by Joey Kramer
Tim had gone from running the band to running our whole lives. He had the same talent for rage that my father and Steven had. I had been afraid of confronting them, but with Tim, that fear was compounded by my sense of financial insecurity. Tim had built up his power over us like a cult leader. Aerosmithland was a culture of fear. All five of us in the band lived in fear. Each of us, in his own way, believed that if we slipped up on any little thing—boom! We would pay a price one way or another. Even our wives had to toe the line, and he was really crude about it. I remember his talking to the suits at the record company and referring to the wives as “the cunts,” as in, “we need to get the cunts under control.”
We never could differentiate between management and meddling because everything ran into everything else. Our need to find sobriety opened us up to what looked liked love and concern, which encouraged the trust, which extended into his actual job of managing the band, which overlapped with being friends.
Shortly after I got back to Boston, Tim called a meeting, freaked out about rumors that Steven and Joe were back drinking and doing drugs. All our band meetings had become these intervention-style confrontations and accusations. Tim even called Steven’s wife, Theresa, telling her that Steven had been sleeping around with a couple of girls in Miami. Then Tim insisted on creating a confrontational letter from all of us to Steven, telling him that he had to change or we wouldn’t be in the band with him anymore. At this point we were all still weak enough to go along with this bit of insanity. The call to his wife was way over the line, but it was this letter that really froze Steven out. Tim had been so worried about losing control of the band that he actually came close to breaking it up altogether. For a long time Tim maintained a precarious balance: he’d keep us separate and mistrusting of one another, all the while reassuring us that he had the back of whichever one of us he was talking to at any given moment. He created drama and urgency and then would be the hero who would keep it all together—like the arsonist who comes back as the fireman. Even with his brilliance at manipulation and control, Tim’s magic curtain was starting to fray. Trying to hold it all together, I think Tim himself was starting to fray.
By July all of us were back at Steps in Oxnard to have the group sessions Chatoff had suggested, sitting down to talk about just these kinds of boundary issues. Tim had agreed to let us meet as a band and then for him to come in later, but the band members started comparing notes and discovering contradictions.
When I said, “You guys never fuckin’ called me when I was here,” they came back with, “Tim told us you needed to be left alone. He told us not to bother you!” Divide, control, and conquer. Tim did the one thing I could never tolerate. He betrayed me as a friend. The more we talked, the more we uncovered. He’d been trashing April to Joe, then trashing Joe’s wife, Billie, to me. He’d robbed us of our brotherhood, but the truth was we’d made the dysfunction function simply by not knowing what it meant to take responsibility for ourselves and understand that we had the power to do so.
Chatoff listened, and then he sized up Tim perfectly: “He’s the one who’s been pushing all of you to get healthy,” he said, “and he’s the sickest dog of all.”
Tim must have feared that after spending five days with Chatoff and comparing notes, we were likely to get wise to him. When it was time for him to come join the discussion as we’d agreed, he refused. In Chatoff’s mind, that locked it in. He knew what our manager was all about and, now, so did we.
Tim understood a great deal about the band but ultimately underestimated what the band meant to itself and what made it function the way it did. He didn’t see that the relationship among these five guys was the foundation for everything. I mean, how many bands are still on top, with the same five guys, after so many years? It ain’t easy, and those relationships have to be nurtured—not exploited. But Tim proved to have become the show-biz cliché manager who would use any one of us as needed to keep a dollar from going unearned or uncollected. It felt as though we had become a commodity to Tim.
I think all of us, separately from one another, had looked at Tim’s cult-leader behavior—to the extent that we recognized it—as the price of doing business. This is what we had to endure to get the job done. The crazy irony was that we were so fucked up that Tim’s working to keep us isolated from one another actually helped keep the band together. Each of us was working so hard to conform, to stay “in,” that none of us thought of walking away. Trouble is, other than to make money, I don’t think any of us had a consistently clear idea of why we wanted to stay together and what it was we wanted to accomplish. These discussions helped us realize that, if making money was all there was to Aerosmith, maybe it was time to fold. But everyone was willing to make the necessary changes. I think Joe was the first to cut to the chase. Tim had said that Joe and his wife, Billie, were not close because they were in love but because they were entangled in an unhealthy, codependent relationship. Tim warned they had to go to therapy to deal with it, or it would deal with them and become a serious problem for the band. This clued Joe in enough to really question and doubt the stuff that Tim had been saying about—and manipulated us to say to—Steven.
No place I’d rather be
Courtesy of William Hames.
I felt bad that I had gone along with Tim’s shit, that I cosigned his behavior so willingly. I have made amends to Steven about that. I for one have to own that I (and I dare say we all) agreed to this sort of unspoken deal that Tim would be the one who took care of each of our day-to-day bullshit, which meant that none of us had to deal with it band member to band member. In return, we gave up our power to Tim and accepted his judgment far too much of the time. It wasn’t the first time Aerosmith had sold its soul to this kind of devil.
