Hit Hard

by Joey Kramer

  Richard Guberti, one of the guys I spent the summer of ’69 with at that big house in Harrison, New York, was up at my place during the last few weeks before Jesse was due. He and I had had a falling out shortly after our summer of dealing drugs, but then he showed up at my wedding, and we reconnected. I’d been getting high and snorting cocaine the whole time that April was pregnant, and Richard and I were up all night, totally blotto, just before I had to drive April down to Newton-Wellesley Hospital for the birth. She had a cesarean, and I went through all that with her, and then I spent the night there, and I spent the next day there, and I loved the fact that I had a new son. On the other hand, I couldn’t handle it emotionally. I left April and Jesse resting up in the hospital, and I drove back up to my house in New Hampshire, where Richard and I sat down and proceeded to get high for two days. That’s how I welcomed my son into the world.

  After our two-day celebration, Richard and I drove down to see April in the hospital. As soon as we walked into the room, she could tell what we’d been doing, and she was not real happy about it. I should have been down there with her—even I knew that. But at the same time, I didn’t know how to do the right thing, and the shame of being absent made me want to get high and be somewhere else even more.

  If it was a rainy day, it was a reason to get high. If the sun was shining, it was a reason to get high. I wanted to get high all the time. I was also a binger. I would get high for three, four, five days in a row. I would so overdo it that, by the fourth or fifth day, I would be sick of the shit and say that was it. No more. Then I’d go for a week or so without doing any drugs at all.

  But then after the week, even though I said I wouldn’t, I’d do it again, and I’d be off to the races. Because I was abstinent before shows, I rationalized that I could do that much more and made up for lost time the minute I got off stage. As soon as I was done, those “make up for lost time” lines would be sitting there waiting for me, and as soon as I got back to that dressing room, I would snort my way right out of town. Still sweating like a pig, even before I could get out of my stage clothes, I would snort up a gram and down a few shots with two, maybe three beers to even me out.

  Everything sucked at this point during my career, everything was falling apart, and I would get seriously bored on stage. We were just going through the motions musically—and not even doing that very well. I’d look over at the set list and think, Ah, five songs to go. Only five songs to go. Ah, only three more songs to go. All I wanted to do was start getting high again. So I would just count down the minutes before I could climb back into my little coke cocoon. There was plenty of time to do a couple of lines between the last song and the first encore, but after that shit at Boston College where they had to prop me up behind my drums, I never crossed that line again.

  Now, of course, I realize that giving myself points for exercising some self-restraint was total bullshit, self-serving active addict doubletalk. That’s like justifying the greasy cheeseburger and french fries with ketchup and an ice cream sundae, because, “Hey, I only drink Diet Coke.”

  Even if I limited my intake to after the shows, once I got started, I couldn’t stop. When I stayed up all night, that affected the next show. I’d start out staying up the night of a show, but the next night was free—a normal night to get some sleep and get ready for the next gig. But after a while I’d end up getting high both nights. Way too often I’d just stay up all night into the next morning, into that day, into that night, right up to the show time. The first high, the first line off the stage, and the shots and the beers and the whole atmosphere of letting go and getting into that kind of head was fun. Everybody around me was doing the same thing. But then the hours would go by, and the other people would peel off to go do their own thing. Nobody else was around. Then the sun would start coming up, and the birds would start chirping, and I hated the daylight and resented the birds’ songs, and I wouldn’t have had any sleep at all. But it would be time to deal with the day, so I’d chop out another line and somehow do the do all over again.

  Sometimes I’d binge so long and hard that it would seem like I’d hit a state of straight again. The cocaine high would quickly have too hard an edge for me, so I’d have more booze; if the booze brought me down too far…more coke. I was self-medicating up and down, trying to find some kind of equilibrium. I’d become so disconnected that the natural way of finding a happy medium just wasn’t available to me. I balanced coke with Tuenols, Seconals, and Quaalude, and the Tuenols, Seconals, and Quaaludes with coke and whatever to drink. Sometimes I would crush up Quaaludes and coke together, which was sort of like throwing all your chips randomly across the roulette table, just to see what would happen. Three or four days would go by, and too often I would wake up thinking, Where am I? What am I doing?

