Читать книгу Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: The Autobiography - Steven Tyler - Страница 7
ОглавлениеZits and Tits
Two months before my eighth birthday—Elvis! “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Hound Dog.” It was like getting bitten by a radioactive spider. Elvis . . . the Extraterrestrial. But it wasn’t Elvis who first turned me on to rock ’n’ roll. I was too young to quite get it. But four years later, Chubby Checker and Dimah the Incredible Diving Horse came roaring into my life.
By the time I was twelve, Chubby Checker’s “Twist” was huge. It was the only single to top Billboard’s Hot 100 twice. I went with my family in the summer of 1960 and saw him at the Steel Pier in New Jersey. It was such a big fucking hit even your parents wanted to see him. He was playing live that night and I got to see a woman on a horse jump off a thirty-foot diving platform into a tank of water. The announcer said: “Ladies and Gentlemen, Dimah the Wonder Horse is going to dive into this small tank of water. Her rider, Miss Olive Gelnaw, will guide Dimah during her thirty-foot drop into the tank. Now, we need you to be very quiet. It takes all of her concentration to get it right, or they will miss the tank and fall to their death.”
Dimah and her rider made a perfect dive and landed in the tank. Most of the water flew up in a huge wave over the side of the tank and the crowd went wild. And those two images—Chubby Checker doing the Twist and the sexy girl in a bathing suit on a huge horse in a death-defying leap—fused in my mind. And that was my introduction to the world of rock ’n’ roll.
I heard sex in “Twist.” I didn’t know what sex was, I hadn’t gotten laid yet, I didn’t know how to do sex, I didn’t know what blow jobs were—“and I’m supposed to put my thing in your what?” But I heard sex in the music. And that’s what I loved. I loved that someone could allude to the most primal of instincts—what everybody wanted to do on a date—and put it in a song on the radio, and if the song came on and you were with your date, you ended up Doing It! Wow! And then there was the Fuck-All of it! All the things you couldn’t say or do, you could do onstage or in your music. What about that Ian Whitcomb song? Where he sings like a girl and he’s begging a girl. By singing it in that crazy falsetto voice he was able to convey unspeakable emotions that made girls blush and turned heads everywhere. And he nailed it, it was a huge hit. And they all had the same things in common: Little Richard’s high falsetto screams that incited the Beatles’ high harmonies, and then there was the end of Ian Whitcomb’s “Turn on Song,” which spoke to those who heard it like a breathy wet spot that climbed right out of the speakers and grabbed you by the neck and made your ears cry . . . and there was nothing you could do about it except dance or be the lead singer of a band and do it all yourself.
And then, later on, I went and saw Janis Joplin. Now that really was my world—pure emotion. Onstage she played the role of that gin-soaked barroom queen. With her gravelly Delta voice and street smarts she could have only gotten by going through all these experiences herself, she transcended all those who came before her. The way she sang a song it seemed like she’d been down that road one too many times and it wasn’t going to happen again—not this time round. She had a brand-new kind of kick-ass confidence laced with a “superhippie,” smart-ass, kinky-kinda-sassafrassy strut to her vocals, the likes of which you’d never heard before. After seeing Janis, it almost seemed like you’d come from a raise-the-tent, raise-your-spirit Pentecostal Holy Roller revelation-type thing. It was that kind of mind-altering sound. And it was like, oh, my god! There was such a raunchy matter-of-factness, a drug-induced-sexy-animal rush to the way she belted out “Piece of my Heart.” I mean, that was the shit. It was almost as if she gave her heart away a thousand times and never did quite get it back.
Janis up there—Janis, what a grand dame, like someone’s mom, but a cross between a stately old woman and a loud, brassy New Orleans bordello whore. That was the end of the sixties. That’s what Janis was to me—a revolutionary spirit, someone who changed the emotional weather.
Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard. “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Who Do You Love,” Awopbopaloolaawop-ba-ba-bam-mboom! Pure adrenaline rush. I’d been zapped by an alien tractor beam and it was pulling me toward the mother ship.
The Beach Boys! “In My Room.” Oh, my god! All I can tell you is that my girlfriend got turned on just now hearing me say those words with such ecstatic glee. That song was the first time I got up from behind the drums and grabbed the microphone away from my bass player and said, “You know what, I’m singing that fucking song, pal!” And then—abracadabra!—I became a singer! I bought a gooseneck and put the microphone on it. “Ladies and genitals, give it up for Steven Tallarico on vocals! ” But I’m getting ahead of my story . . .
By the time I was fifteen I knew what I wanted to do—aside from getting high and trying to get into girls’ pants under the aqueduct. Drums! A friend’s big brother had a drum set in the basement. We snuck down there and when I saw that set of drums I was in-fat-chu-ated! I couldn’t believe that something you banged on made that much noise—and it wasn’t pots and pans. I sat down behind the snare drums, and that was the beginning of the end. I bought instruction records by Sandy Nelson, who introduced the drum solo into pop singles in the late fifties. His big hit was “Let There Be Drums” in ’61. He would play these cool beats at the end, just on a snare. It sounded like ten snares doing a marching beat. That’s funk and soul right there. Fucking everything! There was my card: I just landed on that fucking place in the great game of life. My pass-go card, my get-out-of-jail-free card. That was the magic. That’s the funk the blacks knew. That’s the soul that Elvis knew, right there, and now I had the key to it all, especially after attending the Westchester Workshop Drums Unlimited.
I went to lessons at the WWDU. A guy gave me a rubber thing with heavy sticks and I learned my rudiments . . . paradiddles and stuff. I listened to those Sandy Nelson records like the Beatles LPs when they came out. My head practically INSIDE the speaker, hanging on every movement, every nuance of soundage, REVELING in it. But at the end of one album, Sandy had this thing—like a cross between an 007 guitar and surf rock—a Ventures/Dick Dale rata-tat-tat, basically with accents. It’s all accents. He took the drum beat but gave it a twist, and that one thing was the turning point . . . the way he reversed the beat through the accents. I fucking lost it! “I gotta know that!” screamed the mouth within. So, like I said before, I got under the hood and learned it.
The first time I got up onstage to play was at the Barn. It must’ve been the summer of 1963. A group called the Maniacs were playing, and when they’d finished their set, they let me up onstage. “I’d like to introduce . . . Steven Tallarico.” I played the classic drum solo on “Wipeout.” It was just a speeded-up version of a riff from a high school marching band beat but it sounded stratospheric—a pure sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll rush. All right, now I knew. I was making a huge racket with this demolition-derby–driven surfer blast. Everybody loved it . . . I loved it. John Conrad, the guy who ran the Barn, was beaming—I was in the zone.
When I think about it now, forty-nine years later, I still have the same rush of feeling, that same energy and joy of the endorphins flooding my brain. It’s close to an addiction. I close my eyes and I just want to do it. To play that set and sing those songs—those songs were my way out.
I got into street fights in the Bronx all the time—an hour and a half they went on, I’d come home bloody as hell. I was made fun of quite a lot at high school. Jewish kids were constantly picked on—they got to see a side of life the other half doesn’t see. Prejudice. I got spit on in school and called “Nigger Lips.” The kids would snap my earlobes with their fingers, which was especially painful on freezing cold days. Being hassled at the bus stop, however, turned out to be my salvation. Initially I might have been offended, but as soon as I learned how to sing, I was right proud of that moniker, because I then realized that those were my roots, my black roots were in black music, and it was nothing to be ashamed of.
My family history—if you go back two hundred years ago—the Tallaricos were from the boot of Italy, Calabria. And before that? Albanians, Egyptians, Ethiopians. But let’s face it, in the end—in the beginning, actually—we’re all Africans. You can’t grow humans in cold weather. And before we were humans we were apes, and if we can’t take the cold weather, how could a monkey, who doesn’t even know how to buy a coat? So if you go back, you’re black. It’s so stupid to go around saying, “I’m Italian” (the way I do all the time).
My way of avoiding being beaten up at school was to play the drums in a band. My first group was the Strangers: Don Solomon, Peter Stahl, and Alan Stohmayer. Peter played guitar, Alan bass, Don was the lead singer, and I played drums. We would set up in the cafeteria and do a mixer after school. I played “Wipeout” and sang “In My Room.” In high school the key to not being made fun of is to be entertaining, the same way that some fat people become funny, tell jokes, make fun of people, and then they get left alone. I was skinny and big-lipped and pinheaded. I grew my hair and played the drums in a band, and that was my key to acceptance. I knew about music from my dad, and so rock ’n’ roll was a case of please-don’t-throw-me-in-the-Briar-Patch!
