Best Quotes from Does The Noise In My Head Bother You? by David Dalton with Page Numbers

There’s so much in silence when you know what you’re hearing.

I hear what people don’t say and I see what’s invisible.

I never felt more comfortable than being lost in that forest.

My mother lit the fire that would keep me warm for the rest of my life.

To love and be loved is all we know and all we need to know.

Sometimes you can’t appreciate how fortunate you are until you look back.

It’s the fear that drives us.

You can’t go home again; you go back and it’s not the same.

What dances between the psychoacoustics of any two notes.

The only noise that you heard in a pine tree forest was the gentle whistling sound of the wind blowing through the needles.

"It was like getting bitten by a radioactive spider. Elvis . . . the Extraterrestrial."

"I heard sex in 'Twist.' I didn’t know what sex was, I hadn’t gotten laid yet, I didn’t know how to do sex."

"What about that Ian Whitcomb song? Where he sings like a girl and he’s begging a girl. By singing it in that crazy falsetto voice he was able to convey unspeakable emotions that made girls blush and turned heads everywhere."

"She transcended all those who came before her. The way she sang a song it seemed like she’d been down that road one too many times and it wasn’t going to happen again—not this time round."

"My pass-go card, my get-out-of-jail-free card. That was the magic. That’s the funk the blacks knew. That’s the soul that Elvis knew, right there, and now I had the key to it all."

"I was making a huge racket with this demolition-derby–driven surfer blast. Everybody loved it . . . I loved it."

"I then realized that those were my roots, my black roots were in black music, and it was nothing to be ashamed of."

"I knew about music from my dad, and so rock ’n’ roll was a case of please-don’t-throw-me-in-the-Briar-Patch!"

"Back then you passed a joint, and it was 'make love, not war.' Everybody was your friend."

"Perplexity, sayeth my man Kahlil Gibran, 'is the beginning of knowledge.'"

I’m a great believer in moments arising. You’ll miss the boat, man, if you’re not ready for star time.

I came out of my mother’s womb screaming for more than nipple and nurture.

I knew that in a few weeks the town would start to close up.

I wasn’t going to do it again. I said, 'That’s fucking it.'

What if I take what my daddy taught me, the melodic sensibility I’ve got, with the broken glass shards of reality that these guys wove together? We might have something.

You play what you got. I’m thinking, with me make-believing rock star and Joe channeling Beck-Keit-Page, who could stop us?

Antagonism, pure nitro-charged agro, fuels inspiration.

There is a love there, no matter what.

I knew I’d found my other self, my demon brother... Joe comes up with a great riff and immediately I think, 'You fuck, I gotta top that motherfucker.'

Fuck, we gotta make it, no, break it, man, make it.

"The blues is soiled with muddy water, funky with Storyville whorehouse sweat and jizz, smoky from juke-joint canned heat, stained with hundred-proof rotgut and cheap cologne."

"Love—and the music of its time—is its own reward, isn’t it?"

"Once it’s a hit, that echo is on there forever."

"The collective sound that the five of us make... when it works, it’s above and beyond your wildest dreams."

"Everybody sucks on someone’s tit, and ours was the bitch’s brew of the blues."

"When I wrote the music to ‘Seasons of Wither,’ I grabbed the old acoustic guitar Joey found in the garbage on Beacon Street with no strings."

"If you don’t bring this shit out into the light it gets suppressed and festers."

"It’s all egotistical, all over the place. So I said, 'How about instead of each of you going off on your own tangents, you all play in sync?'"

"You got to think of what’s it gonna take to make it last."

"You can’t SING that unless you’re a drummer or have some major sense of rhythm."

Maybe I wasn’t put here on earth just to mow lawns.

Every time that I look in the mirror, all these lines in my face getting’ clearer.

Sing with me, sing for the years, sing for the laughter and sing for the tears.

When a song comes to you and you write it in ten minutes, you think, There it is.

It’s like those Native American dream catchers. I look at those and go, 'Oh, my god, that’s my fuckin’ brain!'

A song is a kind of ladder, too, but that you’ve got to build without little sticks.

Okay is death.

Own your mistakes! Write something, sing something—as bad or good as it is—that no one has come up with.

Songs are never in plain sight, they’re under your skin; if anything, the best are peripheral and then they pop out like a baby.

Did I want to get that song out with its head crowning out of the vagina of the music? YES!

“If you’re out there, please call this number. I want to know how you are, what you’re doing, and what you look like now!”

“Time becomes meaningless in the face of creativity.”

