Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (41 page)

I’d hear one of her songs and think, “How many affairs does this woman have to have to know how to put it so brilliantly? Oddly enough, she’s married to a parrot named Buttwing who keeps repeating, ‘That’s
brilliant
!’ and ‘I
love
it!’ ” Whereas my songs come out of the muck and mire of the muddy stream of consciousness—or, as I like to say, the stream of
un
consciousness.

I think my way of writing songs comes from when I first heard hymns and organ music in church when God was still there under the pulpit in a box covered with red velvet. I grew up Presbyterian, I’ve walked with God all my life; you know, I always said my prayers. The music was so profound and stimulating, a cosmic harmony pouring into the soul of the congregation. That’s why the organ is so powerful. People hear God in a song because music infuses your mind with melody . . . it floods your brain like the fluid in the placenta. So, in church, hearing those giant organs sweetly playing swelling chords and melodic soaring hymns, I just fell into that angelic sound. And at home, from age one or two, I was lullabied to sleep with the notes of Debussy and Schubert. Looking for God? I did not come here looking for God, I brought Her with me.

Diane wrote “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” and that song, by the way, has one of the most
brilliant
front lines ever. If you’re in love and your significant other ever says to you, “I could fall asleep just to hear you breathing,” you’re going to drop and give her twenty right there on the floor. Or nestle your head in her neck and believe that you wouldn’t be able to live the rest of your life without her. We’ve all been there, haven’t we?

Songs are nothing but air and pure emotion, but they have intense effects on people’s lives. When people relate passionately to a song, all that goes on in their lives gets attached to the song—and the music never stops. All they want to do is tell me how that was their wedding song, or what they played at their wedding.

How about the two guys who created the BlackBerry—they came up with the idea while smoking pot and listening to “Sweet Emotion.” At the Kennedy Honors, a prominent democratic politician told me she had made love for the first time listening to “Sweet Emotion.” Half the current government of the United States has made love to Joe Perry’s licks.

John Kalodner introduced me to Diane Warren—it was an A&R man’s equation: big band, big money, big really talented songwriter—big band needs big hit. I’d written a bunch of things with her before. When I was working on “Devil’s Got a New Disguise
,
” I went out to her house in Malibu. She has a piano that looks out over the ocean and I said, “So, we’re gonna write a song. How do we start?” “Well, I’ll play you something.” She played me a couple things, mostly ballady and it wasn’t working. That’s when I sat down and carved out that beginning piano live and
voilà!
“Devil’s Got a New Disguise” started to take shape. Some years later, the song was completed. . . .

Sweet Susie Q she was a revel

No angel wings, more like the devil

She was so hot, so cool and nasty

Believe it or not, here’s what she asked me . . .

If you need love with no condition

Let’s Do the Do, honey, I’m on a mission

The girl’s so bitchin’, my backbone’s twitchin’

’Cause down in hell’s kitchen

The devil’s got a new disguise

I’m on a mission, a proposition

It’s intuition ’cause

The devil’s got a new disguise

And so that was “Devil’s Got a New Disguise.” Another song Diane wrote that we recorded was “Painted on My Heart.”

And I’ve still got your face

Painted on my heart

Scrawled upon my soul

Etched upon my memory, baby

“Painted on My Heart” was going to be taken by Johnny Hallyday, the French rock star. I gave him the stem mixes, I gave him my vocal, but at the last minute he didn’t do it. A stem mix is the basic track. You put your vocal on it so the band can play behind it. It’s a little like Guitar Hero, where you have the backing tracks and you leave space for the kid to play Joe Perry.

S
ome time in 1997 I got a call from Jerry Bruckheimer saying he’d like to put four or five Aerosmith songs in an upcoming movie. We were all for it and that’s when John Kalodner played me Diane’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.” Little did I know that Kathy Nelson, who was picking the music, would put it in the same Jerry Bruckheimer movie,
Armageddon
, that Liv was talking about.

Okay, let’s get into the what-it-is-ness of Diane Warren. Diane had written the song already and got a Celine Dion sing-a-like to make a demo. Diane put it on a cassette with her band doing it on synthesizers, all done in her studio. I listened to it in the car with John Kalodner and said, “It’s fuckin’ great, but where’s the chorus? It’s a hit single without a doubt, but there’s no chorus.”

A couple days went by, and Diane comes to the Sunset Marquis to my room where there was a grand piano. She sits down and starts playing “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.” And because of the way she was singing it, I finally heard the chorus and I went, “Oh, my god,” and I started to tear up. It was just that tonal difference between the Celine Dion wannabe version—and the way she sold it—and the way Diane sang it, forget about it. It was a perfect example of
it’s the singer, not the song.
The way she sang
“I don’t want to close my eyes”
made a believer out of me and the rest is history.

In Diane’s office, a room that she’s used for the last twenty-three years, there’s the same piano, cassettes from thirty years ago, and thirty number one singles on the wall. She walks around with that little green African parrot on her arm, Buttwing, and never leaves home without it. That little fucker will live a hundred years and it’ll be singing “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” on the space shuttle to Mars. Damn if Buttwing doesn’t get there before me!

