Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (52 page)

After I’d been there two months I was told I could go home for a week, which I did. . . . I had a meeting with the band, at which time I begged their forgiveness and sincerely apologized for my behavior. Looking around the room I realized that although we had all allegedly gotten sober in the late eighties, some of us didn’t exactly stay with the program. Some of us never did get sober. I did, Joey followed . . . but not everybody cleaned up and that’s the sad truth. Naturally I’m always the identified patient. If you get Steven sober, then you’ll have a band. You need the lead singer, you can’t lose him! I begged their dodgy forgiveness and said, “Let’s go out on tour when I get out of Betty Ford.”

When I got out of rehab, that day on the fifteenth of March, there was a song that needed to be written for a million dollars. The next day and the day after that I’m writing that song with Marti Frederiksen and Kara DioGuardi who was the judge from
American Idol
. We came up with a great song called “Love Lives” for a Japanese movie called
Space Battleship Yamato
.

Then we’re on tour again. After a month of rehearsing, we hit Caracas, Venezuela, May 18, 2010. “Caracas of Your Assus” was the running joke. And it was one of the best tours we’d ever done. It was a bit ironic and a thorn in my side, but not worth getting angry over after spending three months in rehab, that I came back to a band where someone was still using. I don’t give a fuck. I live for this band, but the world needs to know.

South America, Europe, the United States. . . . Where are we going to go with this? Oh yeah, Caracas of Your Assus . . . Some of the districts there were beyond the Third World, they were more like the Fourth World. They were selling incense and papaya, goat’s heads, sugar skulls, and monkey meat . . . anything you can imagine. While I was there I went downtown to the area where they used to torture people, looking for an AA meeting—my own personal inquisition. Where is it?
¿Donde es?
Oh, it’s up there. You climb up the spiral steps of this building in the middle of downtown. It was the old hellhole jail . . . and you walk into the interrogation room—that will sober you right up fast—that’s where all the bad shit happened . . . and it’s an AA meeting. Two fucking hours. Drinking nothing but black coffee with tons of sugar in it in these little plastic cups. Not one word did I understand, but I picked up on their passion. They were doing Caracas drugs: opium, heroin, drinking. . . .

When we go on tour to a new place, I like to get to each gig two nights ahead of the band ’cause I like to walk around, get a feel for the town, and get a good night’s rest before the first show. I brought a sober companion with me, Chappy, one of the stars on
Brotherhood
—very funny guy at the beginning of the series with a huge cock, I mean clock . . . dock.

The J. Geils Band tried to throw their lead singer, Peter Wolf, out, too. I had had a nice long talk with him. I said, “These fucking guys, they’re trying to find a new lead singer because I’m in rehab, can you believe that? While I’m down on my knees, at my lowest ebb, what do I find? My old band of brothers is auditioning lead singers to replace me . . . as if that were even possible! Forty fucking years of brotherly love, knockdown fights and drug hoarding . . . did that mean nothing to them? And now they want to replace me . . . and all because I fell off a stage. The exact same thing Joe Perry’s done five times before I did it. Wait, wait, wait! I need a witness, can I get a witness? Isn’t that why they called us the Toxic Twins, because of . . . ?” Peter Wolf looked at me like Mr. Natural saying, “What else is new?”

J
ohnny B. (Joe’s guy and road manager extraordinaire) and me, London, 2010. (Ross Halfin for Aerosmith)

June 29, 2010. We were on tour in France, when Kara DioGuardi texted me asking if I’ve ever thought about being a judge on
American Idol,
because apparently she didn’t want to continue doing it. I didn’t know. Like a dummy, I went, “Does it still have high ratings?” She’s going, “Oh, yeah!” So I said, “Well, I’ll get back to you.”

Early July I’m on a plane coming back from England to start the American leg of the tour and there’s an in-flight movie called the
Back-up Plan
playing. There’d already been rumors and grumblings about my doing
American Idol
. My own internal interrogator is going, “Can you do it, Steven? Do you want to do it, lad?” I said, “You know, yeah, I do.”

