Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (33 page)

I
remember in the midst of my din, hearing from fucking Alice Cooper that Joe was going to be his guitar player. I went, “
What?
You’ve got to be kidding!” My soul mate . . . I was so fucking pissed that I called Joe up and asked him, “Are you joining Alice Cooper? Are you seriously going to fucking be his guitar player?” And he said, “Yeah,” like the prick he is! I said, “What the fuck? That’s the dumbest fucking thing I ever heard! Just stop. The shit’s over. Why don’t you just come back with Aerosmith? How could you go be with Alice Cooper? We’re Aerosmith. We have something so big THAT WE CREATED OURSELF! You’re gonna join a power that is already there . . . be a little piece of it. Whereas YOU ARE the power in this band! We gotta get back together.”

On my children’s lives, that’s what happened. I called him . . . he didn’t call me. This is not ego-speak. I hadn’t spoken to him for more than two years, but it felt like way longer. This wasn’t in
Walk This Way
and needs to be said. I’d push him, he’d scream at me . . . we’d almost come to blows. Joe is passive-aggressive. He’d say heavy words, but say them quietly. You’re always hurt by the ones you love, right?

Joe was really pissed off at David Krebs for holding him hostage. Supposedly Joe owed all this money, an eighty-four-thousand-dollar room service tab. Why was David charging Joe all that money? I know Joe couldn’t afford to pay it. Considering all the money he was making from us, don’t you think David at that point could have said, “What the hell. Fuck it!” He’s a ruthless guy. Then there was this other little matter with Leber-Krebs, who were both our managers and our accountants. Not that we weren’t fucked-up, fried, and filleted, but the whole business about Joe and me as the Toxic Twins, if you really did some digging you might find that it wasn’t all that coincidental that it started hitting the media right around the time Joe was getting ready to sue Krebs over those room service charges.

The press loves catchy phrases and cute headlines and they latched right on to the Toxic Twins. When I fired Joe, the come shot was: “Band Breaks Up Over Spilt Milk!” Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-HA! Now all the journalists in the world get these little stars for being ASSHOLES! They’re not telling the truth ’cause they assume nobody wants to hear the truth! Headline: “Tyler on Drugs!” That should do the trick. The picture shows me holding a bottle of pills. Then in the second paragraph it says, “Those are the aspirins that he bought after he came out of rehab.” And you go back and you say, “Wait a minute! But it said ‘Tyler on Drugs!’ ” And then it clicks, “Ah! That’s how they got me to read it!” ’Cause if it said, “Tyler Safe,” no one would read it. I’d have to be an icon like Madonna to get a headline with my name and aspirin in the same headline. “Madonna Now on Aspirin.”

During the years that Joe and I were broken up I realized that I wasn’t half the musician I thought I was without him. But whatever was going to happen with Aerosmith, Joe would not deal with David Krebs again. Since we’d split up, Joe had met a manager named Tim Collins. I met him for the first time with Joe at a French restaurant in New York near Fifty-eighth Street. We had hamburger
à chevalle,
with an egg on it. Tim said, “Why don’t you just come to Boston?” “Nah, I don’t think so.” That’s when he said, “What if I gave you a gram a day?” And he did. That’s how he got us up to Boston, me and Teresa. He had his guy Monkey bring us over a gram at the hotel every morning at the Howard Johnson’s in Cambridge. He wanted to keep me there while he tried to put the band back together.

Tim played the game all managers play—he’d tell me Joe was interested in getting the band back together, that he’d really missed playing with Aerosmith, blah-blah-blah, and then he’d go back to Joe and tell him I wanted more than anything to reunite the band, that Joe was the essential element and without him,
da-di-da-da-da
—which was true, but it was all done through innuendo and manipulation. And that’s how Joe and I started to work together again.

