Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (29 page)

There were times when Joe was not in the best of shape. He would run behind the drum riser when he’d have to sing harmony with Henry—which, with Joe, isn’t an easy thing to do. You have to watch Joe’s mouth and try and figure out what words were going to come out. Sometimes he’d just make up words; sometimes they weren’t even words. Like anybody who sings the same words day after day, month after month, he’d get tired of singing the same old shit. Or a thought would come into his head while he’s singing and he’d just spit out a wordlike
sound
.

Somewhere there’s a picture of a firecracker going off at the exact moment it hit the stage. A fan mailed the photo in. The flash was going off right between Joe and me at the exact second the M-80 blew up. It was as we were just coming back onto the stage for the encore. I got a singed cornea from that one and Joe cut his hand. The wound on Joe’s hand was the shape of a smile, so Joe drew a face on his hand and he would wiggle it and make it talk. There was the smashed glass bottle at the Spectrum in 1978, which stopped the show. Fans get excited, they get demented. They don’t believe we’re entirely human and do this stuff to find out if we bleed the same way they would. One time we found a
shuriken
—a fucking ninja throwing star—on the stage.

These are war stories. When you’re on tour, short of loss of life and limb—or actual death—you have no time to get sick like a normal person. There are no days off. You’re working yourself to death. The only thing that got us through was the cocaine.

For the whole of the seventies we were all nicely fucked-up and deep-fried. There’s a photo of me somewhere snorting a huge rail of blow off a picture of myself in a Japanese magazine. What a great way to get high; I snorted my own face.

Blow was our rocket fuel. In the end it takes you down, but it’s probably one of the reasons we got as far as we did. We never stopped. We would just blaze through it and fall apart when we got home. You’re going home, you hit the ground, your mind tells your body what to do. It knows it’s off duty and then chooses to get sick. Bands just don’t get sick on the road in general—you’re not allowed to.

After a while our off-tour lives became “At Home with the Draculas.” We were zombied out on Tuinals and smack. Kelly used to send the security guards to wake us up, one to Joe’s house, one to mine. Knock on our doors and if we didn’t answer break them down. If we’d been up all night or up all week, okay, go in. If there’s no clean clothes, scoop up all the ones on the floor, throw them into a bag, throw us over their shoulders, and put us into the limos and out to the airport . . . that’s how we used to get Joe and me on the road in the bad old days.

Kelly’d be out there at the airport waiting. “Oh, shit! Where are they now? I don’t see them on the horizon!” One time when Henry was trying to delay the flight, he told the rest of the crew, “Look, do whatever you’ve got to do . . . start a fight, tell them there’s a bomb on the plane, anything you’ve got to do, because the band’s not here yet and this is the last flight leaving today” for wherever we were going.

All the ticket agent heard was the word
bomb
and he alerted the authorities. We all get on the plane and the door closes. Henry had an ounce of blow on him. It was Allegheny Airlines—they used to have tables on their planes, and we were just about to move up to the front and do the blow on the table. We would snort blow right in front of people back then because no one knew what it was yet. But just then the plane door opens again and airport security, FBI, CIA, everybody else with a badge in the world comes on the plane with this ticket agent and hauls Henry off the plane. Henry also happened to have a suitcase with an ounce of pot in it. Kelly claimed it was his and they never searched it.

They took Henry into custody. The day he went to court we had the band’s lawyer, Norman Jacobs, there to represent him. Henry shows up in court early in the morning. The judge looks down at the docket, he’s going down the list of cases, and when he comes to Henry’s he goes, “Case is dismissed.” Turns out the cop who was in charge of the case got shot the night before. He was murdered by a Harvard football player. For a while Henry looked like a desperado who’d had this cop knocked off so he wouldn’t go to jail.

By 1978 we’d gone from being nobodies to being a multiplatinum band with four albums in the space of three years. We’d played to as many as half a million people at one time. And we had addictions to match. In the early days we were seen as cash cows—we were worked to death. We did three shows a week, and we were kept going on blow. Do you know what a treadmill is? Well, we spent the whole of the 1970s on one. It was tour—album—tour—album—tour—album. No breaks. Everybody knew what we were doing, and we were a mess. No one ever said, “You guys had better take a break.” I was having seizures and passing out on stage. At any time I could’ve had a heart attack, and people would’ve looked away and said, “Well, we didn’t know what they were doing.” Bullshit! There was so much money floating around that no one cared.

