Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (50 page)

It’s interesting that Dr. Pinsky never came up to me, never made any advances; he certainly didn’t ask me to be on his celebrity rehab, because—at best—I would have gone, “Are you
fucking
kidding me?”

I come out of any detox a wreck, but benzo detox is the worst. After five weeks, your skin is crawling, because they stifle your nerves. People take Xanax and other benzos because they’re having a
nerrrr-vous breakd-d-down.
It’s a great drug for masking. In a really laid-back, jive-talking voice you’ll tell yourself, “Hey, I’m really comfortable now, so what the fuck are you tellin’ me, dude, lay the shit on me, because I don’t hear you. . . .”

When you’re coming out of that benzo din you get to see what life has to offer again. Oh, that’s what mango smells like, that’s the color of a peony. . . . I’m ecstatic to be sober again now and coming up a wormhole. I’m ready to change the channel.

The more spiritual side of me tends to get lost behind the stereotype of the Sex Addict, the Toxic Twin, the Screamin’ Demon, the Terror of the Tropicana. But if you listen to “Dream On,” a song I wrote in 1969, you might see me in a different light . . .

Half my life’s in books’ written pages

Live and learn from fools and from sages

You know it’s true

All the things come back to you

Sing with me, sing for the years

Sing for the laughter and sing for the tears

Sing with me, if it’s just for today

Maybe tomorrow the good Lord will take you away

I don’t even know where I came up with that shit! I may be a monster, but I’m a
sensitive monster. . . .

I went to church, I had a sister, I’m Italian, and I’ve probably seen the sun set and rise as many times as anyone. I liked cutting the umbilical cord at my son Taj’s birth. I liked smelling the placenta. I like the act of making love rather than saying, “I fucked you!” If anybody wants to see the spiritual side of Steven Tyler, well, it’s fucking there!

Erin got out of rehab two weeks before me—she’d started earlier than I had—but the day I got out, my new life started unfolding
that
day, while I was making
wild
love to Erin, talking about how we were so
fragile
coming from the rehab, like coming out of the womb, with all these feelings of newness and astonishment. Feeling the wind blow, the sun on your face. When you’re high, you’re numb to everything. We had been taking so much OxyContin and Xanax for so long our feelings were deadened. When you reemerge, everything affects you wildly. The mildest cool breeze and you’re freezing, you’re so vulnerable. Somebody says something negative, the slightest thing, and you’re devastated. We came out of that cocoon, and even two months later, we were still reclaiming ourselves, recovering from the din of addiction.

Colors! I’m so into colors now. I want to eat
food
that’s different colors. I can feel the wind blowing against my face and hear the woods, the woods that were
mine
when I was a kid.

Back in Sunapee, I took off my shoes and felt the cool green moss on my feet; I smelled the pine needles, the pungent, earthy odor of decaying leaves. For a moment I stood alone in a clearing, listening to that muffled silence.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Falling in Love
Is Hard on
the Knees

I
got out of Las Encinas in the summer of ’08 and went home to be with my mom before she passed. I was not on drugs and got to spend a couple of wonderful months with her.

My mom went over to the other side in July ’08. I was sadder than I’d ever been. And I left my body as I cried. I wailed, “Oh, God, how can my mommy die? God, oh, God, please, God.” I cried when Mom was lying there. And I hugged her and held her. We each got to sit with her. I got to sit with her after her soul left her body and talk to her and tell her things I had not told her. It felt as if she was still there with us as we spoke to her. I knew she could hear what I was saying. And felt as much there as she was before. We each said good-bye. Kissed her and wept.

My mom, Susie, was somebody who wanted to make her own life. She was a real tomboy, which was hard in an age when women were supposed to get married, have children, stay at home, and be a housewife. Susie never was that, she wanted to go out into the world. She carried to the grave a regret that she hadn’t done something great with her life. But she had us, loved us, loved my dad.

She painted, played the piano, made pottery, loved to finger paint with me, and read Rudyard Kipling’s
Just So Stories
to me when I was three. She was beyond talented. I could feel her living vicariously through me as I was growing up—from jumping out of trees . . . to barefoot skiing . . . to falling in love . . . to screaming and arguing at the dinner table . . . to screaming at a hundred thousand kids onstage. Toward the end she talked about a piece of her life that she felt was missing. But, ya see, that’s the piece that she gave to me. And no one can deny that I have lived a double life.

