Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (38 page)

And it sang so good.
That’s
what Kalodner was leaving out of his equation:
sing-ing
. He was hearing it literally and I was singing between the notes. He didn’t understand that it doesn’t matter
what
the fuck I sing if it ain’t got that thing. I would be scatting, which sticks to your soul:

It’s down on me

Yeah I got to tell you one thing

It’s been on my mind

Girl, I gotta say

We’re partners in crime

You got that certain something

What you give to me

Takes my breath away

Now the word out on the street

Is the devil’s in your kiss

If our love goes up in flames

It’s a fire I can’t resist

. . . but he was looking for meaning and understanding, which you ain’t gonna find in that verse ’cause I didn’t write it that way. It just sings so good with the melody I wrote that it’s irrefutable.

When he called me unreasonable, I always rubbed it in his face. What was written on the subway walls. . . . John, there’s a very famous saying by George Bernard Shaw that goes something like this: Reasonable people adapt themselves to the situations they find themselves in. But the unreasonable man insists on trying to make the world see things his way—therefore, it’s the unreasonable sons of bitches who are always the catalysts for progress.

I was cryin’ when I met you

Now I’m tryin’ to forget you

Love is sweet misery

I was cryin’ just to get you

Now I’m dyin’ ’cause I let you

Do what you do—down on me

Now there’s not even breathin’ room

Between pleasure and pain

Yeah you cry when we’re makin’ love

Must be one and the same

You can ruin anything by overintellectualizing it. I want my lyrics coming straight at you—I don’t want everything explained, rationalized, sanitized, and homogenized. I’m writing “Deuces Are Wild” and Kalodner the fucking momaluke says, “What are deuces? No one plays cards anymore.” He was right (back then, before TV poker became all the rage in the 2000s) . . . but deuces, when I’m done with them, are sonic dice. I’ll make those bones dance.

I love you ’cause your deuces are wild, girl,

Yeah, a double shot at love is so fi-i-yine!

I been lovin’ you since you was a child, girl,

’cause you an’ me is two of a kind!

It had nothing to do with deuces . . . it had everything to do with gambling as a metaphor for love, betting everything on the hand you’re dealt. Love, gambling, romance, games of chance. And by the way, “Deuces Are Wild” is on the side of the fastest funny car in the world. Do they look at it and go, “Huh? What does that mean?” They’d know what it means: deuces are wild, the car’s fucking fast. So what? If a girl came out naked and she had e = mc
2
on her tits, do you think no one would lust after her because they didn’t understand it?

Salieri in the film
Amadeus
—that fucking prick! You know who he really was? Mozart’s A&R man! Salieri the sycophant . . . who agrees with Emperor Joseph II, who agrees with the Music Director that there are “just too many notes” in Mozart’s opera. A&R men, that’s the way they talk: “Start with this. . . .” “Put that in there!” The critics, too, can drive me crazy.

Their style of dissecting things rubs me the wrong way. However, remaining open to criticism can take you to places you may never have gone to on your own. Thank you, John Kalodner, you’re a genius and I love you . . . no one can wear a dress better than you, including me. Dude looks like the bearded lady.

Can you sing? Can you dance? Tim Collins couldn’t clap twos and fours to a click track to save his life—but he saved ours.

Wait! I know what they’ll say: Salieri was integral—if it hadn’t been for Salieri making Mozart mad, he wouldn’t have written his
Requiem
. And they would have a point. Whenever somebody said, “You can’t do that!” it just made me want to sing it even
louder
! Because that’s what the sixties were all about: hatred of rules, regulations, the accepted way of doing things. Now it’s all fucked. Now it’s nothing but mock rebellions, it’s all “Why, I’ll show you! I’ll do a reality show and . . . shit on the table! Yeah! That’s it.”

Give me the freaks, the geniuses, the confused, the Daltons, the great unwashed, and the ones in doubt. All great art will tip the cart—and I’m not, by the way, claiming Aerosmith is the fucking Sistine Chapel—why no . . . no great art was ever created by playing it safe. Now, in the new gigabyte, iPod apps, 2.0 U.S. of A.’s, they’re all cloned, certified, and convinceified. There are automatons out there! It’s like a Universal horror movie except instead of giant ants oozing nuclear snot, it’s the professionals, lawyers, doctors, shrinks—and A&R men!—with their learned, conditioned responses, their stock answers to every fucking thing. A little-known secret? Listen to the things they’re not saying and you’ll find out what they are really saying. “Well, you see, if I were in your situation, given the parameters of the . . .” “Professionally speaking, if you were to ask my canned opinion . . .” Shut the front door.

Lawyers were brought into the folds of the band to advise us how to handle ourselves in the case of stalkers and how to talk to female employees. For example, if we ever get stalked by a twisted fan, what not to do. Never talk to the person. And since no one in the band ever does talk to fans, what’s the problem?

“Just don’t talk to that person if you sense they’re stalking you.” That was their blanket statement. Thank you—and bye! “How much was that, Mr. Manager, sir?” “Oh, well, that was only fifteen grand to bring in the lawyers again.” The band looks at me and says, “It’s all your fault. You talk to everyone!”

And then Joe and Billie started having stalkers, and then came the beginning of the end.

