Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (13 page)

Okay, so we’re all living and working together and we’re getting these early gigs. Sure, there’s friction from time to time, but nobody in the band has doubts that we are going to make it. Everybody was totally committed. No band I was ever in had gone to that extent. Prior to moving to 1325 I would look at Tom and go, “You’re not leaving, right?” “Are you a quitter?” “We’re doing this, right?” Nowadays, there are fewer places for a young band to set up and play . . . and suck. Dare to suck! We did—you can, too!

Joey Kramer’s the one who brought that funk and shit to Aerosmith because he was playing in black bands and he thought he was all that. Of course, he had no idea what he was going to blossom into. He’s so dis-
tinc
-tive. Even his mistakes
fly-y-y-y
!

And then there was my old buddy and gang mate Ray Tabano. He was there from the beginning. Not the greatest guitar player on the planet but one hell of a crazy motherfucker. Crazy Raymond. And I wanted the sound of two guitars in this band (eye, E . . . the Stones). After a year or so Brad Whitford would replace Ray (in 1971).

Like a lot of bands, we lived in the same house, played, got drunk, went to drug school together, stole to eat. We had no money . . . we were starving to death back then. I was stealing food from the Stop and Shop (rechristened the Stop and Steal). I’d go to the store and get some ground beef and shove it down my jeans to throw in with the rice. I’d make that Gravy Train shit that I could pour over some bread with brown rice and carrots. And then the six of us ate.

The psychological warfare began with milk—which is pretty funny, because it was over spilt milk that the band broke up in 1979. I’d get the milk in the morning and put it in the refrigerator; then I’d go to get a drink of milk and what the fuck, there’s just a drop of milk left. “Well, at least we left you
something
!” they’d say. And there it is . . . there’s the psycho
lacto
logical crux of the thing, and that’s pretty much as humorous as I can get about our petty daily band frictions. I’ve gotten real mad, but I never actually
hit
anybody in the band. That nobody ever hit
me
is a testament to their forbearance. I probably drove everyone nuts.

M
ark Lehman, our first tour manager, 1972. Joe and I wrote “Movin’ Out” on his water bed. (Steven Tallarico)

But if you don’t bring this shit out into the light it gets suppressed and festers. Bands try and avoid aggravation, but hell, it can actually inspire you to write better songs. One day at the very beginning of 1971 I wrote the basic track and lyrics for “Movin’ Out” on a water bed with Joe Perry in our living room at 1325 Com. Ave. I leaped up and shouted, “Guys! Do you realize what we just did?” Their enthusiasm was curbed. “Yeah, what is it, man?” “It’s our firstborn!” I proclaimed. “The first
Aerosmithed
song! How great is that?”

F
irst song Joe and I wrote. . . . My dad transposed it, 1971.

We all live on the edge of town

Where we all live ain’t a soul around

People start a-comin’, all we do is just a-grin

Said we gotta move out ’cause the city’s movin’ in

All this time the band is sprawled out watching TV
,
drinking Ripple and Boone’s Farm, smoking pot. They wouldn’t have been interested if I’d said it was the end of the world. “Move over, you’re blocking the TV,” they’d whine. “No, man,” I said, “let’s go write some more songs!” “
Bah!
Get the fuck outta here!” and they’d flick their joints at me. I got really fucking pissed off at these guys, went in the other room, sat down at the piano, and wrote another verse to “Movin’ Out,” finished up
“
Make It, Don’t Break It,” and worked on “Dream On.” And just did a shitload of stuff. Love may be the best driving wheel, but anger is a pretty good second.

T
he albums that had a huge effect on me were
Taj Mahal
and
Deep Purple
—a mixture of Taj Mahal and the Yardbirds. That’s what I brought to Aerosmith. I said, “These albums are gonna be our Bible, let’s have at it.” Taj Mahal. God, his album was so instrumental for me, leaving all those cover bands and doing Aerosmith. I named my son for Taj. It was Taj Mahal singing “Going Up to the Country, Paint My Mailbox Blue” right out in the open with his harmonica—that first album, I still listen to it.

We got “Train Kept a-Rollin” from the Yardbirds, but it started as an R&B hit for Tiny Bradshaw, who was a swing band leader. Johnny Burnette hillbillyized it in the fifties and the Yardbirds just
smoked
it. What did we have to lose? I always wanted to do “Road Runner”—my totem critter. Bo Diddley’s version Britbluesisized by the Pretty Things.

The first thing you got to do is get yourself a blues Bible: Yardbirds, Led Zep, Stones. The old über-amped Brit blues shit. Pieces of the true cross, baby. Fiery holy relics! Peter Green playing on “Oh, Well” or “Rattlesnake Shake” on Fleetwood Mac’s
Live at the BBC.
What the fuck? Hidden truths! Melodic sensibilities are embedded in that vinyl.

Now, any idiot can basically buy that kit. A bald-headed accountant in a fright wig and tight spandex can do it and end up on the cover of a heavy metal mag. But in the dazed and confused days of yore, the mystic moves of Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Peter Green were only revealed to true believers.

