CHAPTER ONE Now What'd I Do? The True Adventures of Steven Tallarico You could also call this "Two Cellos and a Canoe. --Steven Tyler The Pennacook called the big lake, Soonippi, "Goose Water," for the millions of migrating birds that darkened the sky above the mountains twice a year. The Indians hunted and snared animals and fished along the lakeshore and the Sugar River until they started dying of smallpox around the time white settlers began arriving in New Hampshire along the old Military Trail from Rhode Island and Massachusetts in the 1760s. The legend goes that the last two Pennacooks were a pair of young lovers who took refuge from the spotted sickness inside the Indian Cave, the large rock-ledge formation overlooking Sunapee Harbor. Their bones were supposedly found many years later when hunters stumbled upon their hideaway. The town of Sunapee was settled by families named Trow, George, Colby, Smith. For the next hundred years, it was a rural mountain backwater of farms and mills and occasional summer people attracted by the rugged mountains, Sunapee and Kearsarge, and steamboat rides on the 3,000-acre lake. Other towns sprung up: Georges Mills, New London, Newport, Claremont. In the 1870s the first big hotels were built, and Lake Sunapee enjoyed a sixty-year run as a resort for wealthy New Yorkers. The Granliden Hotel, built in 1906, attracted important politicians and corporate executives, while the Ben Mere Inn and Indian Cave Lodge housed people from the Boston area who would later buy land and build summer cottages of their own. The hotels in turn attracted musicians for their house orchestras; later the big swing bands considered Sunapee an important and pleasant stop on their regular routes. The Depression of the 1930s ended Sunapee's days as a fancy resort. Many of the mills closed after World War II, and the population began to drift away. All the old wood-frame hotels were torn down, and Lake Sunapee gradually became a typical quiet New England family resort, where young kids had their own motorboats and an ice cream cone tasted pretty good on Saturday night down at the harbor. This was the genius of the place where, during the late 1950s and 1960s, rock 'n' roll bands gradually took over from the dance bands and combos that entertained Lake Sunapee on the weekends. After the Beatles hit, it was all over. Lake Sunapee was the address where the world first encountered Aerosmith as a rough beast, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born ... 1: Animal Crackers at Trow-Rico Lodge Steven Tyler: There's a life force that you get from your ancestors. My story starts with four brothers from Calabria, the arid mountainous southern toe on the boot of Italy. The family name was Tallarico, and for generations they lived in the town of Contronei, a place of olive groves and goats and a feudal economy that still exists today. The Calabrians are tough people, famous for the music and dancing that dominated raucous local festivals, so it was no accident my grandfather Giovanni Tallarico and his three brothers were all accomplished musicians. Drought hit Calabria in the late 1800s, followed by huge earthquakes, which forced thousands of Calabrese to emigrate to America. Giovanni and his brothers arrived in New York and began working as professional musicians. By 1900 Giovanni was a professor at the Kimball School of Music in Waterbury, Connecticut. The Tallarico brothers played classical concerts--Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn--as a quartet: Giovanni and Francesco on mandolins, Michele on guitar, and Pasquale on piano. I have a tour brochure somewhere that advertises a 1918 appearance by the Tallarico Brothers at a fancy hotel in Akron, Ohio, "Rubber Capital of the World." They played chamber music all over the Eastern United States, and in the 1920s one of my grandfather's favorite places to play was the sumptuous Granliden Hotel on Lake Sunapee, a famous resort in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, a place that didn't take Prohibition that seriously. My grandfather Giovanni married Constance Neidhart in 1912. She was a pianist who had studied at the Peabody Conservatory. They lived at 124th and Broadway in Manhattan and she gave piano lessons and rented out practice time on one of the two pianos in their big apartment. Over the years some of the people she worked with became famous. She taught and eventually gave a piano to a local Harlem kid named Seymour Kaufman, who became the Broadway composer Cy Coleman. In the 1950s two young piano students, Ferrante and Teicher, who later did "Exodus" and other hit movie themes, practiced in her living room. She was known as Mrs. T., and believe me, she was a big presence in my life. In 1922, my grandfather was working in Lake Sunapee when someone told him about a property for sale, going for a song. Trow Hill Farm was a house and barn on 250 acres of fields and woods facing Route 11, which runs down the western side of the lake, and I think he got it for under $5,000 from Henry Trow, whose family ran the local sawmill. He brought up my grandmother and their two sons, Ernie and my father Victor, and they became pillars of Lake Sunapee's summertime musical community. In 1935, they built a few cabins on the property and started Trow-Rico, a children's music camp that lasted until 1940. After that, Trow-Rico Lodge became a musical resort, where