Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (26 page)

I
n the head on a jet going to England. I guess life’s a pisser when you’re a-peein’, 1975. (Aerosmith)

I’d been on the exhausting flights to Europe many times before, but because I was with Bebe, I actually arrived before I took off. It was the shortest flight ever, in the sweetest kind of way. When we arrived, the press and the fans were so there, we had to get whisked to a back room to clear immigration. They searched Bebe as if she were Marlene Dietrich. I, on the other hand, a skinny-assed rock star, was the poster child for all orifice checking at every border. I had Bebe draw a W on each of my ass cheeks in red lipstick on the plane prior to landing so when they checked me and asked me to bend over, it would read “WOW” in any language. There I was, finally figuring out I had the power to communicate beyond my music.

Unfortunately, Marlene and my WOW wound us both up in the interrogation room, surrounded by blue-eyed blondes wearing white rubber gloves. Unbeknownst to them, my hash coffin was stashed in my sock. The border cop said, “Vot eese dees?” I replied, “What the???” Raising his voice, he put it closer to my face. Again, “VOT EESE DEES?” And I fumbled back, “Whatinthewhatthe?” Then, even closer to my face, at which time . . . I blew into the hash coffin as hard as I could, and the hash went flying everywhere! I was grabbed by my scrawny neck and handcuffed, and we wound up in a local slammer but were soon released for fear that we might apply for German citizenship . . . and the promoter’s terror that the festival would break out in riots, because we were headlining—and you can’t headline without a lead singer, no matter what country you’re in.

Bebe was with us when we saw Paul McCartney and Wings at the famous Hammersmith Odeon in London. Backstage, Paul and Linda are in this tiny dressing room. Bebe walks in and had some nickname for Linda. “Sluggo,” she says. “Sluggett,” fires back Mrs. Beatle. Then they fucking went at each other and started wrestling on the floor. When they finished their friendly skirmish, I went to the bathroom. I’m peeing when I look to my right and eight stalls down is Paul McCartney, who looks at me and goes, “I like your music, man.” I haven’t pissed right since!

I
’d like to think it was because of my Cherubic Behavior that I landed on the cover of
Rolling Stone,
but I . . . semimodestly digress. WE got on the August 24, 1976, cover of
Rolling Stone
because Aerosmith had pulled Excalibur out of the stone. I was in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont just below the Sunset Strip. Annie Leibovitz—bigger than big and soon to be bigger—showed up to shoot “moi.” If my daddy could see me now! Well, maybe not. It had to be five in the morning and I was out of dope. I’d had two hours of sleep from the night before. Annie promised that as soon as she got her shot . . . I’d get
my
shot. I told Annie, “Look, we need to go out and cop some shit right now so I can get straight.” “Okay,” she said, “but look, just take your shirt off and lie down on the bed for a second. Just do this for me. It’ll take five minutes, come on, honey! And then we’ll go get it. I know someone that’s got some really good shit. They know Belushi and they’re right around the corner.” By now, I’m like Pavlov’s dog, salivating with a raging schooner. I leaned back on the bed and she got her shot . . . raw, razzled, and real. She was beyond good. Annie knew what she wanted and got it. And I didn’t. Nope . . . no dope for Stevie. I went home with my tail between my legs.

Please, I just got to talk to you

Please, get yo’ head out of the loo

Please, you long, long way from home

Please, you’d turn a young man’s heart to stone

Sick as a dog, what’s your story?

Sick as a dog, mmm . . . Cat got yer tongue?

N
ext stop, Japan . . . Reminiscent of the sixties Beatlemania, we were welcomed with hysteria. As soon as we got off the plane, there were hundreds of screaming fans in the terminal, so many that we had to be lifted over their heads, like Cleopatra’s arrival at the bedside of Marc Antony. Their screams were almost deafening at the airport as at the Budokan where we played four sold-out shows in a row. If only management had had the foresight to tape those shows instead of rolling up dollars and getting laid on our dime, we might have beaten Cheap Trick to their Budokan punch. Which, by the way, was a great record. A live vinyl classic.

We were terrified to get high in Japan, and drug desperation set in. Elyssa’s mantra was always “Let’s go shopping!” So Joe, Elyssa, and Henry Smith went out to see what was out there and ended up in an antiques store. In the window of the shop was an old clay pipe with a curved stem. Well, that looked promising, ancient drug paraphernalia, and Elyssa said, “I want that!” So Joe bought it for her and brought it back to the hotel. Joe handed it to Henry. “You do it first,” says Henry, because he didn’t know what might be in it. Joe turns the pipe upside down, lights a big bunch of matches all at once, and proceeds to inhale. Holy Edgar Allen POEpium! It
was
opium.

He exhaled and the whole neighborhood got high. I even got a buzz and I was six floors above Joe!

Joe then slams the pipe on the table and, using his instinctive drug-user expertise, he digs out the black residue from inside the pipe. Like the fine artisan he is, he exhumes every smidgen to leave nary a trace of opi-yum in the ancient artifact. The room reeked from the unique, sweet smell of opium. They got a contact high from the countless lips that had kissed that pipe before. Within the hour, they were all projectile vomiting. “That’s some good shit,” Joe said. And they all pipe dreamed till dawn’s early light.

The drug drought had been severe overseas—people’s eyeballs were squeaking, and if there was any white substance on the corner of anyone’s mouth it was left over from a week-old Dunkin Donut. It created maniac cravings for everyone; so on the way back we decided to stop in Hawaii and refresh ourselves. Kelly orchestrated with Krebs to accommodate the band’s so-called well-earned needs. We had somebody go to Boston to pick up a slope’s worth of snow and fly it to Hawaii, straight to the room we’d booked at the Holiday Inn. At the airport there was a mountain of bags from the Japanese tour. Somebody’s job was to stay and be on bag duty, but with bag drag and in a coke frenzy . . . it was like, “Fuck the bags.” They made a beeline for the hotel, where Kelly took the mirror off the wall and put it on the bed. We laid out the ounce of blow and with an ace of spades playing card proceeded to chop out the names of everyone in the room. Ed got a weak bump. But Tulio Eppa Galucci can’t feel his nose to this day.