  All in all, I suppose I was lucky just to keep waking up.

  As long as my stash held out, I could continue through the day, and by the time it was four or five in the afternoon I’d be completely fuckin’ delirious. I would not have slept. I would not have eaten because I had no appetite. I couldn’t wash my face—I wasn’t even sure when I had to piss. I could barely sit up, but as long as I was still conscious, I could sure as hell stick another line up my nose. So I would, and then I’d remember that I had a show to do that night, and so I was in big fuckin’ trouble. And by then the stash would have just about run out, so I’d really get serious about connecting, scoring, copping. But until that would all go down, alcohol would do just fine.

  I can remember nights going to a show after having maybe ten days off, meeting Tom and Brad on the plane. We’d snort the whole way, getting shitfaced out of our brains.

  April always felt guilty about using with Asia around, so she would rein it in a little and try to get some sleep so she could be a good mom in the morning. My philosophy was that if you were not going to enjoy it, don’t do it and if you're going to do it, enjoy it.

  Asia was a very smart little girl. She would get up early, and I would have been up all night. So at six in the morning, we used to sit and talk. I was gakked out of my skull, but we’d have Cheerios together and watch cartoons while April slept.

  Asia had a very deep voice for a little girl, so even at seven years old she seemed very old and wise. We’d talk about how her mom and I got together and how it was fun that we’d gotten together, and we’d talk about her dad and how come her mom and her dad had split up.

  This little kid taught me how to be open to and accepting of who she was—which was the exact opposite of the situation when I was little. I’d never been around young children since becoming an adult, but when I got married, I got instant family. I had to wonder how this sweet little kid felt about all the craziness. But the conversations with her over those Cheerios taught me that in her child’s eyes everybody was good unless there were clear indications to the contrary. Whatever came down, it was cool, and she would deal with it. Being seven years old, she didn’t know anything about the band, and she didn’t look at me as being any different than any other dad, which was terrific, because most of the time people figured they knew the whole story about me the minute they knew what I did for a living. So Asia and I got along right from the get-go. I helped bring her up as if she were my own, and I love her as if she were my daughter. As a family man, however, I had to take care of business, and my business—Aerosmith—was slipping seriously off the rails. There was less and less going on, but I still needed the steady income. I owned a piece of a rehearsal studio called Top Cat, and I started trying to write, doing production work, anything to try to keep the ball rolling. I even tried to start a band called Renegade. We had Tom and my friend from New York, Bobby Mayo, who had played with Peter Frampton, and Jimmy Crespo, and Marge Raymond, who had been the singer in a band called Flame. We did a showcase at S.I.R. and started to cut a record. We lined up a record deal, but then Steven suddenly decided he was ready to do another Aerosmith record. Jimmy and Tom and I all belonged in Aerosmith, so that was that.
We dropped Renegade and started back to work.

  Steven had moved to New York, and we were going to record at the Power Station there, so Tom and I commuted down every week. Monday through Friday we were in the studio, and then on Friday night we drove back, snorting all the way. When we got home, we just snorted more coke and started doing shots, and next thing you know, it was Monday morning and time to get back on the road to New York.

  They would call sessions at 6 a.m., and I would come in after being up all night getting high. I would get there and people would be all stuffed into the bathroom free basing. We didn’t call it crack back then, but they were smoking coke all the same. Then I’d go into the studio, and on the console would be the white lines. At first I thought it was more cocaine, but these were lines of heroin. Fucked up like that, it would take us twelve hours to do twenty minutes worth of work. Brad did some tracks with us, but then he got disgusted and walked out. He put together one album with Derek St. Holmes from Ted Nugent’s band, and then he moved to L.A. and started touring with Joe.

  I think it was mostly the sense of waste that got to Brad. We’d be so high that we’d get into a thing and become distracted by all the tiny details that don’t really matter. Doing drugs sort of melds people together, which is part of the reason that I did it in the first place, but this means that you start yakking and start trying to solve the world’s problems, and you can talk all night repeating yourself a hundred times with only slight variations. The next day you wake up, and if you remember any of the bullshit, you say to yourself, well shit…sounded good last night. It was all just a fucking waste of time like some freshman dorm room bull session…only with the meter running.