Three weeks later, we’re getting ready to begin the American tour down in Florida. And that’s when I said, “You know, I’m just gonna fucking do it.” And I signed the papers. I hadn’t told the band yet.

When we get to Vegas, Joe barges into my dressing room and accosts me: “What the fuck’s going on?” And I, all innocent, said, “What?” “Well, how come I’m finding out about this in the press? Why didn’t you tell me?” And I say, “Well, c’mon man, two months ago you were trying to throw me out of the band, so I got myself a job, that way I’ve got something steady while you guys are trying to figure out what you want to do.” It’s all water under the bridge now. It’s all this bullshit that happens because bands’ wives get to talking to the guys in the band. When we’re onstage, none of that shit’s there. But when they’re off the road, their wives start pecking them to death.

The day I came out of rehab is the day the rest of the band should have gone in. Nevertheless, the tour was beyond successful and we end up August 15, 2010, at Fenway Park on a double bill blowout with J. Geils—twin bad boys from Boston—selling out the stadium. The last show on the tour was September 16 in Vancouver, and then . . .

Next stop:
American Idol
. Hey, like my dad said, make sure you have something to fall back on in case your day job doesn’t pan out. And, boy, what a day job I got!

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Take a Walk Inside My Mind  . . .

A
h, yes, it was the best of rhymes it was the worst of rhymes. . . .

I’ve been mythicized, Mick-icized,

Eulogized and fooligized,

I’ve been Cole-Portered and farmer’s-daughtered,

I’ve been Led Zepped and twelve-stepped.

“C
hairman of the Bored,” 2010. (Ross Halfin for Aerosmith)

I’m E to the Z ew tweedle-dee, I’m a rhyming fool that weren’t learned in no school—me, Fritz the Cat, and Mohair Sam are the baddest cats. . . . What
is
what
am
.

Every time that I look in the mirror

All these lines on my face getting clearer

The past is gone

It went by like dusk to dawn

Isn’t that the way

Everybody’s got their dues in life to pay

“Dream On”—I wrote that when I was seventeen, and sometimes I feel like that young kid, this seventeen-year-old who just wormholed himself into this sixty-year-old man. The voice seems fine, but then there’s my feet, my knee, and my throat. But when I hit the stage, something miraculous happens. I go on tour and after a month I turn into Peter-fucking-Pan. The band is my happy thought and then I get my wings again. It’s my fountain of youth. I get so strong from the workout that I’m zapped back into being a twenty-year-old. And it’s not that I
feel
that way, but it
is
that I
am
that way.

Janis, Jimi, Jim Morrison, Keats, and Brian Jones, didn’t they all die at twenty-six or twenty-seven? It’s that weird doomed age. And I always wondered, since we all shared the same lifestyle, would I live past that glorious age. And guess what? I’ve been lucky; I’ve lived long past that. I was born on March 26, so I always wondered what I’d look like when I was twenty-six. It’s funny, when I was a teenager and way before Aerosmith, I would dry my hair after a shower with a blow-dryer and search for my face in the foggy mirror—because I couldn’t see my reflection. . . . I aimed the dryer at the clouded glass. There I was at ninety, and then the slow melt back to nineteen . . . “Every time that I look in the mirror . . .” Gee . . . sounds familiar! But the singer didn’t arrive until the song was written. Life is like a roll of toilet paper, the closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.

Erin and I were sitting on the lawn in Sunapee, New Hampshire, one morning and the phone rang. It was Billy Joel. He asked me if I’d like to play the final show that Shea Stadium would ever see. I told him I saw the Beatles there in 1965 and that I’d love to do it. He sent a plane for us and we were on our way. Jump to . . . I’m backstage in my dressing room when Billy Joel walks in, saying his hellos. He introduces me to Tony Bennett, who to me is a god . . . second only to Frank Sinatra. . . . and I’m sharing a dressing room with him. HUDDA THUNK? Tony then introduces me to his son who asks me, “Do you know whose jacket this is?” It’s in my dressing room so I’m thinking, it gotta be mine, but no, I tell him, “It reeks of Sgt Pepper.” At which time he says, “Yeah, and it’s Ringo’s . . .” And he lets me try it on. Turns out, he’s one of the largest collectors of Beatles memorabilia in the history of memory. So, here I am, sixty days sober, sixty years old, sixty thousand people in the audience and in the house. . . . Sir Paul fucking McCartney, as the extra special guest, flown in from London that evening, who’s closing the show with “I Saw Her Standing There.” Forty-three years since I heard the Beatles open up with that at the same stadium back in 1965. We flew back to Sunapee that night and sitting out on the lawn in the dark, the same lawn where we had been that morning, I asked myself, “What just happened, what did I just do?” Living on the tail of a comet, it’s all so fast. It’s such an age of supersonic travel, transcendental or otherwise, and instant everything that life can become a blur for me.

