Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (51 page)

A
gift from Willie Davidson for playing at the 2003 Harley Davidson Year End Bash. (Ross Halfin)

Here’s what happened that night moment-by-moment in Tylerama: The night of the show, we’re backstage, we’re waiting to go on. There’s a terrible thunderstorm. Lightning puts out the electricity on half the stage and the floor is flooded, soaking wet. They’re trying to mop up the stage and consequently the show is held back an hour. A fucking hour! Anyway, we get out there and we get to “Love in an Elevator.” Suddenly the sound goes out, my microphone is dead. I walk back to Joey and go, “Can you hear?” No response. So I make a T sign for time-out and he runs his finger across his neck like he is slitting his throat, signaling, “No, I can’t.” I begin walking slowly back down to the front of the stage to start singing “Love in an Elevator,” but half the PA system is out in the front of the house and just to keep the audience entertained I do one of my Tyler moves—and I fall off the side of the stage. I zigged when I should have zagged, and I fell eight feet ten inches. Right then and there I knew the world was gonna know I fell off the stage and what they were going to think. And there it was, the whole thing on YouTube as soon as I got to the hospital, twenty minutes later. I just figured, What the fuck? I’ll say, “Yep, I was high,” and just call a spade a spade. Tyler falls off stage. Tyler fucked-up on drugs. I could’ve sidestepped the whole thing by saying, “I zigged when I should have zagged.”

Backstage they laid me out in my dressing room on a gurney and only Brad Whitford came back to see how I was. Only guy in the band. When I fell off the stage, a soon-to-be band member’s wife yelled at my manager, “You know what happens when you let him hang out with drug addicts?” So, after falling off the stage everyone got so mad at me no one in the band called me for twenty-seven weeks. I’m not sure how deep I would want to go with this, but it’s just fucking ironic, isn’t it, that not one of those fucks came to see what was going on with me, and when I asked them a couple of months ago, “What the fuck?” they said, “Well, we were angry at you!” Angry? They were angry at me for falling off the stage? That was the best that they could come up with.

After falling off the stage, I started the healing process and twelve weeks later I went out on the road to do a few makeup gigs with the band—San Francisco, Honolulu, Maui—or we’d have been sued. I did them, but I still wasn’t talking to the band. I had my manager get me a Winnebago so that I wouldn’t have to go backstage and see any of them. Not once did I talk to any one of those pricks. I got out onstage that first night in San Francisco but not one word did I speak. I shot daggers at them, smiled, put my arm around Joe, thinking, You fuck! I remember looking at Joey—he and I had always had a laugh together—but I just stared him down. I read a book by Og Mandino called
The Greatest Salesman in the World,
where it says if you tell yourself when you’re angry at your friend, that you love him, he’ll feel it. It works. But at that moment I looked at Joey and said silently to myself, “I hate you, you fucking piece of shit.” I didn’t know what else to do. And . . . it was one of the best shows we’ve ever done.

I got chastised for falling off the stage high. That I may have done. I guess some are yet to fall off their own stage. I see people in this band who drink and fuck up, fuck up and drink, and if I ever point that out to them they always say, “Yeah, but I didn’t do what you did.” The hypocritical finger-pointing shit. “I don’t have a problem.” Yet. And then, lo and behold, what do I see not so long ago but one of the guys in the band mid-snorting, there was a fucking luger at the end of his nose. I saw the picture! It was taken by a Fan Club Girl, Amanda Eyre, of a certain member of the band with a fucking stalactite hanging out of his nose. It was a high def image so we zoomed in to see what the fuck color it was so we could figure out what drug he was snorting.

When those gigs were over, I went to New York, got an apartment on the Upper West Side, and worked with Keren Pinkas who was helping me organize my book. During this time the band was scouting for other lead singers behind my back and putting out rumors that I was leaving Aerosmith—that I had quit. On November 10, 2009, I was at dinner with Erin Brady, Mark Hudson, Mark’s girlfriend, and Keren Pinkas in New York and there was a phone call from Paul Santo, Joe Perry’s guitar player, saying, “Hey, we’re playing down here at Irving Plaza, blah, blah, blah. . . .” And I thought, hold on a minute, let’s go get a limousine, we’ll ride downtown to the theater and wait outside until he’s about to do his encore, then I’ll run in and get up onstage and tell the world what happened.