I was giddily starstruck. At the Brooklyn Fox I ran up onstage and touched Mary Weiss, the lead singer of the bad-girl group the Shangri-Las. With her long blond hair, black leather pants, and melancholy eyes, Mary Weiss was a teen goddess. She alone was reason enough for making rock ’n’ roll your own personal religion, especially while she was singing “Leader of the Pack.” She was a gorgeous tough girl who later got questioned by the FBI for carrying a gun across state lines. I was completely smitten with her. The next time I saw her it was a little more intimate—but not because Mary Weiss wanted it that way. In 1966 I went to Cleveland with one of my later bands, Chain Reaction, to do this teen dance show, Upbeat. I wanted to sing lead, so I got David Conrad (nephew of John Conrad, who ran the Barn) to play drums. There were no dressing rooms, so I went into the bathroom to change. I heard someone in the next stall. Thinking it was David, as a joke I hoisted myself up to the top of the stall. But when I peered over, there was Mary Weiss, with her black leather pants around her ankles and her patch showing. I got such the boner from that—I fantasized about that for weeks! It got me through a lot of cold winter nights up in Sunapee.
At our house in Yonkers, no one locked their doors, so with the advent of sex and drugs I had to figure something out to stop anyone from catching me smoking pot or rubbing one out or whatever else I was doing up there. A serious problem for a teenager. You had to put a chair in front of the door, but what a drag! From working with traps I knew how to rig things, and I came up with an ingenious way of locking a door. I drilled through the tongue—the metal latch that goes into the strike plate of the door—and put a coat hanger through it, leaving four inches sticking out like a pin on a hand grenade. If you turned the handle the door wouldn’t open.
Then I devised a more fiendish plan. Through the mail I bought an induction coil, which is nothing more than a transformer for an electric train. On your train set you can turn the transformer up to ten, twenty, thirty, forty, so your Lionel train is just whippin’ around the track until it’s going so fast it falls off the tracks. I took the induction coil and attached it to the railing on the way up to my room so that if anyone touched that railing, they’d be zapped right off their feet. I’d be upstairs doing a girl, parents were gone for the weekend, those few, chosen moments when I needed serious warning. And YES, people did get zapped. But only my best friends! I’d go, “Touch that!” and they’d go “Yeeoooow!” Suddenly best friends were so well behaved. I don’t know what happened.
Once I ran a wire all the way down to the basement and up under the couch and the pillows. I undid the wires, stripped about four inches off the insulation, spread them out—the positive and negative wires—and put them under the cushions so that whoever sat on the couch would get zapped. My best friend was down there eating peanuts. “Here, have this beer,” I said. “I’ll be right back!” I’m upstairs in my room, turning the train transformer on, and I get the door open and I switch it on. I’d hear the transformer buzz as it connected. I’m waiting there, listening to hear what happens . . . “Yow!” Just a little evil teenage fun.
When “The House of the Rising Sun” came on the radio, I thought it was the greatest record I’d ever heard. I saw the Animals perform it at the Academy of Music and was so overcome with raw emotion I jumped out of my seat, ran up the aisle, and shook the bass player Chas Chandler’s hand. Then came the Stones. Rock is my religion, and these guys were my gods!
You don’t need to go to the fucking Temple of Doom to find my banter on the Stones or the Yardbirds—what I thought about back then in my sixteen-year-old make-believe mind. It would have been the desire to write a song or be in an English band when the first Brit Invasion came over and—more than anything—fame! Immortality! I wanted to inject myself into the grooves of the record. I wanted dreamy nubile girls to listen to my voice and cry. A thousand years after my death I fantasized that there’d be people in the outer galaxies listening to “Dream On” and saying in hushed tones, “It’s him, the strange Immortal One!”
And then, briefly, I was touched by the caressing hand of fate when, sometime in 1964, I became Mick Jagger’s brother, Chris. Mick Jagger was the baddest guy on the block, and of course I empathetically picked up on all his shit. Mick and Keith and all that—it hit me like a locomotive. “It’s All Over Now” was like a fucking blues freight train coming straight at me.
In the summer of ’64, I went to a lake in upstate New York, Bash Bish Falls or something like that, up near Utica, with a bunch of kids from Yonkers. Long hair, sixteen, no band, but somebody said, “Wow, you look like Mick Jagger!” And that was it . . . off and running! “You know what, I’m Chris, Mick Jagger’s brovver. I am him!” And I went with it like mad. Shot off from there to this Limey planet and immediately lapsed into a Cockney accent. I was talking like “Bloody bleedin’ ’poncey wanker, spot of Marmite, darlin’? Care for a leaper, mate? Ghastly weather we’re ’avin, innit?” It’s called, you know, lost days of youth. When you’re a kid you can jump into other people’s personalities like a transmute. I can still relate to that.
In those days of the British Invasion you had to be a Brit to make it. First of all, you had to have a bloody English accent. That was number one. And that I could do. I still have those Strangers clippings at home: “Steven Tyler, his lower lip hanging like Jagger’s, brought the front row to its feet.” They wrote that in the paper. Bought my Mick impersonation lock, stock, and barrel. I couldn’t believe it. But of course, I—more than anyone else on the planet—believed it. I was him. I was barely sixteen but in my mind already one of “England’s Greatest Hit Makers.” Even if the Strangers sounded more like a bad imitation of Freddie and the Dreamers than the Stones. Yonkers Greatest Hit Makers maybe.
In the early seventies I was embarrassed to say I was into Mick, because the press was already harping on the Mick Jagger and Steven Tyler thing and I wanted to get as far away as possible from those comparisons. I was hoping they would find something in my music that would have some merit other than making Aerosmith into some sort of tribute band with me as a mock Mick Jagger.
But yes, he was my fucking hero. There was actually a six- or seven-year period where I was afraid to tell the press that. I was, like, “No he isn’t!” And then, of course, I came out of the closet and went, “Fuckin’ A, he is!” To this day, to this minute, to this second, Mick Jagger is still my hero. I remember being at a club at One Central Square in the West Village in early ’66, turning around and seeing Mick Jagger and Brian Jones sitting behind me. Not a word came out of my mouth.
I didn’t become Steven Tyler all at once. I made him up, bit by bit. He kind of grew out of playing all the clubs in New York and doing acid and hanging out in Greenwich Village and tripping and going to be-ins in Central Park. All that stuff is where I come from. But more than anything I was shaped by the kind of music that I listened to in ’64, ’65, ’66. The Yardbirds, the Stones, the Animals, the Pretty Things and their wild drummer Viv Prince—he was Keith Moon before Keith Moon became the maniacal drummer of the Who. Moon used to go down to the Marquee Club to watch him and pick up a few mad moves. And of course the Beatles, whom I saw at Shea Stadium. They were the musical G-spot.
I’d get all the Brit imports from a record store down in the IRT subway station at Forty-sixth Street. Those Yardbirds 45s: “For Your Love,” “Shapes of Things,” “Over Under Sideways Down.” That’s what I cut my teeth on—not that I was in any shape in 1964 to take all that stuff and run with it. I’d take speed and listen to the Yardbirds, the Pretty Things, the Stones. We were what—sixteen? You couldn’t drink till you were eighteen, so all we could do was grass and pills . . . red crosses, white crosses, Christmas trees, Dexedrine, Benzedrine. I’d go up to Sunapee in the winter and sit in the barn—four feet of snow outside—light a fire, and snort speed until I was vibrating at the same frequency as the fucking records.
The Strangers slowly began to get gigs. We played a lot of weird places at the beginning, like Banana Fish Park on Long Island. We even had a slogan: “THE STRANGERS—ENGLISH SOUNDS, AMERICAN R&B.” At Easter my mom drove the Strangers up to Sunapee to perform. We played stuff like “She’s a Woman” and the Dave Clark Five’s “Bits and Pieces.”
My life four years before Aerosmith . . .
with The Strangers.
My motto has always been: “FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT.” If you wanna be a rock ’n’ roll star (like Keith Richards says) you gotta get your moves off in the mirror first. The look. Pick up a copy of Rave magazine, see what the cool cats are wearing in Swinging London this month. Rave was the midsixties Brit mag of immaculate Mod haberdashery. Check out Mick’s houndstooth pants. And green shoes. Where’d Keith Relf get those wraparound shades, man? You gotta stay on top of this stuff, you know, if you wanna be a rock star. Gotta be properly attired in the latest Mod gear when the moment arises and the fickle finger of Billboard’s Top Ten touches you.
