Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? Quotes

“Seems like the light at the end of the tunnel may be you.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

“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’. . . .”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

“To love and be loved is all we know and all we need to know.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“Love may be the best driving wheel, but anger is a pretty good second.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

“Sex is the strongest force in the universe. Forget about the Grand Unifying Theory, Stephen Hawking, I’ll tell you what it is: women. Aren’t women the strongest sex? What force is more magnetic than that? It’s not just pussy. We’re attracted to women for their energy. We’re attracted to their fluidness, their ability to nurture a baby without even knowing how, to be able to put up with screaming and crying and colic and shitty diapers where men would go, “I’m fucking outta here! I’m gonna go kill me a saber-toothed woolly mammoth an’bring it on home to eat tonight. Wa-haaaaaa!” We don’t have tits; we couldn’t nourish a gnat.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

“So study your rock history, son. That be the Bible of the Blues.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“Sure, we're the sum of our experiences. If you listen to that song I wrote in 1969, "Dream On," you might get a different view. I may not have been quite sure of what I was doing, but I was on to something.”
― 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?

“I may be a monster, but I’m a sensitive monster…

I went to church, I have a sister, I’m Italian, and I’ve probably seen the sun set and rise as many times as anyone. I liked cutting the umbilical cord at my son Taj’s birth. I liked smelling the placenta. I like the act of making love rather than saying, “I fucked you!” If anybody wants to see the spiritual side of Steven Tyler, well, it’s fucking there!”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“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?

“Sometimes I feel compelled to read parts of these memoirs so I can remember things about me that I don’t remember.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“Life is short. Break the rules, forgive quickly, kiss slowly, love truly, laugh uncontrollably, and never regret anything that makes you smile.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“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?

“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.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

“I’d been a rock star ever since I could remember. I came out of my mother’s womb screaming for more than nipple and nurture. I was born to strut and fret my hour upon the stage, fill stadiums, do massive amounts of drugs, sleep with three nubile groupies at a time . . . AND endorse my own brand of barbecue sauce (oh no, that’s Joe).”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: The Autobiography

“Then we went into “Nobody’s Fault.” This was one of the highlights of my creative career. If you listen really close to the front of “Nobody’s Fault,” there isn’t an intro to the song. I suggested to Joe that he turn his amp volume to 12 and the volume on his guitar off. Since the key of the song was an E, I suggested he start by fingering a D chord, and then turn the volume knob all the way up slowly. I told Brad to play an A chord, same dealio as Joe. Then Joe played a C, did the same thing—Brad played a G, Joe played a B-flat, Brad played an F, Joe played an A-flat, Brad played an E-flat, and then Joe and Brad both played a D chord. And when they played that D together, rolling the volume knob up with their pinkies—and holding it for a second—then the band came in on a crashing E chord like Hitler was at the door. I looked over and Jack Douglas was internally hemorrhaging with bliss. I was in the middle of the room with my headphones on (which we called “cans”) and a live mic in front of me, because I loved singing live vocals as the band tracked. It always seemed to incite a little riot inside of everyone. Right before the band came in on the downbeat, the union engineer from Columbia marked his presence for all time by opening the door right in the middle of that sweet silence. He had a clarinet in his hand that wound up on the front of “Pandora’s Box,” but that’s another story. You can actually hear the door opening in “Nobody’s Fault” to this day and it somehow seems to get louder and louder with each play, only ’cause you know it’s there now.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“People, too, often miss the silver lining because they were expecting gold.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“I shoulda gone to see the gypsy, because before too long I found myself in a world of trouble and pain. Nobody knows the trouble I seen. Gimme an E! Heavy is the head that wears the motherfucking Mad Hatter’s hat. Thank you, God, may I have another?”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“You know, looking back on that, I can’t believe I left because of her flashing . . . when here I am, humping Joe’s monitor during “Back in the Saddle” every night.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“By day’s end, there were seven hundred ODs on angel dust, one rape, and two dozen robberies. Two babies were born the night we played,”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“These things I knew and learned and passed on to Joey. So he played, and for the last thirty-five years, I lived through him. I don’t know how not to.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“When we were making Just Push Play, we recorded our empty room. If you record that hall noise and sing over it, it’s like letting the hall embrace you. It has chairs and equipment and people. The room IS another instrument. The room is in the band.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“The Beatles sang in a room that had a voice . . . which means the room had an echo. They didn’t have some ass fuck engineer try to get rid of it. They put it on the track like that. Once it’s a hit, that echo is on there forever.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“But because I had decided not to be the drummer in the band, I gained a right IN MY MIND to be able to live vicariously through Joey.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“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.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“Antagonism, pure nitro-charged agro, fuels inspiration.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“If a drum beat is a hundredth of a second off, I become unstable. I rant, I rave, it has to be fixed or the world will stop spinning on its axis. I drive my band crazy with this shit.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“I just figured out why guys like me turn into curmudgeons . . . the world’s going to hell in a handbasket, everybody has rolled over and given up, and there’s no more afternoon baseball.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“Bring it on, motherfucker! Come on! Come on! Where are you? I’m waiting. ’Cause if you’re here . . . be here. And if you do show up later, I’m gonna kick your ectoplasmic ass!” You gotta talk tough to demons . . . you can’t shilly-shally or they’ll pounce.”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“I never had to hide my pot smoking from my mom. I’d say, “Mom, you’re drinking! Why don’t you smoke pot instead?” I’d twist one up and say, “Ma, see what it smells like?” She never said, “Put that out!” mainly because Mom loved her five o’clock cocktail”
― Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir