By Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY
LOS ANGELES � Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, that romanticized Boomer clich�, gets a booster shot of head-spinning authenticity in Steven Tyler's brash memoir, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?, out today.
By Tony Duran, Fox
Walk this way: Steven Tyler has a memoir out on Tuesday, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?
By Tony Duran, Fox
Walk this way: Steven Tyler has a memoir out on Tuesday, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?
In his hyperactive tone and razzle-dazzle lingo, the Aerosmith singer alternately revels in debauchery and celebrates sobriety, sharing his hectic life story of success and excess.
"I've always played both sides of the fence," Tyler, 63, says of his reckless past. "I never wanted to taste honey without getting stung. I just went out too far."
Unwinding after an American Idolbroadcast, Tyler picks at a plate of sliced apples and ham in his trailer on the CBS Studios lot where the Fox series is staged. Girlfriend Erin Brady prepared green tea, but Tyler opts for blackberry water. He has changed out of the flamboyant get-up he wore at the judge's table into a pink T-shirt and jeans, but he's still flashing the stacks of bracelets, wing pendants, raccoon-teeth choker and earrings. A Jolly Roger is draped behind him, alongside a "Booty Way" street sign.
He's in typical manic form, a beehive of scattershot salvos, sentimental one moment, seething the next.
"It's not my take, it's what is," Tyler says of Noise (Ecco, $27.99), written to set the record straight and serve as a cautionary tale to young bands. It's also an act of revenge against managers, label executives and colleagues who betrayed him.
"There were things I couldn't do to get back at people, so I wrote a book," he says.
The Bronx-born Steven Tallarico realized his rock star fantasies after rising to fame in the '70s as singer for the Boston-based band that set out to be America's Rolling Stones. Since 1973, Tyler, guitarists Joe Perry and Brad Whitford, bassist Tom Hamilton and drummer Joey Kramer have sold more than 100 million records globally, racking up nine multiplatinum albums on the strength of such top 10 hits as Dream On, Walk This Way, Janie's Got a Gun and their sole No. 1, 1998's I Don't Want to Miss a Thing.
Tyler chronicles Aerosmith's rise, fall, infighting, drug sprees, sexcapades and rehabs, along with his lechery, failed marriages and frayed bonds to four children. He addresses low points (the night in 2009 when he was "nicely loaded" and fell off stage, angering bandmates, who didn't call for 27 weeks). And he riffs on the rock world (when Keith Richards' girlfriend Anita Pallenberg finds Tyler's black magic book under their guest room bed, she screams, "Are you here to cast spells on us?").
A telling line appears on page 102: "Pretty much anyone who wants to be a rock star is by definition a raging narcissist ? then just add drugs!"
Both sides of the line
Tyler ingested staggering amounts of illicit substances in Aerosmith's first decade. By 1983, he was broke and hooked.
"I blew $20 million," he writes. "I snorted my Porsche. I snorted my plane. I snorted my house in that din of drugs and booze and being lost."
Now, he says, "I probably spent $10 million on drugs in my life. In the early days, tripping and hallucinating was wonderfully beautiful. Who knew how things would turn out?"
Drugs played a creative role, he argues, in Noise: "For those who OD'd ... drugs are bad! ... Are all drugs bad just because some of them took over my life from time to time? I wrote some beautiful songs under the influence."
Aerosmith's classic hits "wouldn't have sounded like that if it wasn't for those drugs," Tyler says. "And we would never have been able to do four or five shows in a row in the '70s if we hadn't been high. Peruvian marching powder, we called it."
He insists he's not conflicted or excusing his drug rampages.
"Everyone who does them like that winds up dead or in jail or in institutions," he says. "Thank God I wound up in a few of the latter."
He's especially critical of prescription painkillers and benzodiazepines like Xanax and Valium, the "new plague" of drugs that sent him on his most recent rounds of rehab after surgery for nerve-damaging Morton's neuroma. He still suffers foot pain and insomnia.
"If I can't sleep, I stay up," he says. "I've had many nights of crying because I can't walk. My balance is off now."
Tyler endured a rash of ills in recent years: a knee ligament injury, hepatitis C, back pain, a torn blood vessel in his throat.
"I can still sing good!" he proclaims. His first U.S. solo single, soaring pop-rock tune (It) Feels So Good, arrives May 10. A timetable for new Aerosmith tunes is less certain owing to continuing rancor in the ranks.
His Idol role, which he accepted impulsively last summer at the urging of ousted judge Kara DioGuardi, added to the tension (Perry derided the show as "one step above Ninja Turtles").
Tyler's rejoinder? "I'm not hanging out with people who don't believe in me," he says.
As for his persistently positive feedback to contestants, he says, "It's not a show about criticism. It's a show of hope. We're not putting people down. We brought talent to be reckoned with this year. I don't want to be harsh with them. I don't want to say, 'What's wrong with you? Who told you to pick that song?' Well, I can blame that on (producer) Jimmy Iovine. The kids don't know any better."