Managers are predatory, they troll the stars—and we got trolled, used, and abused more than once. Not long after he’d got us, he was down at a club in New York, at a party, drunk out of his mind, bragging that he’s got Aerosmith, and this guy he was talking to said, “Aerosmith? Good luck! I used to book them. . . . You’ll never manage those guys, they’re too stoned. And by the way, the only thing that’ll get them outta that is AA.” And Tim went, “Huh? What the—?” But that stuck in his mind and it would resurface a few years later when the band was totally fucked-up again and he needed a way to pull us out of free fall.

I went to see the Joe Perry Project perform at the Bottom Line, then Joe came to the Worcester Centrum in the spring of 1983 to see an Aerosmith concert. We did a few lines of heroin in the dressing room—just for old times’ sake. “Joe, check this shit out, you’re not going to fucking believe it! See what you’ve been missing?” And then I fell down. I just got too high. That’s only happened three times in thirty years. So drunk or so stoned that everything was spinning so much I couldn’t stop it. This was at the height of my addictions and whatever the fuck. When you’re in that state, even when you lie down on your bed the room is still spinning around you. Anyway, we do a bunch of lines and I get onstage at the Centrum and I realize I’m lost. I can’t function at all, it’s like, “Oh, God, please help me!” Those few times when I got so fucking drunk or high that I couldn’t stand up we had to cancel that show.

I think it was the third song (it takes about fifteen minutes for whatever’s in you to really take hold) when I realized I was in serious trouble. “Oh, dear God, my God!” I stumbled over to the drum riser. I put my hand out, slipped, and missed it. It was totally fucked-up—a great way to reintroduce Joe to the band. But as Joe always says, it’s good to see a train wreck onstage—it means there’s something going on up there. Fallible fuckups, not the click-track machine flawlessly reproducing its iPod hits. But in my case, it was getting a little too close to a demolition derby.

In early 1984 the band got back together at Tom’s house. That was great. The old machine was rollin’ ’n’ tumblin’ again—and stumbling and mumbling and falling down and disintegrating. For the first three years we were back together, everybody was so fucked-up! Eventually it reached critical mass and at that point Tim Collins recalled what the promoter had said to him when he first got the band: “It’s never going to work. These guys are alcoholics and drug addicts. Your only hope is AA.” It was time to get Aerosmith clean and sober. Not everybody in the band, of course. Since I was the Designated Fuckup I was the first one to get sent away. I wound up at East House, a rehab facility at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Masschusetts, in February of 1985. I put it in a song called “My Fist Your Face”:

Wake up, baby, what you in for

Start the day upon your knees

What you pissin’ in the wind for

You musta snorted too much bleez

East House pinball wizard

Full tilt bozo plague

Second floor trekkie makin’ warp speed out the door

Julio Afrokeluchie

He the only one who stayed

Counting up the days

Please, no more

Naturally, I wasn’t exactly ready to give everything up on the spot, either. While I was in there, Teresa went to get me some blow from the only dealer she knew, a place in Queens. Now, as it happened, a friend of Tim Collins’s was there at the same time getting blow for Tim. Joe heard about it, called Teresa up, and said, “I’ll break your fucking legs if you give Steven any cocaine!” Meanwhile, Joe had gotten the okay from the Vatican master, Tim Collins, to carry on, drink, do whatever he wanted.

They figured as long as they got
me
sober, the band would be fine. I had to be straight in order for Aerosmith to work. Gotta get Steven straight! So it was back into East House at McLean a second time in the fall that same year. At McClean I met a therapist named Bob Hearne and for the first time I began to think about another path to enlightenment other than drugs and booze. The problem is that rock ’n’ roll is a fantasy life and part of that fantasy is being high. Like most rock stars I suffer from Terminal Adolescence. I’ll never grow up. The animated twelve-year-old thing—without that you wouldn’t get up onstage in the first place. In rock you never have to grow up because you’re so insulated, you never have to deal with anything. Everything’s done for you . . . you’re surrounded by staff and crew and managers and promoters and PR yentas. How do you rent a car, buy a plane ticket, reserve a hotel room? Oh, you’ve got to
call
them first?