When we tour we often hub in Minneapolis, fly to Detroit after that . . . and two hours later we’re back in the same hotel, hitting the sheets by four and thinking, “Where were we tonight?” When you rattle it back and forth . . . memories of what
that
tour was like, it all blends together: plane, limo, lobby, backstage, encore, limo, lobby, dressing room, plane. It’s just a big fucking
blurrrrr
.

Sometimes it feels like . . . all I’m doing is rearranging deck chairs on the fucking
Titanic
. And then I wonder why I don’t dream anymore—my subconscious must be saturated.

What I’ve seen, faces that remind me of faces, places that remind of other places I’ve never even been to yet . . . It’s just another example of vooja de. I could talk to you forever about the people I’ve met in the shadows of time, in the vibrations between musical fifths, even in the spaces between the words you’re reading right now. But when I zero in, things come into focus. When I went back and looked at my yearbook, seems like everybody I ever knew was there in those twenty small pages. Different people maybe, but then one tends to morph into another. Those forty or fifty kids in your graduating class, you never thought their faces would bleed into the future. . . . And so now I realize after peering into my own yearbook that the guy who was sitting next to me in wood shop looks exactly like the president of Sony. Where am I going with this? Whatever happened to a good melody? Maybe to be the headline speaker at the Alzheimer’s convention with speech in hand . . . to an empty house that forgot how to get there. . . . Gasp! Only to wake up in front of President Obama, Oprah, and Paul McCartney singing the last four songs of “Abbey Road” at the 2010 Kennedy Awards. And you tell me I’m not living the dream.

M
e and Erin meet the Obamas at the Kennedy Center Honors, 2010.

One day, after my mom had passed, my dad sent me an e-mail which said: “Don’t wait until it’s the last minute to make the phone call. And use one of the quarters I gave you for these calls as a kid.” So I wrote him this little poem:

Once upon a dime I felt so alone,

So I first made a call on the last pay phone;

Something so strange inside of me stirred,

So I knew I’d be the first to get the last word.

I screamed “Oh, Lordy, is this my time?

I feel like the first at the back of the line.

So it’s all your fault and it seems to me,

I was on the last pay phone in NYC.”

M
e and my dad, 2010. (Erin Brady)

A
long with everything else that’s happened, life is good. And I’ve learned that if I shoot an arrow of truth, I must first dip its point in honey. I’ve learned the ancient lesson of apology—OWN IT. It puts out every fire you may have walked through in life. People, too, often miss the silver lining because they were expecting gold. I’ve seen the sun go down only to be swallowed by the ocean! Only to rise again in the morning.

TOP:
M
e and Bebe Buell, Liv’s mom, 2010. (Liv Tyler)

BOTTOM:
M
ilo Langdon, my grandson, 2010. I’m a grandpa . . . 
O yeah! (Liv Tyler)

I fell in love with Bebe Buell, and on July 1, 1977, my first baby Liv arrived. I married Cyrinda Foxe, and soon Mia was born on December 22, 1978. Then I married Teresa, and along came Chelsea, and two years later my man child, Taj, was born. Fatherhood changed me forever. I wept when I heard Chelsea sing in kindergarten. I burst with pride when Taj graduated high school. My heart broke from the honesty that Mia put in her book. And how Liv dazzles me in her movies. . . . And now I’m ever so humbled by the way she loves Milo.