Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (23 page)

I once owned a Cessna Riley Conversion turbo, bought it in New Hampshire—twin-engine turboprop, safest plane in the air. My friend Zunk would fly it with his father. I’d be at the house and call him up, “Let’s go flying, Zunk,” and I’d swing over, pick up a gram, and we’d go up and do parabolics . . . where we’d pretend to go up around (and over) a clock: 10–11–12 (woeeee) . . . 1–2–3 and between 11–12–1–2 and 3, you are truly
weightless
. There’s nothing on the planet Earth like this. You can simulate it, but up there—
flying around the clock
—that’s the real deal.

So one day our flight was canceled and the band had to get to Indiana. We’re flying from New Hampshire . . . just me, Zunk, and Joey. Zunk wants to show off for Joey so he goes into a parabolic. And I’ve got an ice chest in there. The ice chest goes up in the air and it’s hovering in front of Joey’s face. “What the fuck?” He’s freakin’ out. But even better, another time, we’re on the band plane and we happen to hit some nasty turbulence. I whip out my vial of coke, put a line on my thumb, grab a straw, and start to snort. Just then, the blow begins to
float
up in the air . . . hovering like fairy dust in front of my face. I shove the straw up my nose and
snifffff
the powder right out of the air! A gram of coke floated out of my bindle and into the air! I was known from then on as the human DustBuster—which turned into Dirt Devil, which turned into demon of screamin’. And then at one point, the demon o’ semen—but that’s another chapter.

For a while we had a guy in the crew who was an ex-cop. Having worn a badge himself, he’d get friendly with the local cops in the towns we played, hang out with them, and they’d give us the stuff that they had taken off the kids. Fucking cops in uniform! They’d say, “Put your hands out,” and they’d put bags of weed and little dime bags of whatever in tinfoil in them. He could also buy guns from various people. So one time he goes, “Come here,” and pulls the bay down from the bottom of the bus. I look inside and there’s what I thought was an AK-16 and this shotgun with a huge clip. The clip was round. I’d never seen anything like it. You can’t even get one anymore. It’s known now as a weapon of mass destruction.

I took the AR-16 up to Henry’s house, went into his backyard, loaded it up, and said, “You know, this doesn’t look right.” I walked into his woods, pulled the trigger, and it went,
rattttatttatttttt. . . .
I had never shot a machine gun up till that point. I freaked! Then I ran back to Henry’s house, rolled it up in a blanket, went back to my house, took my boat out to the middle of Lake Sunapee, and threw it in the water. Rambo, I am not.

Whenever we wanted to snort blow together backstage, we’d say, “Let’s go have a production meeting,” and disappear into some little room and pack our beaks. There wasn’t anything subtle about it. It was, like, “Production meeting!” We’d take over an office and have a cop stand guard for us outside. We called it the “money room.”

We were all gacked to the gills back then.
Gacked
is when you’ve done too much blow and your jaw starts moving like a robot, there’s white on the side of your lips—you’re babbling, speaking in tongues . . .
rattling
on about
nothing
. It doesn’t matter what it is. You’d get to the end of some insane rant and go, “Wait a minute, did I just say that?” That was the norm back then. You’re so stoned and speeding, thinking about what to say while the other person’s speaking. You’re just
gacked
. That’s the best part. The worst part is . . . nothing’s funny. You could make a joke like “What’s the difference between pink and purple? Your grip!” and the room would look like an oil painting. Not a laugh. And then you think you’re the phallic mentor on this shit, but when it comes to doing the deed, it’s like pushing a rope uphill, or stuffing an oyster in a slot machine.

Drugs were already getting to be a problem onstage and off—but it was a problem we wanted, and there were plenty of people to help us go down the road to perdition. Sometime along the way we’d met this character Brimstone—what a perfect name for a dealer.