M
e and Mom, 1976. (Ron Pownall for Aerosmith)

When I was ten, my mom would say, “Yo, where are you going?” (Yes, Mom said “Yo!” She was ahead of her time.) And I could talk to her about anything. I tried to get her to smoke pot instead of cigarettes. It was her idea for me to be in music. “I’ll drive you to the gigs in the station wagon,” she said, and drove me and the Chain Reaction to the County Center in White Plains to open up for the Byrds.

I have this indelible image of my mom the way her brother, my uncle Eddie, described her as a young woman: jumping into a Buick convertible, her long hair streaming in the wind behind her—and
vroooooommmmm
! She was off in her element. She loved that. She was like a thoroughbred horse that just jumped the fence and was running free across the fields. With Susie it was always just, “Let’s go!”

My mom passed away and so did my sobriety. I started using right after that. That went on for another half a year. I would spend nights at home thinking about going on tour with the band and I just couldn’t do it; I couldn’t dance. The pain was so excruciating just walking around and I had moments when I shed tears thinking,
I really can’t do this.

M
y mother’s final resting place. (Steven Tallarico)

W
hile I was in Las Encinas in the spring of 2008, I got a call which pulled me out of my melancholy mood. Erin had just left and I was there all by myself doing Neurontin, a beta-blocker used to prevent seizures. Then on my twenty-sixth day there—which already felt like an eternity—Henry Smith of the Living Myth called me and said, “The Yardbirds are thinking of getting back together and they’re wondering if you might want to be the lead singer.” Well, hell, yeaaah! I would. I’d always had this dream that someday the old Yardbirds would re-form and I would somehow be part of it, and, damn me, if it wasn’t happening. The Yardbirds was the band that had been Aerosmith’s greatest inspiration, and, outside of Aerosmith, that would have been the group I would most want to be in.

Four months later I’m on the phone with Peter Mensch, Jimmy Page’s manager. “Peter, let me ask you something . . .”

“You know I’d do anything for you, Steven,” he said. “Besides you gave me my first job.”

“I did?”

“Don’t you remember, I was your tour accountant. Hah! Anyways, what was it you wanted to ask me?”

“I’d heard that Jimmy was thinking about re-forming the old Yardbirds and I—”

“Hold on, Steven, he’s right here,” and he handed Jimmy the phone.

“Steven,” said Jimmy, “would you consider coming over to the UK and giving it a try?”

“You know I’d really love to do that—it’s been a fantasy of mine since I was seventeen.”

I wanted to do it because I wanted to say I did. Everybody’s dying to hear Led Zeppelin again, with me—or someone—especially Robert—singing lead. So, in September 2008, around the twenty-second as I recall, Henry, Erin, and I flew to London to see about doing some dates with Jimmy, John Paul Jones, and Jason Bonham, “Bonzo,” John Bonham’s son. Henry and I went to the studio in Putney and all went pretty well, I thought, but unfortunately I was getting high. The first day I was there I got a migraine. Friday we played Led Zep songs all day. Fuckin’ heaven!

But I soon realized it wasn’t going to work. Not that I couldn’t sing this stuff, I could do Led Zep in my sleep, but I wasn’t Robert Plant, and Robert wasn’t anything like me. Fans want to hear “Percy” wail on “Whole Lotta Love,” “Communication Breakdown,” etc. It never would have been the same. Aerosmith tried it when Joe and Brad left in the early eighties and it never worked without them either. I was flattered that he’d asked me, but it would be like trying to replace Bonzo—it’s not going to happen and maybe it shouldn’t. The way a band works is chemistry—and you can’t substitute for that. I blew it, but even though it didn’t work out, the kid in me was dying. I got to sing every song from “Black Dog” up and down. I called Jimmy and told him, “I’ll never forget the experience of singing with you as long as I live.”

I just didn’t think a band like Led Zeppelin needed a singer like me. They already had the best; they were the best. Robert used to say, “I think I could sing and shear a few sheep at the same time.” I can think of a few things I could do while singing but that ain’t one of them. Maybe that was the problem.

Anyway, I was already missing my own band. I hadn’t given up yet. I’d been trying to get them to do an album for four years—and this detour made me more determined than ever.

To tell the truth, one of the reasons I tried to do the thing with Jimmy Page was because I was feeling bereft. My mother had just died; Joe, my brother, was mad at me for working with other songwriters. I felt he was trying to get back at me by doing his own album. And then he disappeared off the face of the earth. I couldn’t find him under a rock and no one would tell me where he was. I called Truly Mean, who was our manager at the time. All she’d say is, “Joe’s unavailable.” Un-fucking-available!

