Hit Hard

by Joey Kramer

  Our crew had a rule that if you didn’t see one of us for twenty-four hours, you were supposed to break down the door. Aerosmith was still the main customer for drugs in Boston, and there was always a lot of activity outside Joe’s house. Where we were in the drug food chain, we were always just one level away from getting killed. That is, if our fans didn’t get us first.

  The blue army was still well represented in our fan base, and their antics continued. At the Spectrum in Philadelphia in October an M-80 went off in a stairwell and hit Steven in the face, burning his cornea. I’m not sure how, but Joe ripped open an artery in his hand and had to be taken to the hospital with a police escort.

  We were such a big deal that year that we bumped Springsteen from the schedule at the plant where they actually pressed the records, but when it was time to manufacture it, Draw the Line still wasn’t ready. Finally, in December 1977, when the record was released, there was no single. It was our fastest-selling album—1.5 million copies in six weeks—but then it disappeared because there was no touring, and because it sucked. The critics hated it—they called it dysfunctional and chaotic, just like us. We had become as self-indulgent in our music as we had become in our lives.

  On March 18, 1978, at Cal Jam at the Ontario Motor Speedway, we had 350,000 kids—the Woodstock of the seventies. Steven was out of coke, so he sent a kid in a Learjet back to Boston to get his stash.

  It’s hard to imagine things getting much worse, but then we agreed to be part of maybe the biggest piece-of-shit movie ever made—Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. When the Rolling Stones turned down the roles, we signed on to play the Future Villain Band. Our job was to put on Nazi-style uniforms, give shit to Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees, then try to turn pretty little Strawberry Fields into a groupie.

  We went out to Hollywood and stayed at L’Hermitage. We were living large, so much so that we got thrown off the set for being drunk and obnoxious. Later, back at our “Warehouse” outside Boston, George Martin, this nice English gentleman in a shirt and tie who had produced the Beatles, had the task of getting us to record a cover of “Come Together.” He had heard that we were insane in the studio and that we took forever, but he had also heard that we were big Jeff Beck fans. He told us there was a Jeff Beck concert that night, so we managed to nail the recording in two takes. He disappeared with the tape, and we raced over to Trax to hear Jeff Beck. Sir George had lied to us—no Jeff Beck. But he did get us to focus and finish the job.

  The album shipped platinum, but the joke was that it was returned double platinum. The movie was a huge embarrassment, and everybody hated it.

  During the time we’d been filming, I spoke to my dad over the phone, and he made this little offhand comment to me about how easy I had it now. I suggested that he come out to L.A. and see for himself. I appreciated how he had gone to bat for me when I’d been in the hospital, and I was thinking that maybe this was a time for us to mend a few fences. I rented a Rolls-Royce convertible for him, but when he showed up at LAX, he refused to drive it. He traded it in for a Mercedes.

  He had been out there four or five days with us when he walked into the room where I was sitting with some of my friends, smoking hash. My dad just came in and sat down—I forget who it was that he sat next to—but this friend of mine just handed him the pipe, and we lit him up. He got high with us. He got a little loose and started having the best fucking time! But then he looked at me and said, “Make sure your mother doesn’t find out about this!”

  Blue army

  Courtesy of Ron Pownall.

  This was as close to my father as I ever felt. Another day he sat with us when somebody started passing around a plate with lines of coke. He didn’t know what to do with this, so he asked me. I explained that you take the straw and you suck it up through your nose. So he did. About twenty minutes later, he looked at me and said, “So, Joey, how am I supposed to feel now?”

  I said, “You’re supposed to feel good.”

  He said, “I feel like…I have to go to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.”

  So he went to the bathroom, and he was yakking a mile a minute. Then he came back, saying, “How am I supposed to feel now? How am I supposed to feel now?” He was asking me how he was supposed to feel so much that he didn’t seem to ever feel what he was feeling. I don’t think he’d ever really allowed himself to experience anything just in the moment, so he really didn’t know how.

