Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?\ A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir \ \ By Steven Tyler \ Ecco\ Copyright © 2011 Steven Tyler\ All right reserved.\ ISBN: 9780061767890 \ \ \ Chapter One\ I as born at the Polyclinic Hospital in the Bronx, March\ 26, 1948. As soon as I could travel my parents headed\ straight out of town to Sunapee, New Hampshire, to the\ little housekeeping cottages they rented out every summer,\ kind of an old-fashioned bed-and-breakfast deal,\ only it was 1950. I was put in a crib at the side of the house. A\ fox came by and thought I was a cub, grabbed me by the scruff\ of my diaper, and dragged me into the woods. I grew up with the\ animals and the children of the woods. I heard so much in the\ silence of the pine tree forests that I knew later in life I would\ have to fill that void. The only thing my parents knew was that\ I was out there somewhere. They heard me cry in the forest one\ night, but when they came up to where I was, all they saw was\ a big hole in the ground, which they thought was the fox's den.\ They dug and dug and dug, but all they found was the rabbit hole\ I'd fallen into—like Alice.\ And like Alice I entered another dimension: the sixth\ dimension (the fifth dimension was already taken). Since then, I\ can go to that place anytime I want, because I know the secret of\ the children of the woods; there's so much in silence when you\ know what you're hearing—what dances between the psycho-\ acoustics of any two notes and what reads between the lines\ is akin to the juxtaposition of what you see when you look\ in the mirror. My whole life has been dancing between these\ worlds: the GOAN ZONE, the Way-Out-o-Sphere and . . .\ the UNFORTUNATE STATE OF REALITY. In essence, I\ call myself a peripheral visionary. I hear what people don't say\ and I see what's invisible. At night, because our visual perception\ is made up of rods and cones, if you're going down a dark\ path, the only way to really see the path is to look off and see\ it in your peripheral vision. But more on this as we progress,\ regress, and digress.\ When I finally got pulled out of the rabbit hole, my parents\ brought me back to the third dimension. Like all parents they\ were concerned, but I was afraid to tell them that I have never\ felt more comfortable than being lost in that forest.\ In Manhattan we lived at 124th Street and Broadway, not far\ from the Apollo Theater. Harlem, man. If the first three years of\ your life are the most informative, then surely I needed to hear\ that music, and I was inspired by the noise coming out of that\ theater. It had more soul than Saint Peter.\ A few years ago I was back at the Apollo, and saw the park\ where my mom had pushed me in my carriage. My first visual\ memory is from THAT PARK: trees and clouds moving above\ my head as if I were floating above the earth. There I am,\ a two-year-old astral-projecting infant. At age four, I remember\ going to get a gallon of milk with two quarters, walking with\ my mom hand in hand through passages and corridors of the\ basement of our building and through tunnels into the adjoining\ building where the milk machine was. I thought I was . . .\ God knows where. I might as well have been on Mars. Ah,\ it was the mysterious world of childhood, where someone is\ always leading you by the hand through a dark passageway and\ into a brand-new world just waiting for the child's overactive\ imagination to kick in.\ My mother lit the fire that would keep me warm for the\ rest of my life. She read me parables, Aesop's Fables, and Rudyard\ Kipling's Just So Stories. Children's tales and nursery rhymes from\ the eighteen hundreds, nineteen hundreds: "Hickory Dickory\ Dock," Andrew Lang's The Nursery Rhyme Book, Hans\ Christian Andersen, Helen Bannerman's Little Black Sambo. So great!\ Never mind the "Goose That Laid the Golden Egg!" My mom\ would read me all these stories every night at bedtime. But one\ night when I was around six, she stopped.\ "You gotta learn how to read 'em yourself," she said. Up until\ then I'd been reading along with her as she pointed to the words.\ We did this for months until she knew I kinda had the idea, then\ suddenly there's no Mom looking over my shoulder. She just left\ the book by my bed and I became distraught. "Mom, I wanna\ hear the stories. Why won't you read to me anymore?!" I said.\ And then one night I thought to myself, "Uh-oh, now I gotta get\ smart." Naah. . . . I'll just become a musician and write my own\ stories and myths . . . Aeromyths.\ Mom used to tell me of a man she'd seen on the Steve Allen\ Show, in 1956 when I was eight. His name was Gypsy Boots.\ He was the original hippie, a guy who lived in a tree with hair\ down to his waist and who promoted health food and yoga.