I scoured the pseudo–Carnaby Street boutiques of Greenwich Village for the genuine article. Collarless shirts, leather vests, and checkered pants at Paul Sargent’s on Eighth Street. Beatle boots with Cuban heels from Bloom’s Shoe Gallery in the West Village or Florsheim Shoes on Forty-second Street. They had the fuckin’ greatest boots, high heels, tight around the ankles—those were the ones I wore onstage. Then there were the Mod shoes, brightly colored Capezio ballet shoes, flowered shirts, and satin scarves—well, okay, the scarves came later (inspired by Janis Joplin). Those I got along with my incense from Sindori (is that what the place was called?), an import store across the street from the Fillmore East.
In the early days, I would put incense all over the amps and in front of the stage to mark my territory. I thought by burning exotic scents like myrrh they’d remember me by my smell, like God in their church. I wanted something other than our bad tuning and my ugly fucking Mick Jagger face to remember us by. It’s like if I were a dog, I would go out to the tip of the stage, lift my leg, pee, and say, “I’d like to leave a little something for you to remember me by.” Dogs piss on trees to mark their territory, so I marked mine with incense and banners—like old Scottish tartans that I found, the ones that held special family colors and crests.
It’s so funny, the obsessive Limey mimicking that went on. Back in 1966, down on Delancey Street, where the blacks got their stuff, you could get a beautiful leather jacket for twenty-six bucks . . . but who had twenty-six bucks back then? I’d hang around Bloom’s Shoe Gallery just waiting to see who would go in. I bought all my shit there, you know, because they did. The Stones, the Byrds, Dylan. Mike Clark, the drummer for the Byrds, turned me on to this place in Estes Park, Colorado, where he got his moccasins, the ones he wore on an album cover. I asked him, “How could I get a pair of those?” He gave me the address and I got me a pair, which I later on brought into the studio where we were recording our first album. I got the rubber-stamp holder with all the different rubber stamps they used to mark the two-inch master reels. The rubber stamps would say “DOLBY OUTTAKES,” “REMIX VERSION. SLAVE, MASTER”—all things that could be done to tapes. I rubber-stamped my moccasins, which I chose to call my recording boots, all over and I wore them till the soles fell off.
Bloom’s Shoe Gallery was where I ran into Bob Dylan. Okay, he was coming out of there and I was walking in. I’d love to have a great story where I told him I was in a band (I wasn’t). I wish I could’ve told him I loved his voice (I did). I used to go down and walk around Greenwich Village, all the time hoping to bump into the Stones, which of course never happened. I never got a chance to speak to Dylan or Keith or Mick to ask them how the fuck they wrote their songs. I assumed they had to get their lyrics from their life experiences. I knew that drugs had something to do with it. I’d heard that Pete Townshend’s stutter in “My Generation” came from leapers, some weirdass British speed. Tuinals, acid, and grass . . . I knew about those. And there was this drug called “coke.”
I had been around the block and I’d done as much crank as anyone, but somewhere along the line I decided to do something else instead of using the speed to go and party in the Village. Fuck that, I think I’ll stay at home tonight and channel John Lennon. I’ll write a song based on my muddled understandings and my profound misunderstandings that’ll change the world. But it took a while to get to that place.
New York City was filled with very odd folk—which I loved. I’d take my mother’s car down to the city, park it on the street, get a parking ticket, throw it away, and drive home. I can’t imagine how many tickets I got. I know I never paid any of them. A rock ’n’ roll Dillinger in the making. Or I’d leave the car in the Bronx at the first train stop, which was past White Plains and Yonkers Raceway, get on the train, and get off at Fifty-ninth Street, Columbus Circle. The Fifty-ninth Street subway stop wasn’t that far from where Moondog would stand with his spear and Viking helmet. He lived on the street, wore only homemade clothes, and thought of himself as the incarnation of the Norse God Thor. He was so noble and mysterious, like a character from mythology come to life on Sixth Avenue.
Clyde and his ride (Honkin’), 2010. (Keren Pinkas)
Moondog wrote “All Is Loneliness” (that Janis sang on Big Brother and the Holding Company’s first album). He’d hang out with a bald-headed guy who would blow raspberries and yell “Fuck you!” at anyone who walked by. He had a ragged and gravelly street voice. Welcome to Freak City! There were freaks on the streets, in the clubs, on TV. There were magnificent misfits everywhere, and you had no idea what they were famous for but they were all famous for something. I loved them. Then I’d wander into Central Park, smoke weed, and catch a sweet Gotham buzz.
On Friday afternoons me, Ray Tabano, Debbie Benson, Rickie Holztman’s girlfriend, and Debbie’s friend Dia would head for Greenwich Village because that’s where the beatniks lived and we wanted to be beatniks. It was the summer of ’64. I was a white boy from Yonkers, trying to get high, trying to get hip. We’d sit in Washington Square Park drinking Southern Comfort or Seagrams 7 (or whatever else we could mooch off somebody) until we were completely shitfaced on booze, pills, and pot. Then we’d go check out the clubs! The Kettle of Fish, the Tin Angel, the Bitter End, the Night Owl, Trudy Heller’s, Café Wha? Those clubs in New York were my education. Later on we played all those joints. The smell of those bars was like a funky nostalgic patchouli. To this day I love the stale smell of cigarettes and beer that you got in those places.
Debbie Benson, 1968.
O, how I loved her. . . . RIP. (Ernie Tallarico)
One night we were wandering around the Village and saw a group advertising itself as the Strangers outside a club—they seemed to be a pretty established band and sounded better than us, so we decided to change our name to the mildly pretentious Strangeurs.
I’d go down there Friday night, come home Sunday. I loved it; I wanted that life so bad. I’d sit on a car in the West Village outside the Tin Angel with Zal Yanovsky from the Lovin’ Spoonful and talk. He wore culottes, a Bleecker Street Keith Richards. And Josie the She Demon—a transvestite who paraded around Greenwich Village with no particular mission save her own sense of eccentric expression. It was just such a trip. Then uptown there was Ondine’s, and Steve Paul’s club, the Scene. Teddy Slatus was the doorman at the Scene, a runty little guy. You’d go down the stairs into a cellar. It was like the beatnik grottoes from old movies. Low ceiling, small, cramped, but magical. Everybody looked like Andy Warhol. Steve Paul in his turtleneck, tall, talking in a beat lingo so fast and clipped you could barely grasp what he was saying, but you knew it was hip and one day you’d be able to understand it. Late at night, Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney, or Brian Jones would just show up and play—they’d be on a tiny stage about four feet away from you. I performed there early in ’68, with my second band, William Proud, with Tiny Tim singing and playing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” on his ukulele, a tall skinny Lebanese freak with long greasy hair, a high voice, and bad teeth. But that was the great thing about the Scene: he wasn’t treated like a sideshow character—it was more like . . . this is the artist in residence. He belongs—you’ve gotta get in tune with him if you want to fit in.
I would go see bands like the Doors at the Scene, and I couldn’t believe the way the lead singer was acting. I thought, “Wow! What the fuck?” But maybe that’s the reason people loved the Doors—because they really thought Jim Morrison was possessed. That club was seriously in your face. I can’t tell you how close you were to the performers. You sat at a little table, and right there was the Lizard King three feet away from you.
I was Steve Tally, copying everything I saw, reading the poetry that Dylan was reading—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso. There were readings at the Kettle of Fish, where Dylan would show up and recite his incredible shit. I’d sit there slack-jawed and hypnotized.
In ’65 the Stones had two monster hits: “Satisfaction” and “Get Off of My Cloud.” We heard that they were staying at the Lincoln Square Motor Inn, so we got our friend Henry Smith to drive us down there in his mother’s car with the excuse that we needed to go rehearse. I already had my mock Mick look down, and we got our bass player, Alan Stohmayer, who had blond bangs like Brian Jones, to come with us. When we got there, the streets around the hotel were mobbed with kids. Very cute, very hot girls—Stones fans. Well, how could I resist trying out my Mick impersonation on this crowd?