“Hey, Diane, everyone’s fucking to your songs,” I said. “Do you ever get laid?” She laughed shyly. “I get it,” I said, “you take all the angst from not getting it—and put it in a song.” She goes: “You got it! I’m just a frustrated romantic.”

O
kay, I was hitting them out of the ballpark, but unbeknownst to me I was cursed, cursed as Cain, doomed as Captain Ahab. The seven plagues of Egypt . . . all fell on
me
! What did I do to bring this on myself? Did I desecrate the Pharaoh’s tomb? Did I violate some dire taboo? Is there someone somewhere putting pins in a voodoo doll?

Or . . . was it the Faustian bargain I made with the Bitch Goddess of
Billboard,
when she whispered in my ear, “Steven, baby, how would you like a hit record?”

“That’d be sweet.”

“How about a
number one
hit record?”

“Fuck, yeah! Honey, I’d do anything to get a number one record.”

“Anything?
Are you sure, Steven, because, you know there may be a price to pay. . . .”

“Hell, bring it on!” said I recklessly. “Whatever it is, I can handle it.”

Oh, yeah? Did I really say that? I shoulda gone to see the gypsy, because before too long I found myself in a world of trouble and pain.
Nobody knows the trouble I seen.
Gimme an E! Heavy is the head that wears the motherfucking Mad Hatter’s hat. Thank you, God, may I have another?

W
e would soon get our hit with “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”—came out in August 1998, stayed number one on
Billboard
’s Hot 100 for four weeks—but before that happened the price to pay prophesied by the Bitch Goddess of
Billboard
came horribly true.

My litany of maladies, misfortunes, and woes began in the Year of the Rat. It started out uneventfully enough. The band had a day off, we were in the Allegheny Mountains. I called Joe’s room and told him I wanted to lease a llama and fill our backpacks with crunchy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and climb to the top of Pikes Peak. We hiked five miles up. Unbeknownst to Joe, I had a copy of “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” the version with the strings on it. So I brought my CD player—and
two
sets of batteries, because I’m on to Murphy.

We were on the edge of a cliff. Joe’s sitting on top of the mountain eating his sandwich, and I walk off, about a hundred feet away. I looked over, found a little place to sit down, and listened to “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing
”
under the headphones, with that orchestra welling up and me watching eagles soar for the first time in my life, and I wept like a baby. And then I knew that we really had something. Just like the time I listened to “Love in an Elevator,” going “
Whoops!
This is gonna be a hit!” I
knew
. The crying part of “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”—
duh-da-duh-DAHN-N-N!—
it was, like,
fuck,
wait’ll they hear this! Never mind “Is it gonna be?” I don’t want to jinx anything, but guess what? I know what’s on the radio—this is
better
!

The first Demon of Excruciating Pain visited me a week later. We were on tour in Alaska playing the Sullivan Arena in Anchorage on April 29, 1998. We’d never done Alaska, so I said to management, “If that’s the only state in America that we haven’t played, we’ve
gotta
do it.” So we’re up there in Anchorage, and we’re doin’ “Train Kept a-Rollin’.” At the end of the song, during Joey’s drum bit, I do this thing where I jump in the air, do a spread eagle split, and at the same time swing my scarf-festooned mic stand around. The bottom of the mic stand weighs around four pounds, and as I go up in the air I accidentally whack the inside of my left knee with it. It’s like hitting your funny bone with a four-pound hammer—your knee will go all tingly with electricity, so for a moment you can’t feel your leg. And that’s what happened to me. I landed, but because my knee was tingling and numb, I didn’t have any sensation in that leg when I hit the stage and the ACL in my left knee shredded, ripped right out. Your ACL is a ligament inside the knee. Anterior crutiate ligament—it’s what holds your knee on.

And this happened not in midconcert or midsong but
right at the end
of the show, “Train Kept a-Rollin’, ” our encore song. In other words, I fell down at the conclusion of our show, providing an unintended climax. I’m lying there, writhing in pain, going, “
Aaaaaaagggh!
” No one realizes what’s just happened to me. I played it like it was part of the show. And I looked back at my tour manager and I mouthed the word
ambulance
.

He went, “What?” He didn’t understand yet. But I knew that I’d hurt myself beyond any pain I’d ever felt before. I could tell something really bad had happened. The ambulance came, they gave me a shot of what I love—I didn’t know what it was, but I could hear the opening line of “Strawberry Fields” floating through my head.

At the hospital, they said, “Here’s what you did: you tore your ACL. It’s going to take two weeks for the swelling to go down before we can go in arthroscopically to look around and see what the damage is and take care of it. Two weeks. And here’s what you’ve got to do: ice it every day and get that swelling down.” Fuck! End of the tour. Wrong time to make the doughnuts—and right into the video of “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.”

After that we went somewhere in the Midwest to do the video for
“
I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.” I’m still in a cast, packed in ice, and if you watch that video, you’ll see that they only shoot me from the waist up—just like Elvis. The director created a futuristic scenario using two hundred cones, geodesic shapes and stuff. The stylist had Betsey Johnson make me a very freaky coat, as I found out later, out of human hair—I instinctively knew what to do with it, so I fucked with it, used it as a prop just like I did with the mask at the beginning of
“
Cryin’
.”