\ Gypsy was the proto-hippie. In the early thirties he had dropped\ out of high school, wandered to California with a bunch of\ other so-called vagabonds, lived off the land, slept in caves and\ trees, and bathed in waterfalls. I was totally seduced by that\ lifestyle. Boots's message was this: As primitive as his world\ seemed, he wanted people to think that he would live forever.\ Hey, he almost did, dying just eleven days before his ninetieth\ birthday in 1994.\ Next in my life came a bohemian composer named Eden\ Ahbez, who wrote a song called "Nature Boy" (which my mom\ heard on a Nat King Cole record). He camped out below the\ first L in the Hollywood sign, studied Oriental mysticism, and,\ like Gypsy Boots, he lived on vegetables, fruits, and nuts. My\ mom sang that song to me before I went to sleep. I'll never forget\ how it made me think that I was her nature boy.\ The song tells the story of how one day an enchanted\ wandering Nature Boy—wise and shy, with a sad, glittering eye—\ crosses the path of the singer. They sit by the fire and talk of\ philosophers and knaves and cabbages and kings. As the boy gets\ up to leave he imparts the secret of life: To love and be loved is\ all we know and all we need to know. With that Nature Boy\ vanishes into the night as mysteriously as he had come.\ Unfortunately the people who own the rights to "Nature\ Boy" won't let me publish the actual words to the song in this\ book (still, you can just Google them), but I promise it will be on\ my solo album come hell or high water.\ Then there was Moondog. What a fantastic character, a\ blind musician who dressed up like a Viking with a helmet\ and horns and a spear to match. He hung out on the corner\ of Fifty-sixth Street and Sixth Avenue. I saw and smelled him\ every morning on my way to school. Oddly enough, he lived\ up in the Bronx, apparently in the woods, back behind the\ apartment buildings I grew up in. Was that a coincidence or\ was that God secretly telling me, "Steven, thou shalt become\ the Moondog of your generation"? Or at least the leader of a\ rock 'n' roll band.\ What I heard about Moondog was that he wrote "Nature\ Boy," but what do I know? Maybe Eden Ahbez is Moondog\ spelled backward. . . .\ My mother's birth name was Susan Ray Blancha. At sixteen\ she joined the WACS (Women's Army Corps). She met my dad\ while they were both at Fort Dix in New Jersey during World\ War II. One night he had a date with a woman who was rooming\ with my mom. The roommate stood him up, and instead\ he was greeted by my mother, who happened to be playing the\ piano at the time. My dad walked over to her and said, "You're\ playin' it wrong." It was love at first fight! They got married and\ had lil ol' Lynda, my sister, and lil ol' me came two years later.\ Ha-ha! That's my mom, that's my dad, and that's why I'm so\ fuckin' detail-oriented—and such a maniac. I got the traits that\ I don't want and the ones I do. Because you're an offspring, you\ pick up those traits unconsciously, in case you haven't noticed.\ You become your mom!\ So that's how I happened, 1948, a rare mixture of classical\ Juilliard boy meets country pinup girl, who, by the way, looked\ like a cross between Jean Harlow and Marlene Dietrich with a\ tinge of Elly May Clampett. And if God's in the details—and\ we know She is—then I'm the perfect combination. I'm the N\ in my parents' DNA. So now, if anyone's mad at me and calls me\ a dick, I know they really mean Fort Dix. My daughter Chelsea\ always thought God was a woman from the day she was born.\ It was so nurturing hearing that from a child, that God would\ have to be a woman, that I just never questioned it. (No wonder\ I keep watching Oprah.)\ Mom was a free spirit, a hippie before her time. She loved\ folktales and fairy tales but hated Star Trek. She used to say,\ "Why are you watching that? All the stories are from the\ Bible.  .  . just six ways from Sunday. Get the Bible!" And I\ thought, "Oh, boy, that's just what I wanna do after I've rolled\ a doobie and I'm smokin' it with Spock." And by the way, that's\ why teenagers today go, "Whatever!" But you know—and I can\ only admit this in the cocktail hours of my life—SHE WAS\ RIGHT!!!!! Isaac Asimov's I Robot, Aldous Huxley's Brave New\ World, that's where they got their inspiration. In the same way\ that Elvis got his sound from Sister Rosetta Tharpe (I dare you\ to YouTube her right now), Ernest Tubb, Bob Wills, and Roy\ Orbison. And they, in turn, begat the Beatles and they begat the\ Stones and they begat Elton John, Marvin Gaye, Carole King,\ and . . . Aerosmith. So study your rock history, son. That be the\ Bible of the Blues.\ I was three when we moved to the Bronx, to an apartment building\ at 5610 Netherland Avenue, around the corner from where\ the comic book characters Archie and Veronica supposedly lived\ (I guess that makes me Jughead). We lived there till I was nine,\ on the top floor, and the view was spectacular. I would sneak\ out the window onto the fire escape on hot summer nights and\ pretend I was Spider-Man. The living room was a magical space.