We orchestrated it like a movie where you go in, you go out, and no one gets hurt, like the scene from
Oh, Brother Where Art Thou?
I was going to go in and fucking take over. We put our plan into action. We called the limousine company. I said, “Keren, look up on the Internet, find out what Joe played at his last show, and then we’ll know exactly what song he does before he comes back and does his encore: “Walk This Way.” Then we sent Keren into the theater as our satellite, as our mole. Keren went and stood right in front of Joe. Right away, she texts me, “Oh my god, I can’t believe it, there’s barely two hundred to three hundred people here. . . . It’s half empty.” Poor Joe’s in there playing to half an audience! Then Keren texts me again, “I think this is his last song.” We run in, I meet the guys at the back door, and they recognize me. I tell them, “I gotta get onstage right now!” They go, “Okay, okay, okay, Mr. Tyler!” We’re like a snake, running through the crowd, this way and that. I see Billie Perry, she sees me and goes, “Joe! Joe! Steven’s here!” She starts freaking. It’s Elyssa Perry, the Wicked Witch of the North again. Billie, Elyssa, same woman. If you ever meet guys who have had three, four wives, you know they keep getting married to the same woman over and over. They pick a new woman who’s just like the old one every time. Nothing else will do. If you’re a sex addict, you’re not gonna go look for a date in a library!

So I go backstage, Joe’s just come off, and I walk in the room and go, “Hey, Joe, what’s going on?” He goes, “Nothin.” I say, “Havin’ a rough night?” He doesn’t answer me. I say, “Joe, let’s go up there, I want to do ‘Walk This Way’ with you.” He introduces me to his lead singer, some German kid named Hagen Grohe. I say, “I know I heard you up there. How you doin?” and shake his hand. Joe says, “Here’s what’s going to happen. My guy Hagen’s gonna take a verse then you take a verse.” And I go, “Well, now you know that just ain’t gonna happen!!” I shoulda said, “FUCK YOU I’m singing it. What are you gonna do about it?” Just like when I was growing up, the guys in the gangs, that’s what they did. “Fuck you, I’m stealing your date, what are you gonna do about it, prick?” That was the kind of words that went down in Yonkers among the Green Mountain Boys. But instead what I said was, “Come on, Joe, let’s go, let’s go do this thing.” There was tension and an ominous silence that you could cut with a knife. It was bullshit. I said, “Joe, come on, man, they’re waiting for you.” I walked out and he had to follow me. I grabbed the mic and the place was roaring. They gave us a standing ovation for at least a minute—that’s a long fucking time when you’re up there—it seemed like two minutes of whistling, clapping, and hollering. I got them to quiet down. I said, “All right, here’s what’s happening. I’m going to sing with Joe tonight. The rumors about me quitting the band aren’t true. And Joe, you’re a man that wears a coat of many colors. But I, motherfucker, am the rainbow.”

I thought, where the fuck did I get that from? You get these moments when you know how the movie’s going to go. I said, “Count it off, drummer boy!” And we did the song and when it was done I jumped off the stage, into the crowd, went out into the limousine and went, “Uh, what just happened?”