I leaned out the window and in a very loud, crude Cockney accent said, “I say, I see some smashing crumpets out there, mates. Wot you doin’, later then, darlin’?” They went wild. “Mick! Mick!” “Brian, I love you!” Tears streaming down their faces. Lovely—except that they wrecked Henry’s mother’s car, tore off the radio antenna and the windshield wipers. It turned into a big riot and got on TV on the evening news. When we got back, Henry’s mother was standing there with her arms crossed. “Have a good rehearsal, boys?”
Because we were too young to drink at clubs in the city, I took Tuinals and Seconals. I’d crush all that shit up and snort it. I was always fucked-up when we got into Manhattan. That same night we were at the Scene, we saw Monty Rock III! We all knew about him from watching the Johnny Carson Show on TV. On would come this very grand queen with a let’s-tell-it-like-it-is name. He was high camp, a flamboyantly gay hairdresser/rocker or something—you didn’t know what he did exactly. He was this outrageous person saying outrageous stuff. Who cared what he did?
He wore pseudomod clothes, and in person he was just as over-the-top as he was on TV. “Come on back to my house, darlings,” he said. “I really got some shit goin’ on there!” We get to his place and there’s two Great Danes, a chimpanzee, and a defanged cobra—but it still bit you. Oh, and never mind the fucking freak folks that were there. Here we are, pubescent punks coming down from Yonkers. We hadn’t a clue. Debbie Benson was gorgeous, we were cute kids, and here we were among these flaming queens. Someone starts passing around handfuls of Placidyls. “Here, have some of these!” They were fucking paralytic downers, sleeping pills. Monty had a hot tub in his living room. I ended up knocking the plug out of his tub. After the water drained out, I threw some pillows in and slept there.
“Jim’ll be here soon,” Monty said. Jim fucking Morrison was coming over? We all awaited his arrival like that of a god. He came late, and by the time he got there, we were so wasted we thought it was Van Morrison. We were in some place where words melted into sounds, and Jim was out there . . . even further! It scared the shit out of us. We were so terrified, we hid in the bedroom, then wound up getting under the sheets with a candle, just shaking because we were so fucking stoned. It was all so freaky; we were scared what the chimpanzee might do to the Great Danes, let alone what Monty had in mind for Morrison.
We were in no shape to walk or talk. We took more Placidyls and fell out around two in the morning . . . totally zonked. Around 5:00 A.M. we woke up. Debbie was crying. “These aren’t my clothes,” she said. “What do you mean,” I said. “You’re wearing the same dress you had on last night.” Her eyes were glassy. “But these aren’t my panties!” Omigod! I looked down and thought, what the fuck? “You know what? These aren’t my pants, either.” We were running down the stairs, Debbie crying, “I’ve been violated! I’ve been violated!” Shit, we’d all wanted to take a walk on the wild side, but this was a little bit more than we bargained for.
The thing about the British Invasion bands is that they were like gangs—especially the Rolling Stones and the Who. Unlike the Beatles, they looked defiant and menacing, guys you wouldn’t mess with. I’d like to attribute this insight about groups and gangs to the Stones with their collective leathery eyeball, but I’d already figured this out long before the Beatles arrived, when the gang I was in turned into my first band.
How do you get into a gang? You act tough—and I’ve always been good at the acting part, anyway. I wasn’t tough. I was skinny and scrawny and into my own weird world. Acting tough is easy: you just try and be as obnoxious as you can and get the shit beaten out of you for it. Throw in a few stupid and illegal things—like running across Central Avenue naked, stealing stuff for the clubhouse—and if they’re feeling kindly they’ll let you in.
At Roosevelt there was this guy Ray Tabano who was to become my lifelong friend. We first became friends from my telling him to get the fuck out of my tree (the one he was climbing). “Stay off my vines,” I yelled. I paid for that a couple of days later when he beat the shit out of me—but it was worth it because I eventually became a member of a gang, really more of a club, called the Green Mountain Boys. With membership in a gang you got protection from the more thuggish elements in high school. It also attracted girls, who are always into that kind of asshole.
When I was about fourteen, I hung out with Ray at his dad’s bar on Morris Park Avenue in the Bronx. Not bad for a hangout. He would let us drink beer. A local Bronx R & B group, the Bell Notes, used to perform there, and between their sets Ray and I would sing their 1959 hit “I’ve Had It.” We’d also do the old Leadbelly song “Cotton Fields,” but in the collegiate folk song style of the Highwaymen, who had a hit with it in 1962. Later I would be in a band called the Dantes with Ray that evolved out of the Green Mountain Boys (while still playing with the Strangeurs). The Strangeurs were more Beatlish and pop; the Dantes darker and Stonesier. I played one gig with the Dantes.
Me and Ray Tabano, aka Rayzan the Apeman, around the time we played “I’ve Had It” at his father’s bar, 1960. (Ernie Tallarico)
How the Strangeurs got their first manager and how I became the lead singer of the group also came out of the gang in a way—through Ray and stolen merchandise. I’d been ripping off stuff from the little Jewish corner candy store where I worked as a soda jerk in Yonkers. I’d go down in the basement where I did inventory and grab candy bars and packets of cigarettes and give them to Ray to sell. I then progressed to the Shopwell supermarket on Central Avenue—bigger items, boxes and crates. Peter Agosta was the store manager, and to prevent me from moving stuff out of the back of the store and handing it to Ray, he had me collect the shopping carts, so he could have me where he could keep an eye on me. Why he didn’t just fire me I’ll never know. I told him I was in a band, and he said he’d like to see us play, so I said I’d invite him to the next gig we played, which turned out to be a Sweet Sixteen party for Art Carney’s daughter. It was a gig my dad had gotten us (he taught piano to Carney’s son). Peter Agosta liked the group, but he thought I should be the lead singer—oh yeah! We got Barry Shapiro to play drums.
This was the era of spacey rock. The Byrds’ truly cosmic single “Eight Miles High” came out in March 1966. It vibrated in your brain like you were tripping. It was blacklisted by radio stations because it was thought to be a drug song—duh!—despite Jim McGuinn’s unconvincing explanations that it wasn’t. I’ll tell you what “Eight Miles High” was . . . a stratospheric Rickenbacker symphony!
Soon Ray Tabano and I moved on to other quasi-criminal activities. To support our pot-smoking habit, we began selling nickel bags: buy an ounce for twenty dollars, sell four, keep two for ourselves. This was a cool deal and a cheap way of getting high until . . .
They put an undercover narc (who will remain nameless) in our high school ceramics class. The fucking ceramics class! He popped us eventually, but first he was selling us nickel bags of good shit he got off some other poor fuck he’d popped.
On June 11, 1966, Henry Smith booked us to play at an ice-skating rink in Westport, Connecticut. We rehearsed that afternoon, did a sound check. I hoped some people in town would come, because we had a little following in Connecticut. I’d met Henry Smith, “the Living Myth,” up in Sunapee in the summer of 1965—he became a close friend and a key person in my life. He was impressed with our sound when we played the Barn, where we did stuff by the Stones like “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me,” the Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and all the current hits. Slam-dunk rockers like “Louie, Louie” and “Money.” Henry and his brother, Chris, the band’s first photographer, started getting us gigs in Connecticut.
Outside the rink, on the other side of the fence, was a trampoline center. I had been on the junior Olympic team in high school for trampoline; I could do twenty-six backflips in a row. Not such great form, but I could get height from hell.
For three dollars, you could jump in this trampoline park for half an hour. There was nobody there, and I looked around and snuck over the fence. I jumped from one trampoline to another, and on to the next one. Backflip. I’d probably got through the first six trampolines and on to the next row when I heard, “Hey! Get the fuck off my trampolines!” “Listen, man,” I said, “we’re playing next door—you want tickets?” His name was Scotty. “Oh, you’re in the band that’s playing here tonight?” He loved that. “Why don’t you come up to my house?”
I went over to Scotty’s house. Nice pool and a fridge full of St. Pauli Girl. We’re swimming and throwing back a few beers when these two guys come ripping into the driveway on the two sickest go-carts from hell. It’s Paul Newman and Our Man Flint, James Coburn. Holy shit! “Scotty, what’s goin’ on?” I asked. “Oh, that’s my dad,” he said. “Which one?” “Paul Newman,” he said. “I’m Scotty Newman, pleased to meet you.” “You fucker! When were you gonna tell me?”