people could rent cabins and enjoy the recitals my grandmother staged in the barn on Sunday afternoons. My father, Victor Tallarico, began playing piano as a little boy. He trained at Juilliard in New York and has worked as a musician all his life. As a young man, he played in New York society bands--Ben Cutler, Lester Lanin, Mayer Davis, Joe Carroll--and later, while I was growing up, he worked as a high school music instructor and as a private piano teacher. My parents met while my father was in the Army, at Fort Dix, New Jersey. My mother, Susan Blancha, was a secretary, and my father was actually dating her best friend. One night Victor came to pick this girl up. She wasn't home, so Victor asked Susan out instead when he heard her playing the piano. They got married after the war and moved in with my grandparents not far from the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, which is where they were living when I was born in 1948. We lived there until I was four years old. I grew up under my father's piano. I'd sit under his big Steinway and play games and pretend things while listening to him practice for two hours every day. So I was literally immersed in Debussy, Chopin, and Liszt. That's where I got this emotional thing I have with music. My father was a schooled musician who was very much into technique. He'd play a Beethoven sonata in the living room and I'd almost stop breathing. So I got all my emotions and feelings through music, which gives off twice the emotions and feelings of any other art form. (The time I spent sitting under that piano still influences the way I write songs. It's easy for me to write at the piano. I'll play something in the key of C, F, F minor. If Joe or somebody plays some chords, I'll sing a melody over it. My gift has to do with all this listening to my father.) The summer after I was born--and every summer after that--my parents took me up to New Hampshire, so that's where my childhood memories really come alive. We'd leave New York about seven in the morning and get there at night. On the way we'd see the giant stone dinosaur by the roadside near Hartford. My mom smoked in the car, we counted phone poles until I went crazy, and it was great to stop for a picnic of bread and hard-boiled eggs near Bellows Falls, Vermont, which was always called Fellows Balls in our family (hence my love for lyrical twists). I was usually asleep when we got to Sunapee, so my father would carry me in the house and when I woke up, we'd be there. From the time I learned to walk, I was a total mountain boy, always barefoot and wild. I fished in our little pond, hunted birds with my slingshot--twenty BBs shooting through the trees, fffwwttt--and I'd come back with sixteen blue jays hanging from my belt. Later I trapped animals and sold the pelts. From June to September up there, no one could even find me. I was always in the woods or hiding in the hayloft above the barn with my cousin Augie. I was off in my own world, the closest thing to heaven there was until I was old enough to push a lawn mower. On weekends, the Tallaricos and our guests would gather for shows and parties in our barn. It had a concrete floor and a Ping-Pong table, a bar, a stove, and a Coke machine, which was my job to fill up. There was also a "stage," with a curtain pulled across the floor, and there my show business career began, putting on skits every Friday night. My Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Ernie would get all us kids together and we'd have rehearsals. The first thing Aunt Phyllis taught me was to pantomime this song called "Animal Crackers," which went "I'm just wild about animal crackers ... firecrackers won't do!" This was my showstopper, a huge hit. From the time I was three years old, people would yell at me, "C'mon, Stevie! Do `Animal Crackers'!" I also did "There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza." Aunt Phyllis had me lip-synch to Nat "King" Cole records, and people thought this was really funny. When the kids were through, the adults would put on little plays, musicals, shadow acts, poetry, and dancing. Some of this was hilarious, like when Uncle Ernie would dress up as a doctor and Aunt Phyllis as a nurse and they'd make one of the guests give birth to a huge doll. Aunt Phyllis was my second mother and Uncle Ernie my second father, because my father was always in the barn practicing on the Chickering piano for the Sunday night recitals. People would come out from town and my father and grandmother and some of their students would play. Aunt Phyllis was the one who taught me how to perform. She was the one. We had another ritual at Trow-Rico: making hard cider in the fall. We'd get apples from the all-you-can-pick orchard, grind them through the cider press, and let the juice ferment. It got bubbly like champagne and tasted great. One night my cousin Augie and I drank a whole bottle with our Boy Scout mess kit tin cups in my cabin. At first it was great. I went over to the barn and started working the room. Then it hit me and I started getting off, got scared, staggered out, and fell down in front of the double cabin. I found my way back to my room on my hands and knees, following the trail of apples that had fallen off the trees onto the path. It was my first time drunk, something I've never forgotten. 