E
ventually I moved into my daughter Liv’s brownstone in the Village—she was off doing a movie. During Thanksgiving I drank, did some blow again, and then Christmas was coming up so I had a guy bring me an eight ball of coke and a bunch of pills. And those deliveries got through Erin a couple times. But by December, the last package arrived and Erin saw it and said, “What is this?” I said, “Gimme that!” I pulled it away from her and the package ripped. Cocaine went all over the place. I went back later that night and snorted it all up, off the counters and everywhere, and got a nice fucking rail out of it. It was pretty cool. It’s interesting how fast you can go back to romancing your drug. I got laid the first time on coke. I’ve done every fucking drug under the sun. I’ve smoked combs, for chrissakes! You’d buy a nickel plastic comb in the men’s room at a gas station, cut all the teeth off, stick one in the end of a cigarette, and smoke the plastic. Pure poison. But, like they used to say in the Renaissance,
Dosis sola facit venenum,
which translates to something like, “Only the quantity makes the poison.” A very cool saying by Paracelsus, a sixteenth-century alchemist and doctor: “All things are poisons,” he said, “for there is nothing without poisonous qualities. . . . It is only the dose which makes a thing poison.” I love it. Anyway,
amo, amas, amat,
and December 14 rolls around, and I’m laying in bed, wiped out from arguing all day with Dave Dalton. I’ve been having a shitty week, which got a whole lot worse after Erin found my shit. Four
A.M.
she wakes me up and says, “Guess where you’re going? Betty Ford.”

I called my friend Frank Angie who sent his plane for me. The guy loves me—he’ll do anything for me. We flew out to L.A., then flew over to Palm Springs where I made a brief pit stop to grab a double double In and Out burger—where they bake the fries in the bun—for my last meal in civilian life.

Oh, you know what I forgot to say? We have to put it in right here. Just before that tour where I fell off the stage, I was in New York. I was up here on the West Side and went to this little restaurant where I met my new manager Allen Kovac, who I’d met through his partner at 10th Street Entertainment, Eric Sherman. I told him about my problems and what was going on with the band.

The day before I went to Betty Ford, I said to Allen, “Get me something else, something besides the band. I need to have some backup plan outside of Aerosmith.” My father used to tell me: “Always have a backup plan, something you can fall back on.” Aerosmith wasn’t exactly a sure thing anymore; they were looking around for other lead singers—and I was getting calls from Lenny Kravitz . . . who was wondering if I was really quitting the band.

M
y last drink, 2009. Go big or go home. (Erin Brady)

I knew I was going to be all right after the second day at Betty Ford. I went from detox to the community, having, ironically enough, come to Betty Ford high on the very same drug they wound up giving me to deal with my addiction: Suboxone. They let me out in a day, only to be greeted by this guy who said, “Hi, I’m the Kings of Leon’s dad.” His kids didn’t like the way their dad was behaving. He’d remarried and they hated his new wife, he was getting drunk all the time, running trucks and buses off the road (he was the band’s tour manager)—just fucked-up shit. So they sent him to rehab, and so I spent the next month in the best of company with the Kings of Leon’s dad.

After detoxing and spending a month at Betty Ford, I was talked into spending two more months there. After the first month at Betty Ford they put you in what’s called the lane. It’s a house in a cul-de-sac. I lived there with four other guys—three rooms, two guys in each bedroom. The first day I was there I went, “Wait a minute, you guys are doctors?” “Yup.” One was shooting fentonyl, a potent narcotic painkiller, and the other was delivering babies and stealing all the drugs he could get his hands on. They all had to submit to random urine tests—or they’d never get their licenses back. There was a pilot there who flew a route from England to America. On the day of the flight he was dead drunk and fell out of the truck taking him to the plane he was about to fly. His best friend, thank God, grabbed him and sent him into rehab. Can you imagine what would have happened if he’d taken off and flown the plane bombed out of his mind? That’s who I was in rehab with. I decided I’m just going to do it, too—the random urines and whatever. I don’t give a fuck. At this stage of the game, you’re kind of a little like I will follow the program wherever it takes me, I will do whatever it is to get through this.

I knew that after the first month in rehab that my not calling anybody in the band was really fucked up. It was one thing for those suck-asses to not call me for twenty-seven weeks; it was quite another thing when I didn’t call them, because when you’re in rehab, you look at your own side of the street. It was then that I realized that I loved the band, regardless of a guitar player that’s a loose canon and doing a solo record and angry at me for doing stuff he’d done half a dozen times himself. And suddenly I’m Peck’s Bad Boy? There’s the pot calling the kettle beige.