“You know what? I could do this all night and the next day but I gotta get up really early to catch this goddamn flight.”

“When you love somebody, set them free.”

“The greatest thing she taught me . . . that love is love reflected.”

“Fame is the bitch goddess of rumor, innuendo, slander, and gossip and the perverted purveyor of tabloid trash.”

“Once you become a rock star—something you’ve prayed for fervently since you were sixteen, making promises to sleazy saints and strange goddesses of the night—all bets are off.”

“Either way, you become a dartboard for other people’s fears, doubts, and insecurities.”

“Why are you angry at me? I just make love to them through my music.”

“With my bad self being twenty-six and she barely old enough to drive and sexy as hell, I just fell madly in love with her.”

‘Life is something to be reckoned with. Winter has to be reckoned with. For the cold, find something warm.’

‘In every moment, you have a choice to make between fear and love. I believe that.’

‘All we really need at the end of the long and winding day is to be petted, to climax, to makelove, and to be happy.’

‘Using in spite of adverse consequences. Certain things happened in this band that weren’t drug induced, although there haven’t been many.’

‘When a band has doubts or thoughts that they have other options and tell themselves they can become accountants and Realtors and carpenters... they’re going to fail.’

‘The record will be played long after you’re dead. Our records would be up there in the attic, too, with the things that you loved and never wanted to forget.’

‘You must go through hell before you can get to heaven.’

‘I live on the tail of a comet, and I must admit that with all the me that’s me, I know in my heart of hearts that I would not be HERE if it weren’t for those around me.’

‘It’s always been EUPHORIC...thinking back to your childhood and the best memories of those times—that’s euphoric recall.’

‘The thought that we might not make it never occurred to any of us.’

"Love IS a drug... Frank felt pain and anguish and sadness, and those are drugs of sorts."

"It’s not the walls but the space between the walls that defines the room."

"I believed that there were more toys in our attic. They would flame out magnificently while we were still setting a fire."

"We came to fly our freak flags."

"If you don’t know where to draw the line, then your choices become infinite."

"You know, at four in the morning, anything goes."

"Let’s go shopping!"

"Some guy at the studio left a packet of sugar on the console. I took the packet of sugar, held it up to the Neumann, and shook the sugar. And that’s the opening of 'Sweet Emotion.' That was sweet!"

"You must be your own worst critic to get better."

"Sometimes the drugs can push the creativity out, and you forget the initial inspiration."

"All the nuances that a lighting director could never get, that movie crews wait for all day. They call it the 'magic hour.' We called ours the 'witching hour.'"

"The most fun I had doing the movie was when I was strangling Strawberry Fields...just for shits and giggles, 'cause I loved it."

"I was having seizures and passing out on stage. At any time I could’ve had a heart attack, and people would’ve looked away and said, 'Well, we didn’t know what they were doing.'"

"In a book, if you want the truth ... read between the lines! And in music, it dances between the notes."

"I know there have been (and I’m sure there will be) more books written about me ... But I do know some things. And the me that I ain’t!"

"But I’d be the first to admit that I would not be who I am without the good, the bad, and the ugly."

"If you want to control people and you know they’re weak, you give them money!"

"We were a complex mix of utterly unreasonable people...and the momentum revolved around Kelly, who had left after Cal Jam."

"The truth of the matter is that after nine years of playing, writing, and recording together I still couldn’t get through to Joe."

"You can get into a crazy head space where all you want to say is 'Fuck you!'"

Aeromythology was built on the glamour of self-destruction.

Self-destruction was great fun—still, I wouldn’t want to do it again.

Writing songs had gotten harder and harder, and now I had to write them without Joe.

The minute my feet hit the stage, I’m off and running.

You get up there in front of twenty thousand people and it’s a high in itself.

Drugs were just part of being in rock ’n’ roll then.

The first rehab I went to was back in ’83 because I was so fucked-up I was too wobbly to walk down the sidewalk.

You’ve got to believe in something other than a pill craving or you’re just going to sink back into the muck.

We all need something to carry us: your mother carries you, falling in love, then rock ’n’ roll.

I got twelve years out of it.

"You’re not fantasizing about drugs and booze and hot chicks so much as you’re dreaming about falling into a comfortable bed at the end of that endless day."

"The tour’s the surfboard, the wave is your popularity... it’s a wave from the backside of Hawaii twenty feet tall and you’re riding that fucker as long as you can ride it."

"You have to be realer than the realest real for people to relate to when fans are standing on their feet for three hours to come see you."

"They need to see a show that evokes something extreme in them."

