Pepper

“By the end of the seventies, some nights I was so out of it our road manager, Joe Baptista, would have to carry me onstage. The promoter would be sitting there in the dressing room with a look of horror on his face. I’m almost comatose, he’s hyper-ventilating. He thinks he’s presenting the legendary cash cow Aerosmith, and now he’s going to lose his shirt because the lead singer’s down for the count. Is he dead or alive? What am I going to do? “You’d better get him on that stage. I don’t know how he’s going to do this how, but we’ve got too many kids out there.”

Not to worry. The minute my feet hit the stage, I’m off and running. I don’t know how it happens, but hey, you get up there in front of twenty thousand people and it’s a high in itself, it’s a charged space.

Still, the train kept a rollin’ and we kept getting high until one night in late ’78, I don’t know where we were, maybe in Springfield, Illinois, I blacked out in the middle of “Reefer Headed Woman.”

I got a reefer headed woman
She fell right down from the sky
Well, I gots to drink me two fifths of whiskey
Just to get half as high
When the —

And then I hit the stage like a fish out of water.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

“Well hellfire save matches, fuck a duck and see what hatches!”
― Steven Tyler

“Gay sex just doesn't do it for me. I tried it one time when I was younger, but just didn't dig it.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

“These are war stories. When you’re on tour, short of loss of life and limb – or actual death – you have no time to get sick like a normal person. There are no days off. You’re working yourself to death. The only thing that got us through was the cocaine.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?