Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (25 page)

After those lines I would stomp with my feet on the plywood.

In the prechorus you’ll hear “
I’m BACK in the saddle a-gai-ain
” with the sound of my tambourine boots on the plywood. Jack and engineer Jay Messina double-tracked it, then triple-tracked it so it sounded like an army marching . . .

Peelin’ off my boots and chaps, I’m saddle sore

Four bits gets you time in the racks, they scream for more

The next line went “
Fools gold out of their mines
.” I figured people would just think it was “Fools
go
out of their minds.” Then comes . . .

The girls are soakin’ wet, no tongue’s drier than mine

I’ll come when I get baaaaaaccckkkkkk . . .

And then, if you listen really carefully after the next verse, you’ll hear a whip sound . . .

I’m calling all the shots tonight, I’m like a loaded gun

Peelin’ off my boots and chaps, I’m saddle sore

Four bits gets you time in the racks, I scream for more

The title of the song evoked riding a horse into the sunset, so I wanted the sound of a lariat and a whip. I set up two Neumann U80 mics and placed them twenty feet apart, got in the middle, grabbed a guitar cord, and said, “Turn on the mics,” whereupon I whipped the cord around my head letting it out—ten feet, eleven, twelve, thirteen . . . till it got out as close as it could to the mics without hitting them. So in the mix, Jack panned the whip from the left speaker to the right speaker. I’d call that ear candy.

B
ack in the saddle, getting my rocks off on tour for
Rocks
, 1976. (Ron Pownall for Aerosmith)

At the end of the song, you hear the clomping sound of horses’ hooves galloping. I used two coconuts I stole off a mermaid’s chest. Actually, they were part of a percussion kit I got from SIR Studios. When we did “Sweet Emotion,” I asked for that same kit but they forgot the maracas. So if you listen to the front of “Sweet E,” you hear that
chicka, chicka, chicka
? That’s not maracas. Some guy at the studio left a packet of sugar on the console. I took the packet of sugar, held it up to the Neumann, Jack said, “Go ahead,” and I shook the sugar. And that’s the opening of “Sweet E.” That
was
sweet!

“Back in the Saddle” I hoped would be nostalgic, hearkening to the spirit of every Spaghetti Western I ever saw. The band played like the gods they were. Jack mixed it with Jay in the way you hear it today.

I wrote “Rats in the Cellar” as a tip of the hat, or an answer to “Toys in the Attic.” Rat/cellar—toys/attic. Meanwhile, in real life, “Rats” was more like what was actually going on. Things were coming apart, sanity was scurrying south, caution was flung to the winds, and little by little chaos was permanently moving in.

Goin’ under, rats in the cellar

Goin’ under, skin’s turnin’ yellow

Nose is runny, losin’ my connection

Losin’ money, getting no affection

New York City blues

East Side, West Side blues

Throw me in the slam

Catch me if you can

Believe

That you’re wearing

Tearing me apart

Safe complaining, ’cause everything’s rotten

Go insanin’, and ain’t a thing forgotten

Feelin’ cozy, rats in the cellar

Cheeks are rosy, skin’s turning yellow

Loose and soggy, lookin’ rather lazy

See my body, pushin’ up the daisies

A
s time goes by, everything gets more chaotic: three shows in a row, one meet-and-greet (we called ’em “press the meat”) after another, every night, as the fun of it all came crashing in. It felt like the band was traveling a million miles a year, stopping at every galaxy, leaving our cosmic fingerprint and celestial scent as a little something for everyone to remember us by.

The stadiums we played were getting bigger. Backstage setups became more elaborate. When we performed at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, there were pinball machines and ridiculously slammin’ naked mannequins that lined the hallways from the stage to our dressing rooms. You could only imagine how the wives loved that. In May ’76 we played to eighty thousand fans at the Pontiac Metropolitan Stadium in Pontiac, Michigan. The drugs were becoming more serious, too, and not just among the band and the crew. We rocked the Motor City for a little over ninety minutes. It seemed about one fan a minute got taken out of the stadium from an OD—Quaaludes and booze mostly.

