Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (27 page)

Joe had this lick he wrote on a six-string bass that was so definitive, the song just about wrote itself. It reached down my neck and grabbed the lyrics out of my throat. The way the band played that track was off the Richter scale as the energy of
that
song defined our very existence at that time.

Checkmate, honey, beat you at your own damn game

No dice, honey, I’m livin’ on an astral plane

Feet’s on the ground, and your head’s goin’ down the drain

Oh, heads I win, tails you lose, to the never mind

When to draw the line

All this and the Grateful Dead’s cooks in the kitchen! There were two or three girls crafting midnight munchies on the big old stove while growing pot in the basement. That’s all we knew about them—that they had cooked for the Dead. It wasn’t very good food . . . and it was dosed. They’d put assorted drugs in our dinners. We never knew what was coming. One time they made pot brownies and Joey got so stoned he couldn’t record that night. We started buying our own food. Man must choose his poison . . . not be surprised by it in his soup.

Every other day Henry would take my Porsche and go to Happy Town, New York City, or Westport, pick up an ounce of blow, drive back, split it up among the gang. And when our vials got to the bottom, everybody hit on Tom, ’cause he always had some stashed in his sock. The next day, it was, “Fuck, we need more.” One of the road crew would borrow a car, go back to Let’s Make a Deal, cop the shit, and come back to the Cenacle. Ground Hog Day kind of defined our lives, minus the alarm clock and Sonny and Cher. Every now and then we’d have a guy deliver. Room service personified. I’ll have a cheeseburger and a side o’ blow, please. He’d show up, we’d play him a track to wow him, snort a Buick, and send him on his way.

We were all on different floors to keep each of our self-indulgent secrets to ourselves, wrapped in the shroud of “I need my privacy.” In the attic of the mansion, Joe had set up a shooting gallery, but this one was with guns. Joe had a single-action .22 rifle and I had the sister pistol, a Walther PPK 380; I’d given the brother gun to Keith Richards in New York in the guest bedroom of Freddie Sessler’s apartment on Keef’s thirty-sixth birthday . . . along with a giant gratuitous four-way horse tab of methadone.

I would hide lines under ashtrays and various places in the room so nobody would find them. Rabbit and Henry Smith, our two trusted roadies, knew that Ray would sneak into my room and vacuum the floor with his schnoz. He could snort a jockey off a horse and suck the Formica off my kitchen table. So one day, after finding that even my bed had been Hoovered, I laid a line of Ajax on the kitchen sink under a doily left behind by one of the sisters. I was downstairs recording a vocal of “Draw the Line” when he screamed loud enough to be heard all the way back in Peru. We left it on the album, it was such a shriek; we comped it and mixed it into one of the guitar player’s feedback tracks. It was E to the Z . . . EW TWEEDLE-E-DEE.

And then there was cocaine’s nasty stepsister—BOREDOM. In my more crazed phase at the Cenacle—in the space between my mind and where rumors lived—I began to secretly tape people who were saying shit about me behind my back. Fuck looking through the peephole of your apartment and seeing the CIA, aliens, and J. Edgar Hoover in drag (
HOLY SHIT, THEY’RE OUT THERE!
), they
were
talking about me. I had bought some wireless bugging devices in Japan with transmitters that had voice-activated microphones. I’d strategically strewn them everywhere and soon was listening to them talking about how
she’d
screamed the night before (instead of me on “Milk Cow Blues”). The crew called them Tokyo Spiders; they would find them all over the place—they were usually pretty obvious. I thought I was paranoid thinking they were talking about me. Just imagine how paranoid I felt when I
heard that story
. Well, it’s a he-said-she-said kinda story, because I never planted anything! And the only time I saw Tokyo Spider, she was blowing Ping-Pong balls out of her gynie in a strip club.

Just how shattered we got lives in the tracks of “Bright Light Fright”. . .

Livin’ on Gucci wearing Yves St. Laurent

Barely stay on ’cause I’m so fucking gaunt

Best lyric Joe Perry ever wrote. It was the truth, it was clever, and it described us to a tee.

We had a hard time making
Draw the Line
because of all the mountains of blow we had climbed with backpacks full of heroin and Tuinals. And when that becomes more important than the music, that’s when I should have drawn the line. I was up to four or five Tuinals a day, and David Johansen was bringing the Mexican black tar for Joe. It was all for one, one for all . . . and me for myself. Everybody was waking up at different times. We were told to get to the studio at noon, but the band wouldn’t show up till seven or eight in the evening. Sometimes I wouldn’t get there until much later. I might show up at five in the morning and want to start recording just as Joe was leaving. For the crew it was a tag team—and someone always got the graveyard shift. That’s when I did my best vocals with Jack. There was no sense to me being there for Joe’s recording hours. He never wanted to record his tracks until I was finished with my vocals anyway. And they called my shit LSD! Talk about Lead Singer Disorder? Joe, knowing it would take me weeks to write the lyrics and sing the vocals, would use that time to get lost in Elyssa.

Me? I did my fair share of Houdini. I would disappear into my Bela Lugosi boudoir, like Boris Karloff and the bride of Frankenstein. I wouldn’t come out until an angry mob arrived with pitchforks and burning torches. I didn’t realize until ten years later that it was Brad, Tom, and Joey. Days went by without anybody recording, or even playing. I was used to writing to riffs, but now there weren’t any riffs to write to.

With
Draw the Line
we were trying to do the album we started at the Cenacle and tour at the same time. It took six months to do and cost half a million dollars. We’d go to, like, AIR Studios in London and do a session and then we’d go to Germany and do a concert. The crew would drive all night to a session at some other studio and we’d show up burned to a crisp in the wee wee hours of the yawn. “Hurry up and wait,” it seemed.