  He liked the hash, though. A couple of times after that, when I’d come home like for Thanksgiving, he would pull me aside and ask if we could get high.

  I think the truth of the matter is that for the first time, my father was seeing my world from within my world and not from his familiar setting in Eastchester where he was the king and he made the rules and where, for twenty years, I was an embarrassment to him. Out on the road my world was impressive—it was a very big deal to have a backstage VIP All-Access laminated pass, and Mickey had one because I was his son. It made him feel good—successful, I think. I’d made it big, and in my world, because of me, Mickey could rub shoulders with the “important.” In this world it was Mickey who had to fit in, and getting high with the guys was part of the deal. At this point in my life he was no longer judging me. Of course, he had no sense of my being an addict. I had some major money, I was making a movie, and he was loving it!

  During that same stint in L.A., Jack Douglas’s new secretary came out from New York to see what was going on. Her name was April; she was a jazz fan and really didn’t know who the hell Aerosmith was. I fell in love with her immediately. She told me she had a little girl named Asia who was four years old, and somehow that made me love her even more. This was her first time in L.A., and I took her to Chianti on Melrose, and we sat up talking until they closed the place.

  As we talked, I had this amazing feeling, a kind of joy I had never felt before. All I wanted to do was to be with this woman from morning till night, and then sleep together, and then be together again and again. Up to that point, it was the most joyous evening of my life. I didn’t even know I was falling in love because I was too busy doing it.

  I had been building a house in New Hampshire that I’d designed myself, and I invited her to visit. A few months later she agreed to come, but on the day of her arrival I was too gakked to remember to drive to the airport and pick her up. She pulled into my driveway in a taxi just as my ex-girlfriend, Kay Rhodes, was leaving, driving off in my Jeep. I met Kay at a show in Dallas, and I almost married her, but she was way too young. To say the least, this driveway overlap was a very bad scene, which required a great deal of repair work, meaning that it was a long time before April would even speak to me again.

  After I tracked April down, I asked her, “What do you want?”

  She said, “Love, honesty, stability.” She’d been married before and made it pretty clear she was tired of the same old bullshit.

  I said, “Okay.”

  She said, “Okay what?”

  I said, “I want the same thing.”

  So from that time on, it was me and April.

  On July 4, 1978, Aerosmith played Texxas Jam at the Cotton Bowl. It was 120 degrees, and kids had to be doused with fire hoses. Ted Nugent passed out and had to be carried offstage. Steven had to be carried onto the stage. Our tech, Henry Smith, carried him out piggyback, pretending it was a joke, but the fact was our front man couldn’t walk.

  That summer, five alleged coke dealers were murdered in a Boston pub called Blackfriars. Once again, the drugs and death thing was hitting a little too close to home.

  We were back to touring, and for the East Coast segment we worked out of Boston. My hands were black and blue from playing so much and hitting so hard. When we were back in Philadelphia, which had been the scene of the M-80 attack, someone threw a beer bottle onto the stage that shattered right in Steven’s face. He wanted to go on with blood all over him, but he got out-voted and we left.

  In November, the band headlined in Madison Square
Garden for the first time. My mother’s “auditory condition” was nowhere to be found. She sat in the first row with all her friends and her cousins and seemed to be eating it up. April sat on the side of the stage holding Asia, who fell asleep. I remember carrying this tiny little kid home and up the six flights of stairs to April’s apartment. I was being offered this sweet little taste of what it was like to be a dad, but I was too stoned to feel it.

  The boys of bad

  Courtesy of Ron Pownall.

  This was the year Joe’s house burned down, Sid Vicious murdered his girlfriend, and Keith Moon went out with his overdose. Columbia Records was just about done with us after the fiasco with Draw the Line, but we went on the Bootleg Tour with AC/DC as our opening act anyway. We were based at the Whitehall Hotel in Chicago for a month, fanning out in a Learjet to do shows in the Midwest. At the Fort Wayne Coliseum, we were threatened with incitement to riot.