June 18, 1976. Mid-South Coliseum, Memphis, Tennessee—the infamous Memphis bust. I’m onstage, going, “Motherfuckin’ this and motherfuckin’ that,” my usual stage rap, but on this particular eve in this particular southern city, the cops didn’t like it one bit. Apparently there was a law against profanity. Who knew?! They told me to stop swearing or else. Or else
what
? Don’t they know that’s only going to
encourage
me? I was told, “If you cuss one more time. . . .” I said, “Like what?” And they said, “Well,
shit
and
fuck
.” And I said, “But
those are lyrics in
our songs!” The cop didn’t really like us a whole lot, so I said, “All right, I’ll do my best.” He goes, “Do your best? If you cuss, we’re throwing you in jail. And if you think we’re fucking with ya, try us out. We’ll
lock you up for a month.
We ain’t like the way they are up north!”

I couldn’t help myself, so I laid it down and said a few more choice words. . . . Our tour manager came up in between songs and said, “The cops are waiting for you. After the show, you’re gonna get arrested.” I was sufficiently drunk, to say the least. “Okay, no prob . . . tell ’em I’ll meet ’em in my dressing room.” And we went into “Mama Kin,” and before the song was over I told our tour manager to “Give me a blackout at the end of ‘Mama Kin.’ ” I waited for the right moment, and during the blackout I jumped off the front of the stage, ran all the way up the aisle and into the lobby, and they came from everywhere, four directions—here, there, and everywhere. Guns a-blazing . . . all to my head. Knocked me to the ground. “Boy, you’re under arrest! We gon fuck you up. You try to run, we’re gonna . . .” I was frozen in my tracks and scared shitless.

H
ow we won the war by reaching out, 1976. (Ron Pownall for Aerosmith)

One of the white cops said, “You ain’t getting away with it like some of the niggers around here.” And I said, “How dare you fuckin’ say that! Don’t you know the word
nigger
was invented by white folks that
hate
?” Thrown to my stomach, foot on my neck, and with a gun to my head, he said, “Now you’re gettin’ double for saying the word
fuck
.” They grabbed me and threw me into the back of the car, and I wound up in a cold, dank cell for three hours. My lawyer called up and found out they set the bail for ten grand. Later, back at the hotel, smokin’ a bone, I thought to myself,
Sweet Jesus, I’ll never do that again,
then looked in the mirror, smiled, and said to myself,
Oh, yes I will.

After my short-term incarceration, I got back to my room and as usual it was party central. We threw the girls out of the room and the TVs out the window into the pool. If you kept the extension cords on the TVs, when they hit the water they exploded like depth charges. We sent down our security guy to make sure there were no people in the pool who might get fried. No soup for the roadies that night.

I don’t know if I can remember all the times I was arrested. There was a bust in Philly, there was a bust in Memphis, there was the time Joey and I were busted for setting off firecrackers at the Holiday Inn in Lincoln, Nebraska. And then there was the bust of Bebe Buell. She was a gorgeous model that caught my eye and ear at a club one night in New York City. Her reputation (like mine) preceded her. Mine being a rock star . . . hers,
dating
rock stars. And what a roster she had. The thought that I could make her Top 10 made my Dick Clark.

Bebe’s best friend, Liz Derringer (tuning-ax prodigy Rick’s wife), was chewing my ear off at Steve Paul’s Scene. Liz mentioned that Bebe didn’t have a composite sheet—that being an eight-by-ten glossy proof sheet of her beauty that would open doors and hopefully land her in the big time. Overhearing that, I wrote her out a check on the spot for three grand to cover the composite and with hopes a kiss would follow. Liz let us stay at her apartment on a double-sized pullout bed in her living room where we proceeded to cause the first New York blackout. But even that didn’t stop us from sucking the juice out of Manhattan. I had never been in that much love in my life. I didn’t know what to do with it all. But God did. She gave us a love child from heaven above, my beautiful Liv. We were on fire, and I got to tour Germany—with Bebe Buell on my arm.