We were playing the old Michigan Palace in April of ’74. One of the roadies says to Raymond, “Someone wants to talk to you.” And there he was, the devil himself. Brimstone was five feet four, big curly hair, big lips. He pulls out a bag
filled
with drugs. Raymond tells him, “Here’s the deal. Party afterward, if you want to come, it’ll cost you an eight-ball to get in the door. Walk in the room, don’t say a word, take the shit out, put it on the table, then we’ll talk.” With that he became the band’s regular dealer; he traveled with us, followed the tour with his own money. As we made more and more bread we bought bigger and bigger amounts until eventually we gave him twenty thousand dollars for a pound of coke. Two o’clock in the morning, there’d be Brimstone. Always had two six-foot blondes with him. Came to a bad end.
Brimstone became tombstone.
In fond memory, I will say this . . . that man knew more about R&B than Joe and I put together. He’d sit on the floor with us like the Beatles did with the Maharishi, talking about music. As in the rest of my life, there are no coincidences. I feel blessed for knowing him.

Eccentric characters always found us. We’re playing the Cow Palace in San Francisco in ’93. Night before the show, we’re invited down to the O’Farrell Theater, the infamous sex club owned by the Mitchell Brothers
. Rolling Stone
writer Hunter S. Thompson is in command central . . . the office upstairs with the pool table. “Steven, come here!” he shouts. “I want you to see this!” He proceeds to introduce me to two blondes that were . . . no shit, 11s out of 10. The first girl has her lip pierced with a four-foot chain hanging from it that’s connected to the other girl’s pierced clit. Right through the poor thing. “Couldn’t you have done that after I got to it?” I said. “How you gonna feel my mouth?” The question was, at best, rhetorical. “Oh, I will,” she smiled. They climbed on top of the billiard table and we commenced to play. Gave new meaning to the term
pocket pool
. Left ball in the side pocket!

W
hen the drum riser starts harmonizing, you know you are either too high or some mystic Pythagorean force is at work. After the band stopped playing, the sound waves from the stage would vibrate the drum riser and out would come this
perfect note
. A booming E-flat. It was wild! What was that? The stage was haunted! The note would come out through the holes we’d cut into its side so that we could move it. It was feedback, but it was freaky, especially on a few lines of blow, to hear this otherworldly foghorn sound emanating from it.

Like I said earlier, I was a drummer, so I’d share all my tricks with Joey. Back when I was with Chain Reaction and no one could hear me, I put a pillow in my drum, ripped the front head off, placed a Shure 58 mic in there, and hooked that into two Colossus amps. I put ’em on either side of my drums when I played, which pissed off Don Solomon no end, but he knew it accentuated what he was playing.

I told Joey that story later on, so he, having to outdo me, got a twelve-inch speaker that someone built for him that he stuck behind his head to enhance our show. It would get miked for sound, the bass would get miked for slap. And we were off and running. One day I look at Joey and I hear the stage talking to me, humming this note. Little did I know it was his fucking bass amp feeding back. Joey is a good drummer, but I’m the one that showed him foot foot, foot foot—high hat, high hat—foot and high hat playing the same thing . . . snare in the middle. He fuckin’ practiced that and he got it.

I showed Joey the egg on my foot. The egg is the muscle you get on your foot from playing the foot pedal. I showed him because I was so proud of it. He looked at me and I could see in his eyes that he loved the whole thing, the romance of it. Joey became one of the greatest drummers ever, which made him two feet taller than he was when he started. Now he’s taller than me! But he still wears spandex, with a little teeny nub. You’ve no doubt heard the expression “I know it’s small but it’s fat like a beer can.” Most men dress to the left or the right; Joey dresses straight out. Far as endowments go on the other members of the band, two are hung like a Sopwith Camel, one’s got a licorice nib, and one has a
big ten-inch.
I won’t say who that is . . . but his first name is Steven.