Paul Newman was very laid back and as cool as Cool Hand Luke. It was like being in a movie with him. I went into the sauna with Paul and Scotty. We’re all sitting in there getting sweaty and Paul Newman whips out this bottle of fifty-year-old brandy he’d got from the Queen of England, which I downed immediately. I toweled off, put my clothes back on, and wandered into the house. There on the mantelpiece was Joanne Woodward’s Oscar with its arms folded as all Oscars are. “Where’s yours?” I asked Mr. Newman. “Well, I never got one, but my friend made that one up for me.” It was a mock Oscar, only with its arms open wide instead of folded and with the guy going, “Vat?” Like, how could you have passed me up after all my great performances?
Twenty minutes later, I got a phone call from my mom, completely hysterical. “They found it!” she’s yelling. “Mom, calm down,” I said. “What’s goin’ on?” She starts explaining . . . and it ain’t good. “The cops are here and they found your marijuana! It was in one of your books.” Uh-oh, they found my stash so cunningly concealed in a copy of The Hardy Boys and the Disappearing Floor. “Get home right now!” I jumped in the car and drove back. I pulled into the driveway and saw a black unmarked car approaching from around the corner. My heart fell out of my ass. The cops handcuffed me and walked me to the car while I protested my innocence. “What are you doing? Why are you arresting me?”
Ah, it never rains but it pours. My dad had come home early that day because it was his birthday. “Gee, Dad, Happy Birthday! I just wanted to make sure we’re all here to . . .” You couldn’t put that in a movie. Action! Have the dad drive up while you’re being carted off to jail. It got in the paper. The shame! The Italian guilt! “Dad, is there a file in your birthday cake I can borrow?”
We were taken down to the police station. They’d popped a bunch of us, most of the kids in my class. We were giving them the finger through the two-way mirror. I’m sitting handcuffed to a bar when this fucking guy who had been smoking pot with us walks in flashing his badge: DEPUTY SHERIFF. The narc was very fucking pleased with himself. I was still playing the injured party. “How could you have betrayed us like that, you ceramic fuck?” I shouted at him. “You set us up!” “They’re gonna throw the book at you, kid,” he said as he walked away. Well, not the book, but maybe a couple of chapters. The narc who busted us was on a vendetta—his brother had died of an OD, and we were the unfortunate victims of his moral crusade.
At the hearing I asked if I could speak to the judge privately. I’d seen enough Perry Mason episodes to know about consultations in the judge’s chambers . . . and once you’re in there you can tell him whatever the fuck you like. I told the judge that this guy, this narc—not me—was the criminal. He’d infiltrated our ceramics class and turned us on to grass and then busted us for doing it. I said I’d never heard of grass before this, never once tried it. “He was handing out joints, I swear, telling us this was the latest turn-on. I’m Italian, your honor (conveniently, so was the judge), and I’ve always lived by my parents’ moral code, by the sacred beliefs of the Catholic Church. . . .” Ferris Bueller had nothing on me.
I got a reprimand and was put on probation. You pay, that’s how the system works. The good news is that the four misdemeanors I received put a YO, Youthful Offender, on my draft card—so no fucking Vietnam for me. The bad news is . . . we’ll get to that in an upcoming chapter. I wouldn’t have gone to ’Nam anyway. I was against it.
Busted for smoking pot—
imagine that. I’d be nineteen in eleven days.
My whole life’s been like that. Of course, I also got kicked out of Roosevelt High, but they let me be the guitar player in The Music Man at the end of the year. Yeah, there was trouble in River City—the trouble was me. Right before the performance, “somebody” set off an M-80 in the bathroom. It was at the end of the year, everyone was about to graduate, and had all these unfortunate things not befallen me, I would have graduated, too. I was devastated. As a memento I went off with the bass drum that I played in the marching band. That drum came back to life with a haunting vengeance at the end of “Livin’ on the Edge.”
I got sent to Jose Quintano’s School for Young Professionals, 156 West Fifty-sixth Street. It was a school for a bunch of professional brats and movie stars’ kids. There were actors, dancers, the girl who played Annie on Broadway, that kind of thing, but it was way more fun than Roosevelt High. Everyone there had this crazy spark to them of fake-it-till-you-make-it-ness. Steve Martin (same name as the comedian) was in my senior class. His full name was Steve Martin Caro. One day I asked him, “What’re you doin’ tonight?” “We’re recording,” he said. “You’re recording? What? Where?!” “Apostolic,” he replied. “Can I come?” I asked breathlessly. “Well, yeah, sure,” he said. “What’s the name of your group?” “The Left Banke,” he said. “You mean the Left Banke as in ‘Walk Away Renee’?” “Yeah,” he smiled. That’s when I just freaked. He was the lead singer of the Left Banke.
The Left Banke were huge. Along with the Rascals and the Lovin’ Spoonful, they were the other big New York City band that had hits on the radio at that time. “What’s the song you’re going to record?” I asked. “Dunno. They give us the lead sheets when we get to the studio.” “Wait, you’re in the Left Banke, and you don’t know what song you’re recording?” “No, our producer tells us,” he said. I couldn’t believe it. “How the fuck can you do it?” I asked. “You don’t even know what you’re recording when you get there?”
One of the guys in the group had some Acapulco Gold. I had a thing for blondes, as all boys did, and this Acapulco chick was soon to be my new girlfriend. I got me a dime bag, which in those days came in a paper bag. A dime bag and I was on my way. We get to Apostolic Studios and it’s huge. Eighteen-foot walls, and right up at the top were the windows of the control room. I went up there to watch. I remember listening to the string section and waiting for Steve to sing. The producer and the engineers looked down at the musicians in the studio and then hit a button and over the PA they’d say, “Hey, um, will you re-sing that?” There was sheet music on a stand. I was stunned. This wasn’t like the Stones or the Yardbirds who wrote their own material, played their own stuff. They didn’t even know how to tune their instruments. The only guy in the band who had a clue about music was the keyboard player, Michael Brown. His father, Harry Lookofsky, was a session musician and he controlled everything. He was the producer and arranger, and he hired the musicians. Michael McKean, who later played David St. Hubbins—the blond dude with the meddling girlfriend in This Is Spinal Tap—was one of the studio musicians. Hell, I still have a problem with that movie. That woman is too close to the truth I lived (look for elaborations on that point later). I sang backup on a couple of Left Banke songs, “Dark Is the Bark” and the flip side, “My Friend Today.”
That was my introduction to recording, and I knew if they could do it, I could do it. They were drunk all the time, fer chrissakes. I hung out with the bass player, Tommy Finn, at his apartment. So here’s me, a kid from Yonkers, hanging out with a bunch of guys that have hit singles and have great pot. I was beyond impressed—I was in seventh heaven.
Hendrix had been at Apostolic not long before. God himself. “Hendrix was here two months ago . . . and he used this mic,” the engineer said. “Which one?” I begged. “This Sennheiser pencil mic.” And then, casually, he adds, “Yeah, he put it in this girl’s pussy in the bathroom. He was fuckin’ her with it!” And I went, “Whaaattt? Hendrix used that mic?” When the engineer turned his back, I sniffed it . . . which gave new meaning to the term purple haze. I guess I looked a little incredulous because he then said, “Yeah, listen to this tape! You’re not gonna believe this!” Whereupon he claps a pair of headphones to my melon and . . .
You could hear the squishing noise as Jimi inserts the mic into her gynie. And you could hear him going, “Oh, that’s gooooood, man, that’s cool.” And you could hear the girl moaning, “Oh-ohhhh, ohhhhhhh, ohhh, ohhhh. . . .” Then it shifts into an orgasmic octave higher, “O-ohhhhhh, o-oh-oh, oh-ooooooooh!” And he’s done. That’s when the Electric Lady’s man says (no shit), “Hey, baby, what’s your name again?” “Kathy,” she purrs. I mean, talk about urban legends. With a gearshift! I was in a new league now.
The Strangeurs were the opening act for every kind of gig from the Fugs at the Café Wha? to the Lovin’ Spoonful at the Westchester County Center to an uptown New York discotheque like Cheetah. Then, on July 24, 1966, the Strangeurs opened for the Beach Boys at Iona College. Pet Sounds had come out in May and blown everybody’s minds. It was sublime and subliminal and saturated your brain. After you heard it you were in a different space. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” with “God Only Knows” on the flip side, had been out only a week before our performance and it was all over the radio. They had a competition to choose the band that would be the opening act. We played “Paint It Black” and sealed the deal. We got to hang out with the Beach Boys. Brian, even in those days, was on another sphere, vibrating his Buddha vibe.
