullet in his head

Oh, my god! Now’s she’s done it!
Now it makes sense from the beginning.
Sometimes I think I’ve given more forethought to
that
than to getting married, having kids, getting a driver’s license, going to school, college. It transcends the Everything because it
is
the Everything.

Songs are never in plain sight, they’re under your skin; if anything, the best are peripheral and then they pop out like a baby. Did I want to get that song out with its head crowning out of the vagina of the music?
YES!
And in some cases, like “Jaded,” those breech-birth songbabies caused so big a disruption in my life that I endangered my marriage, squandered the time I should have spent with my children, just to get that song out.

CHAPTER SIX

Little Bo Peep,
the Glitter Queen,
and the Girl in the
Yellow Corvette

D
id women get backstage and offer themselves to us on our altar of lust? Take off their clothes, do tricks, satisfy our aching needs? Not in the beginning. Stuff like that doesn’t happen on a regular basis until you become really, really famous. But still, were there ass-shakin’ trollops in the audience who defined our existence and made our minds go into Glory Hallelujah mode? Absafuckinlootley! Hell, that’s what it’s all about!

Now, I’m not saying these girls didn’t come backstage after performances—of course they did. Isn’t that why they showed up to begin with? Music was one thing, but
my
thing was the other. I’d run back and get Kelly  . . .

“Kelly—the girl with the red dress in the front row—have her shaved and oiled and brought to my tent!” And she’d be there. As dirty as my mind is, my body’s pretty clean. Kelly always made sure the girls were in the shower when I got in the room. I liked my pulchritude pristine! I can’t kiss a girl that’s been stage diving with five hundred other guys. I’m very oral and I like clean. Back then, sure, you could’ve gotten gonorrhea, but with one shot of penicillin . . . see ya. Unlike today, STDs were a dime store a dozen in those days. How do you avoid ’em? Screw ’em through Saran Wrap? Nah, if they washed, they were clean. As someone once said, “You ain’t seen nuthin’ till you’re down on a muffin”—and I’m no different.

After we became more famous, girls began coming backstage without having to be coaxed. Soon they started getting inventive, printing their own backstage passes for the price of a little backstage ass!

But early on, there were no girls doing backflips, no limos, no private jets—just the occasional girlfriend of a band member who acted like the only thing they ever blew out was their hair. Of course, there were other pleasures of the road. Like . . . the girl in the yellow Corvette.

Rewind to the summer of 1972 when we used to drive to our gigs in this truck that Mark Lehman owned, our original roadie and road manager all wrapped up in one. These days it’s probably moldering in the woods with vines growing through it. Anyway, that’s how we got to the gigs in the early days. And who wants to ride in a fucking van with the guys in the band? Sure, it’s okay to ride together when you’re on your way from Connecticut to New York to do a show. That’s a mere two hours, you’re all in the van together, and you’re psyched. You’re getting buzzed from breathing in the “eau de low tide” of the night before mixed with the sweet smell of sensimilla, stale cigarettes, and flat beer. To this day, it’s an aphrodisiac like no other to me. But the long, endless road trips in that van with guys farting, telling lame jokes, pissing in pop bottles . . . that was murder.

Somewhere in the grain belt between Indianapolis down to who knows where, I fell asleep on the top of the amps in the back of the van with my head staring out the window and my mind on Mars. I woke as the wheels rolled over half a deer that’d been sliced in two the night before by a semi. We were doing fifty-five in our International Harvester truck, christened the Good Ship Aerosmith, when I spied something yellow—it looked like a giant sour lemon drop—moving in retrograde in the next lane. My curiosity was instantly tweaked. I shouted to the driver, “Mark, slow down, and let that car we just passed catch up to us!”

Suddenly, I’m staring at a yellow Corvette bearing a blonde with gigantic orbs and a smile from heaven. I crawled up over the top of the amps like an infantryman on the beach at Iwo Jima and landed on Joe’s lap in the front seat. Joe goes, “What the fuck are you doing, Tyler?” “I’m just lookin’ for a kiss,” I say. “You ain’t gettin’ that from me,” said Joe. “That’s not what you said last night,” I quipped. You can’t ever really get back at a guitar player. They’ll just crank their amp up to a million and drown you out.

