Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (30 page)

And thus ended Aerosmith Mach I. It was an insane thing to do after all we’d done to make it. But I had gotten so enraged I’d now destroyed the one thing that had made Aerosmith so powerful, that fine tension that created Aerosmith’s feral howl. It didn’t matter to Joe that he and I were a team. He didn’t care that we’d been together for almost ten years! All he cared about was getting high and being with
her
.

I was that angry with him, so I went, “Fuck you! You’re fired. I’m gonna find a new guitar player.” And I did. Jimmy Crespo. At least he wasn’t Joe Perry . . . the cocksucker.

CHAPTER TEN

Food Poisoning at
a Family Picnic

I
t’s the fall of 1979—just after the Fall of Aerosmith Mach 1, the departure of Joe fucking Perry. I’m ready to time travel with my carry-on bag of goodies. Into the great unknown, baby. Yep, we’re gonna get under the hood. I’m going to tell you the way it was: unexpurgated—that means nothing censored, nothing gained!

Aeromythology was built on the glamour of self-destruction. Self-destruction was
great
fun
—still, I wouldn’t want to do it again. Like the old joke about the Viking: “Fuck, not another night of rape and pillage, mate!” Of course, in rock ’n’ roll we don’t classify debauchery as bad behavior—that comes with the territory. Bad, shameful behavior would be turning up for shows in no fit state to play . . . and there was plenty of that, too. Don’t worry, with this band there was at least another ten years of wretched excess, drug abuse, and hell-bent self-destruction to come.

Every once in a while, I’ll hit on something useful to tell you, especially if I’m talking about a subject that I’m kind of an expert on, like roasting marshmallows. How long the stick should be and how long to leave it in the fire. See, I come from a long line of fact-based, overbearing people.

I
was living with Cyrinda in that gray house up in Sunapee, had my Porsche and the Jeep. Mia was a brand-new baby. Scoring drugs had become our principal activity. Cyrinda, my friend Rick, and I would all drive down to Marshfield outside of Boston to get dope. Joe Perry had thrown me onto this dealer before he split the band. Back then in ’79, ’80, two blocks from Joe’s house lived this guy named John we got all our dope from. A three-hour drive! I now live in Marshfield, I moved there in ’88. When I go home I get off at the same exit—Exit 12—the same one I used to take when I was scoring dope. Ironic or just moronic?

Alas, I had kicked Joe out of the band in the middle of
Night in the Ruts,
our new album due out fall 1979, and Leber-Krebs were putting pressure on me to finish it. Joe played on “No Surprize,” “Chiquita,” “Cheesecake,” “Three Mile Smile,” and “Bone to Bone (Coney Island Whitefish Boy)”—the song I wrote about Joe. A Coney Island whitefish is a rubber. Brad Whitford, Neil Thompson, Jimmy Crespo, and Richie Supa handled guitars on the remaining tracks.

Even before we started I knew what I wanted the title to be:
Night in the Ruts.
I was into switching the initial letters of names and words, like Johnny Ringo into Ronny Jingo, so
Night in the Ruts
is code for
Right in the Nuts.
Back then you couldn’t have an album title like that, the censors were all over you. You’d get blipped no matter what . . . you couldn’t even sing “Goddammit!” For the cover I’d thought of filling a room with nuts. Twenty or thirty big burlap bags of nuts would cost you, what, eighteen dollars a bag? We’d be standing there up to our waists in nuts. And nobody could argue about the title because we
were
nuts. It was a takeoff on the cover of
The Who Sell Out,
where Roger Daltrey is sitting in a bathtub filled with beans and a surprised look on his face. I ran into Roger later on and asked him, “Were you really sitting in a tub full of beans? What was it like in there? Was it really full to the top or—?” “Nah, they, like, filled it with cloth,” he said, “and then the beans on top. I didn’t have to sit in all that.” Damn.

But in the end we shot the cover in the entrance to a coal mine. It was black with coal dust. I rolled in it for a couple of minutes. And then I went over and rubbed the coal dust on everyone’s face. It was a dark and gloomy cover, but we were in a bleak and doomy state.

Writing songs had gotten harder and harder, and now I had to write them without Joe. Joe’s riffs were the engine . . . and the engine had stalled. I had tried writing with a bunch of different people. In the spring of ’78 I flew up to Sunapee with Bobby Womack (who’d written “It’s All Over Now”) to work on songs, but nothing came of it. Just a lot of blow and blowing lines.

Sometime in the midseventies, David Krebs had introduced me to Richie Supa. He was a singer-songwriter signed to Columbia, also managed by Leber-Krebs. I was coming out of a meeting one day and he was going in and Krebs said, “You guys should hook up! Richie’s a great songwriter, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.” We started talking and one thing led to another, as it always does. Richie told me he had a studio at his house and all kinds of instruments, so naturally I had to go over and check it out. I think David gave me a copy of some of his songs, and I thought, “Yeah, this shit ain’t bad!” When I was in L.A. I dropped in on Richie’s session and sang harmony on a song called “Chip Away the Stone,” which wound up going on the Cal Jam album.

Richie also wrote “Lightning Strikes,” our first MTV video. Then later on there was “Amazing” and “Pink.” He was my ally when shit would jump off in the band and I was fighting with Joe Perry. I always had Richie to collaborate with. After the band broke up in July ’78, he came up to Sunapee that fall and helped me with lyrics. He was also my sounding board and played some guitar tracks on the album.

Richie Supa had been in the Rich Kids. He came out with me on my first tour without Joe, along with Joey, Tom, and Brad—just before Jimmy Crespo came in. Richie played guitar and keyboards because he knew the material so well. Given all the drugs on the road, it was incredibly insane.