  We were paying through the nose for every hour we sat there dicking around in that recording studio. The Power Station was brilliant in its day, and our producer, Tony Bongiovi who owned the place, was pulling what little hair he had left out of his head. Tony was the consummate professional, and he just couldn’t deal with the nonsense that was going on among us. After a while he gave up, and they brought Jack Douglas in, because he was just as much into the drugs as we were. Jack got it finished and mixed, and the record is what it is. After we’d dropped $1.5 million on studio time, Rock in a Hard Place was released in September 1982 and hit number 32 on the charts. We also did a pretty primitive-looking video of lightning strikes to promote it.

  The record doesn’t suck. There’s some really good stuff on it. But it’s not a real Aerosmith record because it’s just me, Steven, and Tom—with a fill-in guitar player. Brad played rhythm on “Lightning Strikes,” the single; otherwise, it’s Jimmy doing all the guitar work.

  Our lineup on stage was now Jimmy Crespo in place of Joe, Rick Dufay instead of Brad, and Bobby Mayo as a sideman on keyboard, but the sound and the chemistry just wasn’t there. By the time we started touring again, we had slipped further down the food chain. We played the smaller venues, and definitely no more Lear jets. When we played the Tangerine Bowl in Miami, it was second billing to Journey. People wanted the real-deal Aerosmith or nothing at all.

  The problem wasn’t just the lineup—it was the drugs. At the Civic Center in Portland, Maine, Steven collapsed on stage, and the show was canceled. Then he had a motorcycle accident and ripped off his heel and spent two months in the hospital. We thought some of these New England gigs would be like a homecoming. Instead, everybody was yelling out from the crowd, “Where’s Joe?”

  Courtesy of Gene Kirkland

  About the same time the record came out, Steven went to see the Joe Perry Project at the Bottom Line in New York. It was supposed to be a fence-mending deal, but nothing came of it.

  By this time my own cash flow had gone from bad to worse, so eventually I sold the New Hampshire place, and we moved to a rented house in White Plains, New York. I had to keep borrowing money just to stay afloat. Still, even when everything bottomed out for me, it was still a “high bottom.” Tom was also okay—he took a sublet in Manhattan—and I think Brad was okay, although he had to sell all his classic guitars for a song. Steven and Joe were the ones who were really banging against the bottom of the tank, because they were the ones with the most expensive habits. Steven had royalty income that should have kept him going, but he also had huge expenses and huge debts. He was reduced to living at the Gorham Hotel in New York, subsisting on cash doled out by Krebs. That fact, combined with Steven’s addictions, just meant that Krebs had that much more control over him. Joe at this point had a new manager, Tim Collins, who was dedicated to turning things around for Joe. When the IRS put a padlock on his house, Joe wound up sleeping on Tim’s couch.

  Collins started out managing the Joe Perry Project, saying he was going to bring Joe Perry back to life, but it didn’t go so well. Joe was touring in a van and playing small clubs.

  In the spring of 1983 Aerosmith played the Worcester Centrum. Joe showed up backstage, and he and Steven disappeared into the dressing room to snort some smack. This show was meant to be a big local homecoming for the band, but Steven passed out on stage and once again we had to cancel. I had a big fight with Steven afterward because he came onstage and made a fucking fool of himself. I was insulted and embarrassed, and I wanted to tell him; I grabbed him, but he pulled away and I ripped his shirt. The only difference between him and me, in this regard, was that I did my drugging offstage.

  For years these guys had convinced themselves that they could perform fucked up and get away with it. Everyone used to catch a buzz before going on. Brad used to drink beer, and Tom used to throw back Jack Daniels, and it was okay. Until it wasn’t. Now it was totally out of control, and the results were fucking humiliating.

  In October 1983 Joe released Once a Rocker, Always a Rocker. It was his third solo album, and it bombed just like the others. He could no longer afford serious drugs, so he was drinking everything in sight. That winter he bottomed out, playing to empty clubs in L.A. that couldn’t have held more than a hundred people, standing room only. Tim started working him over, badgering him to call Steven. Rock ’n’ roll had moved on, and there were new bands like U2 and Van Halen and Def Leppard that had taken our place. But maybe Aerosmith could make a comeback. Maybe Joe had learned that a solo career wasn’t necessarily all it was cracked up to be. Maybe the place for him to really shine was alongside Steven, with me and Tom and Brad—the original Aerosmith.