She worked at the motel we’d stayed at the night before and was out on the highway doing a bit of her own randy reconnaissance. You can’t always get what you want, but she knew if she tried hard enough she could get her heart’s desire—and that was lucky me! She took me to a room and fucked my brains out. It was like three in the morning and she rolls over and caresses my back. What,
again
? Oh, baby, I thought, but what I said was “You know what? I could do this all night
and
the next day but I gotta get up really early to catch this goddamn flight.”

“Well we can take my Corvette,” she says. “And tell ya what . . . I’ll sit on your lap and grind you till the middle of next week or you can ride my face all the way to Chicago or wherever the hell we’re going!” It didn’t matter. Time becomes meaningless in the face of creativity. Was I dreaming? Or the luckiest guy on earth? “That sounds okay to me,” I said with all the casualness I could muster.

“But first,” she says, “I gotta go back home for a few minutes to put out some feed for the horses.” Oh yeah, I’m not in New York anymore. I end up back at her house, riding horses bareback all night, naked. Right out of a storybook. Is this really happening? Am I dreaming, or am I being dreamed? Around 5:00
A.M
., she says, “Put your clothes on, we’re going. What the hell, I wanted to see the show anyway.” If this ain’t something I already put in a song, it sure as hell’s gonna be.

Well, the next gig was in Davenport, Iowa, and damned if we didn’t drive that little Corvette all the way. Four beautiful hours, with mysterious fields of corn flashing by, rusty old gas stations, grain elevators, clapboard churches—and the sun’s coming up.

Two months later, she’s still on tour with me. The guys in the band, of course, are royally pissed. Why wouldn’t they be? They’re up there reading their in-flight magazines, drooling stewardess dreams, while I’m out there getting my kicks on Route 66. I swear to god—or General Motors—I never traveled so sweetly . . . to this day.

I only wish we were on the radio right now, or on
Oprah
. I would say, “If you’re out there, please call this number. I want to know how you are, what you’re doing, and what you look like now!” Of course, sometimes you don’t wanna know. You’d rather remember them the way they were—the way we all were.

Later on, when fame comes, things change. We’re in all the pop magazines and gossip columns, we’re fuckin celebrities, and we’ve got an impressive entourage of haute coke dealers and purveyors of other things for the discerning drug addict. Everybody wants to be my baby, everyone wants to kiss my ass.

“But isn’t that what you always wanted, Steven?” my guardian angel in a pink bustier asks. Hell yeah, baby. Whatever you say.

But Fame is a bitch. You’ve probably heard that somewhere, but only because it’s goddamn true. It’s a riderless horse, it’s a two-headed dog sniffing its own butt, a one-eyed cat peeking in a seafood store. And . . . it’s the absolute greatest generator of creative fiction there is. You make it up, then
they
make it up. And as soon as you get well known enough for people to want to make stuff up about you, they will. It’s not up to you anymore; the demon is on the loose. Everybody you work with, buy a car from, hire as a babysitter; everyone who fixes your computer. Each becomes, overnight, a writer of short stories, a chronicler of mouth-watering scandal.

Remember who we’re talking about! Famous people. Why, they’re capable of almost anything you can imagine. They’re degenerate, ruthless, heartless, and disgusting, so pile it on. Anyone who’s worked for Paul McCartney, believe me, has a story to tell.

“I saw Macca massaging her stump!” “Get out!” “No, really!”

Of course, that’s all we ever wanted: to be famed and acclaimed, but be careful what you wish for, because fame is the bitch goddess of rumor, innuendo, slander, and gossip and the perverted purveyor of tabloid trash. She’ll say anything to anyone anywhere. “Pssst! Wanna hear some real hot stories about Steven Whatsisname?
How he got there
and what he did to whom when he got there. It’ll make your hair stand on end—and that’s not all that’ll stand on end, baby. Wanna see some Paris Hilton–type sex tapes? Wanna hear some nasty shit secretly recorded by his babysitter—I swear!” Oh, yeah . . . that shit goes on. Tapes of the babysitter overhearing every private conversation you ever had with your children, band mates, accountants, ex-wives, even your fucking proctologist. In the end, even the babysitter’s story makes you look like an asshole.

Once you become a rock star—something you’ve prayed for fervently since you were sixteen, making promises to sleazy saints and strange goddesses of the night—all bets are off.