I had my first out-of-body religious experience that day singing along with the Beach Boys. It was me and six thousand kids from Iona College, all singing “California Girls.”
The promoter Pete Bennett (a pretty heavy guy in the business) knew me and my bands from watching us play around New York City. And I must have been radiating that glow of Sufi—I know I felt like one when he was done talking to me. He asked if we wouldn’t mind opening up for the Beach Boys for the next four shows, there and around New York City. I said to him, “Let me think for a minute,” and slam-dunked him a big fat “YES!”
Through Peter Agosta we got our first recording contract. Agosta knew Bennett, who eventually became promotional manager for the Beatles at Apple and worked with Elvis, Frank Sinatra, the Stones, and Dylan. Pete Bennett arranged for us to audition for executives at Date Records, which was a division of CBS. Back in those days you brought your equipment up in the freight elevator and set up in the boardroom and played. We did a couple of numbers, and then they went and got one of their producers, Richard Gottehrer, who eventually ran Sire Records with Seymour Stein. Gottehrer offered us a deal: six thousand dollars. Okay, we’ll take it.
We did a song called “The Sun,” kind of Lennon-McCartney pop. It came out in ’66 and got a little play, but didn’t do that great here. It was a big hit in Europe: “Le Soleil,” they called it. It was about staying up all night and watching the sun come up in the morning.
It comes once a day through the shade of my window
It shines on my bed, my rug, and my floor
It shines once a day through the shade of my window
It comes once a day and not more.
It was definitely one of Don Solomon’s finest moments. The flip side was “When I Needed You,” a little harder rock, a little more experimental . . . our version of the Yardbirds. At this point we had to change our name again—CBS was concerned that our weird spelling, the Strangeurs, wasn’t different enough from the other Strangers and we might get sued. So we became The Chain Reaction, which is a continuous, unstoppable flow of energy.
During this time, I moved out of my house in Yonkers to West Twenty-first Street, the only blue building on the block. There I lived with Lynn Collins, a gorgeous blonde whom I stole away from my guitar player, Marvin Patacki. In ’69 I saw Zeppelin at the Tea Party. When the band came offstage, I went back to say hello to the guys, ’cause Henry Smith was working for Bonzo, and who do you think comes walking out of the dressing room on Jimmy Page’s arm? Lynn Collins. She was a genuine, high-class girl-about-rock-’n’-roll-town. I thought to myself, “If I was gonna lose her, might as well be to a legend like Page.”
Eventually, Henry became our first roadie (whom we could pay), and because he lived in Westport, Connecticut, a richer side of the tracks than I came from, he could get us better-class gigs. Henry would book the Chain Reaction into these gigs we could have never booked ourselves, like opening for Sly and the Family Stone, opening for the Byrds, and the coup de grâce, opening for the Yardbirds. Jimmy Page was on bass, Jeff Beck was on lead guitar, and we were in seventh heaven. We drove up in my mother’s station wagon with our equipment. The Yardbirds had a van. We pulled out our gear and put it on the sidewalk while they took theirs out. They had some fantastic equipment, so I made this little joke, like “Let’s not get it mixed up.” I saw Jimmy Page struggling with his amp and I said, “I’ll help you with that.” Hence: “I was a roadie for the Yardbirds.” At least it gave me something to talk about while Aerosmith was getting its wings in the early days.
The Chain Reaction opening up for The Byrds in 1967 at County Court, Yonkers, White Plains, New York. Me, Alan Stohmayer, and Peter Stahl. (Not pictured: Barry Shapiro and Don Solomon.) (Ernie Tallarico)
Oddly enough, three years later, Henry Smith, still working for us as a full-time roadie this time, gets a phone call from his old-time buddy Brad Condliff at the front door to the club in Greenwich Village called Salvation, asking Henry if he wanted to help out his old buddy Jimmy Page with his recently formed band, the New Yardbirds (always respect the guy at the door). Henry grabbed a ticket to London and his only possession at that time, a large toolbox covered with stickers with only enough room for a pair of underwear, which he stuffed in behind his ounce of pot, and headed off to Europe to help his friend with this new band that over that summer became Led Zeppelin.
Everybody likes to overblow their past, including me—to squeeze out the relevance of what may or may not have really taken place. And when you’re just starting out, any story will do. Beck was on guitar, Jimmy Page on bass—it was the Yardbirds’ second incarnation (after Eric Clapton left), an unbelievable, unstoppable, funky, overamped R&B machine. “Train Kept a-Rollin’ ” was bone-rattling . . . there was steam and flames coming out of it, and the whole place quaked like a Mississippi boxcar on methadrine.
Every morning before school I’d fill a plastic cup with Dewar’s whiskey or vodka and down it. I used to dry my hair before school to “Think About It,” the last single the Yardbirds did. I’d get the vacuum cleaner, take the hose, and stick it in the exhaust socket so it blew out . . . turn it on, go upstairs, and eat breakfast. By the time I got back downstairs, the vacuum cleaner was warm and I could blow-dry my wet hair to look like a Brian Jones bubblehead. Got to have good ha-air! I used to sew buttons to the sides of my cowboy boots, and at the bottom of the inside leg of my pants I would tie three or four loops of dental floss and attach those to the buttons on the boots so that my pants would never ride up. I loved doing that sort of thing! I was a rabid rock fashion dog. So I went to school, spending an hour getting ready every morning, and ended up getting shit for it. I wound up in the principal’s office every day. “Tallarico, you look like a girl,” the man would say. I’d tried to explain, “It’s part of my job . . . rock musician, sir.” That got me absolutely nowhere.
From winter ’66 into spring ’67, Chain Reaction continued to get good gigs—in part through Pete Bennett. We played record hops with the WMCA Good Guys. We opened for the Left Banke, the Soul Survivors, the Shangri-Las, Leslie West and the Vagrants, Jay and the Americans, and Frank Sinatra, Jr. Little Richard emceed one of our shows—the original possessed character always doing that crazy shit. He was so fucking out there. He could get so high and still function. I don’t know how the fuck he did it! He was doing amyl nitrate. That’s scary stuff. There aren’t a lot of drugs I’ve refused, but with that shit I was, like, “I’m outta here!”
Pete Bennett wanted to get rid of the band and just represent me, but I wouldn’t do it, even though Chain Reaction was already winding down. After three years I’d definitely had it with covering Beatles tunes. I was already thinking about a hard rock band. Our last gig was at the Brooklawn Country Club in Connecticut on June 18, 1967. We made one more single, which came out on Verve the following year: “You Should Have Been Here Yesterday” and “Ever Lovin’ Man.” And that was that—the Chain stopped a-rollin’.
The Chain: me, Don Solomon, and Frankie Ray, 1968. (Ernie Tallarico)
In the summer of 1967 I found myself up in Sunapee with no band and wondering what to do next. I’d been a local star with records on the jukebox, but now kids were asking me, “Where you guys playin’?” Later on that summer I formed another band called William Proud, with Twitty Farren on lead guitar. Twitty used to play acoustic guitar and sing at the Anchorage with a guy named Smitty. Twitty and Smitty were a major thing in New Hampshire. They covered Simon and Garfunkel to the T, nailing uncanny versions of “Sounds of Silence.” We played out in Southampton for the summer, and while we were there wrote “Somebody,” which is on the first Aerosmith album. I collaborated with Don Solomon on most of the early Chain Reaction songs, but with the song “Somebody” (which I cowrote with Steve Emsback), I realized I could truly compose a good song. The inner voice was wailing, “Let’s get cracking here!”
“When I Needed You,” the flip side of the first Chain Reaction single, had a Yardbirdish tinge to it, but “Somebody” was straight Yardbirds. The Yardbirds were so strange and unpredictable. They could make a pop song like “For Your Love” (with its minor key) sound dirgelike and ominous. We’re talkin’ fucked-up time-traveling R&B monks. Gregorian chants! Outlandish Australian wobble-board percussion! Harpsichords and bongos! They virtually invented the rock solo as an end unto itself. The Yardbirds used minor thirds and fourths like alchemists. They were really the first progressive rock band, with their use of Eastern melodies on “Over Under Sideways Down,” the howling sirens on “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.” I loved their weirdness and their mystery.