After the sessions with Chatoff, we went back East and called a meeting at the Four Seasons in Boston. We were very civilized, and Tim was too. We reclaimed Aerosmith, and we made a commitment to take back ownership of our own lives. When we told Tim “thanks, it’s been a good run,” he immediately went out and told the press that we were back on drugs. We started having meetings with Wendy Laister and Burt Goldstein, who had been with us for years, about taking over managing the band.
And then on top of everything else, I found out that John Kalodner wasn’t happy with the sound that had come out of those sessions with Glen Ballard down in Miami. They had worked digitally, and after listening, everybody said the record sounded too homogenized—it didn’t sound rock enough. When we re recorded in New York in the fall of 1996, everybody was pussyfooting around me, wondering if it was okay to say this, or wondering if it was okay to act this way or that way. I hung in, and by doing that, I proved a couple of important things to myself, one of which was that I could bear down and do what needed to be done (which also provided an opportunity to reclaim my turf). But, more important, I gave myself the opportunity to sit back and begin appreciating the strength I exercised in doing it.
Courtesy of Gene Kirkland
NOW THAT THAT’S OVER…
10
I was cruising along Route 3 just south of Boston, going to meet April for dinner. It was the middle of July in 1998 and a beautiful, hot, summer day. I actually had some time to chill that summer because while we were on the road a few months earlier at a show in Alaska, Steven broke his knee on stage, which meant the interruption of our tour. I was almost to the city when I realized I didn’t have any gas, so I pulled into a Sunoco station and up to the pump. The kid opened up my gas tank, put the nozzle in, then walked away to fill up another car. It was hotter than hell, and I was sitting there with the top down fumbling through my wallet to get out my credit card. Which is why I didn’t notice when the nozzle fell out of the tank. Or when it hit the ground and didn’t stop pumping. Or when it continued to pour gasoline onto the ground—maybe ten or twelve gallons—creating this little lake of gasoline underneath my car. I was in my Ferrari, which sits so low to the ground that the heat coming off the bottom of the car
was only a couple of inches above the gas.
When I looked up from my wallet, the flames were maybe fifteen feet high. They were licking up to the gas-station overhang. The car was engulfed, and I had to get out. I took off my seatbelt and opened the door, but the only way out was through the flames. I put my forearm over my eyes and just leaned into the flames. I was wearing shorts and a tank top, and my forearm caught fire. I burnt my leg from my thigh right down to my ankle, and my hand and arm from my fingernails right back to my shoulder. The skin there had melted and was just hanging off.
It took maybe twenty minutes before the ambulance came. They wrapped me in an ice pack, but that was like a joke up against the kind of pain I was in. About halfway to the hospital they pulled over, put in an intravenous line, and started pumping me with morphine.
As soon as we got to the hospital and the doors of the ambulance opened, I could see April standing there waiting for us. But by now the pain was even worse, and the medics had to get it under control before they could clean up the wounds. In the ER, the nurses kept giving me more morphine and kept asking me, “Mr. Kramer, is the pain under control yet?” But it wasn’t. It was the most excruciating physical thing I’ve ever felt in my life. God only knows how much narcotic they pumped into me, but eventually the pain subsided enough that they could clean the burns and bandage me up.
The doctors wanted me to spend a couple of nights in the hospital, but I just wanted to go home. I’d had enough pain and enough clinical settings, so we hired private nurses to come and take care of me down in Marshfield.
The band had been gearing up to go back on the road, but now my accident meant that we had to postpone the rest of the tour for maybe another month and a half. Nobody was too happy about that, and I was just angry at the whole thing. I was angry at the kid who left the pump unattended. I was angry at the owner of the gas station who never showed the kid where the main stops were so he could shut off the pump.
At work in the new millennium
Courtesy of Ross Halfin.
But once I got past the anger and the pain, I found a lesson in all this. Even when I think I’ve hit cruising speed and I seem to have life figured out, I never know what’s waiting just around the bend. I can be in the thick of it, living large, and in the blink of an eye it’s over.
Being nearly burned to death woke me up to just how precious life is, which includes being alive to my own emotions every second. I can have a yacht and six Ferraris and a house the size of Wellesley College and none of it can take the place of simply feeling okay when I wake up in the morning and being okay with the person who wakes up next to me.
After everything I’ve been through, I’m better about smelling the flowers. I’m even more aware of the crunch of my cereal in the morning. Which of course doesn’t mean that the old demons of fear and anxiety and uncertainty don’t make a visit from time to time.
Back in the nineties, I had needed some serious prodding before I was ready to buy our first really big house. In 2002 April wanted to tear that place down and rebuild something even bigger. In fact, she was so insistent that I just let it go. I acquiesced, and in August of that year the bulldozers came and flattened the place, which was kind of tough for me to watch. I had gone through enough anguish just deciding to buy that big house in the first place—also at April’s insistence. But there I was watching them tear it down. And then I left to go on the road and took my anxiety about the whole process with me.
I had been off antidepressants for over a year, but with the anxiety I felt after the house experience and having to face going back out on tour, I started taking them again. Only they didn’t kick in right away. Four or five weeks went by with no results, until we were out in California for a show. The hotel doctor there, Dr. Shapiro, turned me on to a psychiatrist out there, Todd Sadow, who got the mix of meds just right.