“No Surprize,” the opening track on
Night in the Ruts,
was a miniautobiography of the band inspired by the night we were signed by Columbia that I rambled on about earlier. A brief encore . . .

Nineteen seventy-one

We all heard the starter’s gun

New York is such a pity but at Max’s Kansas City we won

We all shot the shit at the bar

With Johnny O’Toole and his scar

And rolling on into Aerosmith’s spectacular autodestruction . . . our headlong highway to hell (cheers, Angus!). . .

Midnight lady

Situation fetal

Vaccinate your ass with your phonograph needle . . .

Ridin’ on the wheels of hell

Smokin’ up our axle grease

and concluding with a wish for the acid rain to stop . . .

Rock and roll

Junkie whore

Got my foot inside the door

Knock knock, knock knock, knock

Nobody’s keepin’ score

Bad times go away

Come again some other day

Side two—remember when albums had two sides?—had some great songs on it:
“
Three Mile Smile,” “Reefer-Headed Woman,” and “Bone to Bone.” The last track, “Mia,” I wrote about my daughter, because I missed her and I was missing in action most of the time.

Rock-a-bye sweet lady gypsy blue

Ooh, the nightingale’s singin’ her song in the rain

Hush-a-bye sweet lady soft and new

Ooh don’t you cry, the wind she’s a-screamin’ your name

There was a little room onstage behind the amps, behind the curtains, off limits to crew, where no one except the band was allowed. That was where drugs were laid out on the table so that we could step behind the curtain during the show and get a snort of cocaine or heroin . . . whatever flavor of ice cream we wanted.

We’d run out of blow a lot and we’d be
writhing
! What a great fucking word,
w-r-i-t-h-i-n-g.
A snakelike word, sounds like what it is. Like the word
sheath.
Sheath your weapon! Ooh, it’s sexy!
Sheeeaaaaaa-th
! It’s a delicious word, it’s like eating a grape and eating a cherry, a nice hard one, just ripe, and making sure you bite down just enough to break through the skin, but not to hurt your teeth on the pit inside.

Drugs were just part of being in rock ’n’ roll then. Nobody knew the downside of years and years of cocaine abuse and we could care less. It was the thing to do. Everybody laying it out for you, even the cops.

Oh the backstage is rockin’ and we’re coppin’ from the local police

That’s right the local police

Or the justice of peace

Promoters would have it backstage. There would be a deli platter and a mound of coke. So even if you didn’t want to get high that night, even if your nose was falling off because it was raw and bloody from all the snorting, you ran into it at the next gig.
Boo-hoo!
That was just the climate. I never flew without having some blow on me.

By the end of the seventies, some nights I was so out of it our road manager, Joe Baptista, would have to carry me onstage. The promoter would be sitting there in the dressing room with a look of horror on his face. I’m almost comatose, he’s hyperventilating. He thinks he’s presenting the legendary cash cow Aerosmith, and now he’s going to lose his shirt because the lead singer’s down for the count. Is he dead or alive? What am I going to do? “You’d better get him on that stage. I don’t know how he’s going to do this show, but we’ve got too many kids out there.”

Not to worry. The minute my feet hit the stage, I’m off and running. I don’t know how it happens, but hey, you get up there in front of twenty thousand people and it’s a high in itself, it’s a charged space.

Still, the train kept a-rollin’ and we kept getting high until one night in late ’78, I don’t know where we were, maybe in Springfield, Illinois, I blacked out in the middle of “Reefer Headed Woman.”

I got a reefer headed woman

She fell right down from the sky

Well, I gots to drink me two fifths of whiskey

Just to get half as high

When the—

and then I hit the stage like a fish out of water.

I rarely went that far, but the few times I did, it was due to a little matter of not having the right combination of rocket fuel and booze. You drink something and you go onstage on an empty stomach and because you’re jumping around and sweating and the lights are hot, you get fucked-up fast. When you’re sitting there, it usually takes twelve, fifteen minutes for a skin pop in your ass to get in your system. But a runner doing a marathon, because he’s inhaling and exhaling so hard,
ah-huh-uh-huh-uh-huh-uh-huh,
and his blood pressure’s rising rapidly, he’ll get off probably in three minutes flat after you stick a needle in his ass because his metabolism is racing.

What happened is this. . . . I was up in Portland, Maine, got drunk. This was around Christmas 1980 and I was waiting for Bebe to come. She was living up there and it was very emotional seeing her again. She’d gotten pregnant in Germany and we’d somehow broken up after the tour. I guess I was in denial about it being my child, and she’d had just about enough of me and decided Todd Rundgren would be a better father. Bebe showed me pictures of baby Liv and we both cried before I went on. And, like all nights, I would order
two
double Beefeater martinis. I would down them in five, and chew up the olive really quick as I could, swallow it and not throw up. That is kind of where I was at in January 1980. I would drink two of those and if I had enough blow, I’d be good onstage, but on this particular night I didn’t have
any
blow. Happened twice in my career that I was so soused and so dizzy that I became a fall-down drunk. Well, rather than fall down drunk in front of the audience and act like a pathetic idiot for an hour while they throw apples at me, I said, “Fuck this! Please, let’s fold the show, man, and get me offstage!” But I knew they’d never stop the show just because I was drunk, so I lay down and didn’t move, as if I’d fainted. And to make it look convincing I twitched my foot spastically so they’d look at the twitch and go, “Look, he’s twitching! Holy shit! He’s having a seizure!”