chefcraig
05-31-2011, 12:43 PM
Like VH, I only have use for Aerosmith's first six albums (OK, seven counting Live Bootleg). Yet out of impulsive curiosity, I picked up Is The Noise In My Head Bothering You? for the hell of it while leaving work Friday. After reading it, I have a few issues with it.
I'm not so sure who Tyler is attempting to reach with this thing: the devoted Aerosmith die hards or the late-coming American Idol fans. Neither group is well served. Most hardcore fans have by now read Stephen Davis' Walk This Way bio, written with the band and published over a decade ago. Tyler's book redundantly goes over the same material, only serving to further muddy the waters of what was already a fuzzily remembered tale. (The problem with these rock star books is the only people that seem to know what took place is the band members themselves, who were apparently loaded out of their skulls at the time. So their recollection of events is dubious at best and self-serving at worst.) The American Idol crowd will wonder just what in the hell Tyler is talking about most of the time, as he seems to veer off on tangents that only make sense to him and only vaguely to other musicians.
For instance, early on he describes the act of songwriting, mentioning his use of scat singing and adding the detail that "Yesterday" was scatted as "Scrambled Eggs". Swell, yet unless you happen to know what scat singing is (using nonsense words in a rhythmic fashion to create a vocal line on which to later apply lyrics), the average reader will be confused. Also, if you were not a devoted Beatles trivia nut, it's unlikely you'd know that Paul McCartney carried the song "Yesterday" around for nearly two years with no words for the melody other than "Scrambled eggs, all I ever eat are scrambled eggs". Otherwise, reading this you'd come away scratching your head:
I would listen back, along with the rough of the song and I would hear lyrics. Every time. Tapped into my own subcontinent. It would jump right out at me from the scat. I could play you scats and if you listened close enough, you would hear the lyrics that I wrote. Not unlike psychoacoustics. If two people are playing, you hear things in the middle...Harmonics-slash-psychoacoustics-slash-vibe. The scat kink became Pink. The scat to "Yesterday" was "scrambled eggs". Fucking magic.
Even when Tyler goes into detail that is understandable, he misses the boat. When describing writing the song "Mama Kin", he says he based it upon an obscure Blodwyn Pig tune called "See My Way", yet when you play the tunes back to back, there is little (if any) similarity. Later on, he mentions the opening of the song "Write Me" is based upon the Beatles' "Got To Get You Into My Life", yet even as a so-called musician, I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about.
Instead of a straight forward, chronological narrative, Tyler jumps backward and forward, going all over the place and occasionally repeating the same story two or three times. What's worse, is each time he relates the story, the details are changed, giving the effect that two or three people are recalling the same thing, each with different perspective. Better yet, he mentions things that supposedly happened earlier, but when you flip back several pages to find these things, they are not there! He mentions a club that both Eric Clapton and Joey Kramer had played in a manner that implies he'd already mentioned it, but nothing can be found of the reference in the previous or following pages.
The overall effect of the book is of dealing with someone who possesses a case of arrested development and never got past being a teenager. That's fine for being a successful artist, actor, sportsman or musician. It just becomes incredibly tedious and quite annoying to read about someone's exploits written in that odd manner. For every insight and bit of humor Tyler offers, there are pages and pages of (what seems like) utter gibberish. On the other hand, you do not come away feeling stupider for having read the book, which is the only way to describe Sammy Hagar's attempt at an autobiography. And thankfully, Tyler doesn't need to talk about other people in order to make himself seem interesting.
All in all, not that great, a bit of a slog to get through and only occasionally worthwhile. Then again, compared to a book recently written by the rotund rocker, it's worthy of the Nobel Prize.
http://img1.imagehousing.com/88/f62300c90a4cf7a4add72000773c90de.jpg (http://www.imagehousing.com/)
I'm not so sure who Tyler is attempting to reach with this thing: the devoted Aerosmith die hards or the late-coming American Idol fans. Neither group is well served. Most hardcore fans have by now read Stephen Davis' Walk This Way bio, written with the band and published over a decade ago. Tyler's book redundantly goes over the same material, only serving to further muddy the waters of what was already a fuzzily remembered tale. (The problem with these rock star books is the only people that seem to know what took place is the band members themselves, who were apparently loaded out of their skulls at the time. So their recollection of events is dubious at best and self-serving at worst.) The American Idol crowd will wonder just what in the hell Tyler is talking about most of the time, as he seems to veer off on tangents that only make sense to him and only vaguely to other musicians.
For instance, early on he describes the act of songwriting, mentioning his use of scat singing and adding the detail that "Yesterday" was scatted as "Scrambled Eggs". Swell, yet unless you happen to know what scat singing is (using nonsense words in a rhythmic fashion to create a vocal line on which to later apply lyrics), the average reader will be confused. Also, if you were not a devoted Beatles trivia nut, it's unlikely you'd know that Paul McCartney carried the song "Yesterday" around for nearly two years with no words for the melody other than "Scrambled eggs, all I ever eat are scrambled eggs". Otherwise, reading this you'd come away scratching your head:
I would listen back, along with the rough of the song and I would hear lyrics. Every time. Tapped into my own subcontinent. It would jump right out at me from the scat. I could play you scats and if you listened close enough, you would hear the lyrics that I wrote. Not unlike psychoacoustics. If two people are playing, you hear things in the middle...Harmonics-slash-psychoacoustics-slash-vibe. The scat kink became Pink. The scat to "Yesterday" was "scrambled eggs". Fucking magic.
Even when Tyler goes into detail that is understandable, he misses the boat. When describing writing the song "Mama Kin", he says he based it upon an obscure Blodwyn Pig tune called "See My Way", yet when you play the tunes back to back, there is little (if any) similarity. Later on, he mentions the opening of the song "Write Me" is based upon the Beatles' "Got To Get You Into My Life", yet even as a so-called musician, I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about.
Instead of a straight forward, chronological narrative, Tyler jumps backward and forward, going all over the place and occasionally repeating the same story two or three times. What's worse, is each time he relates the story, the details are changed, giving the effect that two or three people are recalling the same thing, each with different perspective. Better yet, he mentions things that supposedly happened earlier, but when you flip back several pages to find these things, they are not there! He mentions a club that both Eric Clapton and Joey Kramer had played in a manner that implies he'd already mentioned it, but nothing can be found of the reference in the previous or following pages.
The overall effect of the book is of dealing with someone who possesses a case of arrested development and never got past being a teenager. That's fine for being a successful artist, actor, sportsman or musician. It just becomes incredibly tedious and quite annoying to read about someone's exploits written in that odd manner. For every insight and bit of humor Tyler offers, there are pages and pages of (what seems like) utter gibberish. On the other hand, you do not come away feeling stupider for having read the book, which is the only way to describe Sammy Hagar's attempt at an autobiography. And thankfully, Tyler doesn't need to talk about other people in order to make himself seem interesting.
All in all, not that great, a bit of a slog to get through and only occasionally worthwhile. Then again, compared to a book recently written by the rotund rocker, it's worthy of the Nobel Prize.
http://img1.imagehousing.com/88/f62300c90a4cf7a4add72000773c90de.jpg (http://www.imagehousing.com/)