Joey was one of the reasons why I wrote the song “Big Ten Inch Record.” I guess it was always wishful thinking. And when it comes to rumors, while we’re on the subject of phallic nobility, here’s one more. . . . I’ve come to find out, as the years roll by, that everybody seems to think that in the middle of “Big Ten Inch Record,” I say, “Suck on my big ten-inch.” I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard this from—engineers, producers, disc jockeys, and, of course, fans . . . from all over the world. Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but the song is about a big ten-inch record, and in the middle I say, “ ’cept” (like
except
) for my big ten-inch. How do you get
suck on
from
’cept for
? Again . . . wishful thinking.

B.J.
(aka Billy Joe Reisch), who was one of the crew in the seventies, used to make jokes on the backstage passes. He’d print them up in the dressing room and laminate them. Like: T
HIS BACKSTAGE PASS AUTHORIZED BY
M
ONDO
. O
R
D
EATH BY
V
ALIUM . . .
with a drawing of Kelly crucified on Joe’s amp stack. There’s an old blue Aerosmith backstage pass somewhere showing me pissing on it.

I kept my medicine cabinet onstage, in a fourteen-inch drum head, the bottom of which contained Jack Daniel’s and two Dixie cups: one Dixie cup with a straw and blow in it and the other with Coca-Cola and Jack Daniel’s. From behind the amps, I’d put the towel over my head and put my nose over it. The straw would be sticking out of the cup, as if it were a drink.

I wanted an onstage dressing room where I could snort drugs. The idea was a small movable sentry box that we could put at the back of the stage. The towel over my head routine was starting to get risky and a bit obvious. So, sometime in ’76, we ordered a small dressing room from Tom Fields and Associates, a theatrical lighting company that also builds sets. We gave them the plans and the size: thirty-six inches deep by thirty-six inches wide by six feet tall. But when it showed up it was thirty-six
feet
by thirty-six
feet.
They called it “Mondo’s Condo.” It was such a monstrous-sized fucker it showed up on a huge flatbed truck. It was like the Stonehenge prop in
Spinal Tap,
only in reverse. We sent it back. We wrote on it, “Sell it to the Stones,” and I think they did.

Joe had vials of coke with straws in them at the back of the stage, and when the lights would go out he’d go over there like he was checking something or making a guitar change and Kelly would put the straw in his nose; he’d take a hit, then the lights would come on again. The coke bingeing got so bad and blatant to where we just laid out lines on top of the bass amps on the left side of the stage.

One of the things we always put in our riders was that the promoter had to provide in the dressing room a full-length, six-foot-long mirror. I would take the local promoter’s rep into the dressing room and he’d say, “Well, there’s the six-foot mirror you requested, Steven.” And I’d say, “I can see the mirror all right, but where the fuck’s the three-foot razor blade?”

The crew used to strew the stage with bizarre, arousing, and strange objects to startle, amuse, and titillate the band. For a while they put a scale model of the Starship
Enterprise
onstage and moved it around. Elsewhere, they’d scatter Polaroids of naked girls from the night before across the floor, and then there was the pièce de résistance: Nick Spiegel’s artificial vagina.

Nick Spiegel was an Aerotech, and we made fun of him when we first caught him playing with a latex pocket pussy. Kelly decided to get him a deluxe model. He went to this porn store, waited until nobody was around, and pointed to this top-of-the-line artificial vagina . . . a realistic-looking latex rubber job with a receptacle inside and some plastic pubic hair on the outside. It looked like they’d taken the sweepings off the barber shop floor and glued them on with Super Glue. But this was definitely the item, so Kelly said, “Let me see that one.” “Will that be all?” the clerk asked. “That’s okay, just wrap it up.” So on the way out, the guy’s going, “Oh, have a nice night, sir!” And Kelly says, “Oh, it’s not for me. . . .”

U
nlike the other bands I’d been in, with Aerosmith the band members were willing to go the distance. The thought that we might not make it never occurred to any of us. When a band has doubts or thoughts that they have other options and tell themselves they can become accountants and Realtors and carpenters and whatnot—they’re going to fail. And when the guys in those bands give up, they become bitter. They’re all schoolteachers and cops on fucking meds.