All the big worms in the Big Apple came out to help us
Draw the Line
. . . from Johnny Thunders to John Belushi to John Lennon. One night, looking for some rock in a hard place, Belushi and I went panning for gold after a twelve-hour session. We were so obsessed with copping that night, when the cab-driver asked Belushi, “Where ya headin’?” he answered simply (and loudly), “Cocaine!” I’d get in the cab with him and the drivers would say, “Hey, aren’t you—?” Belushi was beyond famous for being the Samurai guy on
Saturday Night Live.
But all we wanted to do was chop out lines with that sword.

M
e and John Belushi, 1975, at Studio 54. (Susan B. Tallarico)

The negativity and the drama sucked the creativity out of the marrow of my bones. I was down and Jack knew it. What drugs couldn’t fix, maybe a change of scenery would. “Come stay at my house and we’ll finish the album together.” Even that was like pulling teeth—when you don’t have any. When you’re that high, inspiration can be like standing in the middle of a rainbow, writing lyrics you never thought you could write, and blaming it all on the buzz. But then the day comes when you come to realize that even rainbows get the blues.

You wake up in a dead-end alley having committed the ultimate sin, letting the right ones out and the wrong ones in, and even with a royal flush, you can’t win.

Going on the road with an unfinished album. Oh, it must be my fault. So now I’m on tour with people
I Don’t Even Like
(including myself).

S
o how could someone so broken not fall so in love with David Johansen’s main doll, Cyrinda? What a beautiful name, Cyrinda Foxe, and what a fox she was. I was on the chase for four months after we met in the Village in ’76. I was wounded and beaten from the band, the drugs, and the road, and in a hopeless romantic moment, I borrowed from Humphrey Bogart . . . “Are you guys getting along? Are you two really in love? Do you think you could fall for a guy that doesn’t wear lipstick? If I told you you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?” What a grouch I was. She looked at me and blushed. “David’s a different kind of guy. Heee’s &#^^@^)@&%@$!*&, and not only that, he’s #&^#!%^& up. . . .” My “in” was that Cyrinda was really close with Elyssa and Joe. The triangulation between those three was like playing hockey in a sandbox, but once Elyssa invited Cyrinda on tour, I was on the road to
Casablanca
. Joe was against it, Elyssa was all for Cyrinda’s cock teasing.

But she was a strange bird, that Cyrinda. She was a Warhol girl . . . had a part in his film
Bad
. She could Marilyn my Monroe one minute, and the next, Cruella my Deville. And then out of that love came the sweetest love of all, Mia. The rumor mill was cranking out bullshit in overdrive. She was on the cover of
Life,
and I loved her to Death. She worked for Warhol; I was an ass-hole. She was always too dramatic, and I was known as a drugged-out addict. The one thing they couldn’t write—and didn’t even think of—was what
we were,
and
that was
In Love.

I knew that because we were both on fire was why the rumors kept burning. The “I’m going to take him for all he’s worth” type shit melted by the wayside. Cyrinda was trying to be the wisecracking, gum-chewing, Lolita-type blonde—but she wasn’t born yesterday. Sometimes a lost childhood can erode your innocence. By the time Cyrinda was twelve, she was already twenty-five. She could be bittersweet, wouldn’t let you get away with anything; sharp as a tack and ferociously to the point.
So
to the point, they called her “Syringa.” She told me that when she was thirteen, she’d walk along the beach in L.A. with needles stashed in her bobby socks and sell them to speed freaks.

Where do you go from there? I know I’ve developed obsessions . . . but I’m not obsessed. But I’m not obsessed. But I’m not obsessed. But I’m not obsessed. . . . I’m not sure whether I’m obsessive-compulsive, but I’m definitely obsessive-
im
pulsive
.
In courting Joan Jett while on tour with her, I would strip bare naked, put on a robe, pull the chair from near the elevator all the way over to the end of the hall, pushing it to right in front of her door. I’d then take my robe off and, sitting spread-eagled, ring the doorbell and wait for her to open it. She’d open the door and her jaw would hit the floor as I said, “I hate myself for loving you.” She gave me that look that I really wanted to see and responded in her best Mae West velvety growl, “I’m not into the big ten-inch, honey,” and slammed the door.

But as all-consuming obsessions go, Cyrinda was my greatest. Why? you ask. ’Cause she was a good bad Catholic girl. And she laid it on heavy. God knows, I thought, I wanted it so bad, but she wouldn’t let me have it. “Don’t touch me there, God is watching.” Okay. “You can’t kiss me there, I’m still married. God is watching.” Okay. “Can I put my finger in your holy water?” Smack! I guess not. Now, you guys might not believe this, but God knows that we actually held out and waited to make love until her divorce with David was finalized. The waiting was beyond worth it . . . and actually Divine. Because that was the night Mia was conceived.

W
e were still working on
Draw the Line
when, in August of ’77, we went on tour to Germany. It was a Mudfest run by Mama Concerts. At Bilzen Jazz Festival in Belgium, the promoter showed up in a horse-drawn caravan, and as soon as the show began he took off, like the coachman in a Dracula movie. The backstage catering was roast pig. If you wanted cream in your coffee, they tied a goat to your table and said, “Milk away,
svinehunt
.” Eighty thousand people with mud up to their knees! We had to get the fire department to pull our bus out of the bogs. To make matters worse—after we were promised the world, our road crew wound up getting a stein of beer and a cold bratwurst. One of our crew guys climbed into the promoter’s trailer and took a shit on his desk. Leaving a little something for him to remember us by. It gave new meaning to the term . . . Mudfest. Holy SOURbraten.