Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

Full disclosure, the title isn’t mine, it belongs to Steven Tyler, lead singer of Aerosmith. It’s the title of his memoir, one made about seven years ago, introduced to me by my uncle, and it’s just a question that has plagued my brain ever since. It says something if that’s the question you ask of folks out in the world, about the madness inside you, rather than about the mad voices trying to get in. At least that’s what most among the mad ask, since it usually doesn’t feel like the chaos comes from within. This isn’t the case for everyone though, as some of us are painfully aware of some of the noises, the voices, and how they originate from both within and without. Okay, perhaps it wasn’t full disclosure, I didn’t just get that title from a book I heard about almost a decade ago. Truth be told, when my uncle told me about it I remember feeling like those were some of the most choice words I had ever heard compiled, like they were waiting for me, a question that the gods demanded be asked one day. I feel like I live in that question, that I had been asking it for years before, because for quite a while, and still today, there’s a lot of noise upstairs. It’s mainly voices of a stunning variety. Sometimes they’re famous voices that I learned to imitate as a kid in my desperate bid to get other kids to like me. Sometimes they’re family and friends who had wonderful and disheartening things to say that I would carry around for a good long while. A lot of times it’s my own voice offering deconstructions, critiques, postulations, irritations, irrationalities, irreverence, and irrefutable irregularities amidst my daily. As of late, the voice sounds like mine, though also horrifyingly not, and it’s made of venom, and doubt, and every last little thing I’ve ever done wrong blown up to gargantuan proportions. It snipes at me, eats me alive, smothers the last solitary inch of my energy and will until a room away is a mile, and a phone call is an execution. Though, some days, with some luck, I hear this.

I can’t tell you exactly why. I remember first hearing it some summer many years ago when this particularly demeaning voice roared its ugly head and would not leave for quite a while. It was a summer not too long after I had found the classic rock sound that would come to dominate my music taste for years to come, and to compound it I had become obsessed with “The Warriors,” the 1979 cult classic gang film and especially the video game adaptation, so I was more specifically knee deep in late 70s disco and hard rock. I think I listened to Desmond Child’s “Last of an Ancient Breed” a thousand times during that summer. Hell, just to give you an idea what I’m talk about…

I leave this here because it’s a really great song, and so you maybe you have a context as to the kind of music I needed at the time, but it’s Manfred Mann’s work I really want to discuss. Interestingly enough, this song, as entertainingly tongue twisting and ridiculous as it is wasn’t written by Mann, but by the Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen. Now I mean no disrespect to the Boss, but I find Mann’s version to be the superior version. Not unlike Jimi Hendrix’s cover of “All Along the Watchtower,” or one of my personal favorites, Thrice’s cover of “Helter Skelter.” Don’t get me wrong, there was genius in the work of Bob Dylan and the Beatles, respectively, but some songs, or quite interestingly and coincidentally in my case, some words, are just waiting for another era, for another mind to hear them, to feel them, to make them realize the full potential they couldn’t in an earlier time because of the constraints of culture and imagination. It’s sometimes only when we hear the right words, feel the right sound, that it all clicks. It wasn’t any “teenage diplomat” or “early pearly” that did it for me. “She got down, but she never got tight. She’s gonna make it through the night.” I don’t know why, but at my lowest points I’ve at times heard this song, and those words specifically. Just echoing back to me. “…gonna make it…through the night.” I think everyone should have that, the little echo at the back of your head that occasionally can shut up the asshole who tries to put you down. Even if it doesn’t entirely make sense, if it makes sense to you, that’s all that matters.

Here’s a pretty good example. I turned this one on again just a little bit ago, because I felt I needed it. I remember this as a kid, this may have been the soundtracks to one of the first movies I had ever seen. Every blue moon, when I need to feel inspired, that life and the effort one needed to keep it going is worth it, I hear this at times in my mental background. It doesn’t always make sense, the Raimi films are a distant memory to me now, to the rest of the world even more so. Most folks listen to Queen, Whitney Houston, Bon Jovi, Lennon, and the like when they need a pick me up. I apparently listen to Danny Elfman and the guy who wrote about the world’s mightiest drug peddler. Eh, I guess to each their own.