When Jimmy Page came to Boston on the
Outrider
tour in June of 1988 and dedicated “Train Kept a-Rollin’ ” to” “Steven and Joe from Aerosmith,” that was like a blessing from one of our gods.

We rehearsed at Boston University, down in the basement of the girls’ dorm. Jeff Green, the director of the West Campus One dorms, was a heavyset guy who loved the band and let us practice there for free. We rehearsed until four thirty and then hitched a ride back to the apartment so we could all watch
The Three Stooges
at five on Channel 38 and share a bong full of brown Mexican marijuana. Let’s get stupid. Well, not everybody gets stupid. I actually think I wrote some good lyrics on pot, but meth, coke, and Tuinals were my drugs of choice.

In Joe Perry I’d seen raw power . . . but how to harness it? One day it dawned on me why Led Zeppelin was the shit. Jimmy Page figured it out, and it wasn’t
jamming.
Everyone in that band knew what they were playing and played the same rhythm. I heard Joe Perry, Tom Hamilton, and Pudge Scott jamming back at the Barn in Sunapee
.
I was blown away by their unleashed fury, but I wasn’t crazy about their rambling, indulgent noodling. “Hey, we’re jammin’, man,” they’d say. They even
called
themselves the Jam Band. My answer to that was “Yah and . . . what?
What?!
” There’s nothing so great about three people
jamming.
It’s all egotistical, all over the place. So I said, “How about instead of each of you going off on your own tangents, you all play in sync?” Now, there’s balls! “You guys, we gotta play
together
. We can’t jam and be a big fuckin’ rock band. The foot’s gotta play with the bass—then we’ll have a serious fucking rock machine.”

There are secrets to rock, just as there are secrets about making love to your wife or girlfriend. Do you come at the same time? I’m not going to ask, but I will tell you that some of the finer moments in my life were making love to a woman and coming together. There’s an ancient magic ritual to this: if right before both of you come, you make a pact or say a prayer and focus that thought,
“Sweet Jesus, I want you to send this light”
to cure an illness, to achieve some deep purpose in your life, it
will
happen, because there is no power on earth stronger than that. There’s electromagnetic theory behind it. If I hooked up that energy at the instant you came to an electrode it would go
mmmmmnnnbrrrrggggnnnnnnn.
The little red needle would thrash like a rattlesnake’s tail.

Now, what if you had a thought
while
your electricity was ramped up? What if your every thought had an electrical charge attached to it that got overamped during sex? When the two orgasms combine they have unbelievable psychic power. The English occultist Alistair Crowley based his ritual Magick on this principle. And it’s an interesting fact that for a dozen years in the seventies and eighties, Jimmy Page owned Bolskine House, Crowley’s old home on the shore of Loch Ness—so who knows what effect Crowley’s Magick had on the serpentine rise of Led Zeppelin?

I’ve practiced that Crowley Magick so I know it works. I’m not saying that every girl I slept with came at the same time as I did or that I asked her to pray for the same thing I was praying for: namely that Aerosmith would become the greatest American band. But then I didn’t have to, because that’s all I ever thought about . . . or prayed for.

E
very kid on every block in every city in America wants to be a rock star. But if girls, money, fast cars, houses in Maui, and skybox seats to Red Sox games are your only motivation—and that’s
a lot
of motivation—then you’re in trouble. Aerosmith has been together—the five of us—for forty years, with a short two-year break, and you don’t get to do that without some very strong motivating force to counterbalance all the stupid fucked-up things that are constantly working to tear you apart. The psychic glue that held us together was
the music.
The collective sound that the five of us make. Peel back the layers of the onion (that’s what it is) . . . and when it works, it’s above and beyond your wildest dreams.

Like it must have been for Jimi Hendrix’s band. His music was so heavy that when you hear the thunderous, orgasmic opening to “Purple Haze,” you don’t have to
say
anything. You can imagine Jimi’s drummer, Mitch Mitchell, listening to that playback and going, “Oh, my god!
Oh, my god!
” The rush and din of it sucked you in, it pulled you under. It was magnetic, utterly addictive—you would follow that sound to the ends of the earth. It’s not something you can walk away from. It’s the sound of humping, pumping, grinding life itself—with a voodoo vibe to it.

I remember my first girlfriend, Geraldine Ripetti, saying, “I heard this song on the radio—I’ve never heard music that sexy.”

“What do you mean?”

She goes, “ ‘Purple Haze.’ ”

Gerry Ripetti had the biggest boobs—I couldn’t even look at them while I was standing in front of her, they were so big, it so affected me, I was st-st-stuttering, be-be-be-because. . . . She was so beautiful. She said, “Steven, you’ve got to hear this record, this is the sexiest music I ever heard.” And just hearing her say “sexiest music” I could feel the lump already arising in my pants. “Sexy? What do you mean by that?” She played me “Are You Experienced?” and, come on! She was so fucking right on, because when you heard those Stratocasting gears churning . . . that was sex as sound in its purest primal form.