  Eventually, Joe and Steven sat on the phone together and sort of worked out a deal. One of Joe’s conditions was no more using Krebs as the manager. Joe wanted Tim to take over, and the rest of us went along. One of Tim’s first jobs would have to be extricating us from Krebs, which was not exactly a slam dunk. Getting us out from under the arrangement with Krebs and Leber would take two more years and lots of legal wrangling.

  I had my doubts about Tim, but I was willing to do pretty much anything that would bring Joe back in and get us going again. I even played drums for the Joe Perry Project now and then, helping Joe finish off his commitments, trying to get him freed up so we could revive Aerosmith. Tom was also on board, and eventually we talked Brad back into the fold.

  Tim got Steven and his girlfriend Teresa to fly up from New York. Steven arrived at the airport looking like some kind of refugee with all his stuff in a cardboard box. Some reporter described him as looking like the Queen of France, but he was really the Sun King, because everything still revolved around our front man.

  We started rehearsing, borrowing more money, not just to live on, but for our tour and to mount our legal battles with Krebs. One guy who really believed in us—putting up a lot of cash—was Jack Boyle of Concerts/Southern. As a promoter, he was to the Southeast what Bill Graham was to the Northwest—a real force and a great guy to do business with.

  In May of 1984 we launched our Back in the Saddle Tour, but here’s where reality caught up with us. Overcoming our personal differences and recommitting to the partnership wasn’t enough. On stage Steven couldn’t remember some of the songs. I don’t mean that he couldn’t rememb
er the lyrics; I mean he couldn’t remember that he ever wrote them or recorded them or had ever heard them before. During one California show he stopped singing and simply sat on the edge of the stage and started telling jokes, but this band on drugs had become the joke. I remember looking over at Tim standing on the edge of the stage and giving him this look like, Yeh? So what are we supposed to do with this?

  With Back in the Saddle we just wanted to get out in front of an audience again. We did seventy or more shows with no album to promote, which is always going to be a lackluster proposition. On top of that, Leber-Krebs had lawyers at the performances with court orders, attaching the receipts. We set up a different legal entity each night for each concert so we could stay one step ahead of the sheriff. Some nights we were performing under the auspices of Large Penis, Inc. Other nights it was Big Belly Productions. After a while Krebs gave up and left us alone. The Back in the Saddle Tour made some money, and by touring like bastards, we were able to repay Jack Boyle and all our other investors.

  Everybody was seeing a profit except me, because I owed what Krebs claimed to be something on the order of $650,000 for past living expenses—and I couldn’t prove it wasn’t true. Joe and Steven stepped up and allowed me to borrow money on their royalties to get the lump sum to clear the books with Krebs, and then I paid them back over time. I spent the first two years of our being back together just working to get myself out of hock.

  Once we had our chops back, we were ready to get back in the studio, and God knows why, given the shape we were in, but John Kalodner, one of the industry’s most brilliant and successful A&R men from Geffen Records, was interested in working with us. The one thing he insisted on was that we bring on a song doctor, an outside song-writing expert to help dress up the songs and the tracks. The idea was that our stuff would still be 100 percent Aerosmith, but with a kind of insurance policy for commercial hooks and such. The result was Done with Mirrors, produced by Ted Templeman, who pretty much discovered the Doobie Brothers and worked with Van Halen, Van Morrison, Little Feat, and Nicolette Larson. We released the album in November 1985, but the critics said it sounded unfinished. Even if the songs had been killer, though, the packaging never gave it a chance. There was no Aerosmith logo, so sitting in the record bin it looked like a mistake. All the more so because the type was printed in mirror image—you needed to hold it up to a mirror to read it. The whole concept was like one of those half-assed ideas people come up with when they’re fucked up on drugs—which of course we were. Until we got clean and sober, our effort to resuscitate the band seemed to be just so much pissing into the wind.