2: Nigger Lips Steven Tyler: I started getting into trouble before I learned to walk. At nine months, I swallowed a penny. They pumped my stomach, and my mom put the penny in my baby album. Then I ate an ant cup, which was another trip to the emergency room. Today you'd say I was hyperactive but back in the 1950s I was a problem child. People were always yelling at me and my mantra was "Now what'd I do?" My parents moved to an apartment in the Bronx when I was four--5610 Nederland Avenue--and I started school the next year at PS 81. I was this skinny little kid who got picked on. I got called Nigger Lips a lot at the bus stop, but things generally went OK until the fourth grade. Every morning we lined up with our classmates and marched into school. I found a broker lightbulb in the garbage--I was always getting into stuff--and I showed it to the girl next to me. She screamed--negative bonding, right?--and I chased her. She told her mother and they threw me out of school. I spent the next two grades at the Hoffman School with a lot of other brats and some retarded kids. Then we moved again. My parents bought a house in Yonkers, north of the Bronx in suburban Westchester County. The grass was green, there were no fences, and there was a heavily wooded reservoir nearby in Sprain Brook Park where I could hunt and trap. I caught little animals, clubbed them on the head, took 'em home, skinned 'em, and sold the fur to make a little money. At school they said I smelled like a skunk and sent me home. There were deer and raccoon. One day I caught a baby coon and that was the end of my trapping career because he became my best friend. Me and Bandit would go down to the lake together and fish. Bandit finally got so big that my mom made me sell him to a guy that ran a gas station in the country. Later I heard that Bandit chewed through some wires in his owner's barn and the place burned down I think we stopped going to that gas station. Now I really started to get into stuff. I stuck a firecracker up a frog's ass and watched him explode. You've seen frog baseball on Beavis and Butt Head? We did that shit! I snared herring gulls with wingspans of six feet painted USAF under their wings, and let them go. My father kept playing piano in our basement for two hours every day and I went to sixth grade at PS 32 up on a hill about a mile from my house I went to Walt Whitman Junior High the following year, and on to Roosevelt High after that. The bad kids at the bus stop kept calling me Nigger Lips, and I'd get beat up. This made me hate that word more than anything else I can think of. I could cry right now, just thinking about it. You say "nigger" and I see the whole thing in my mind--people getting whipped, beaten. I would go home and cry about it and my mother would say, "Don't you worry about those lips of yours, Stevie. All the better to kiss the girls with those lips." Then I started to grow my hair, and this was before the Beatles and everything. So the greasers started to make fun of me, and I began to pour a shot of Scotch whiskey into my orange juice in the morning, just to be able to face these people who were hassling me. I used to cut school a lot and go to the reservoir and climb trees. There was this one big maple I really liked. It was my tree. One day in 1959 or '60, I'm up this tree and I see this kid pulling himself up along the vines. "Who are you?" I said. And this kid goes, "Ray-zan the Ape Man! You got a problem wit' dat?" I yelled down, as tough as I could: "GET THE FUCK OUTTA MY TREE!!" He got down and a day or two later--he didn't do it right away--Ray-zan the Ape Man beat the shit out of me. This is how I met Ray Tabano when I was about twelve. Ray Tabano: I actually first saw Steven a couple weeks before this, just after my mother and I moved to Yonkers. I was cruising the neighborhood on my bike and some kid yelled at me and I stopped and this other kid--Steven--comes out of his house and eggs me on to kick this first kid's ass. I guess he'd been tormenting Steven or something. Then Steven kicked me out of his tree and I had to show him who was boss. But then we became friends. There were two areas in Yonkers, Tanglewood and Lockwood, and both had gangs: hoody Italian greasers--very tough. The Roosevelt area where we lived was kinda in-between and didn't have a gang. So when we were in junior high, I broke away from the Little Tanglewood gang and formed my own gang, the Green Mountain Boys. Steven used to call us the Robin Hoods of Yonkers, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, which was ourselves. Our main activities were hanging out at Tibbet's Brook swimming pool or at Adventures' Inn, a pinball arcade on Central Avenue that later became a Nathan's hot dog joint. Our motto was "Green Mountain Boys don't mess." Steven wanted to join my gang because it meant protection from other gangs, especially after we started high school. But he wasn't really one of the guys. Steven liked to keep to himself more, and he was into animals and other weird shit. If we all went to the store to buy hot dogs, he'd buy pickled lizard noses. If we all wore baggy pants, he'd go to the tailor and have his pants pegged so he'd look cool. So finally we said, "OK, you can be in the gang if you run across Central Avenue naked and buy us a lantern for the clubhouse." Also he had to steal some stuff as an initiation, but he messed up and got arrested for shoplifting. So Steven got in, even though he wasn't tough. He was the opposite. He was a