When Henry Smith was working for Zeppelin, Jimmy Page would blow his speakers and Henry would send them to me. I had two huge deer antlers I got from New Hampshire from eight-point bucks, and I put one on the left headboard post of my bed and the other on the right. I’d put my speakers there and painted them with thick phosphorescent paint—five or six coats—so that when you held a lamp to them, they would glow forever . . . well for at least ten or fifteen minutes, but if you smoked pot or took hallucinogens, as we did in high school, that was enough.
I’d draw mustaches on the Beatles and Stones posters and put phosphorescent paint all along the drawers and the knobs of the dressers, so when I went to bed at night, the room was a psychedelic cave! I put dots, like, all along the edge of the chest of drawers and the molding. Dot, dot, dot (maybe that’s where my . . . thing started), then a nice big fat one, and I did it all over the room with phosphorescent paint, six coats, so it was that thick—to hold the light.
In the middle of the room at the end of my bed, I had a twelve-foot span (from the door to the window) of fifteen thick rubber bands knotted together—which could really stretch out—and in the middle I attached a five-ounce sinker dipped ten times in phosphorescent paint, so it glowed like a fucking red-hot poker. When you let go of the sinker, the linked rubber bands would bounce like crazy . . . swinging in slo-mo, back and forth across the room . . . and you’d be Star Trek-trippin’. By the time I was done, when I was, like, seventeen or eighteen and getting ready to move out, my room was a masterpiece. You were in this realm of pulsing phosphorescent light between the speakers. I would smoke a joint, bring the linked rubber bands all the way over to one side of the room, and let it go back and forth, right? ’Cause it was right in the middle.
Then I’d crank up the Association, Pretty Things, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Boy Williamson, and all this weird early German electronica stuff. I’d invite my friends over and they’d get wrapped up in my phosphorescent audio wonderland.
I went up to the Woodstock Festival with Don Solomon and Ray Tabano a day or so early. We told them we were Ten Years After—you never know when that Brit accent is going to come in handy—and they let us in. We made our way through the woods to the Hog Farm. The Hog Farm was the name of Wavy Gravy’s commune in Tujunga, California—the longest-running hippie commune of the sixties. It eventually became what they called “a mobile hallucinatory extended family”—now that’s the kind of extended family I wanted to join. The Hog Farm got involved in the Woodstock Festival to make trails, dig fire pits, and provide a food kitchen. The trail through the woods was called Groovy Way, a quarter-mile path hung with Christmas lights.
When I went to Woodstock, I was tripping my brains out. Everyone always says, “Woodstock, Woodstock—were you there?” but the funny thing is . . . half the people who were there didn’t know where they were. I walked over to the stage area from the Hog Farm through a strip of woods with multicolored holiday bulbs running through them. I was so high they were like the mother ship zinging messages to me. And we wouldn’t just do one tab . . . I’d already snorted another. Can you snort acid? My friend Ray knew Owsley. He would call him on the phone with advice on how to improve the product: “Dude, more colors! More colors!” As high as I was, I could’ve met the Buddha, Murf the Surf, and the Tooth Fairy, and I wouldn’t have turned a hair.
Now, who I really would have liked to bump into walking down Groovy Way making her merry way down the path was Janis fuckin’ Joplin! But it was enough just knowing she was there at Woodstock. When I saw Janis sing she blew my mind. Everybody used to think Mick was my real hero, but I’ll confess now (’cause that’s what a memoir is for, right?), it was Janis. The scarves on the mic, the howl . . . inspired and perspired by pure 180-proof Joplin. She’s bone deep and still makes me weep. Cole Porter, Nat King Cole . . . the divine vibratos of my youth . . . but none finer nor more sacred than Saint Janis.
And then—this is so amazing!—who do I run into on Groovy Way but Joey Kramer! Joey had been in a band called the King Bees, which was a younger version of the Dantes. Something I’ll never forget, ever, colliding at Woodstock . . . both tripping our asses off. I loved the hallucinations; I loved that vibrating, molecular trance. The molecules that are dancing through your body, your hands giving off sparks. Altered states? Please! Psychedelics take you places you can’t go on the natch.
One of my literary gurus was Aldous Huxley, who wrote The Doors of Perception based on his experimentations with mescaline. He was hip to the whole cosmological, folktale realm that is under the radar of the, um, mundane world. Ah, how did spots get on trout? The Raven did it! Coyote laughed and it rained for twelve years. Those stories. As a youth, it was, “Wow, what a brilliant mind!” Some of those fuckin’ guys—Coleridge, de Quincey—were on laudanum (Victorian smack), too! But really, any of these seekers and freakers, because their thoughts are out of the box, out of their heads . . . you know there had to be something wrong with them. There’s always been something wrong with me, too. I’ve always been the designated patient, clinically speaking, and therefore the bad boy, even in fucking Aerosmith! Especially in fucking Aerosmith! But we’ll get into deeper diagnosis of my condition later.
If there’s a fifth, sixth dimension. . . . If? Oh, come on! Anyway, it must be something like what you see on acid. Things would vibrate differently. . . . No kidding! What acid did for me was made me think about other planes and possibilities, contemplate things that I see and feel that aren’t there. I’ve gone to the wall with that stuff, straight and stoned. When I got my new house, I went in, turned all the lights off, sat in a chair in the black, infinite not-wisdom, and said, “Bring it on, motherfucker! Come on! Come on! Where are you? I’m waiting. ’Cause if you’re here . . . be here. And if you do show up later, I’m gonna kick your ectoplasmic ass!” You gotta talk tough to demons . . . you can’t shilly-shally or they’ll pounce.
After a couple of days tripping my brains out I was crashing into the deep dark pit of apocalyptic blackness. I didn’t know anything about dope back then. How great would it have been to snort some heroin while you’re coming down from LSD? You’re going into a tailspin, the alien pods have drained your synapses, you’re wildly thinking about the deaths of stars. Everything is profound and meaningless at the same time. The micros of the lysergic acid shrinking the whole universe to the size of a pea—that’s when you need a Valium! “TAKE ONE OR TWO OR THREE . . . AFTER COMING DOWN FROM AN ACID TRIP.” That’s what it should say on the label.
The morning Hendrix played, Woodstock had become a war zone. We were walking about aimlessly, and then I heard baa-baw-baw-ba-ba-ba, the first notes of the Jimified national anthem. It was about three in the morning when he went on. Hendrix was so smart . . . he’d been up all night. I saw him walking around like a visitor from Xanadu. He played “The Star Spangled Banner” knowing he’d wake everyone up. That was brilliant! It was like an X-ray report from Alpha Centauri to the third stone from the sun.
After three days of peace, love, music, and massive amounts of drugs, Woodstock looked like Vietnam on acid. People were eating watermelon rinds; the helicopters were thrumming and hovering everywhere. After everybody else had left, the fields all around looked like there’d been a war but with no bodies—sleeping bags instead of corpses.
Somebody stole the gas cap to Don Solomon’s car, and since it rained for two days, the gas tank got full of water and we couldn’t leave. I still have a Coca-Cola cooler that I’d stolen, and I went around picking up everybody’s pipes. There’s a banner that hung behind us at Woodstock with a stick figure holding a cornucopia and with a dick, or a tail, between his legs. I stole that, too. I had Aerosmith’s seamstress, Francine Larness, and her sister duplicate it and I still have them.
At Woodstock I sat and watched Hendrix and Joe Cocker and the Who especially. I had those deranged thoughts watching them up onstage: “Someday I could be that spectacular.” The experience of the first Woodstock totally outweighed the second one that we played at in 1994. We had all those people backstage, and the press is coming to you. Every time I went out of my trailer there were millions of flash cubes in my face. It wasn’t my idea of Woodstock. I would rather have been out there rolling around in the mud. Had I been there as a spectator, I’d have been fucked-up and had that experience again.
At the original Woodstock I was in a tent, and suddenly the tent was making this warping noise from the helicopter blades—it was shivering—it was alive! I went outside, my brain on LSD. I was tripping my ass off. I was atomized, sparks were flying off me like a Roman candle, and fuck me if it wasn’t raining frankfurters! Incoming! The helicopter was talking to me: “GET OUT OF THE WAY!” it said, like Jehovah out of a cloud, except it was army helicopters dropping six hundred pounds of hot dogs (and pots and pans to cook them) in huge nets. They would hover ten feet off the ground and let their payload drop. I went over and I picked up a pot . . . and started drumming. Then another guy came over and he did the same. Pretty soon, a dozen people banging on pots, then two dozen . . . three. Ken Kesey was there banging on a pot! The original bona fide hippie drum circle. And the beat would change as people dropped out and came in and dropped out and came in again. This went on for days . . . or at least hours that seemed like days.