\ It was literally eight feet by twelve! There was a TV in the corner\ that was dwarfed by Dad's Steinway grand piano. There's my dad\ sitting at the piano, practicing three hours every day, and me\ building my imaginary world under his piano.\ It was a musical labyrinth where even a three-year-old\ child could be whisked away into the land of psychoacoustics,\ where beings such as myself could get lost dancing between the\ notes. I lived under that piano, and to this day I still love\ getting lost under the cosmic hood of all things. Getting into it.\ Beyond examining the nanos, I want to know about what lives\ in the fifth within a triad . . . as opposed to drinking a fifth!\ I've certainly got the psycho part . . . now if I could only get\ the acoustic part down (although I did write a little ditty called\ "Season of Wither").\ And that's where I grew up, under the piano, listening\ and living in between the notes of Chopin, Bach, Beethoven,\ Debussy. That's where I got that "Dream On" chordage. Dad\ went to Juilliard and ended up playing at Carnegie Hall; when\ I asked him, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" he said, like\ an Italian Groucho, "Practice, my son, practice." The piano was\ his mistress. Every key on that piano had its own personal and\ emotional resonance for him. He didn't play by rote. God, every\ note was like a first kiss, and he read music like it was written\ for him.\ I remember crawling up underneath the piano and running\ my fingers on top of the soundboards and feeling around. It was\ a little dusty, and as I was looking up, dust spilled down and hit\ me in the eyes—dust from a hundred years ago. . . ancient piano\ dust. It fell in my eyes and I thought, "Wow! Beethoven dust—\ the very stuff he breathed."\ It was a full-blown Steinway grand piano, not a little upright\ in the corner—a big shiny black whale with black and white\ teeth that swims at the bottom of my mind and from a great\ depth hums strange tunes that come from I know not where.\ 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea had nothing on me.\ Later on, I went back to visit 5610 Netherland Avenue. I\ knocked on the door of apartment 6G, my old apartment. It had\ been years, and the man who answered was drunk and in his\ underwear and undershirt.\ "Dad?" I asked. He cocked his head like Nipper, the RCA\ dog.\ "Hi, I'm—" I started to say.\ "Oh, I know who you are," said he. "From the TV. . . . What\ are you doin' here?"\ "I used to live here," I said.\ "Well raise my rent!" said he.\ \ \ (Continues...)\ \ \ \ \ Excerpted from Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? by Steven Tyler Copyright © 2011 by Steven Tyler. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.\ Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. \ \

Semiprologue 1\ 1 Peripheral Visionary 5\ 2 Zits And Tits 37\ 3 The Pipe That Was Never Played 74\ 4 My Red Parachute (And Other Dreams) 85\ 5 Confessions Of A Rhyme-A-Holic 123\ 6 Little Bo Peep, The Glitter Queen, and The Girl in The Yellow Corvette 133\ 7 Noise In The Attic (Snow Days) 148\ 8 Ladies And Genitals ... I'm Not A Bad Guy (I'm Just Egotestical) 170\ 9 The Hood, The Bad, The Ugly ... Hammered with Hemingway 198\ 10 Food Poisoning At A Family Picnic 212\ 11 Getting Lost on Your Way to the Middle 247\ 12 Where You End and I Begin ... Again (The Goddess) 256\ 13 Trouble In Paradise (Losing Your Grip On The Life Fantastic) 265\ 13.5 The Bitch Goddess of Billboard 282\ 14 Holy Smoke, Quest for the Grand Pashmina, and The Big Chill of Twenty Summers 302\ 15 To Zanzibar And Back 329\ 16 Falling In Love Is Hard On The Knees 356\ 17 Take A Walk Inside My Mind ... 372\ Acknowledgments 377\ Index 387

\ From Barnes & NobleSteven Tyler once protested that he's just a country boy, but nobody this side of sanity would mistake this Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Famer and legendary Aerosmith frontman for a farmer. Born in Yonkers as Stephen Victor Tallarico, this son of a classical musician and pianist really began to blossom after he and his fledgling band moved to Boston in 1970. For decades thereafter, Tyler full-out performances onstage and off have captured fans' imaginations. Clearly, he meant it when he famously asserted, "If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing." In this richly vivid "rock 'n' roll memoir," the popular American Idol judge unfurls "all the unexpurgated, brain-jangling tales of debauchery, sex & drugs, transcendence & chemical dependence you will ever want to hear."\ \ \ \ \ \ Entertainment Weekly“The Aerosmith frontman and American Idol judge delivers a no-holds-barred, ripsnorting (and rail-snorting) memoir that’s a crazy excursion into his entertaining mind.”\ \ \ Washington Post“[Tyler’s] forays into music theory are absorbing snapshots of what goes into making great songs. When Tyler is able to articulate what went into Aerosmith’s music, the book becomes fascinating.”