friend to the underdogs and the handicapped kids that we all fuckin' laughed at. He loved these people. I thought Steven was a fuckin' saint. Steven Tyler: Yes, I ran naked across Central Avenue when I was thirteen years old. It was like my bar mitzvah! The Green Mountain Boys was really more like a club than a gang. If you weren't in something like that, you just weren't cool. Anyway, all we did was pick up girls and try to get in their pants under the aqueduct. Eventually the "gang" turned into my first band. I started really getting into music when I was twelve. My radio was tuned to all the Good Guys on WINS, WMGM, WMCA, WABC, twenty-four hours a day. I tried to pick hot singles by calling in the Vote Line telephone polls they had. I remember how proud I was when I picked Del Shannon's "Runaway" to be a big hit when none of the callers liked it. When Raymond and I were both about fourteen, we used to go over to Raymond's father's bar on Morris Park Avenue in the Bronx. Ray's dad let us drink beer and jump onstage and do a couple songs when the band took a break. "OK, boys, show me what you can do." We did "I've Had It" by the Bell Notes (from Long Island) and "Cotton Fields" by the Highwaymen, a hit song in 1962. Ray played drums and I played guitar and sang. But this changed when I switched to drums so I could play in my father's band, Vic Tallarico's Orchestra, the following year. My dad started giving me piano lessons when I was little, but I just couldn't quite get it. I'd yawn and he'd smack me. Then I got this drum box in maybe 1960; you pushed the buttons in time and you could mix all the styles together. Then I got these drum records by Sandy Nelson: Let There Be Drums and Drums Are My Beat! I heard him do some riffs on the snare drum and thought, Wow, I've gotta learn this shit! So I went over to WWDU--Westerchester Workshop for Drummers Unlimited--which was like a clinic with kids in jackets and ties and their moms. I hated it, left after two weeks, and never came back. I think my dad bought me my first set of drums, around the time I started playing in his band. I also had a paper route and some of the money came from that. We played mostly up in Sunapee in the summer, places like Indian Cave Lodge and Soo-ni-pi Lodge in New London. Uncle Ernie was on saxophone and we did stuff from the hit parade, Viennese waltzes, cha-chas, fox-trots, The Tonight Show theme, "Porgy and Bess." It was awful. They made me comb my long hair back and tuck it down my jacket. I'd sit there playing "Begin the Beguine," the social director would lead an old lady onto the dance floor, then people would waltz a little. The worst was when kids my age came in and went, "We're outta here!" I'd look at them, girls my age, and go, Fuck! I tried to play a little louder when kids came in, but it didn't work. On the way home afterward, I'd sit staring out the car window, imagining myself doomed to this existence forever. 3: The Strangers Steven Tyler: I didn't start out as a singer. I was the drummer in a band we had in junior high; one day we were working out "In My Room" by the Beach Boys and someone handed me a mike. So I sang it. These were the days, 1963-64, when you asked the kid who played snare drum in your school band to be in your group, but I was a little ahead of that. I'd already sat in with a group called the Maniacs in Sunapee, the first time I got to get on stage at The Barn and play "Wipe Out" and show what I could do. There were two bands in Yonkers, and I was kind of in both of them. The Strangers were me on drums, Don Solomon on keyboards, Peter Stahl on guitar and Alan Strohmayer on bass. In early 1964 we were playing Friday afternoon mixers after school in Yonkers. I was the drummer and it was so cool because all the girls were there. Ray Tabano was in the other band, the Dantes, with Ricky Holtzman and Henry Schneiderman, who asked Ray to play bass because he had long hair, looked cool, and he protected them from the other gangs. If the Dantes had an important gig at Randy Goldstein's Sweet Sixteen party, they asked me to get up and sing with them. That's how come I was in both of these bands at the same time. The Strangers were "The Beatles," clean-cut and nice. The Dantes were "The Stones," scruffy, greasy, with longer hair. Eventually my band, the Strangers, got really good. Don Solomon was the leader and the most talented musician. By Easter 1964, when my mother drove us up to Sunapee to play a weekend at The Barn, the local nightspot, we were pounding out rocking versions of the big hits of the day: "She's a Woman" by the Beatles, "Not Fade Away" by the Rolling Stones (their first big record), "Bits and Pieces" by the Dave Clark Five, "Little Children" by Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, and all the other shit we used to play. Our business cards read: THE STRANGERS--ENGLISH SOUNDS, AMERICAN R&B. Sometimes I'd do whole shows in an English accent. School was a big problem for me. There were too many distractions and I couldn't pay attention. I got my education mostly on the streets of Greenwich Village. We'd leave school at four o'clock on Friday afternoon and take the subway to the Village--me, Raymond, Ricky, his beautiful girlfriend Debby, and her girlfriend Dia. It was Bleecker and MacDougal, baby. We'd get a bottle of Seagram's 7, sit in the park, get 'faced, and walk the streets like everybody else, back and forth, back