Tyler Steven - Does the noise in my head bother you?: a rock n roll memoir

To the loving memory
and the spirit of
Susan Rey Blancha Tallarico

Contents

Peripheral Visionary

Zits and Tits

The Pipe That Was Never Played

My Red Parachute (and Other Dreams)

Confessions of a Rhyme-a-Holic

Little Bo Peep, the Glitter Queen, and the Girl in the Yellow Corvette

Noise in the Attic (Snow Days)

Ladies and Genitals... Im Not a Bad Guy (Im Just Egotestical)

The Hood, the Bad, the Ugly... Hammered with Hemingway

Food Poisoning at a Family Picnic

Getting Lost on Your Way to the Middle

Where You End and I Begin... Again (the Goddess)

Trouble in Paradise (Losing Your Grip on the Life Fantastic)

The Bitch Goddess of Billboard

Holy Smoke, Quest for the Grand Pashmina, and the Big Chill of Twenty Summers

To Zanzibar and Back

Falling in Love Is Hard on the Knees

Take a Walk Inside My Mind...

If youre a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

If youre a singer, everything looks like a song.

L ife is short. Break the rules, forgive quickly, kiss slowly, love truly, laugh uncontrollably, and never regret anything that makes you smile. Were not quantified; theres no chart of desire. When the roaring flames of your heart have burned down to embers, may you find that you have married your best friend. Hunch, conjecture, instinct... a blind allegiance to anything can get you killed, and always remember... sing as though no one can hear you; live as though heaven is here on Earth. Here I want to say something deep and meaningless, like To thine own self be true, but in truth, the first thing we have to do is KILL ALL THE LAWYERS.

When I was a kid and in a gang, my so-called best friend, Dennis Dunn, would slam me in the arm and say, Pass it on, motherfucker! So I turned to Ignacio and punched him in the arm and said, Pass it on! Ignacio turned to Footie and punched him in the arm, and Footie punched Raymond, who in turn... punched me again. Its all about fighting for position. Later on in life I was to find that being in a band was not too different. Only in my new gang, Brad punched Tom, Tom punched Joey, Joey punched Joe, and Joe punched me (in the mouth), and thats the sweetest way I can tell you what happens in every band that ever there was (at least those that lasted more than ten years and got the chance to manifest the light).

I remember once my mother telling me, when I said I wanted to be like Janis Joplin: If you manifest the light, you will become a dartboard for others fears, doubts, and insecurities. And if you can handle that, Steven, my little skeezix, you may have your Blue Army. And guess what? I got both barrels! I also wish to articulate at the outset here, neighbors and neer-do-wells, that my lifes journey has not taken me to a place to defile, demoralize, or damage anybody.... So all of you who have ruffled my feathers and done me wrong for being an inquisitive child or an oversensitive pain-in-the-neck artist, remember, just like they said about Mongo in the movie Blazing Saddles, if you shoot Steven, youll just make him angry.

When youre young, you experience everything for the first time, and because its happening to you so matter-of-factly, it just is ... and you argue your way through it. In midlife, you question fucking everything, and so much energy is wasted questioning the whys of it all. You want to find that angel of thunderstorms that will put out your internal fire. You start to believe that you made it through six decades because there is an angel on your shoulder.

Thats why Im a songwriterbecause Ive lived through the changes of not knowing ANYTHING... to knowing EVERYTHING... and now at sixty-three Im back to NOT KNOWIN NOTHIN. And when your mind is free of so-called knowledge, it is now set free to use its imagination. Like Albert Einstein once said: Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Radio plays your song; the melody is so catchy that it crawls inside of the people listening and changes their Everything. They start singing it! You got into them. You made love to them. You got into their soul... and vice versa. Its like Vuja D, and thats when the miracle manifests... youre trading faces, places, spaces, and graces.

Father of four children (loves of my life), a songwriter, got a doctorate at Berkeley and another one at UMass, Boston, a poet, a painter, a drug addict, and a person who learns something new on a daily basis, from the Malibu Home for the Recently All Right to having dinner with Sheikh Nion in Abu Dhabi... and now... an author? You gotta be kidding! RoMANtics. SeMANtics. Exotic, neurotic, you got it! Does the noise in my head bother you... yet? Yeah, really? Id say were off to a good start.

S.T.

Peripheral
Visionary

I was born at the Polyclinic Hospital in the Bronx, March 26, 1948. As soon as I could travel my parents headed straight out of town to Sunapee, New Hampshire, to the little housekeeping cottages they rented out every summer, kind of an old-fashioned bed-and-breakfast deal only it was 1950. I was put in a crib at the side of the house. A fox came by and thought I was a cub, grabbed me by the scruff of my diaper, and dragged me into the woods. I grew up with the animals and the children of the woods. I heard so much in the silence of the pine tree forests that I knew later in life I would have to fill that void. The only thing my parents knew was that I was out there somewhere. They heard me cry in the forest one night, but when they came up to where I was, all they saw was a big hole in the ground, which they thought was the foxs den. They dug and dug and dug, but all they found was the rabbit hole Id fallen intolike Alice.

T row-Rico Lodge and the lawn I was mowing when Joe Perry drove up, summer of 69. (Ernie Tallarico)

And like Alice I entered another dimension: the sixth dimension (the fifth dimension was already taken). Since then, I can go to that place anytime I want, because I know the secret of the children of the woods; theres so much in silence when you know what youre hearingwhat dances between the psychoacoustics of any two notes and what reads between the lines is akin to the juxtaposition of what you see when you look in the mirror. My whole life has been dancing between these worlds: the GOAN ZONE , the Way-Out-o-Sphere and... the UNFORTUNATE STATE OF REALITY . In essence, I call myself a peripheral visionary. I hear what people dont say and I see whats invisible. At night, because our visual perception is made up of rods and cones, if youre going down a dark path, the only way to really see the path is to look off and see it in your peripheral vision. But more on this as we progress, regress, and digress.

When I finally got pulled out of the rabbit hole, my parents brought me back to the third dimension. Like all parents they were concerned, but I was afraid to tell them that I have never felt more comfortable than being lost in that forest.

I n Manhattan we lived at 124th Street and Broadway, not far from the Apollo Theater. Harlem, man. If the first three years of your life are the most informative, then surely I needed to hear that music, and I was inspired by the noise coming out of that theater. It had more soul than Saint Peter.

A few years ago I was back at the Apollo, and saw the park where my mom had pushed me in my carriage. My first visual memory is from THAT PARK : trees and clouds moving above my head as if I were floating above the earth. There I am, a two-year-old astral-projecting infant. At age four, I remember going to get a gallon of milk with two quarters, walking with my mom hand in hand through passages and corridors of the basement of our building and through tunnels into the adjoining building where the milk machine was. I thought I was... God knows where. I might as well have been on Mars. Ah, it was the mysterious world of childhood, where someone is always leading you by the hand through a dark passageway and into a brand-new world just waiting for the childs overactive imagination to kick in.