I
n the spring of 1977 David Krebs had this bright idea that for our next record we should be insulated from the big, wicked city, away from temptation and drugs. Dream on! A geographical cure? Fuck me! Drugs can be imported, David . . . we have our resources. Dealers
deliver
! Hiding us away in a three-hundred-room former convent was a prescription for total lunacy. Perhaps it was their
plan
to drive us crazy. Not a chance.

Jack and the band designed every nuance for our own type of Deep Purple
Smoke on the Water
album experience. Rebuild a Studio A inside, out of the Record Plant mobile studio outside. Bring in the Grateful Dead’s culinary entourage—cooks at our beck and call (not that anyone was eating—sniff sniff) and dealers at every doorstep. It was called the Cenacle, an estate near Armonk, New York, and what got the band members into the idea was that it was pitched to us as a castle. But the only thing remotely resembling a medieval castle was the large fieldstone water tower. Other than that the Cenacle was just a big institutional building with lots of tiny rooms, covered in cobwebs, and probably haunted. What a fiendish plan.

The Cenacle, a reference to the upper room where the Last Supper was held. Holy shit! I held court in my own mind up there. I was judge, jury, and instigator of all the lunacy that took place within the dysfunctional band family paradigm and the prayers left by the nuns unanswered. The silence was deafening, not even a face in a jar by the door. Just my own mind trying desperately to decipher the leftover realities of an abandoned nunnery. Quick—see if you can find some rhyme and reason to
that,
Steven.

I fantasized about being Keith Richards in the south of France playing slide with a freshly broken-off bottleneck from a slammin’ vintage Lafite Rothschild that I’d just guzzled in homage to a vibe that I so fucking badly needed—to intimately feel like I was recording at Chopin’s mansion where Elton John birthed his classic
Honky Chateau
. I needed to get drunk on the placentic creative juices of my own musical imagination. A paradox of Creation—with delicious contradictions to create a fertile mind-set that I needed to embrace in order to occupy my own mental Cenacle and make this record real.

A stoned-out rock star in his tattered satin rags lying on the ancient stone floor of a castle—slightly mad, but still capable of conjuring up a revolutionary album that would astound the ears of the ones who heard it and make the critics cringe. Still, that medieval fantasy must have seeped into my subconscious one enchanted evening when I wrote “Kings And Queens”. . .

Oh I know I

Lived this life before

Somehow know now

Truths I must be sure

Tossin’, turnin’, nightmares burnin’

Dreams of swords in hand

Sailing ships, the viking spits

The blood of father’s land

Only to deceive

The Cenacle was Aerosmith at its most extreme in its high middle period—it was just over the top! We mentally and physically took the place over. Long before cellulars, we hard-wired phones in every room. We had a huge kitchen, a dining room, a place for the crew to sleep and work, and our massive Studio A along with smaller rooms for Jack to get sounds in. We ran a hundred feet of barbed wire to microphones in the chapel, where Joey’s drums were set up on the altar. And Jack Douglas exorcised Joey’s ass into the middle of next week working on drum parts to, of all things, a song called “Critical Mass.”

Some of us lived and breathed the Cenacle, and some of us simply went home at the end of the day. That never sat well with me. So if the recording day started at 4:00
P.M.
, Joey wasn’t done till six in the morning anyway. To snort or not to snort? That wasn’t even a question.
Blow
and more blow to the point of
krell meltdown
. Joey achieved critical mass the night he hit a guardrail at 4:00
A.M
. in his black 308 GTB Ferrari, foolishly passing up the blow we had offered him so he could stay awake. He was still totally burned, totally stoned, and when he totaled his car—by some miracle—he was all right.

It was an incredibly creepy place . . . very poorly lit. There wasn’t much to whatever lighting was left in the place, so it was a lot of big dark living rooms and a lot of long hallways—a cavernous, grim place, especially at night. And then there were the little tiny rooms where the nuns had slept. I would walk into each room and go, “Rrrrrrright,” ’cause there was a bed, a chair, a window—and that’s it. Methinks frequent visits were made to one’s next-door cubicle. Fast and quickly in the wee hours of the morning, methinks. And the
freakquent
flier miles the sisters ran up . . . God only knows! If you marry divinity and deny your humanity, something’s gonna give. They were there before us and I waited patiently for divine intervention so I could tap into some of their sacred ether. And I thought to myself,
THE THINGS THAT COME TO THOSE THAT WAIT MAY BE THE THINGS LEFT BY THOSE WHO GOT THEIRS FIRST.

If you ever had to go get something in the kitchen in the middle of the night, it was a trip across the Sahara, never mind finding your way back. So we put little fridges in each guy’s room, but to go to the kitchen to get something, you had to go into this dark, dank basement. It was like the setting for a Roger Corman movie . . . and then the vampires settled in. All in our minds, of course, but what an hors d’oeuvre for the main course to come.

It’s always interesting the way other people—those outside our coven—see us in times of extremes. The cartoonist Al Hirschfeld came up while we were there and drew the caricature of the group that’s on the cover of
Draw the Line.
He really nailed us. We look like freakish botanical specimens pinned under glass.
Draw the Line
—it was the perfect title for the way we were living. I always went too far and was often reminded that I never knew where to draw the line. I hated to hear that, but that’s how it was. Say “Don’t do it,” and we would do it. ’Cause I knew that if you don’t know where to draw the line, then your choices become infinite.