and forth. We'd check out the Kettle O'Fish, the Other Side, Ondine's, the Bitter End. You could eat at the Tin Angel upstairs. We'd go to the Cafe Wha? or the Night Owl, which had bands like the Lovin' Spoonful and the Fugs. One night, standing on the sidewalk, we heard a band playing inside, really good, and I got weirded out when I saw their name was the Strangers. They were a lot better than us, so we changed the spelling of our band to the Strangeurs. There are a lot of Greenwich Village stories. One night when I was fifteen, five of us guys jumped into the car and headed down to Delancey Street. Raymond had some pot, we all got high, and we wanted to get laid. My first timer! We hired the first lady we saw standing on the corner. She looked pretty old to us, fifty-five or sixty for all we knew, but she said she'd do us all. We followed her down to this basement apartment, where six black guys were watching Bonanza on TV. She marched us through the kitchen--a chicken was boiling on the stove, black guys yelling, "Mothafucka!"--and into a back bedroom. She got $35 for doing all of us. I got to go fourth and it was disgusting, a terrible experience. I came out of the room with tears in my eyes and started to wash my dick in the kitchen sink. Black guy comes in and yells, "Mothafucka, you pissin' in my mothafuckin' sink?" We thought we'd get the shit kicked out of us, but they let us go. On the way home, we stopped at a red light and this beautiful chick comes up to the car, Raymond goes, "Now this is a bitch" and invited her into the car with us. He gets her into the backseat and started to fuck around with her until she started to like, moan, in a deep voice. "It's a guy," someone whispered, and we threw him out and drove back to Yonkers with our tails between our legs. As we got older, we'd leave Yonkers on Friday after school and stay in the Village until Sunday night. I'd drop some acid at my house, get into the car, and be driven down to Times Square. Meanwhile, I'm getting off! Forty-five minutes later--peaking!--I'd get out of the fuckin' car and step into the street. Vvvrroooommm, it felt like rubber. Wwhhooaa! Go into the 42nd Street Florsheim shoe store because they sold Beatle boots with Cuban heels that were the only cool things to wear onstage. Then down to Paul Sargeant's on Eighth Street for hip clothes--collarless shirts, leather vests, checkered pants, de rigueur stuff. Then off to Washington Square to see this wonderful hooker we knew, Josie the She-Demon. We went to a lot of rock shows, which made me crazy because I was completely starstruck. For me, this was everything. Obviously--look at me today--I wanted it so bad for myself, but then it was as much a thrill to meet somebody in the limelight as it was to put a worm on a hook or sleep all night next to a girl. I wanted to meet stars. I rushed the stage at the Brooklyn Fox to try to touch Mary Weiss, lead singer of the Shangri-Las, as she belted out "Leader of the Pack." The Shangri-Las (from Queens) were unreal. They did "Remember (Walking in the Sand)" and I flipped out. When the Animals came over from England the first time, it was phenomenal: they were playing "House of the Rising Sun" and I was so into it I ran down the aisle at the Academy of Music on 14th Street and shook Chas Chandler's hand. The highlight of this whole era was when the Rolling Stones came to New York in May 1965. To say I worshipped the Stones at this point would be a gross understatement. Everybody told me that I looked just like Mick Jagger with my big lips, and Keith Richards basically was the music I used to love more than anything. "Satisfaction" was the #1 record in the world and "The Last Time" and "Get Off of My Cloud" were constantly playing on the car radio and in my head. We all bought tickets to the Stones' afternoon show at the Academy of Music. After the show, we were determined to get close to them somehow. Debby and Dia rented a room at the Gotham Hotel on Fifth Avenue, where the Stones were staying, so they could get into the hotel, which left me and Raymond and the other guys standing outside on the sidewalk. Suddenly a gray Cadillac limo pulled up to the curb and Brian Jones got out, followed by Mick Jagger and Bill Wyman. I was trying to get next to Mick while Raymond's brother aimed his Polaroid at me. Ray was all over Brian Jones. Girls started screaming, my brown derby hat got knocked off and trampled, the Stones signed a few autographs and escaped into the hotel. We hung around for a while, buzzing like crazy just because we got to touch them! Later that night, a funny thing happened. We got hooked up somehow with Monte Rock III and his campy friends. Monte was a hairdresser who dressed up in flashy pseudo-Mod clothes and went on The Tonight Show and sang a little, coming on as an outrageous hipster. We went up to his place, where he kept a chimp and a couple of mastiffs. So we're partying, popping amyl nitrate, and I think they gave us some Placidyls, a heavy downer. I came to about six hours later. My pants were off and our girlfriends were naked. Someone had their way with us! Maybe it wasn't so funny, but it's a snapshot of a certain scene in New York, 1965. On the way back to Yonkers, the Good Guys were playing "Hang On Sloopy," "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," and "Go Now!" by the Moody Blues. 