In rehab they have all these theories: “No, no, no, Steven, don’t paint with your right hand! Paint with your nondominant hand!” “Why? Because I don’t know how to play with my left hand?” “Yes, that way you may come up with something that you don’t know was in there!”
Rrrrr-ight
.

And even if I—through prayer, abstinence, and superhuman strength of character—were able to forswear the demons of dope and alcohol—what about my mates? Of course I’d call Tim from rehab from time to time and say, “Where’s Joe? When is Joe coming here?” “Oh, Joe’s down in the islands.” Tim let Joe go to an island, where he was drinking paregoric, that baby for the gums, and he’d dip a cigarette in it, smoke it, or drink the bottle, and you can get so stoned on a bottle of paregoric. Trouble with me, the Designated Patient, was that everyone else in the band and all the people around us were still using—massive amounts—so naturally, it didn’t take.

Tim’s theory of keeping the band straight on the road was farcical. Basically, Therapy 411 . . . He would have his secretary dial information for AA meetings in the towns where we were playing. Dial tone. Start counting . . . one chimpanzee, two chimpanzee, three chimpanzee, four chimpanzee, five chimpanzee. CUE Lily Tomlin switchboard operator: “How-may-I-direct-your-call?” “Yes, L.A., downtown Los Angeles, AA, please? Thank you, I’ll wait.” Nasal Directory Assistance Operator’s voice: “The number is . . .” I mean, that would take one minute, wouldn’t you say? Two? You dial the number for AA in L.A.: “Hello. What’s the address there? Do you have meetings? What days?” That was Tim Collins’s plan for keeping Aerosmith clean on tour.

Tim Collins found an apartment for Teresa and me in Beacon Hill, Boston, and another one for Joey. Then we moved from that apartment to a better one in Brookline. Teresa and I started going to a methadone clinic in Kenmore Square to try and get clean ourselves. This is fall 1986. I got down to five milligrams a day at the methadone clinic, because I didn’t like the way things were going. There was too much blow and too much heroin and I knew if I didn’t do something it was going to be The End. Who knows if I’d have made it on my own, but I was on my way down. No one told me to go to the methadone clinic. Teresa and I just did it. We were going to get married, we were going to have kids; we needed to change our lives.

One day Tim called me and said, “There’s a conference call to Japan tomorrow morning, so you gotta be over early. Be at the office no later than seven
A.M
.” Drag myself out of bed, get down there, and what do I see but the entire band, on time (suspicious in itself), and all looking
very serious,
all sitting at a round table, and presiding over the round table is High Lord Doodle Dum . . . the therapist Lou Cox. He singles me out and points his finger at me! What’d I do now? Or, let’s rephrase that: what’d I do that everyfuckingbody in this band hasn’t been doing up until this morning—and I’m not even sure about that. But they’re all looking fucking smug, because it’s Steven that’s to be burned at the stake. It’s pretty intimidating when your band members, your manager, and this self-important authority on mental health are sitting there in judgment, and I’m shaking and
jonesing.
Your own band the firing squad!
Aerosmith & Wesson.
Big-shot doctor from New York tells me this is an intervention, which turns out to mean I have to listen to all the fucking complaints about my behavior from everybody in the band and
I can’t speak
.

“Steven, just listen to the guys in the band; they want to address some of the issues of your behavior. Is that okay?” Fuck no! But what am I going to say? He starts going around the room, from Joey to Brad to Tom to Joe. It was all that “when you did that . . . I felt” shit.

“Steven,” Joe says somberly, “I felt betrayed when I was playing my guitar and you nodded out at the keyboard at rehearsal yesterday—”

“What are you talkin’ about?
You
gave me the dope! We both did the same shit. We crushed up a Dilaudid and shared it—and you fell asleep right after me!”

Therapist: “No talking, Steven.”