I’d drop acid and go into the city. You’d look down at the sidewalk and it was melting. I was walking on a great gray, sparkling snake. It shivered when you stepped on it. The sidewalk was alive! And then there was the Electric Circus in the East Village with the Rubber Room. I’d take acid and go in there. I lived there! The Rubber Room was this padded space made for people who were tripping, because they were going “YEE-HAA!” and they didn’t want anybody to hurt themselves.
One Sheridan Square in the West Village—the Stones and the Animals would go there. I’d sit there listening to that song “Judy in Disguise (with Glasses)” by John Fred and His Playboy Band.
It was the beginning of the disco era, and in that club they would play the music so fucking loud, and we were in there going, “Fuck, this is fucking great!” Clubs with bone-jangling loud music! That was the beginning of all of it. And no one sold T-shirts to the revolution. Think about that! No one was selling T-shirts in 1971! What were we thinking?
By the late sixties I was seriously into Haight-Ashbury. I’d way got over my Mod Mick phase—so had Mick. I was into—I don’t want to say my feminine side, but the hipper women’s stuff, the way Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg dressed those guys! They really had that motley, tatterdemalion medieval troubadour thing down. Eventually the hip King’s Road shops began exporting that stuff, like the New York branch of Granny Takes a Trip. As soon as I began to refine my own personal style, I was immediately attracted to the Anita Pallenberg/Keith Richards gypsy look. But after I saw Janis—she became my fashion idol.
Eventually Anita and I became good friends. When I go over to England I always try to see her. Last time I met her where she works, at the designer Vivienne Westwood’s boutique. Vivienne Westwood, now Dame Vivienne, designed clothes for the Sex Pistols and then brought her eccentric clothing into the mainstream—if you can call her wildlife outfits mainstream. I was looking around at the bizarre clothes in the shop when a woman came up behind me, covered my eyes, then put her hands around my neck, almost snapped my fucking neck off, and said, “Who is this?” “Uh, I give up.” “Your best English fucking cunt!” It was Anita in her broken-English Cockney accent.
A few years ago, when Keith and Anita still lived in Bing Crosby’s old house out on Long Island, I went to spend a couple of days with them. I’d bought this rare book in a weird little bookstore in New York. The guy kept it in the back room; it was about black magic and shit. I took it with me. A little light satanic reading for a weekend in the country. It was about the derivation of the Seven Sacred Sins and all that dark stuff. When Anita found it under my bed, she had a fucking fit. She ripped the book up. When I asked her why she did it, she screamed at me in front of Keith, “How dare you bring this into my house? Are you here to cast spells on us?” Meanwhile we were all gacked to the nines on coke.
The sixties and us, we got away with it. And now, “fuck-all” lives on! You’d read R. Crumb and then these characters would be there right before your eyes. You’d go, hey, he’s from R. Crumb. Oh, that was so great! A little lame and filthy, but what the hell, R. Crumb had Mr. Natural and, you know, Flakey Funt and Angelfood McSpade. Oh, it was just so good.
At the end of the sixties I lived at Sleepy Hollow Restorations, right before the Tappan Zee Bridge. I’d be so high coming from New York or Yonkers in my car, in my Volkswagen, from eating hash brownies and recording records, I would wind up missing the exit and drive over the bridge. Whoops! Forgot cash! I’d go over the bridge with no money! Problem is, there’s a toll on the way back into New York. I’d drive up and go, “I just don’t got—!” But I was scared to death. That happened quite a few times. I remember there was a tree there that had such a beautiful face against the sky at sunset.
At eighteen most kids think about becoming a man. Never did! The guy you went to high school with figured it out. Got a job, went to work every day. He became a man. But here I was at twenty-two. I was at a loss. What was I going to do? Tune pianos like my uncle Ernie or teach music like my dad did at Cardinal Spellman High School? I had that moment of angst.
“Perplexity,” sayeth my man Kahlil Gibran, “is the beginning of knowledge.”
Yeah, but he wasn’t living in Sunapee and doing crystal meth. I loved speed, man! Remember the speed that burned when you snorted it and you had to keep it in the freezer? It was blue and it had that terrible smell? “Oh! That tastes terrible!” It was an acquired taste, one that I acquired without too much difficulty. You could eat the paper it was wrapped in and you were fuckin’ forget-about-it.
I loved Quaaludes, too. Especially when you got too high on speed or blow. Whenever I’d go to rehab, they’d say, “Well, you’re always chasing the drug.” And I go, “Yu-uh!” It’s like having a fast car and you go really fast, but then occasionally you’ve got to stop and go get gas, but while you’re getting gas all you want to do is get back in that fast car. It’s like that time again! You have no blow, you run out, you go to your dealer and get some more, and then you’re in the car breaking the sound barrier and your brains are pouring out of your ears and then someone goes, “Here, check this out!” It’s like ethyl alcohol and you hit this button and your mind chills down.
The wildest places we played were fraternities. With Fox Chase I played Bones Gate—it was a famous raunchy fraternity at Dartmouth they based Animal House on. At those parties I used to sit under the keg, they’d turn the keg on, and I’d beat everybody out.
Fox Chase was the last band I was in before Aerosmith. Right before that, in 1969, William Proud went out to Long Island and I was with them there until that fell apart and I went back up to Sunapee.
I had no money. I was desperate, defeated, doomed. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. William Proud had played every nightclub, grotto, union hall, gym, bar mitzvah, and VFW hall for a fifty-mile radius. We were burned out on the trail. Nowhere left to play. It all came to a head one night at the last incarnation of Salvation in the Village, way out in Southampton on Long Island.
At the Hampton gig, I practically strangled our lead guitar player, Twitty Farren, to death during a rehearsal. Top that, Alice Cooper! Midrehearsal, I look up and see Twitty—who was a fuckin’ great guitar player, by the way—yawning. I asked myself, “Is it the heat or is it that his heart isn’t in it anymore?” I was high as a kite, and I jumped over the drum set to try and choke his raggedy ass, but I fell over my high hat and cracked my leg instead.
I ran out of the club, stuck out my thumb, and hitchhiked all the way back to New Hampshire . . . drumless, bandless, hopeless. But still telling my mom, “Mom, I’m going to be such a big star there’s gonna be girls hanging off the rafters, kids coming through the windows, battering down the doors. We gotta batten the place down, put up six-foot fences, put shutters on the windows. We’ll need an intercom and electric gates to keep out the rabid fans. Or else we’ll have to move.” “Of course, Steven.” My mom always believed in me, she was a stone romantic.
William Proud—Peter Bover, Twitty Farren, Mouse McElroy, and Eddie Kisler—wasn’t really working out. It was still fun, we still got gigs, but it was small potatoes and wasn’t leading to anything. No road to destiny! I grew up in a family where we were all very close, and I was probably homesick or whatever they call that today.
Summer ended, the town was cold. No one to cop from, no drugs, nothing up here—everyone had left. Oil lamps, candles, winter, the wind whistling through the pines. No band, no plans, no future, and they were starting to roll the sidewalks up. It was my first season of wither. And then, on the seventh hour of the seventh day I heard Joe Perry play. . . .