4: Quest for Immortality Steven Tyler: By the summer of 1965, the Strangeurs were playing four forty-five-minute sets a night at ridiculous clubs like Banana Fish Park out on Long Island. I was on drums and singing, which didn't work out the way I needed it to. Don Solomon and I talked about getting another drummer so I could be out front, but the other guys in the band didn't want to split the $75 we were getting for a night's work with another drummer. Understandable--if you didn't have to sing and play drums at the same time for three hours every night. Think about it. The truth was I had to get out front. I was after total immortality. I couldn't sleep nights, thinking about how famous I could be. I was terrified I would die before I made my mark in the world. That summer in Sunapee, I went to an auction and bought a tool set--some chisels and a ball peen hammer so fuckin' heavy I could hardly carry it. I stole some goggles from Uncle Ernie's workbench and went out to this huge granite boulder behind Papa's Cabin, where my grandfather Giovanni used to live. This rock was the size of a tank, and I spent a couple days chiseling my initials into it so future generations would know Steven Tallarico was here. Immortality. It's not much to ask for, is it? I wanted to sing on a record so after I died I'd still be singing. That way I could live forever. This was also the summer I met Henry Smith, who became extremely important in all our lives. Henry Smith: I met Steven and the Strangeurs in 1965 when they played at The Barn in Georges Mills on Lake Sunapee. My family lived in Westport, Connecticut, and we had a summer house in Danbury, New Hampshire. Steven was the local rock star and the kids packed anyplace one of his bands would play. They covered "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love" by the Stones, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, "Mr. Tambourine Man" by the Byrds, "Money," "Louie Louie," the Kinks' "You Really Got Me," all the important songs of the day, and it sounded as good as the original records and sometimes better because Steven put so much energy into it. He could really get a roomful of kids going. It was incredible. My brother Christopher and I got friendly with Steven, and the Strangeurs were such a good band that when the summer ended I started to book them into places where we lived in Connecticut. The first job I got them was the Christmas Cotillion of Fairfield County. My mother was in charge of this rather snooty debutante ball; usually they hired Peter Duchin's orchestra, but this year Duchin couldn't do it and my mother was crushed. "Don't worry, Mom," I told her, "I know a band." So I got the Strangeurs the job for $500, much less than Duchin charged, and everyone was happy until the Strangeurs showed up at the country club in long hair, dungarees, and a snotty attitude. Steven complained he didn't have anything cool to wear, so I cut the sleeves off my grandmother's mink coat and gave it to him to wear as a vest. They looked like the Rolling Stones but even more disreputable. The chaperones were horrified. "How could you?" they hissed at my mother. But the band began to play some Yardbirds song and the kids just went nuts. By the end of the night, everyone said it was the best cotillion they'd ever had. The Strangeurs' resemblance to the Stones caused some funny scenes. Late in the year, the Rolling Stones came back to New York and we found out they were staying at the Lincoln Square Motor Inn on the West Side. So I borrowed my mother's little Dodge Dart and told her I was going to a band rehearsal in Yonkers. I picked up Steven and Alan Strohmayer, the bass player, who had a fringe of blond hair down over his eyes, which made him look like Brian Jones. An hour later we were pulling into the block the hotel is on, totally packed with kids, and Steven rolls down the window and starts talking to people in his English accent. They look at him and start screaming, "MICK!" And "Brian Jones" is in the backseat. Suddenly we were mobbed, then engulfed. "MICK! BRIAN! EEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!" First the antenna breaks, then the wipers get bent, the windshield cracks, the car is totally scratched, and things look bad until the New York City cops battle their way to the car, throwing girls away right and left. They got really angry when they saw who we were--or weren't. Steven ate it up. He loved it. Later that night, my mom's waiting up for me. "How was the rehearsal, Henry?" "Great, Mom." "That's very interesting, because I just saw you on the news, in my car, surrounded by a thousand crazy kids. You're grounded!" Meanwhile, there was another band in Yonkers now, a slightly younger group of kids called the King Bees. We knew about them because Henry Schneiderman's little brother played in the King Bees and both bands rehearsed in their basement. The King Bees had a problem with their drummer. He was really good, but his father told him, "You can't play drums, I don't want you in this band," and took his drums away from him. So one day this drummer--he was maybe thirteen years old--shows up at Steven's house and asks if he can borrow a set of drums so the King Bees could play that night. Steven said sure, the kid came down to the basement, and this was the first time I met Joey Kramer, which shows you how deep the roots of Aerosmith go. 5: High School Confidential Steven Tyler: I had a ritual in high school, at least