  At a show in Hartford, when Joe was drunk on stage and falling down, the crowd almost rioted again, not because we got them so excited, but because we were so bad. Cyrinda and Elyssa were still going at each other, which was like having two Yoko Onos traveling with the same band.

  Elyssa provoked a lot of shit between Joe and Steven that accelerated the downward spiral. She was in Joe’s ear saying, “You don’t need these guys, you can do it yourself, yackity, yak, yak.” So, he started holding back music for a solo album.

  In May we had one last recording session for Night in the Ruts, but that was Joe’s finale with us in the studio. April and I got married in June 1979, and our wedding turned out to be the last time the whole band would be even slightly “together” for several years.

  Night in the Ruts was still not ready, but we went back on tour again. At the World Series of Rock, fans camped out all around Cleveland Stadium the night before. There were several robberies and shootings, and one guy was killed. Backstage, Elyssa threw a glass of milk at Tom’s wife, Terry, which started a fight that proved to be the last straw for all of us. Joe walked out. In August we canceled a world tour.

  We had been living in a bubble called rich and famous. Nobody could tell us anything, which meant that we had completely lost touch with reality. But now reality was going to come back and bite us in the ass.

  Courtesy of Ron Pownall.

  I NEVER MET A DRUG I DIDN’T LIKE: HAS ANYONE SEEN MY CAREER LATELY?

  6

  The band was on the road. I was out in California, staying with Sandy Jossen—my old buddy from Hebrew school—and we’d been drugging pretty heavily and then went to bed. A few hours later I got up and walked out the front door and down the street, only I was sound asleep. I sleep in the buff, so here I was sleepwalking through a luxury beach town, buck-naked. That’s a pretty good image for this whole period in my life.

  The whole wedding when April and I got married was a blur. Sandy was my best man, and we had a rabbi for the service in the backyard of my parents’ house in Eastchester. We had the reception at the New Rochelle Beach Club, but it was like they had booked two different parties at the same place on the same afternoon. My parents’ friends were at the bar or out on the dance floor, doing the hora, and the people from the music business were buzzing back and forth to the john, snorting coke. At least I had the good sense to spend some time with April’s little girl, Asia, who was five years old at the time. She stood on the tops of my feet as we danced. That was the best part of the whole affair.

  One of the few things that registered clearly was a shitload of lobster tail and filet mignon going back to the kitchen, uneaten. The big appetite for blow did a very good job of replacing any appetite there may have been for food. We did a lot of that—passing up some of the good things in life in order to jam the pleasure chemicals directly into the brain. They say lab mice will keep pressing the little bar that gives them a dose of coke until they die. If the drug’s freely available, the mice won’t bother to eat. Looking back, we were hardly different from mice.

  All the guys at the reception were coming up to me handing me envelopes, small ones, uniquely folded with no checks in them. These were single-gram envelopes of coke. By the time we left, I must have had a good half ounce on me. We stayed at a hotel in New York the first night, coked up and awake all night. We then headed to the Bahamas for our honeymoon, which just shows how out of it we were—who the hell goes to the Bahamas in June?

  When we came back, it was to the fiasco of our summer tour—bickering on stage and the “milk in the face” cat fight at Cleveland Stadium—and I was about as sick and tired of the same old bullshit as Joe was sick and tired of it. When he asked me to leave the band and sign on with the Joe Perry Project, I told him that I would…but only if he got David Hull to play bass. David was a friend of mine who at the time was playing with the Buddy Miles Express. Joe went after him and got him, but by then I had changed my mind. I had sussed it out and realized where my true loyalty was.

  In November the Project played Boston College and at the Paradise, with David Hull on bass and Ronnie Stewart as the drummer. That same month Aerosmith released Night in the Ruts. It had a few tracks from Joe, but the rest of the leads were filled in by Jimmy Crespo and Richie Supa.