\ \ \ \ \ Rolling Stone“Steven Tyler has a way with words…Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? Is 376 pages of pure, unfiltered Tyler…Noise is compelling stuff…Tyler’s at times gripping, often hilarious voice keeps things moving….”\ \ \ \ \ Associated Press Staff“Roll ‘em: Tyler’s memoir is a wild ride. Explicit and filled with expletives, it reads like an even wilder and louder version of Richards’ best-selling “Life.” Tyler, 63, settles back and tells story after story about life in the “most decadent, lecherous, sexiest, nastiest band in the land.””\ \ \ \ \ USA Today“Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll…gets a booster shot of head-spinning authenticity in Steven Tyler’s brash memoir Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?...a frank, full, and colorful accounting of the band’s tumultuous history.”\ \ \ \ \ Detroit News“Tyler’s memory for detail makes for good reading.”\ \ \ \ \ New York Daily News“One of the book’s charms is Tyler’s lack of guilt or regret for anything in his life…Music fans will enjoy Tyler’s remembrances of the New York scene, dating from clubs like The Scene and Max’s Kansas City.”\ \ \ \ \ Houston Chronicle“Strewn thought the book …are dozens of patented “Tylerisms” that can only come from his well-endowed motor-mouth.”\ \ \ \ \ New York Times Book Review“Tyler’s turbulently high-spirited cheer holds it all together.”\ \ \ \ \ Buffalo News“At turns completely hilarious, surprisingly (perhaps, to some) coherent, poignant and sordid -- a heart-rending read. Once you’ve started it, putting it down is not an option. It would be easier to ignore Tyler from the front row of an Aerosmith concert.”\ \ \ \ \ The Hollywood Reporter“[Tyler] delivers the goods…[his] surprisingly insightful and entertaining voice brings the familiar contours of this story alive.... What on the surface seems clichéd...manages somehow to rise above that and be a fun ride [and] separates a Rock Star from a merely ordinary pop star.”\ \ \ \ \ The Oregonian (Portland)“Explicit and filled with expletives, the memoir—titled Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?—reads like an even wilder and louder version of Richards’ best-selling Life.”\ \ \ \ \ Washington Post“[Tyler’s] forays into music theory are absorbing snapshots of what goes into making great songs. When Tyler is able to articulate what went into Aerosmith’s music, the book becomes fascinating.”\ \ \ \ \ USA Today“Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll…gets a booster shot of head-spinning authenticity in Steven Tyler’s brash memoir Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?...a frank, full, and colorful accounting of the band’s tumultuous history.”\ \ \ \ \ Detroit News“Tyler’s memory for detail makes for good reading.”\ \ \ \ \ The Hollywood Reporter“[Tyler] delivers the goods…[his] surprisingly insightful and entertaining voice brings the familiar contours of this story alive.... What on the surface seems clichéd...manages somehow to rise above that and be a fun ride [and] separates a Rock Star from a merely ordinary pop star.”\ \ \ \ \ New York Times Book Review“Tyler’s turbulently high-spirited cheer holds it all together.”\ \ \ \ \ Rolling Stone“Steven Tyler has a way with words…Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? Is 376 pages of pure, unfiltered Tyler…Noise is compelling stuff…Tyler’s at times gripping, often hilarious voice keeps things moving….”\ \ \ \ \ Associated Press Staff“Roll ‘em: Tyler’s memoir is a wild ride. Explicit and filled with expletives, it reads like an even wilder and louder version of Richards’ best-selling “Life.” Tyler, 63, settles back and tells story after story about life in the “most decadent, lecherous, sexiest, nastiest band in the land.””\ \ \ \ \ Entertainment Weekly“The Aerosmith frontman and American Idol judge delivers a no-holds-barred, ripsnorting (and rail-snorting) memoir that’s a crazy excursion into his entertaining mind.”\ \ \ \ \ The Oregonian (Portland)“Explicit and filled with expletives, the memoir—titled Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?—reads like an even wilder and louder version of Richards’ best-selling Life.”\ \ \ \ \ Buffalo News“At turns completely hilarious, surprisingly (perhaps, to some) coherent, poignant and sordid -- a heart-rending read. Once you’ve started it, putting it down is not an option. It would be easier to ignore Tyler from the front row of an Aerosmith concert.”\ \ \ \ \ New York Daily News“One of the book’s charms is Tyler’s lack of guilt or regret for anything in his life…Music fans will enjoy Tyler’s remembrances of the New York scene, dating from clubs like The Scene and Max’s Kansas City.”\ \ \ \ \ New York Times“Steven Tyler is an unalloyed genius.”\ \ \ \ \ Houston Chronicle“Strewn thought the book …are dozens of patented “Tylerisms” that can only come from his well-endowed motor-mouth.”\ \