The Vietnam War was terrible, but we made peace by smoking pot. That’s something that we don’t have today. It’s all fucking Ecstasy and clubs and, er, fucking. Back then you passed a joint, and it was “make love, not war.” Everybody was your friend. You’d make eye contact with someone and end up smoking a joint with them. You started talking sweet and beautiful shit. In the sixties everyone had a common ground . . . and pot and the drugs were a big fuckin’ part of it. There’s your triangulation: Pot, Rock, Vietnam (and civil rights).
We used to give the peace sign, and if someone nodded, you’d say, “Wanna get high, man? You got a joint?” And it was lovely. Today you don’t know what somebody’s thinking. Today, I see people in the street and don’t know if they’re going to hug me or mug me. You know, I don’t really care if you get on the Internet, text, or Twitter . . . we were accessing the fucking cosmos! Okay, now I do sound like a character out of a Crumb comic—or Oscar the Grouch. But I just figured out why guys like me turn into curmudgeons . . . the world’s going to hell in a handbasket, everybody has rolled over and given up, and there’s no more afternoon baseball.
I’d drop acid and go into the city. You’d look down at the sidewalk and it was melting. I was walking on a great gray, sparkling snake. It shivered when you stepped on it. The sidewalk was alive! And then there was the Electric Circus in the East Village with the Rubber Room. I’d take acid and go in there. I lived there! The Rubber Room was this padded space made for people who were tripping, because they were going “YEE-HAA!” and they didn’t want anybody to hurt themselves.
One Sheridan Square in the West Village—the Stones and the Animals would go there. I’d sit there listening to that song “Judy in Disguise (with Glasses)” by John Fred and His Playboy Band.
It was the beginning of the disco era, and in that club they would play the music so fucking loud, and we were in there going, “Fuck, this is fucking great!” Clubs with bone-jangling loud music! That was the beginning of all of it. And no one sold T-shirts to the revolution. Think about that! No one was selling T-shirts in 1971! What were we thinking?
By the late sixties I was seriously into Haight-Ashbury. I’d way got over my Mod Mick phase—so had Mick. I was into—I don’t want to say my feminine side, but the hipper women’s stuff, the way Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg dressed those guys! They really had that motley, tatterdemalion medieval troubadour thing down. Eventually the hip King’s Road shops began exporting that stuff, like the New York branch of Granny Takes a Trip. As soon as I began to refine my own personal style, I was immediately attracted to the Anita Pallenberg/Keith Richards gypsy look. But after I saw Janis—she became my fashion idol.
Eventually Anita and I became good friends. When I go over to England I always try to see her. Last time I met her where she works, at the designer Vivienne Westwood’s boutique. Vivienne Westwood, now Dame Vivienne, designed clothes for the Sex Pistols and then brought her eccentric clothing into the mainstream—if you can call her wildlife outfits mainstream. I was looking around at the bizarre clothes in the shop when a woman came up behind me, covered my eyes, then put her hands around my neck, almost snapped my fucking neck off, and said, “Who is this?” “Uh, I give up.” “Your best English fucking cunt!” It was Anita in her broken-English Cockney accent.
A few years ago, when Keith and Anita still lived in Bing Crosby’s old house out on Long Island, I went to spend a couple of days with them. I’d bought this rare book in a weird little bookstore in New York. The guy kept it in the back room; it was about black magic and shit. I took it with me. A little light satanic reading for a weekend in the country. It was about the derivation of the Seven Sacred Sins and all that dark stuff. When Anita found it under my bed, she had a fucking fit. She ripped the book up. When I asked her why she did it, she screamed at me in front of Keith, “How dare you bring this into my house? Are you here to cast spells on us?” Meanwhile we were all gacked to the nines on coke.
The sixties and us, we got away with it. And now, “fuck-all” lives on! You’d read R. Crumb and then these characters would be there right before your eyes. You’d go, hey, he’s from R. Crumb. Oh, that was so great! A little lame and filthy, but what the hell, R. Crumb had Mr. Natural and, you know, Flakey Funt and Angelfood McSpade. Oh, it was just so good.
At the end of the sixties I lived at Sleepy Hollow Restorations, right before the Tappan Zee Bridge. I’d be so high coming from New York or Yonkers in my car, in my Volkswagen, from eating hash brownies and recording records, I would wind up missing the exit and drive over the bridge. Whoops! Forgot cash! I’d go over the bridge with no money! Problem is, there’s a toll on the way back into New York. I’d drive up and go, “I just don’t got—!” But I was scared to death. That happened quite a few times. I remember there was a tree there that had such a beautiful face against the sky at sunset.
At eighteen most kids think about becoming a man. Never did! The guy you went to high school with figured it out. Got a job, went to work every day. He became a man. But here I was at twenty-two. I was at a loss. What was I going to do? Tune pianos like my uncle Ernie or teach music like my dad did at Cardinal Spellman High School? I had that moment of angst.
“Perplexity,” sayeth my man Kahlil Gibran, “is the beginning of knowledge.”
Yeah, but he wasn’t living in Sunapee and doing crystal meth. I loved speed, man! Remember the speed that burned when you snorted it and you had to keep it in the freezer? It was blue and it had that terrible smell? “Oh! That tastes terrible!” It was an acquired taste, one that I acquired without too much difficulty. You could eat the paper it was wrapped in and you were fuckin’ forget-about-it.
I loved Quaaludes, too. Especially when you got too high on speed or blow. Whenever I’d go to rehab, they’d say, “Well, you’re always chasing the drug.” And I go, “Yu-uh!” It’s like having a fast car and you go really fast, but then occasionally you’ve got to stop and go get gas, but while you’re getting gas all you want to do is get back in that fast car. It’s like that time again! You have no blow, you run out, you go to your dealer and get some more, and then you’re in the car breaking the sound barrier and your brains are pouring out of your ears and then someone goes, “Here, check this out!” It’s like ethyl alcohol and you hit this button and your mind chills down.
The wildest places we played were fraternities. With Fox Chase I played Bones Gate—it was a famous raunchy fraternity at Dartmouth they based Animal House on. At those parties I used to sit under the keg, they’d turn the keg on, and I’d beat everybody out.
Fox Chase was the last band I was in before Aerosmith. Right before that, in 1969, William Proud went out to Long Island and I was with them there until that fell apart and I went back up to Sunapee.
I had no money. I was desperate, defeated, doomed. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. William Proud had played every nightclub, grotto, union hall, gym, bar mitzvah, and VFW hall for a fifty-mile radius. We were burned out on the trail. Nowhere left to play. It all came to a head one night at the last incarnation of Salvation in the Village, way out in Southampton on Long Island.
At the Hampton gig, I practically strangled our lead guitar player, Twitty Farren, to death during a rehearsal. Top that, Alice Cooper! Midrehearsal, I look up and see Twitty—who was a fuckin’ great guitar player, by the way—yawning. I asked myself, “Is it the heat or is it that his heart isn’t in it anymore?” I was high as a kite, and I jumped over the drum set to try and choke his raggedy ass, but I fell over my high hat and cracked my leg instead.
I ran out of the club, stuck out my thumb, and hitchhiked all the way back to New Hampshire . . . drumless, bandless, hopeless. But still telling my mom, “Mom, I’m going to be such a big star there’s gonna be girls hanging off the rafters, kids coming through the windows, battering down the doors. We gotta batten the place down, put up six-foot fences, put shutters on the windows. We’ll need an intercom and electric gates to keep out the rabid fans. Or else we’ll have to move.” “Of course, Steven.” My mom always believed in me, she was a stone romantic.
William Proud—Peter Bover, Twitty Farren, Mouse McElroy, and Eddie Kisler—wasn’t really working out. It was still fun, we still got gigs, but it was small potatoes and wasn’t leading to anything. No road to destiny! I grew up in a family where we were all very close, and I was probably homesick or whatever they call that today.
Summer ended, the town was cold. No one to cop from, no drugs, nothing up here—everyone had left. Oil lamps, candles, winter, the wind whistling through the pines. No band, no plans, no future, and they were starting to roll the sidewalks up. It was my first season of wither. And then, on the seventh hour of the seventh day I heard Joe Perry play. . . .