Here’s a case in point: I’m vacationing at my summer home with all my kids for the first time. I’m cooking breakfast, and I see someone jump over my fence. My ex-wife, Teresa, says, “I’ll take care of this,” and starts walking toward the door. And I say, “No, you don’t, I got this one.” So, this guy is standing at my backdoor pushing the doorbell. I said, “Ehh, what’s going on here? What are you doing jumping over my fence? This is the last place I can go to get away from people like you. You could get shot jumping over my fence like that. What are you doing here?”

“Well, my mother said you wrote a song about me.” Looking in his eyes, I could tell he was on something or off his meds. I was standing close enough to see his hands so I’d be able to stop him if he went to grab for something.

I said, “I write a lot of songs about a lot of people. How do you know this one’s to you?”

“Well, you sang,
Tommy now it’s untrue
.”

And I went blank. “Tommy? No, no, it’s actually ‘tell me,’ but it could be Tommy. Yeah, if you want it to be Tommy, it could be Tommy.” I didn’t correct him. I asked him, “Where’s your mom?”

“Well, she died when I was three. She left a note to me in a letter.” So that was his connection with the mother—I’m not going to take that away from him.

So, I said, “As far as I’m concerned, it’s ‘Tommy.’ From here on out, I’m gonna sing it like that. Now get outta here!” with a wink, “and don’t ever climb over the fence again.”

I could have called the cops, but I diffused it myself. Half the people in the world who hear your music own it anyway. And it’s exactly what you want them to do.

Marko Hudson told me a story about when he was hanging out with John Lennon and the Hollywood Vampires during the
Walls and Bridges/
May Pang Kotex-on-the-head moment in 1973. You gotta see this picture: Marko buzzing around Lennon’s hive (me thinks a bit too much). Lennon let Marko ask him ONE question about the Beatles, so he asks John about the lyric from “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” “The image of the velvet hand and the lizard—it meant so much to me,” said Marko. “Can you tell me where it came from and what it means?” Lennon, Marko’s greatest hero in life, replies (imagine thick Liverpudlian accent), “Doesn’t mean nothin’. Sounds good comin’ off me tongue. I just write the words . . . you make up the meaning.” My best friend was both crushed and liberated. But it points back to interpretation. . . .

People ask me all these questions about “Dream On
.
” “What does it mean?” What do you mean, “What does it mean?” It means Dream On. You figure it out. You’re the one listening to it . . . make up your own meaning.

W
hile I was working on
Nine Lives
I was clean and sober, I was high on life, but Tim Collins was convinced I was using. How could I be that jacked and on the natch? I think Tim wanted to catch me doing drugs in the worst way.

I went to Tim Collins’s office. I could tell by the smell of sulfur in the room that he was working on something diabolical, the monster. Dark deeds were afoot. “Steven, we’re going to send you to a retreat in Big Sur for a week, we think it’ll do you good.” Whenever I hear that something’s for my own good—
brrraaaannnng!
—alarms go off in my brain.

“I’m gonna go to a retreat in Big Sur? With who?”

“A men’s group from New York—all professional guys, captains of industry—you’ll get on with them famously,” Bob Timmons, Tim’s weaselly minion, chimed in.

“Oh, that sounds like Fun,” I said. “It’ll be five minutes of silence and the rest of the week it’s going be, ‘Uh, dude, man, what was it like singing “Dream On,” man?’ Or, ‘I gotta tell ya something, man, I got laid to your fucking records last week.’ ”

You know what that would be like for me at sixty with another bunch of sixty-fucking-year-olds? “Do you know that my wife and I made love to your song and we got seven good children out of it.”

That marked the beginning of my communication breakdown with Tim Collins. In my head I was going,
Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-dun-da-DA-na-na-na-na-na
. Ha! I was covering my ears so I couldn’t hear this crap. There was no way in hell I was going. Taj was four and Chelsea was eight. And it was hard enough being away from them for so long, but to come back from making a record and go to a fucking men’s club in Big Sur! With a bunch of, you know, sober testosterones? Bad enough going to a fucking bar and talking to those guys! Sober it’s ten times worse! They’re going to remember every epiphanous moment they had in their teenage years when they were watching porn, getting stoned, and listening to “Sweet Emotion” while fingering the girl next door.

“I’m not going, you fucks!” I said. “I just got back from finishing a fucking record—and it turned out great, by the way, thanks for asking.” They’ll tell you they were only
suggesting
I go, but it’s like the Pope suggesting to the Boston cardinal that he better change the subject matter of his sermons or he’s going to go away for a year to a retreat in the Azores! Because when I objected, Bob Timmons said, “No, you have to go, we’ve already booked it.” And the sleazy duo started trying to talk me into it. I got really angry. “I haven’t seen my wife in over two months. What are you guys thinking of? Enough of your fucking control issues! Wait a fucking minute—it wasn’t all that long ago, back when I was in Tucson, Arizona, that you were telling me I could get a blow job. And now you’re telling me that I should go away? For
what
?” I said, “Fuck you! I’m not going there.” I walked out and slammed the door.

Now, keep in mind, this is a guy that helped massage and facilitate our sobriety. He was a strong advocate for us, but all along he was taking sleeping pills, anxiety medication (necessary apparently because he’s managing Aerosmith!), and binge eating. He’s up in his hotel room eating cheeseburgers, there’s three main entrees on the room service trolley. That’s a drug, too.