Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (48 page)

I’ve always wanted to be a comic book character. Now I was going to get my chance. A cartoon of
me
! Tylertoons! “How are you going to make me come alive on Guitar Hero?” I asked. “Well, we’ll draw you.” “But you draw me based on what?” “We put you in an outfit with balls attached to it and the camera reads those outlines and creates a two-dimensional figure.” I had to dig a little to find out that the guy who did the characters in all the other Guitar Heroes was going to be doing
me
. That’s when I went, “Whoa! You mean you’re going to have some guy do
my character
?” The director took me aside and said, “If we had known you wanted to this—” I said, “Didn’t anyone tell you I was coming here?” “No, management said they didn’t think you’d want to do this.” You might say, well, it’s Guitar Hero, it’s about
guitar
players, they don’t really care about lead singers, but I knew better. Whatever they were going to show was going to be called “Aerosmith,” and I’ve been known to be the lead singer from time to time. And I thought all the moves that Joe and I had come up with onstage for the last forty years that we were known for would have been the perfect thing to take the game over the top and represent like no stunt doubles could ever have thought of doing. The interactions between us that millions of pople love to see would have been priceless for the game. At Activision they thought we’d have been happy to have someone other than us do the performance because that’s how they’d always done it. It didn’t occur to them that
maybe
Steven would want to front the band, playing himself, in the video game. Let the bars come down on the video screen and there’s Aerosmith. It’s a guitar-driven video game with a fret board and everyone’s playing that color-coded toy guitar, but people are also going to be looking around at the other members of the band, aren’t they—including maybe
the lead singer—
especially if they happen to be singing along while following the guitar leads? I mean when people are playing “Dream On” on the Guitar Hero game, do you think anybody can even
hear
the guitar part through that vocal?
“Every ti-ime that I look . . .”
It’s like on “Satisfaction,” there’s a guitar playing the opening chords. But do you think anyone can pick out what the rhythm guitar’s doing on that song if there even is one?

So in the spring of ’08 I went to the Neversoft’s motion capture studio to get myself turned into an animated cartoon. For four weeks I jumped around in an outfit with tracking balls stuck on it so that I could be digitized. They even attached them to my mouth: my upper lip, my lower lip, my grin—that alone took an hour. When it was done I pulled the balls off my face, put them in a bag, and snuck out with them. I figured if I could get out with my balls intact management would never get a chance to break ’em again. Managers have a way of being really truly mean.

Aerosmith Guitar Hero turned out so great, what could be better—it’s like a cartoon biography of the band—
and
you get to be Joe Perry. Although I do know Joe tried it out and couldn’t get beyond the first level! Ahh, heck, he’s always playing with himself anyway. It’s a sort of biorama as well as a video game. You can catch Aerosmith from start to finish—or at least up to 2008. You get to see us at Nipmuc High School in Massachusetts, where we played our first gig, Max’s Kansas City in New York, where we got signed, the Orpheum Theater in Boston. It’s like watching your yearbook on DVD. You see the girl that you took to the prom, and you go, “Omigod, look at what
I
look like. What’s with the hair—and the Prince Valiant haircut?”

We got into the whole Guitar Hero thing when they put “Same Old Song and Dance” on Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. That sold a whole lot of copies and we started thinking,
Hmmmm
. . .
now, what if the first Guitar Hero built entirely around one group—was us!
It seemed like a great idea, especially since we hadn’t put out a studio album of original material since 2001, and people were starting to say, “When are you guys gonna put some more shit out there?”

I’m only bummed that it wasn’t Lead Singer Hero—but they’ll get around to it. Ya think? I think that the
face
of a song is whatever the lyrics are, wouldn’t you agree with that? You know what’s going to happen? In about three years they’re going to come out with a video game featuring the Stones or some other group with a great lead singer, and when that happens they’ll have someone miming the singer and you’ll get a microphone with the game and sing along with it like karaoke.

Having been clean and sober for so many years it was a crying shame the state I was in after I got my feet fixed. I was bumping into people, doing crazy stuff. “Man, you were fallin’ asleep last night right in the middle of dinner,” people were telling me, and I was saying, “You saw me do
what
?” I was just, “Oh, Jesus, this is fucked-up, I wanna live.” But ya know how my girl Amy sings it . . .

Hence the drug addiction rumors in the press once again. I didn’t respond. I was full-on with the OxyContin and the Xanax. I was crushing the long fat two-milligram Zanzibars and inhaling them.

I went to the annual MAP Fun Benefit Concert honoring Alice Cooper and Slash. I presented Slash with the From the Heart Award for his support of MAP’s program: access to addiction treatment regardless of your financial situation. Slash had been clean and sober for three years and here was I still high.
Aaach!

I was high on drugs during that 2007 tour, so high on Xanax I let little things really get me over the top. Oh, god! I thought,
Here I am again in that place again, being a fucking drug addict.
I began to panic.
Am I going to go out like this?
I’m thinking to myself,
Am I gonna go out like this?
I have this running thing with the band about death, the deadline.

I went off the deep end out in L.A. After a while of being absolutely insane, I decided to get off everything, but I wanted to do it by myself—never a good idea. My plan was to get myself a suite in a hotel and have a doctor—using other meds than the ones I was taking—wean me off my drugs of choice.

I happened to know Justin Murdoch, whose dad owned the Westlake Four Seasons—he’s the other Murdoch, David Murdoch. He owns Dole, and he’s the largest landowner on the island of Lanai in Hawaii, my favorite place on earth. I’d met Justin a few years earlier at Koi, a restaurant in L.A. Outside the eatery was a car, a Shelby Cobra, no paint on it, just the body, and I went, “Aha! This is interesting, I wonder who that belongs to.” I walked in, it was, like, after hours, not many people there, and I asked, “Who’s fuckin’ car is that?” This guy stood up and it was Justin Murdoch. We’ve been best friends ever since. Justin’s got more money than God. He flew me over to Lanai in his father’s plane while I had hep C and introduced me to the doctor who invented a cure for addiction.