  Steven continued to spiral further and further out of control, but we tried to keep Aerosmith alive. We continued to tour, bringing in Jimmy to replace Joe, and as usual, I just kept on keeping on. I was living in my own little state of oblivion—sort of an adult version of hiding in the attic with my slot cars. If I’d been lucky, my downward slide would have felt clearly scary and humiliating, making a conscious impact, but I don’t think I really processed any of it. I know I was puzzled, but the way I chose to avoid feeling shitty or insecure wasn’t slot cars anymore—it was coke and Stoli. I had a schedule of when to party and when to get straightened out enough in order to be able to play a gig, and that was about as conscious and deliberate as I could manage, and because I could do that, I thought I was doing fine.

  My own little state of oblivion

  Courtesy of Gene Kirkland

  But even if the stresses and resentments, anger and fears I’d experienced all my life weren’t clear in my mind, they were there building up inside of me. None of these things had a channel for expression, so they all turned inward. Looking back now, I realize how pissed I should have been. I was a professional and had reached a high level of success. I wanted to do my job and keep it going, but everybody was fucking it up—including me, and we couldn’t stop. We had almost unlimited access to drugs and to stuff. There were lots of crazy people hanging around stirring the pot and reinforcing the message that said indulging in it all was the thing to do—after all, we were rock stars. But we can’t blame anyone else for that. Those were the choices we made. We were the ones who took the drugs and decided who to spend our time with. We just weren’t minding the store, and the irony is that our old hometown rivals, J. Geil’s Band, chose that moment to come back from the dead with a vengeance, by which I mean a #1 album and a #1 single. The best we could do was to issue Greatest Hits to fill the gap. We had nothing else to offer. We were done.

  April and I rented space in this big house in Newton, Massachusetts, and in 1981 she got pregnant. Even the thought of having another kid didn’t slow down the drug intake for me. Actually, it became just one more excuse to get high.

  By the time our son, Jesse, was born, we had moved up to the place I’d been building in New Hampshire. Tom and Steven had turned me on to the Sunapee, New London area where Steven’s family had always kept a summer place. Our tech, Henry Smith—we called him “Henry Smith, the living myth”—had a log cabin up there, and I wanted a house just like his, only huge. I bought thirty acres in the little town of New London and designed the house that I was having built when I met April—a 6,000-square-foot log cabin. This was supposed to be my sanctuary to get away from the road and from my partners and from the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, but I never had all that much time to enjoy it. April moved in with me, and for a whi
le everything was cool. Little Asia went to school up there, and nobody bothered us while we walked the dog in the woods and had a great time.

  But really what was happening was that the anger I couldn’t express for all those years and from so many different areas was crushing me inside and getting me so fucked up that, more and more, I just started to shut down. If I was sitting around with someone and we’d just shared a gram, I’d probably be a blabbermouth, yakking as if I’d just downed about a half dozen cups of coffee. I’d start out very social, but then I’d keep pushing it with the drugs, and I would quickly get to the point where I ceased to be good company. I was always ready to do some lines. There was never enough for me, and the stronger the coke was, the more I liked it. If you had enough to keep me up for three days, then I was right there with you. But you do enough coke and you get paranoid. The bogeyman’s out the window and the monster’s under the bed.

  When I was high, I never liked to be outside or driving or public in any way. I always liked to be cloistered in a hotel room, in my bedroom, in my house, in a dressing room. Just like back when I was a kid, I always liked to be in some little nook or cranny, some kind of safe spot, a hiding place. But really, my hiding place was inside the cocaine, among other chemicals and behaviors that separated me. Hiding from the world, hiding from my own feelings.

  Drug use and all the behaviors that went along with it provided a place for me to deny the real pain and the depths of depression I was entering. It became more and more my permanent way of life. As time went on and I continued to do more drugs, I didn’t have to think about any pain or anger or the frustration and fear that came with having success drift away from me. Drugs and alcohol became the all-purpose response to every emotional stimulation. If it was something as fucked up as the state of Aerosmith—drugs and alcohol. If it was something great, like the birth of my son—drugs and alcohol.