"So you’ve got to... reach them profoundly, visually, electrically, do something that changes their Everything."

"The best exercise for anybody is keeping your hand away from your mouth—food is kind of a drug addiction itself."

"Being off the road now, I love to eat, but I can’t just indulge."

"I finally went, 'You guys, fuck you. I’m doing day-on, day-off and I don’t care how much money you think we’re losing, that’s what I need for my voice.'"

"When your audience doesn’t respond to a song, who feels worse about it, who owns it the most, the guitar player or the lead singer?"

"You’re throwing a party for twenty thousand people. I love it, I’m addicted to adrenaline."

Sex is the strongest force in the universe.

Women are the strongest sex. What force is more magnetic than that?

Nurturing is part of a woman’s DNA.

I’d rather be gay, if that’s what gay is: smell the flowers, like to suck on my thumb, cry, smile big.

I just have no life!

At the end of the day, does it matter that I got laid tonight because the girl’s known about me for ten years and loves Aerosmith?

Your girlfriend, your wife, they’re supposed to be your soul mate but you really never know.

Very rarely will you find a compassionate man who’ll say, 'I’m sorry,' or cry.

Women love me because I sing good, because I’m a rock star.

It’s funny. Getting married, it’s all 'I, Betty, take Joe…better or worse'.

In the old game of life, best play it smart, with love in your eyes and a song in your heart.

If you’ve had problems since way back when, did the noise in your head bother you then?

Forget 'fuck me,' 'fuck them,' 'fuck you,' does the noise in my head bother you?

All great art will tip the cart—and I’m not, by the way, claiming Aerosmith is the fucking Sistine Chapel.

You can ruin anything by overintellectualizing it.

The one thing I’ve learned from being a singer and a poet is that it’s often not what’s been said . . . but how you lived it.

Whenever somebody said, 'You can’t do that!' it just made me want to sing it even louder!

How about the two guys who created the BlackBerry—they came up with the idea while smoking pot and listening to 'Sweet Emotion.'

Songs are nothing but air and pure emotion, but they have intense effects on people’s lives.

I think my way of writing songs comes from when I first heard hymns and organ music in church.

If you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything.

When we sing we convey emotion by raising the pitch; the notes change the form of the words.

Animals don’t have brains like ours and are easily impressed by big fake-outs.

The way they treat a broken blood vessel in the throat is just astounding.

Every time that I look in the mirror . . . you’re getting it all over me.

People don’t like to think about it, but like the Irreverend Steven Tyler said: Ladies hold the aces and their lovers call it passion.

Your children are not your children, they are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

What is music anyway? And how does it go from bom-da-bom-bom into a song?

It’s the same old story, never get a second chance for a dance to the top of the hill.

Most of what happens in life is based on electromagnetism.

I think thirty days is a small price to pay for the rest of my life.

If it helped you find your soul again, then how can you not owe it your life?

I wasn’t just mouthing pieties about my road to recovery.

After twelve years of being straight, I’d started using painkillers again.

They have to let the air out of the tires to get traction on the sand.

If you’re lost the camel will take you back.

I want to eat food that’s different colors.

When you’re high, you’re numb to everything.

Feeling the wind blow, the sun on your face.

We were still reclaiming ourselves, recovering from the din of addiction.

I was sadder than I’d ever been. And I left my body as I cried.

She was beyond talented. I could feel her living vicariously through me as I was growing up.

The way a band works is chemistry—and you can’t substitute for that.

I knew what I had to do—gotta fly back to my hive, talk that jive, and hit the road again.

You fucks, to discount my pain and think only about the money!

Sob! The tour was going fine. . . . But I was spending too much time in my room doing.

You know I’d really love to do that—it’s been a fantasy of mine since I was seventeen.

When I fell off the stage, a soon-to-be band member’s wife yelled at my manager.

I could’ve sidestepped the whole thing by saying, 'I zigged when I should have zagged.'

Always have a backup plan, something you can fall back on.

Every time that I look in the mirror, all these lines on my face getting clearer.

Life is like a roll of toilet paper, the closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.

It’s my fountain of youth. I get so strong from the workout that I’m zapped back into being a twenty-year-old.

Living on the tail of a comet, it’s all so fast.

I’ve learned that if I shoot an arrow of truth, I must first dip its point in honey.

I’ve learned the ancient lesson of apology—OWN IT.

People often miss the silver lining because they were expecting gold.

You write a song with somebody, and it’s like having a child with them. . . . The songs are my spirit children.

It’s hard to tell who I am by the trail left by my musical career.

Just sayin’.