Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir by Steven Tyler

full of water and we couldn’t leave. I still have a Coca-Cola cooler that I’d stolen, and I went around picking up everybody’s pipes. There’s a banner that hung behind us at Woodstock with a stick figure holding a cornucopia and with a dick, or a tail, between his legs. I stole that, too. I had Aerosmith’s seamstress, Francine Larness, and her sister duplicate it and I still have them.
    At Woodstock I sat and watched Hendrix and Joe Cocker and the Who especially. I had those deranged thoughts watching them up onstage: “Someday I could be that spectacular.” The experience of the first Woodstock totally outweighed the second one that we played at in 1994. We had all those people backstage, and the press is coming to you. Every time I went out of my trailer there were millions of flash cubes in my face. It wasn’t my idea of Woodstock. I would rather have been out there rolling around in the mud. Had I been there as a spectator, I’d have been fucked-up and had that experience again.
    At the original Woodstock I was in a tent, and suddenly the tent was making this warping noise from the helicopter blades—it was shivering—it was alive ! I went outside, my brain on LSD. I was tripping my ass off. I was atomized, sparks were flying off me like a Roman candle, and fuck me if it wasn’t raining frankfurters! Incoming ! The helicopter was talking to me: “GET OUT OF THE WAY!” it said, like Jehovah out of a cloud, except it was army helicopters dropping six hundred pounds of hot dogs (and pots and pans to cook them) in huge nets. They would hover ten feet off the ground and let their payload drop. I went over and I picked up a pot . . . and started drumming. Then another guy came over and he did the same. Pretty soon, a dozen people banging on pots, then two dozen . . . three. Ken Kesey was there banging on a pot! The original bona fide hippie drum circle. And the beat would change as people dropped out and came in and dropped out and came in again. This went on for days . . . or at least hours that seemed like days.
    The Vietnam War was terrible, but we made peace by smoking pot. That’s something that we don’t have today. It’s all fucking Ecstasy and clubs and, er, fucking. Back then you passed a joint, and it was “make love, not war.” Everybody was your friend. You’d make eye contact with someone and end up smoking a joint with them. You started talking sweet and beautiful shit. In the sixties everyone had a common ground . . . and pot and the drugs were a big fuckin’ part of it. There’s your triangulation: Pot, Rock, Vietnam (and civil rights).
    We used to give the peace sign, and if someone nodded, you’d say, “Wanna get high, man? You got a joint?” And it was lovely. Today you don’t know what somebody’s thinking. Today, I see people in the street and don’t know if they’re going to hug me or mug me. You know, I don’t really care if you get on the Internet, text, or Twitter . . . we were accessing the fucking cosmos! Okay, now I do sound like a character out of a Crumb comic—or Oscar the Grouch. But 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.
    I ’d drop acid and go into the city. You’d look down at the sidewalk and it was melting. I was walking on a great gray, sparkling snake. It shivered when you stepped on it. The sidewalk was alive ! And then there was the Electric Circus in the East Village with the Rubber Room. I’d take acid and go in there. I lived there! The Rubber Room was this padded space made for people who were tripping, because they were going “YEE-HAA!” and they didn’t want anybody to hurt themselves.
    One Sheridan Square in the West Village—the Stones and the Animals would go there. I’d sit there listening to that song “Judy in Disguise (with Glasses)” by John Fred and His Playboy