The promoters at our concerts were awash in cash; they had trunks full of money. We sold tickets like crazy. As a present, our accountants framed all the tickets we sold. We must have grossed at least 140 mil, but the members of the band ended up walking away with no more than 3 mil each. I have no hard feelings, but may they roll over in their graves a billion million years from now! That’s all I have to say. I look back and I think, “God, man, all we were doing was writing songs, making records, touring.” I have a pirate’s chest of horror stories of things they’ve done to my brethren and my band. Unconscionable shit! I look back at that and, in front of Jesus Christ above at Heaven’s Gate, I say, “Thank you and fuck you!”

All our tours had official names—and
our
names for them. The Aerosmith Express Tour became the WTB Tour—for Where’s the Blow? But as things got worse the crew began giving dire names to the tours: the
Grab Your Ankles
tour, the
Lick the Boots That Kick You
tour
.
Kelly made up a T-shirt with “Why Can’t I Fart Anymore?” on it—meaning we’d all been royally fucked in the ass.

By the time we got to late ’78 we were all a little burned. And things started to go awry. We were so fried, we could hear our synapses crackling when we went to sleep. The band fell apart when the crew fell apart. The crew fell apart first and then the band began to unravel. The core rock road dogs began slobbering and howling at the moon. The crew had everything to do with keeping us together. Everyone knew everyone’s personalities and how we functioned in our own quirky, dysfunctional way. The sky darkened and we prayed for rain but no rain came—it just all worsened. We were a complex mix of utterly unreasonable people, and the momentum revolved around Kelly, who had left after Cal Jam. That’s when I began to wonder,
Why does my house have wheels and my car doesn’t?
Aerosmith’s core group—Kelly, Rabbit, Henry, Night Bob—kept the band rolling during those crazy times. Rabbit left in ’78 and Henry left in 1980.

The roadies started leaving Aerosmith’s interstellar probe like rats leaving a sinking ship. Henry Smith said he had to leave the band to keep being friends. Night Bob left to keep his sanity. It was better to step away and remain friends than to stay and work in that infernal mix. It ended up being the better choice, because otherwise I think some of them would have been dead by now.

But we never canceled dates. I’d be in the dressing room freaking out, throwing shit around, and Kelly—designated point guy—would be asking, “What the hell is going on now, you fuck?” I’d be screaming at him, “I want to charter a helicopter
right now
! Call David.” David Krebs would be at home making his 15 or 20 percent asleep in his penthouse. He didn’t have a clue what was going on while we were banging our heads against the wall, losing our minds.
Everybody
needed time off. But it never occurred to me to cancel. I was Captain Ahab in a mad quest for the Great White Quark. So the gears just kept grinding on.

It just got worse and worse. Too much money. If you want to control people and you know they’re weak, you give them money! Trust me when I tell you that. Then drugs took everybody down. It was real bad. Nick the roadie died of cirrhosis, another crew guy hung himself, our dealers were being garroted, stabbed, and given hot shots. I was the crazed lead singer . . . too high for my own good. There were car accidents every day. I broke a Porsche in half up in New Hampshire. Drug demons got inside everything and wrecked everything. Drugs even speeded up the band’s rhythm.

And then one night . . .

Between Joe and me there had always been a certain amount of friction due to the biological fact that we’re such different personalities. But whatever stories you’ve read or Joe and everyone else has told—the eighty-thousand-dollar room service bill, the spilt milk, the solo album—the truth of the matter is that after nine years of playing, writing, and recording together I still couldn’t get through to Joe. He was in his bubble and I couldn’t reach him. He was insulated—by heroin, by Elyssa, by his own fucked-up lack of self-confidence, his inability to see that the band was bigger than his girlfriend, more important than his problems, his drugs. He has a great front, Joe . . . he seems
so cool
—but then don’t we all. He needed his woman, Elyssa, who was cool and gorgeous and poisonous.