Then a few months later I heard my own band was trying to replace me, and I was like, what the fuck! They don’t get it. It’s all in the fucking mix. Robert’s banshee wail synchs with Jimmy’s plaintive Gibson EDS 1275 to make that high octane Led Zep sound. With us it’s the Screamin’ Demon’s howl from hell and Joe’s raunchy blues grind that makes Aerosmith’s 150 proof moonshine—pumped out by Brad, Joey, and Tom. It’s the collective vibe of four or five people tuned into each other that makes the bee sting and the honey drip. I knew what I had to do—gotta fly back to my hive, talk that jive, and hit the road again with that beautiful, dirty Aerosmith liquid hydrogen snarl that makes the liver quiver, the knees freeze, and the booty shake. And that’s an understatement!

But my feet were still writhing in pain. I could barely walk, and if I was to go out on tour I needed to prance. The band wanted to tour—and Aerosmith was my first love, a fucking gift from God—but I questioned whether I could even be onstage. The band said, “Aw, come on out, anyway, Steven, you can sit in a chair.” In a chair? In a fucking chair? Who did they think I was, Lightnin’ Hopkins? I’m a dancer. I can’t even sit still under normal conditions—so onstage, fuggedaboutit! I ground my teeth in anger at my brethren. You fucks, to discount my pain and think only about the money! So I was given the option: either I could sit in a chair and sing (yeah, right!) or . . . guess what?

In the spring of ’09 I went to see Dr. Brian McKeon again. He’s going to know how to take care of my problem, I figured. He treats athletes, and they’re all crippled at forty, all on some kind of painkiller. He did prescribe something really effective, something that attacked the higher centers of pain, so I could at least get onstage without being plunged into the hell of screaming skulls.

Effectively medicated, I went on the Aerosmith-ZZ Top tour (the so-called A to Z Tour), which began in Maryland Heights, Missouri, on June 10, 2009. It wasn’t long before I began abusing my meds. On the list of side effects—sleeplessness, nausea, sweating, headaches—they should add: “may cause patient to respond in an inappropriate manner to the horseshit of others.” I wanted to explain to the band why I was on drugs. It wasn’t—as many cynically believed, “Oh, that’s Steven” wanting to get high. It was me trying to get through the pain. And I fell hard because it was hard. I sacrificed my sobriety and my sanity! And I did it all for them! Sob!

The tour was going fine. . . . I was planning to work on my book—the very thing you hold in your hands!—but Dave Dalton was sending me huge chunks of manuscript and I was having a hard time reading that many pages. I told him, “Only send me twenty pages at a time.” But did he? Not that it would have made that much difference because—on serious doses of Lune-fucking-esta and the Suboxone—I was in the way-out-a-sphere and not really up to reading twenty fortune cookies, never mind twenty pages of Steven-fucking-ography. It’s not that easy to revisit your checkered past while snorting long lines of Lunesta—which I was spending too much time in my room doing.

It’s funny. After all the drugs that I ever did, all the coke and the rest of it, now I am on Lunesta? Lunesta! The least of the sleeping meds. But I just needed to do it. . . . I was flying on the wings of Lunesta, and that along with the Suboxone that I was taking, supposedly one of, but by now I was up to two or three. Suboxone is used to treat opiate addiction—but it has a morphine derivative in it, so. . . . But never the day of the show!

August 5, 2009, Sturgis, South Dakota, the Sturgis motorcycle rally. It’s a big day because my brother-in-law, Mark DeRico, and I were building our Red Wing motorcycles, and Red Wing was going to be named bike of the year there. Sturgis is biker heaven and I was getting nicely loaded. I was there with my friend Justin Murdoch. Justin’s downstairs with me and Erin, and Mark and the family were upstairs in the hotel. The night comes, we play the gig, I fall off the stage and suddenly everybody is on a witch hunt for Justin. They just assumed he was the one who had given me the drugs. Now Justin’s like my father—he can’t drink more than one beer, two beers tops. No one gave me any drugs! I was using—if you can call it that—doing the Lunesta! And instead of eating the three pills prescribed me I was snorting them, too, at night. That’s all! Compared to what anyone who went to see Hendrix swallowed, or smoked at a Be-in or Woodstock . . . Lunesta? What the fuck! That’s like . . . smoking banana peels! After all my running in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, I’m smoking banana peels? You know ain’t nothing in that. It’s like what the fuck?