a bit anxious about moving in with everybody; but at the same time I was ecstatic. It was a good anxiety, nervous and excited at the same time. And just then, the highway opened up—right at the junction, right at that spot on the highway where you see the skyline of Boston, and you go, “What!?” Because it suddenly goes from trees, woods, and crickets to cars flashing by and skyscrapers and apartment buildings. . . . Just at that moment, I went, “Oh, shit, the city!” I was sitting in the backseat. I grabbed a box of tissues from the back window of the car and asked if anyone had a pen and started to write on the bottom of the Kleenex box.
I’m in my bubble in the car. It’s like a projection booth where I’m screening our future on the windshield, a wide-screen movie of coming attractions—I can see it! Joe’s Les Paul gnawing through reality like a sonic shark, little pop tarts throwing their panties onstage, the high of fusing twenty thousand people into your own fantasy. The car’s moving (it’s also in the movie) . . . images and words colliding, generating a kind of spell of what I wanted to happen.
At the moment that I saw the Boston skyline, words began flooding into my head: Fuck, we gotta make it, no, break it, man, make it. We can’t break up, we gotta make it, break it, make it, you know, make it. And I began writing: “Make it, make it, make it, break it,” saying the words over and over to myself as I wrote them, like a prospector panning sand in a stream, back and forth and back and forth—water and sand, water and sand—until a little nugget emerges out of the sand. And there in the back of the car I thought to myself, What would I fuckin’ say to an audience? If we write songs, get up onstage, I’m gonna be looking the audience in the eye, and what am I gonna say? What would I want to say? I’m starting to pan for the gold: What do I say? What would I want to say? What’s cool to say? All those ideas were beginning to gell into one fuckin’ phrase. . . . Whoops, here we go!
Um . . . good evening, people, welcome to the show . . .
[First-person, me singing to the audience . . . ]
I got something here I want you all to know . . .
[The collective we, the band . . . ]
We’re rockin’ out, check our cool . . .
[Um, no, no, that’s no good, uh, talk about my feelings . . . ]
When life and people bring on primal screams,
You got to think of what it’s gonna take to make your dreams,
Make it . . .
Oh, fuck yeah! Now I’m scribbling like crazy on the Kleenex box.
You know that history repeats itself
But you just learned so by somebody else
You know you do, you gotta think the past
You gotta think of what it’s gonna take to make it last;
Make it, don’t break it!
Make it, don’t break it! Make it!
And there it was, first song, first record. Put that in your pipe. . . .
My Red Parachute
(and Other Dreams)
I’ve been. . .
New Orleaned, collard-greened, Peter Greened and tent-show queened; woke-up-this-mornin’ed and givin’ you a warnin’ed, Seventh Sealed, cotton field; 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; mojoed, dobroed, crossroad, and mo’ fo’ed; share-cropped and diddley bopped, Risin’-Sunned and son-of-a-gunned; voodooed, hoodooed, and who do you’d; red-light-was-my-minded and baby why you so unkinded; Mississippi mudded and chicken-shack flooded; boogie-woogied, Stratocasted, blasted and outlasted; 61 Highwayed and I did it my wayed; Little-Willie-Johned and been-here-and-goned; million-dollar riffed and Jimmy Cliffed; cotton-picked and Stevie Nick’d. . . .
The blues, man, the blues . . . the blooze! That achin’ ol’ heart disease and joker in the heartbreak pack, demon engine of rock, matrix of über-amped Aerosmith, and the soul-sound of me, Steven Tyler, peripheral visionary of the tribe of Oh Yeaah!
Now the blues is, was, and always has been the bitch’s brew of the tormented soul. The fifth gospel of grits and groan, it starts with the first moan when Adam and Eve did the nasty thing and got eighty-sixed from the Garden of Eden.
“Once upon a time . . .” “In the beginning was . . .” That’s the way it always starts off. Every story, gospel, history, chronicle, myth, legend, folktale, or old wives’ tale blues riff begins with “Woke up this mornin’. . . .” The blues is soiled with muddy water, funky with Storyville whorehouse sweat and jizz, smoky from juke-joint canned heat, stained with hundred-proof rotgut and cheap cologne. It’s so potent ’cause it’s been in every low-down, get-down joint the world has ever seen.
Everybody sucks on someone’s tit, and ours was the bitch’s brew of the blues.
My first sexual musical epiphanies came through the radio. They were all entangled together. I can’t remember how old I was when I first realized they were separate things—but are they? That’s the question. I used to listen to the radio as if these sounds and voices were coming from outer space. Deejays were magicians who talked to you through the air somehow and brought you these erotic sounds, songs about love, desire, jealousy, loss, and sex. Later on I’d listen to 1010 WINS, which was a New York rock station back then, and hear all these great crazy characters talking that buzzy deejay jive talk.
When I moved with the band at the end of 1970 to Boston, it had the greatest rock ’n’ roll stations of all time, and believe me I heard them all. Radio at its finest.
When Aerosmith was just starting out I began dating a very sexy deejay at one of those stations. I’d never known an actual disc jockey before, but I knew they were famous people who could get you famous—and thus get you laid. But until I met her I didn’t know you could do both . . . on the air.
Of course me being in a band and trying to make it in Boston, what better thing than to be over there on the air making out with her while she was doing the dog and cat reports—that’s when they announced the missing pups and pussies. She didn’t have prime-time spotage so she had to do a lot of public service spots: the community center is having a dance; the local synagogue is throwing a picnic.
It was hilarious the things I did to that woman while we were on the air just to see if I could rattle her cage. I never really did. It was funny, though; we did the most incredible things. I’d give her head while she was on the air, take off her panties and have her sit on my lap and fuck her.
Such outrageous stuff, and we got away with it! Nobody knew, but let me tell you what . . . she got rave reviews! Not only were we getting very, very high—I was shoveling spoonfuls of coke under her nose—but we were really climbing under the covers, so to speak. All this while she’s playing Led Zeppelin, Yardbirds, Animals, Guess Who, Montrose, Stones—tons of great shit. It was a graveyard shift, but regardless of what it was, big or small, we were still live on the air, and it makes you just want to test the water and see what you can get away with. I used to do shit like sing along with records—people didn’t know that I was doing it, they must have thought she was playing some outtake or live track. I’d tell jokes, recite limericks, make up bizarre news items. God, that was heaven!
I would be all over the place: early Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green, Blodwyn Pig, Taj Mahal, the Fugs. In those days deejays would play the whole side of an album. Nowadays some of your best XM/Sirius stations play deep tracks. We should all be proud that our music, what they were inventing back then, has lasted so long. Love—and the music of its time—is its own reward isn’t it? And having sex with the deejay while she’s playing “Whole Lotta Love” was the ultimate consummation of my radio sex music fantasy.
Joe Perry, Joey