A daily review of books worth your time
More like this
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Steven Tyler's Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? is exactly the gonzo, motormouthed rock memoir you'd expect from Aerosmith's frontman — loud, raunchy, and frequently hilarious, with flashes of real candor about addiction surfacing through the showmanship.
The Review
Tyler does not write a memoir so much as perform one. The book careens forward in his actual speaking voice — riffing, free-associating, breaking into half-remembered lyrics and tall tales — and your enjoyment will depend almost entirely on how much you enjoy his company. For long stretches it's a blast: he's a natural raconteur, genuinely funny, with the comic timing of a man who has been working a crowd since the late sixties and never met a story he couldn't goose for effect.
The Aerosmith saga is all here, told as a swaggering rise-fall-rise through the bars, the arenas, the Toxic Twins years with Joe Perry, the spectacular flameouts and reunions. Tyler is at his best on the music itself, on the craft of building a hook and the animal thrill of fronting a band that's firing. And underneath the bluster runs a darker, more honest current: decades of drugs and alcohol, multiple stints in rehab, the wreckage left in his wake. When he drops the act and talks plainly about addiction, the book briefly becomes something more affecting than a celebrity romp.
It's also exhausting and unreliable, and Tyler would probably take both as compliments. The breathless style flattens chronology and skates past the people he hurt, particularly the women in his orbit, whom the book treats with a casual entitlement that has aged badly. A reader wanting a careful, reflective accounting of a life will be frustrated; this is mythmaking at full volume, with the self-awareness coming in flashes rather than sustained reckoning. The humor sometimes works overtime to keep real feeling at arm's length.
What you get instead is the unfiltered texture of a particular kind of rock-and-roll life, narrated by a man who clearly relishes telling it. The jokes land more often than not, the energy never flags, and the sheer momentum carries you past the parts that don't bear close scrutiny. It's less a confession than a one-man show committed to the page.
For all the chaos, the book is sharpest when Tyler talks shop. He's a serious craftsman beneath the clowning, and his descriptions of writing melodies, of the physical work of singing night after night, and of the particular chemistry between a singer and a guitarist carry an authority the party stories don't. Those passages remind you why he mattered in the first place — that under the scarves and the swagger is a musician who spent fifty years obsessed with the sound. When the showmanship steps aside and the craftsman talks, the memoir briefly becomes essential.
Take it for what it is and it delivers: a loud, funny, occasionally moving night out with a frontman who has survived more than most and would rather make you laugh than make you pity him. Just don't go in expecting the noise in his head to ever fully quiet down — that's not the kind of book, or the kind of man, he's interested in being.
Reviewed by Ellis
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.