before I got thrown out. I woke up at seven, went down to the basement, closed the door real quiet, and put my head under the sink in the laundry room. Then I'd connect the vacuum cleaner hose to the dryer and turn it on. I'd sneak upstairs into the kitchen, take a plastic juice cup and fill it to the top with Dewar's, and drink it. If there was no Dewar's, I'd drink vodka and orange juice. The sound of the dryer masked the noise of making my drink. Then back to the basement, where I'd blow-dry my hair with the hose so I wouldn't look like all the other idiots I knew at school with long hair. I hated the way they looked! I wore cowboy boots to school, tying the bottoms of my trousers to the boots with a self-invented system of buttons and dental floss so they'd stay down and look really cool. Along with the ritual--getting drunk and doing my hair--I'd listen to my favorite songs on the big mono speaker I hooked up: "I Can't Explain" by the Who and "I Ain't Got You" by the Yardbirds. I paid close attention to the Yardbirds: They had a hard groove that nobody else was doing, keeping that beat just going. The Stones stuck to tight arrangements when they played live, while the Yardbirds would go into these improvisational rave-ups, especially after Jeff Beck replaced Eric Clapton in 1965. But I heard this as coming from Paul Samwell-Smith. To me, the Yardbirds' energy exploded from their bass player going up an octave and how he got up there. Later, after Jimmy Page joined, I bought their single "Goodnight Sweet Josephine." The other side was "Think About It." I'd listen to those songs over and over again: They were so cool and intense. So every day I arrived at school looking like I'd just stepped off the set of Shindig or Hullabaloo. All the teachers hated me. They told me my hair was too long. They told me I was fucked up. They told me I was poison. Maybe they were right. Early in 1966, my band got an offer to go to Cleveland to do a teen dance party show on local TV called Upbeat. At high school the next day, I got called into the principal's office because of my hair. I went in wearing my usual turtleneck shirt with my hair tucked in. The principal says to me, "Tallarico, you look like a girl!" I got all upset. "Hey, man, I'm a professional musician. I'm supposed to look like this. Whaddaya want me to do? I'm doing a big TV show in Cleveland tomorrow. I can't cut my hair." "Don't your parents care about your hair, the way you look?" "Nah, my mother likes my hair and my father's a classical musician." "Well, the other students can't concentrate if you're in class looking like a Mod beatnik or whatever you are." So I told him I'd quit school right there and this shook him up because too many kids were dropping out, which made the school's statistics look bad. So it was a standoff. The Strangeurs flew to Cleveland, the first time I'd ever been on a jet. We got a friend of ours from New Hampshire, David Conrad, to play the drums so I could just sing. We get there and find out that the Shangri-Las are on the show with us. Dig it! Far out! Far fuckin' out! There are no dressing rooms, so I go into the bathroom to change. I thought David Conrad was in the next stall taking a shit or something, so I climb over the wall. I looked down and saw ... Mary Weiss! Lead singer of the Shangri-Las! And I can see her patch!! I'm like seventeen!!! This beautiful blonde with black leather pants down around her ankles, boner material, major wood! Around this time I got fired from my job as a soda jerk in a drugstore on Central Avenue in Yonkers. I was stealing boxes of stuff and handing them out the back door to Ray Tabano. Then I got busted for stealing from the supermarket next door to the drugstore. That's how I met a guy named Pete Agosta, who became my manager. Peter Agosta: I was the manager of the Shopwell supermarket on Central Avenue and I kept catching Steven Tallarico shoplifting, so I made him a carriage boy so he wouldn't rob me blind. Later he told me he had a little band, and I went to see them play at a Sweet Sixteen party for [actor] Art Carney's daughter in Bronxville. They got the job because Steven's father was giving piano lessons to Art Carney's son. They were a good band. Don Solomon was the leader: He had a kingpin personality and a good voice, but Steve had all the Jagger appeal and the right moves. I knew they were going to go somewhere if he was out front. So I started to manage them a little. First thing, Steve asked me to come to the high school and talk to the principal and explain about his long hair. They were making him slick his hair back and basically glue it behind his collar. "Steve's a performer," I told them. "He has to dress this way or he won't get work." But they didn't care, they just hated him. The next thing I did was to put Steven up front. We hired a kid named Barry Shapiro to be the drummer. He was short like Ringo and could keep great time, and Steven helped him a lot. Steven was a musicians' musician, with a very keen ear; the Strangeurs were a tight band, mainly because Steven would freak if someone made a mistake. In early March 1966, Steven heard that the Byrds were coming to play the Westchester County Center in nearby White Plains later that month. Steven demanded I get the Strangeurs the job of opening act. The Byrds had a hit record, "Eight Miles High," and were probably the hottest band in America. I badgered the