During this time, from August until early spring 2003, April traveled with me, along with our dog, Harry. We were all on the bus together, but I wasn’t really bringing much to the table as far as our relationship went. I had all I could do just to get on stage and play every night. When I left my drums at the end of a show, I would come back for the encore to find a different note taped to my snare. One of those notes said, “J.K., I’m right here loving you. Your April.” Maybe it should have, but it didn’t always make me feel better. What I still needed work on, of course, was learning to feel better without a crutch. I needed to be better at feeling okay without anything from outside my own skin—drugs, booze, toys, or fame. I was working on it, but even with going to meetings, something still wasn’t right.
I had learned that being healthy means being able to recognize my emotions and not freak out because I’m experiencing them. The better I am in feeling fundamentally okay—not the greatest or the worst but just okay—the less any of the other shit that comes along is going to bother me. And that okay feeling has to be independent of how others might try to make me feel. Which is not to say I should be a narcissistic asshole, thinking I’m so fine when in reality I’m being a shit to everyone else, or so self-absorbed that I lack compassion for how anybody else feels. The trick for me is having the right kind of boundaries—knowing which feelings belong to me and which are yours.
I also was able to understand that I couldn’t be there for other people, or for myself, if my whole life is about hiding, whether that means hiding in drugs or in denial. Being an addict is both. As an addict, I convinced myself that nobody knew what I was doing—as if, when I used to go out and spend $1000 on blow, come back home, and not answer the phone for a couple of days, nobody was going to figure it out. And even if other people didn’t know what I was up to, I knew. And that secret life kept me away from other people. It kept all my pain bottled up, which made and kept me sick.
After I came out of Steps, I spent a year or a year and a half on my own with Steve Weinstein, a therapist just north of Boston. I would describe something to him, and he would look at me and say, “And, Joey, how did you feel about that?”
I would look at him with this blank expression on my face, not knowing what the fuck he was talking about. And he would look at me and say, “Man, you were angry. That’s anger, man.” This was after my time at Chit Chat, getting clean and sober, after my time at Sierra Tucson, working on codependency and family-of-origin issues, and after my stint at Steps, dealing with major depression. So this business of reconnecting your head and your heart when they’ve been disconnected since age two is no easy thing.
Weinstein not only helped me recognize the anger I’d always had going on inside, but he also gave me an education about what anger does and how anger can destroy a person when it’s turned inward. Weinstein helped me realize that my anger was not something to be afraid of and that by naming it and facing it, I could handle it. Some people turn it outward, taking it out on other people—raging, being condescending, just being difficult in general. And then there are other people like me who are too afraid of their anger to name it for what it is, who think it would destroy the whole world if they ever felt it and let it loose. I lost the ability to express anger directly. When I swallowed my anger instead, when I turned it inward, the emotion became resentment, and as I learned from Lou Cox, resentment destroys the container it’s kept in. My hidden and festering resentment became depression. Untreated, that depression turned into an emotional breakdown.
With Weinstein’s help, I learned to identify my feelings and begin to differentiate them: anger from sadness, fear from shame and guilt. This process helped me to understand which emotional response would lead me into self-loathing—which is a big part of depression.
All my work in therapy has helped me move forward to achieve balance in real life. When I get angry now, I can identify the feeling and name it, and because I know what it is, I can talk about it. I can express it in a healthy way. I don’t necessarily have to flip out and have steam coming out of my ears, but I don’t have to internalize it either. Just being able to sa
y that something makes me angry is a whole new thing for me, and it feels really good. It’s also a whole lot healthier than swallowing the emotion and carrying it around with me until it makes me sick.
If I’m angry at somebody now, sometimes I let myself really get into a froth, because that shows right out front what I’m feeling. I have to push it sometimes because it’s too easy for me to just talk about it very matter-of-factly, which is almost the same thing as not expressing it at all. To get excited is to really get it out for me. I don’t do that very often, because the fact is, I get angry less and less now that I see myself differently in the world.
Along with all this work on learning to feel my own emotions, I’ve also learned how not to take on other people’s shit, not to make their shit my shit. This means that I don’t have to take their shit personally. At the same time, I’ve worked on being man enough—human enough—to own up to my own shit and apologize when I’m wrong. That’s the only way both the other person and I can move on. It’s still a continuing battle, of course. I like to be close to people, and I like to be friendly and take care of people. So I have to be very astute about finding the proper balance between being aloof—setting too rigid a boundary—and getting sucked in.
It’s only rock ’n’ roll
Courtesy of Ross Halfin.
Doin’ it for “The Rugrats”
Courtesy of Ross Halfin.
It wasn’t until I’d been clean and sober for nine years and had a nervous breakdown that I actually realized I was a pretty decent guy with a lot of compassion and a lot of love for a lot of people. When I’m in what they call a healthy relationship, I should be getting some of that love back. It’s a give and take, with compassion on both sides, and nobody running roughshod over the other person, bossing and bullying, and nobody cowering and deferring.
