Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (45 page)

Like father like daughter. Mia had drug problems as a teenager—drinking, diet pills—but I didn’t know about her cutting herself. At one point I tricked her into going to rehab, saying I was sending her to a spa in California. My heart broke thinking that I had anything to do with her drug addiction. In the end I told her about this old AA slogan that I’d heard in the halls, where a lot of people vent their woes: “A lot of your problems have my name on them, but most of the solutions will have your name on them.”

Not long after that I was walking along the beach, I dropped to my knees, I began crying because I realized that I’d gotten sober, but I hadn’t done it for my kids, or even my own health. I hadn’t thought about them when I was using, so why would I have gotten sober for them, either. Drugs robbed me of my spirituality and compassion, only later to find I’d lost Liv and Mia as well—I cried when they forgave me for my past behaviors but I’ll be working on it for the rest of my life.

What would I say to my children? We may have picked the key but they are their own song. We don’t own them, they only pass through us, as Kahlil Gibran says in
The Prophet,
they don’t owe us anything, either.

Your children are not your children,

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you . . .

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

M
ia mine, 2010. (Mia Tyler)

In the end, all I could do was write a song for her.

On na na . . . na na na na na . . .

On na na . . . na na na na na . . . .

Hush-a-bye my baby soft and new

Oooh loveliness gypsy dance in the rain

Hush-a-bye my baby what’cha do

Oooh the baby cry

The wind she’s callin’ your name . . . (Mia)

Ooooh . . . (Mia) ooooh . . . (Mia)

Ooooh . . . (Mia) ooooh . . .

Where you came from you ain’t alone

Live and loved from the old jawbone

Oh don’t you cry you’re home sweet home

Rock-a-bye sweet lady gypsy blue

Oooh the nightingale’s singin’ her song in the rain

Hush-a-bye sweet lady soft and new

Oooh don’tcha cry the wind she’s a screamin’ your name . . . (Mia)

Ooooh . . . (Mia) ooooh . . . (Mia)

Ooooh . . . (Mia) ooooh. . .

Come too soon that sunny day

You give your heart away

No divorcée or repouise’ . . . yeah . . . yeah

(Mia)

Ooooh . . . (Mia) ooooh . . . (Mia)

Ooooh . . . (Mia) ooooh . . . (Mia)

Ooooh . . . (Mia) ooooh . . . (Mia)

(Mia)

L
ast year I told the band we should call our next album
20 Summers.
They all went, “Oh,
20 Summers,
man, that’s so great.” Pause. “What the fuck does that mean?” “Well,” I said, “you know . . . that’s all you got left.” And everybody gasped. People don’t like to think about it, but like the Irreverend Steven Tyler said:

Ladies hold the aces

And their lovers call it passion

The men call it pleasure

But to me it’s old-fashioned

Times they’re a changin’

Nothin’ ever stands still

If I don’t stop changin’

I’ll be writin’ my will

It’s the same old story

Never get a second chance

For a dance to the top of the hill

M
e running the loop in Sunapee passing a jogger running the other way,

Female voice: Hey, I know you.

Me: Ya think?

I walk off the set of
Good Morning America
after I’ve done another phony intimate interview. I go into a bathroom and some little shit has followed me in there. Christ! I’m pissing at the urinal, “Hey, man . . . ?” And, right there, it cuts off the flow. I mean how am I expected to pee when the guy standing next to me is hemorrhaging internally, his fucking urine flow ain’t going nowhere either. My nerves have somehow pinched it off and nothing’s come out of me, so I head off to a toilet stall to finish the job. I close the door, and it’s like
Aaaaah,
a shiver goes down my backbone because finally no one’s staring at me, no one’s trying to get at me. I’m alone in my wild lonesome in that room . . . and for that one blissful moment I think to myself,
Finally,
you’re in peace.
Then, here it comes from over the top of the stall, a woman’s voice, “Can I have your autograph?” I turn whilst still in midstream and piss all over her pumps. And for one wild moment and while we’re stewing in my own juices, I realize life’s a pisser when you’re a-peeing.

The aloneness—it’s a world in and of itself.

Bitchy Female Fan: Boo-hoo!

Bitchy Female Fan’s Best Friend: Let him finish. This is a riot!