So Justin got me a room at the family hotel, the Westlake Four Seasons—with an adjoining small room where the nurses would sleep. The idea was that my doctor would come see me every day and I would detox there. The doc and the nurses are coming in at night, I’m doing my meds while I’m sleeping. It was a good setup just with the drug he was giving me for my feet at home, Subutex, an alternative to heroin. It’s a drug that fools the nervous system. It’s a narcotic, different from heroin—almost as hard to get off. A month and a half and a
hundred and forty
thousand dollars
later, I’m out of there. I was off the narcotics for a time, still doing an occasional OxyContin, you know, four times eighty milligrams a day, and still doing Subutex.

While the doc was detoxing me, three weeks in—I went, “Stop! Doc, will you come to Boston with me because Joe is at home and just had a knee replacement and I know he could use a tweak. We gotta help him.” I got on the plane with Erin and my doctor and we all flew to Boston first class. Doc stayed at my house, and the next day I called up my brother Joe and for a moment he was into it, too. “All right, come over,” he said. The doctor went over and told him, “If you want to get out of this cycle of dependency I can help you. Come to L.A., and I’ll do for you what I’ve done for Steven.” Next day I jumped back on the plane with the doc, went back to L.A., was in the same hotel, started the regimen again, and after that I don’t exactly know what happened. But I didn’t hear from Joe again for months. A week later I fired
that
doctor because I was still as strung out as I was when I went it. I was singing Amy’s song before she wrote it. But I began to seriously think about rehab.

Erin had left me the month before, went off with her girlfriend, started going to some meetings, and then checked into the rehab at Aurora Las Encinas Hospital in Pasadena. Unlike most rehabs it’s on a huge estate, twenty-six acres. It was started in 1901 to treat alcoholic movie stars. The doctors were so rich and the place so prosperous back then that they were able to landscape it in the most picturesque style. They planted exotic and indigenous trees on the grounds. Trees from Africa, India, South America. It was like an arboretum. A lot of the Hollywood stars of the twenties, thirties, and forties would go there to dry out—that was before they knew that alcohol was a disease—and to get them off the booze, they’d give them
morphine
. While I was there I slept in the house W. C. Fields died in. Slept like a baby.

I went to visit Erin in Las Encinas. I was going to take her to the movies, but she didn’t want to go. I was sitting in her little cabin at the outpatient clinic chatting with her and looking around and saying, “This is pretty nice! Hey, what’s up here?” And at that point her therapist came in, took one look at me, and said, “Steven, maybe you need to stay here tonight.”

And I went, “Oh, god! Are you going to try and talk me into going through rehab?”

“Yes, Steven, I think that would be a good idea.”

I went into the bathroom, took my bottle of pills out, and dumped it in the bottom of her wastebasket, came out, and, given my impetuous Italian sensibility, I said, “That’s it! I’m in.” Because I knew that I couldn’t do it on my own, and they had an intensive detox program. So I went for the real rumpy-pumpy, baby.

A week and a half later:
Ahhhh!
I was in there and God had put this guy named Joe (
Yo
in Spanish) in with me. He was from Mexico, right across the border. I thought
I
was in bad shape! I’d been doing, like, four Zanzibars a day, two Zanzibars during the night. I’d wake up every two hours, snort a half, go back to sleep, and sleep forever. This guy is lying on his back screaming
at the top of his lungs,
holding the backs of his legs, kicking up in the air, going,
“Ahhhh! Ahhhh! Ahhhh!”
Sc-
rea
-ming. They’re shooting him up with shit, but
nothing
worked. He finally settled down after two weeks and when he was in good enough shape to talk I got to hear his story. He’d been eating six eighty-milligram OxyContins a day for ten years.

I always wondered what I was gonna be like at fifty, and here I was sixty and fucked-up. Give me a fucking break! It was all going too fucking fast! Although time never slows down as much as it does in rehab. Going through detox you look up at the clock and say, “Fuck, it’s only
one o’clock
? Oh, god, it’s going to be a
long
fucking day!” And they get you up at six! When you’re in there detoxing at sixty it’s
very
humbling. You tell people, and they go, “
What?!
Muchacho, you don’t
look
sixty!” Or they say, “You telling me, my brother, that you
bought
that shit, you eat
shit
!”

But, you try to protest, these were
prescription
drugs, man! Of course, that’s just the problem. Prescription drugs are the new plague. There’s career drug addicts like me—and just about every other person in America who’s on some kind of meds. Half of the people reading this book are going to be on pharmaceuticals, on legal meds. It’s a pharmaceutical world, baby. “Take when feeling anxious, when you can’t sleep—or just whenever you want to experience that mellow Swannee River mood,” reads the tiny Courier type on the label. Why would I go out and get drugs from a dirty low-down dealer when I can just go and get a script from my sweet old family doctor. “Uh, Doc, do you have anything that’ll, you know, attack the higher centers of pain because, see, I really need something that’ll get me through the night, through my divorce, I’ve just been laid off and I need to get rid of this pain in here. . . .” That’s why all my friends are cops, or dead.

Have you looked in any of your friends’ medicine cabinets lately? You don’t have to go down to Avenue Z and score, no, you can get your drugs from your doctor and hide them from everyone. But trust one who knows from bitter experience, it will start to dawn on you, maybe not until you’re forty or fifty, that you’re hooked. Sooner or later the benzo fiends will come and bite you on the ass, your little sleep aids will turn on you. You began taking half an Ambien to go to sleep and now you’re up to
six
a night? But those prescription drugs just won’t come through for you.