After you’re famous, it’s all simple and brutal: you’re either loved across the board for things you
did
do . . . or sneered at for things you
didn’t
do—or vice versa. Either way, you become a dartboard for other people’s fears, doubts, and insecurities, and right there in the bull’s-eye are the two terrible tabloid twins: sex and drugs. Now, of course, the good stories—we claim proud ownership of those. As for all the rest, well, we don’t read our own press . . . wink wink. But that’s horseshit. One way or another we eventually get to hear all the news that’ll blow a fuse. If we don’t read it, we’re sure to hear it from girlfriends, mothers, fathers—or our best friends. Then there’s the occasional “Tyler’s in Room 221” written in smoky letters across the sky by a stunt pilot who found that we were staying at the Four Seasons in Maui, who got his info from the concierge who got it from the bellboy who got a phone call from the airline steward who sent the call the second he saw your ugly face getting off the plane. “LEND THE FAMILY PARROT TO THE TOWN CRIER!”

No matter what you do, there’s someone putting together a little bag of anecdotes in which you’re prominently featured doing nasty stuff. If I get gas down at the corner, the woman who pumps my gas is going to be telling all her friends the next day. And the story will grow: not only do I get my gas there
all
the time, but I get my car serviced there, and, as matter of fact, I had dinner over at her house the night before and watched
American Idol
with her and made popcorn. And if she happens to be good-looking and your wife finds out, then you’ve automatically had an affair with this girl. That Stevie! The kind of things he asks you to do!

So, go on, make it up! By now Steven Tyler is pretty much a fictional character anyway—I have absolutely no control over the little fuck. I read about him and I don’t know who it is.

Just the other day, I open a book and what do I find? A former Aerosmith accountant, a perfectly reasonable, rational person—someone who adds up columns of figures, divides them, amortizes them, collateralizes them—has turned into a writer of bodice-ripper romances. She’s telling a lurid tale featuring little old me. The woman’s become an authority on my sex life:
My dear, there’s a little-known fact I’ll share with you about Steven Tyler . . . Something that few people know.
By this point we’re all holding our breath, we’re spellbound. In a hoarse whisper, she continues:
He makes his groupies put on kinky costumes. Oh, yes, he designs them himself. He makes them recite nursery rhymes while he fucks them. He can’t get it up unless they’re dressed up as Little Bo Peep, Little Miss Muffet, Little Red Riding Hood
. . . .

What a perv that Steven is! And that was my
accountant
!

Back to our story already in progress. . . . The band hits warp speed in the Midwest. At the helm our driver, Mark Lehman, a one-man hump-amp, rig-lights, set-up-sound-system wizard. When I saw
Almost Famous
I said, “Holy shit, is this sideways Aerosmith or what?” We were on that bus, in that plane, diving naked off rooftops into the way-out-o-sphere along with fellow demon Ted Nugent. The hallways were crowded with bad girls, seedy characters, and a waiter named Julio delivering groupies on a room service cart.

Now, one night after our show at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle in late November 1973, we’re all in this big room backstage, and our very considerate promoter had invited these girls there for us. “I’ve got a little surprise for you boys.” My, my, my, what do I spy with my little eye? Six nubile young chicks, one cuter than the next. They curtsy and introduce themselves to the band. One says, “Hello, boys, we’re the Little Oral Annie Club.” Well, beam me up, Scotty, says I.

Then she says, “Well, sir, we’ve taught each other how to give great head, so when we meet rock stars . . . we blow you like no man has been blown before.” To have two girls come up and say, “Hi, we’ll do each other, wanna watch?” is mind-boggling. Six hot girls and one of them whispers in your ear, “I can eat her pussy right here and now better than anyone on the planet.” I think I can safely speak for all males of the species . . . this moment would have changed your religion.

All these girls were dressed up fantasy style in sexy costumes. Guys are very predictable creatures. We
all
like schoolgirls in plaid skirts, women in high heels and fishnet stockings. . . . Strawberry Fields, as she called herself, was their den mother—kind of heavyset and a little older, but she knew what rock stars—hell, what all boys—wanted. As for the
me
that I thought I knew? He’d left the building! This woman
knew
. She knew how to take care of her girls and how to please the boys.