promoter for a couple of weeks before I could even get my calls returned, but they didn't really want to know. Then I found out that ticket sales were slow, so I called them and said that the Strangeurs were the most popular band in the county and guaranteed them a sellout if they put us on the bill. They said OK, added us to the show, and all 3,000 seats sold out a few days after the posters went up. The show was March 26, 1966. We got a few girls to sit down front and told them to start screaming when we went on. The Byrds' manager told us ten times that we couldn't play any of their songs, but Steven opened up with "Eight Miles High" anyway. Jim McGuinn and David Crosby were watching from the wings, totally shocked, as Steven did their song and girls began to scream. But they weren't our girls! Hundreds of girls began to scream spontaneously as the curtain opened and Steven jumped and pumped and did a hell of a show. The Strangeurs were only supposed to do two songs, but Steven just kept going and did six numbers because the kids wouldn't let them go. Even the Byrds were impressed. As Steven came offstage, dripping wet, McGuinn says, "Great show, man." In fact, they liked us so much their manager hired the Strangeurs to open for the Byrds the following night in Asbury Park, New Jersey. YONKERS HERALD STATESMAN Two groups preceded the Byrds. First the Dillards [who were touring with the Byrds that year]: nice, nothing spectacular, modest applause. Then the Strangeurs, a Yonkers group, five Roosevelt High graduates. The tempo rose. Lead singer Steve Tallarico came on like Mick Jagger of the Stones: bottom lip hanging, tambourine slapping against thigh. This was more like it, and the audience responded. There were hand-waving shrieks and girls running down the aisles snapping pictures. The MC announced if the girls became too hysterical, the Byrds would cut short their concert. (March 27, 1966) Steven Tyler: While the Byrds were doing their last number, "Roll Over Beethoven," a thirteen-year-old girl in green suede boots, matching umbrella cape, and tinted granny glasses almost started a riot when she vaulted over three rows of cops and made it onto the six-foot stage. A cop grabbed her around the waist and threw her off, but then twenty other girls made it up. The Byrds were laughing because it was more like a Beatle thing. The papers called it a "near riot." Henry Smith: I remember the Byrds' show very well because Steven went out and played the whole show with his zipper open and his shirttail hanging out of his fly. I tried to get his attention, but once he starts a show, he's in another world. The kids probably thought it was part of the act. Steven acted like he was furious when he found out about it afterwards, but in a weird way I think he liked it. Peter Agosta: Early in April 1966, I signed the Strangeurs to a management contract. All five musicians and their fathers signed because the band was underage. We signed the contract at Steven's house, and I visited Steven's bedroom up in the attic. There were framed photos of the Rolling Stones and the Walker Brothers [an Anglo-American group whose hair Steven really liked] on the walls, plus trophies of girls, animals he trapped, and stuff he'd stolen. This is a strange kid, I thought to myself. [The bookshelf contained The True Story of the Beatles by Billy Shepherd, Raccoon Family Pets, 3001 Questions and Answers, a hollowed-out copy of The Hardy Boys and the Disappearing Floor, in which Steven hid his pot, Trapping North American Furbearers, Steel Traps, and Deadfalls and Snares.] After we signed the contracts, Steven's dad spruced him up and they left to play a Vic Tallarico date at the Westchester Country Club with Steven on drums. Back then the most important music promotor in the New York area was a guy named Pete Bennett, who lived in Westchester. He was very well connected in the music business and did some work for President Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party. He was a very big wheel. The town of Yonkers even renamed the street he lived on Bennett Avenue. He'd seen us open for the Byrds, and he was very enthusiastic about Steven. He told other people in the business and his disc jockey pals, and we started to get better bookings at clubs and record hops hosted by various Good Guys from WABC. We worked every weekend after that for the next year. Henry Smith booked us into Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut, and we played places like the Northeast Jewish Center in Yonkers, the Club 42 in Tuckahoe, the Hampshire Country Club--wherever anyone wanted to pay us $150-$200 a night. Then the record hops kicked in. Pete Bennett owned a Mod club in Yonkers called the House of Liverpool, and we opened there many times for acts like Jay and the Americans, the Animals with Eric Burdon, and Frank Sinatra, Jr., before the place was shut down. We opened for the legendary Kingsmen of "Louie Louie" fame at a dance hosted by deejay Gary Stephens. We played with Terry Knight and the Pack [later Grand Funk Railroad] at a club called the Jumping Jack in Yonkers, which paid us $375 for a three-night gig. That spring of 1966 was one of the busiest times of my life! Everything was going great until Steven got busted and it looked like he might go to jail. (Chapter One continues...) Copyright (c) 1997 Dogeared Publishing, Inc., and Stephen Davis. All rights reserved.
