New York Review of Books Review

CALLING Steven Tyler an incoherent loudmouth is like describing James Brown as a guy who moved around a lot. Tyler has devoted his improbably long musical career to testing the limits of incoherence, loudness and his mouth. From his 1970s glory days as the jive-talking lead singer of Aerosmith to his unlikely TV success as a judge on "American Idol," he's always delighted in babble for its own sake. In his words, he's been "61 Highwayed and I did it my wayed; Little-Willie-Johned and been-here-and-goned; million-dollar riffed and Jimmy Cliffed; cotton-picked and Stevie Nick'd." What he lacks in lucidity, which is just about everything, he makes up for with garrulous charm. As Laurence Sterne says of Yorick in "Tristram Shandy," he has big sails but not an ounce of ballast. So who goes to a rock star for ballast? His autobiography, "Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?," chronicles one of the music world's strangest careers, in an appropriately dazed tone. It ends up doing for Keith Richards's memoir, "Life," what Aerosmith originally did for the Rolling Stones: it's faster, sleazier and pulpier, and somehow (as if just to prove it's possible) makes even less sense. The book begins with Tyler as a kid growing up in Yonkers and the Bronx, sneaking off to the Village to watch beatniks (and do drugs). He gets together with Aerosmith to play the blues (and do drugs). Over the next 40 years, he leads Aerosmith through a whirlwind of "Behind the Music" adventures: groupies, dealers, countless stints in rehab, breakups, comebacks, great albums, terrible albums, even an album with Stonehenge on the cover. Tyler's turbulently high-spirited cheer holds it all together, even when you don't really believe a word he's saying. He can't stay on the same topic longer than a sentence or two, as he swerves from mystical hippie rambles to borscht belt jokes at warp speed. One story begins, "Early on in the band when I was still Jung and easily Freudened...." Needless to say, the story has nothing to do with Jung, Freud or much of anything else. It's hard to guess what the co-author, David Dalton, did, besides pour the coffee, since Tyler never slows down to get his stories straight. At one point, he talks about his 1987 hit "Dude (Looks Like a Lady)" and how it was inspired by meeting the band Mötley Crüe in 1991. (Or, as Tyler calls it, "1991, the year of the Dude.") Sometimes he gets his own song titles wrong: he refers to the Aerosmith classic "Dream On" as "Game On," while "Train Kept A-Rollin' " becomes "Shank After Rollin'." All through the book, Tyler provides insights into the medical condition known as L.S.D., or "Lead Singer Disease" - it's practically an Oliver Sacks-level investigation into L.S.D., from the perspective of a prize case study. Of course, Tyler sees it not as rampant egomania, but as an affliction that geniuses get from their less evolved band mates. To him, "L.S.D. is a not-much-talked-about syndrome defined in the Mondo Manual of Psychiatric Disorders as 'bone-gnawing, spleen-curdling jealousy of the lead singer in a rock band on the part of other members of the band, erupting in violent blaspheming and tantrums by such members whenever the lead singer's image appears on the cover of popular magazines.'" The last time Tyler told his tale, in Aerosmith's 1997 oral history, "Walk This Way," there was a happy ending: sobriety, marriage, hit records. This time around, things are different. Aerosmith hasn't recorded a hit song, much less a good one, in years. His recent solo single isn't any good either. The marriage ended in divorce, and Tyler acknowledges that he was in the midst of a major drug relapse while putting the book together: "I was in the way-out-a-sphere and not really up to reading 20 fortune cookies, never mind 20 pages." Not even he can feign much enthusiasm for the prospect of his solo career. So it's oddly touching that despite everything, through all the chaos, Tyler's ego remains unkillable. "I wanted dreamy nubile girls to listen to my voice and cry," he muses. "A thousand years after my death I fantasized that there'd be people in the outer galaxies listening to 'Dream On' and saying in hushed tones, 'It's him, the strange Immortal One!'" If the love of his life is his own voice, nobody can say the man hasn't been faithful. Rob Sheffield is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His most recent book is "Talking to Girls About Duran Duran."