It’s the yang of yin, if I may put it like that. It’s the other side of frivolous, kinetic, sparking energy! It’s a deep void, the silent play square. In that anechoic chamber of my own brain, anything I want to come out can, because it’s not being interrupted by other ignorant motherfuckers—otherwise known as the precious children of God.

And the media, my darling . . .

Bitchy Female Fan: Jaysus! He’s not going to play that tired old number, too!

Bitchy Female Fan’s Best Friend: Shut
up
! They all have to bitch about the press, while at night they pray on bended knee to the Whore of Babble-on that they’ll be mentioned on Page Six.

Me: Ninety percent of everything you read about me in the press was made up. Every rag in England disseminates utter bullshit. “Look,” I say, as sweetly as possible, “before we start, do me a favor, let’s not talk about drugs this time.”

Montage of Announcer’s Voices: The drug-addicted Tyler Perry gave us an interview the other night. . . . The ex-drug-addicted rock star . . . The sixty-year-old Tyler . . . The Jaggeresque Tyler . . . The just-divorced Tyler . . .

Me: It all has to be that or they wouldn’t have their jobs. It’s the oldest game in the book.

But wait, why have I never been on the cover of
Wonderland
magazine? I’ll dial my press agent. Evan Dando and Rachel Wood get themselves cover stories. I mean, darling, if they can make the cover of
Wonderland,
why can’t I? So many choices! Should I suck cock or should I suck pussy? Dando or Evan Rachel Wood? I just don’t know . . . maybe I’ll not suck cock and instead I’ll write a song with Evan Dando and I’ll just stick with Julianne Moore and Evan Rachel Wood as far as pussy goes.
Yeeeeessss
. I mean, really, darling, if they can make the cover of
Wonderland
—is it worth my tongue on their gynies?

Well, of course, absolutely.

Female fan: Hey, are you Steven Tyler?

Me: I think so.

Oh, fuck the book, you have no idea what
movie
this is! Get the picture?

STEVEN TYLER, an aging but well-preserved rock star moodily stares into space, wistfully looking out at his twelve-room tree house from the terrace of his eccentric compound in Marshfield, Massachusetts. He’s talking into a digital tape recorder, which he barely knows how to operate.

STEVEN TYLER: (anxious but defiant) “I know you’re not going to have a lot of sympathy for what I’m about to tell you, but it’s my fucking book and I can say what the hell I want, can’t I?” [Click!]

He shuts off the tape recorder and begins again.

STEVEN TYLER: (Cont.) “It’s never again going to be the same way for me as it was before I was twenty-five . . . fuck, is this just
too
self-indulgent?” [Click!]

But if I’m too self-deprecating it’s gonna sound just like all those other fucking candy-ass autobiographies out there.

(He resumes dictating into the tape recorder.)

“I sometimes have to put myself back in that head space of when I was twenty-two just for my own sanity, because it really sucks. I can’t tell you why, but it doesn’t feel good knowing that people already know all about me. They know my cat’s name, my father’s name, they know where I grew up. I’ll be with people, and after a couple of hours of hanging out they’ll ask me out of the blue, ‘Oh, so do you still have that cat?’ That’s what it’s like for me to be with a girl in a club. I never have to bring up my ex-wife, or my last girlfriend; they know my story; and I’m as tired of it as they are.

“People like to tell stories; they’ll tell me stories about
myself
. . . they’ll tell me stories about Joe. ‘Joe Perry, he’s outta control, man. Yeah, I was with him the day he shot himself in the foot.’ ‘Oh, yeah?’ You ask, ‘Joe shot himself in the foot? When was that?’ And at the end the story is that he
almost
shot himself in the foot.”

“I go to people’s houses who work for me and the guy will take me aside and go, ‘Hey, tell the kids that I was your backstage guy, ’cause that’s what I told them.’ And I do it! ‘Your dad, he was the guy . . . Without your dad, Aerosmith woulda . . .’ ’’

“I know all about this because I did it myself. Like when I told that story about Mick, that I was his brother. And imagine! I said we played with the Yardbirds, too. This is when we all carried each other’s equipment from the cars. We drove up to the stage at Staples High School in 1966 with the Chain Reaction. So now people do this stuff about me.

(Reading a poem from his notebook, “Famous Stains.” Clears throat.)