In Noise, Tyler rails against managers and labels that he says preyed on the band's naivet�, turning a blind eye to drug consumption while extracting large chunks of earnings.
"We wrote a couple of songs, and all the moths came to the light," he says. "When you manifest the light, you become a dartboard for other people's fears, doubts and insecurities. They stole our money. They made us overwork and gave us drugs. We were a commodity to them."
And he recounts a long-running love/hate tie to Perry, writing, "Joe is cool, Freon runs in his veins; I'm hot, hot-blooded Calabrese, a sulphur sun beast, shooting my mouth off. ... Right off, there was teeth-grinding competitive antagonism."
Known as the Toxic Twins for their drug-fueled partnership, the two have sparred for decades. Tyler fired Perry in 1979. Last year, the band auditioned singers to replace Tyler, prompting his lawyer to fire off a "cease and desist" letter. Today, Aerosmith is in limbo, despite Tyler's entreaties. Its last album of originals was 2001's Just Push Play.
"I sent two letters in the last year to my band saying, 'Enough with the lawyers and managers. Let's get together,' " he says. He, Hamilton and Kramer recently recorded demos in Los Angeles.
"Joe had prior commitments," Tyler says. "We'll do what we always do, Joe and I. In the last minute, we'll write another Love in an Elevator. I love him so much. All I ever wanted was a brother. When my mom passed (in 2008), I needed him bad, and he disappeared. I needed my band, and it seems like they only need me when there's another tour. I'm a dancing bear and a cash cow to some members of my band."
He adds with a laugh, "If that's what I am, maybe I should get more money!"
Noise both praises and denigrates his bandmates. Tyler's not sweating their reaction.
"I don't think Brad will care," he says. "Joey loves me. Joe may have some things to say, but I didn't write anything that isn't true. I don't care if people are hurt. I had to move on. I learned to love them despite what they did to me. I'm angry, but I'll make them love me again!"
New and old fans
The past decade has not been the band's best, but Tyler "is very much in the spotlight," thanks to armies of Idol fans, says Rolling Stonesenior writer Brian Hiatt, who predicts success for a properly timed, quality Aerosmith disc. "I would never bet against them. You can't rule out how many lives they have."
Though it lacks "huge bombshell revelations," Noise presents a frank, full and colorful accounting of the band's tumultuous history, Hiatt says. "It doesn't disguise the fact that for many years, it was a lot of fun to be Steven Tyler. He doesn't put moral scolding on top of every tale of partying. The book really captures his voice. He's much more lucid than the stereotype might suggest."
While amusing, Tyler's "unique and bizarre jive talk ... goes off on weird tangents, and he can seem more interested in saying things in a funny way than saying things of substance," says David Marchese, Spin magazine's associate editor.
An example: "I've been ... holler-logged and Yeller Dawged; sanctified, skantified, shuck-and-jived, and chicken-fried; black-cat boned, rollin' stoned, and cross-road moaned; freight-trained, achin-heart pained, gris-gris dusted, done got busted; bo-weeviled, woman eviled."
Marchese expects Noise to entice hard-core Aerosmith fans and classic rock lovers more than young Idol fans, whose parents might be horrified by the cocaine-and-groupie smorgasbord.
Idol may be softening Tyler's image, he says. "Something like Idol sands all the rough edges. You forget how dangerous and vital and exciting Aerosmith was and probably still can be on the right night."
Solo tour ahead?
If Tyler can't kick-start Aerosmith, "I'll tour with a full-on orchestra and do every ballad we had, soppy or not, and the next year I'd go out with Elton John or Jeff Beck," says Tyler, adding that he declined an offer in 2008 to join Jimmy Page in a reconstituted version of Led Zeppelin. "It's all there for me. I just happen to love my band more."
He no longer puts his band before his family, however. Tyler dotes on grandson Milo, 6, son of actress Liv Tyler, 33, his daughter from a fling with model Bebe Buell. His volatile marriage to Cyrinda Foxe, who died in 2002, produced designer Mia, 32. He had two more with second wife Teresa Barrick: model Chelsea, 22, and college student Taj, 19.
Fidelity? Not his strong suit. He had a deeper pact with cocaine.
"I'm very much in love with Erin, and I still love my ex-wife (Teresa) and Bebe and Cyrinda," he says. "I love that I can be real, that I have that in me now. That I can say I'm sorry."
Tyler is not among the swaggering, hedonistic autobiographers who claim no regrets. He especially laments his wild ride's collateral damage.
"Looking back, I would have taken getting high out of the equation," he says. "I would have spent time with Liv. I would have been faithful to my wife. I'm an alpha. I jump into things without thinking."
Yet he makes no apologies for his stunted adolescence.
"I'm glad I haven't grown up," he says. "I never want to. I get glimpses of adulthood in my sobriety, and I hate it."
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