Elyssa was very caught up in that whole fashion thing, a model wannabe kind of girl, coming back from England with beavers and the black nail polish and all that kind of stuff. Joe was into role-playing as well, and they fed off of each other, they were always into each other’s games.

She was so into herself and was easy to provoke. Once we were flying from New York to L.A., we’re all sitting in first class, and there’s a guy behind us. He leans over, taps Elyssa on the shoulder, and goes, “Are you what they call a ‘groupie’?” She took a glass of wine and threw it on this guy, and that was before the plane even took off.

The coup de grâce came when I began to confront Joe about the wall he’d built around himself. I’d had enough: “Joe, do you know who you are?” “Yuh,” he mumbled. “There’s a hundred girls tonight that would have sucked your cock until a million o’clock! Are you kidding?” I said. “Well, Elyssa loves me,” he mumbled back. “Okay, okay, okay, and no one else does?” “But Elyssa I can trust.” “Wow. All right. Okay. And that’s it? That’s the end of the story?” Joe didn’t know his own self-worth. He didn’t get how strong a personality he was onstage, a character right out of rock mythology—the electric god who wants his guitar to sound like a dinosaur eating cars. How great is that? And together we were the Terrible, Toxic Twins. But he could never see that—so in the end he left with her.

The straw that broke the camel’s back came on July 28, 1979, at the World Series of Rock at the Cleveland Stadium. We were the headliners on a bill with Ted Nugent, Journey, Thin Lizzy, and AC/DC. Backstage in the trailer Elyssa and Terri Hamilton got into a flaming fight. Elyssa took a glass of milk and chucked it all over Terri. I wasn’t there. I heard about it after the show. “What’s going on?” I said. Then I got into a fight with Joe.

Joe and I weren’t there when the Big Bang occurred . . . we didn’t
physically
see it. We came offstage into this Winnebago parked in the back of this hall. I walked in, panting and dripping, soaking wet, and Elyssa and Terri were screaming at each other. “Get the fuck out of here,” I yelled. “Can’t you see we’re working in here?” That’s when I found out that Elyssa had thrown milk at Terri and Terri just wouldn’t have it. Elyssa would take no shit from anybody and got off on being that way. And neither would Terri. Tom was
spewing
.

Joe walked in and started stickin’ up for Elyssa, but when I saw Terri’s clothes all soaked, I got into it with Joe. “Man, can’t you come over here and control your woman?” Why does it always have to be like this? Worse than me, and I’m the KING of that. Always startin’ fights and bullshitting, but she did that and it’s what broke up the band that night. Joe was acting like it was Elyssa’s right to do what she did . . .
and
he’s saying as much while
Terri’s still in the room.
Didn’t care. He
liked
that his wife was a troublemaker; he got off knowing that Elyssa could morph into a flaming bitch at the drop of a Mad Hat.

I was
so
drunk (as I was every night after a show), but I remember clearly being on the steps of the trailer, walking down and yelling at Joe, “You’re fucking fired!” I don’t even know where that Chairman of the Board voice came from. Never spouted off like I was the leader of this band! We were a gang, a unit. But I was just
so
angry! That was the only way I knew how to get Elyssa to stop it. “You’re fucking fired, Joe!” You can get into a crazy head space where all you want to say is “Fuck you!” I could have just said, “I’m outta here,” but I didn’t; instead I said, “You’re fired!” Those were the words! I’ve never actually punched Joe, but that night I came really close.

It was a mess. So much of this is just so radically true. We
completely
fried ourselves. But again, unlike Sid Vicious or the Dolls and other bands that were systematically sabotaging their careers and lives, if one was to spell it out clinically—we were going down that road unconsciously, we were just getting fucked-up and,
incidentally,
sabotaging ourselves. Joe and I had that mulish Italian strain of
stick-to-itiveness;
Joe’s not actually Italian, but he’s from that island off the coast of Italy, or is it Portugal? With the exception of his guitar volume, he sure the hell doesn’t know how to be loud . . . and who the fuck knows how happy he was that night? I sure wasn’t.