Comedian Steven Tyler the Creator joins Jemele to discuss his life and career, and the crazy things he keeps in his pockets when he's not on stage. He also talks about how he got his name, and how he became a wizard, and why he thinks everyone should be a wizard. Plus, he tells us about the time he almost got run over by a car, and talks about the craziest thing he's carried around with him for 30 years, and what it's like to be a rock star in the 70's and 80's. Plus, we talk about the weirdest things he's carrying around, like a crystal ball, switchblades, and a bunch of other cool stuff. And, of course, he talks about his new album, Triggered, which is out now! The 500 is a production of Native Creative Podcasts. New Song: "Triggered" by Jeffree Star by The Doors Join us on FB: and Subscribe and Retweet! Subscribe to our new podcast, Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Like, comment and tell a friend about what you're listening to this podcast. If you like what you think of it, share it on Apple Podcasts! and we'll be the first to know who else is listening and what they should listen to it! Thank you for listening and spreading the word to your friends about this podcast! Love Ghostz! XOXO! Peace, Blessings, Cheers, EJ, Kristy, Sarah, Jen, AJ & Mikey, Chelsie, Amy, Megan, and Gorms, Krista, AJ, Jake, and Sarah, Kristian, and Joe, etc. XO. Love, Mikey & Joe, AJ and Joe Music: "Thank you so much, Thank you, Joe & Joe" - The Crew, Sarah and Mikey and Glynis, Sarah & Gino, Amy & Gervais, Rachael, J.A. & Glyn, Jr. - Thank you SO MUCH LOVE YOU SO MUCH, KELLY, RYANCHORDS, JR & GABE, JORDY, JACOB & GRAVY, BABY, KAREN, KEVIN, JOSH, JOSEPH, KIM & KIM, MARY, JAYE, AND KIM AND JOSH & JOSH
00:01:38.000We just, you know, I'm such a country boy.
00:01:41.000And when I did Idol, every night, when I walked out on stage and it went, and I'm walking next to J-Lo and Randy, my knife was right in my pocket.
00:03:36.000That's why I watched your show and I watched the beginning right before you walked out on stage, The Triggered.
00:03:42.000And two things that came to my attention was, one, you were talking with your producer, whoever, that said, there's your chair, and by the way, your bottle of water's right there.
00:04:33.000Drove to San Diego that night after that.
00:04:35.000So you write things down, like, after you did them, just to solidify them in your head?
00:04:39.000No, I just came from a whirlwind of press, and Steve and Tyler Day released a documentary that Casey Tebow did, and all this shit happened, and we played the Jazz Fest in...
00:20:21.000But you do, if you go to like an AA meeting, they do get up and tell awesome stories about getting fucked up, right?
00:20:27.000See, when you get sober, if you don't continue your aftercare by going to a couple meetings every now and then, you're going to wind up using again.
00:23:10.000So, I'm at the silent auction, and I bought this and that and this and one of these Mellotron type thing that you squeeze box, you squeeze the fingers and play it.
00:23:24.000And when I left there, a guy comes over and says, you just bought the first edition of his book in his own handwriting.
00:25:27.000But he didn't tell you how in his fucking sleep he would play these riffs.
00:25:31.000And I come down the hallway because, you know, as I see it, of course, not as they see it, But as I see it, we were up in New England, and he was playing at a place, and I mowed the lawn at my parents' place, and I quit my last band, and I was fucking a la-hoo-zer.
00:27:37.000Well, and also, check this out, the best part of it is, when I got sober, I started writing even better shit.
00:27:45.000I'd go in a room with four guys and say, we're going in to write a hit, we're going to stay in this fucking room until we do, or until we can't stay in each other's smell.
00:27:54.000And we would leave in seven hours with a fucking song.
00:28:04.000What did it feel like when you did have these drunken stoned moments when you came up with a song like Sweet Emotion or a riff and then all of a sudden you're listening to it on the radio?
00:28:30.000You know, John Lennon had a studio upstairs and we were down in Studio A with Jack Douglas.
00:28:36.000So we went from there for the 70s, and then end of the 70s, I had done every drug on the planet that I could because I thought it was cool, and if I didn't, I wouldn't be cool.
00:28:47.000And those were the kind of people I hung out with.
00:29:24.000Well, 65, 64, I was a drummer in a band at school, you know, the school drummer.
00:29:34.000Then I bought a set of drums because I wasn't getting looked at and made fun of and called, you know, lipo and lipo-ania and got beat up after school.
00:29:45.000I thought, if we get a little band together, play at lunch, that'd be really cool.
00:31:00.000But I remember walking down this path that was called Groovy Way.
00:31:05.000And I stole this banner off the trees.
00:31:10.000Which we used for Aerosmith in the beginning.
00:31:14.000I had these girls duplicated, so it was two guys looking at each other, you know, smoking a joint, and that was the Aerosmith thing in the beginning.
00:31:22.000But when I was at Woodstock, I'm walking down Groovy Way, and it was where Ken Kesey and the Pranksters had all their buses.
00:31:32.000So I'm tripping on acid, and these helicopters are coming by with 500 pounds of hot dogs, and they're dropping them.
00:31:40.000They're dropping them in the field, and you hear this...
00:32:34.000Later on to become, I was the drummer for Aerosmith in the beginning, so move forward now, 60 to 70. All the bands that broke up, I went up to Sunapee.
00:32:45.000I was mowing the lawn at a place called Traorico, my family place, that I did my whole life.
00:35:13.000Ray Tobano, a guitar player at the time, walks in and he goes, hey, I got a friend of yours, because I didn't really want to play the drums.
00:47:24.000And I would put the headphones on later because I'm the lyricist and I wrote the melody.
00:47:29.000I see when I heard Joe's band, I thought, I'm going to take my dad, Vic Tolerico, who went to Juilliard in New York, and I grew up in the Bronx, 5610 Netherland Avenue, 6G, the apartment, and I grew up under the piano,
00:47:46.000and my dad would practice every day on a Steinway.
00:48:36.000The melody that I learned from my dad and then listening to the music we listen to, you know, Dorsey and Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole and then Janis Joplin and the Village Fugs, who were the first ones to put on the back of their album Lunatic Vagina.
00:50:17.000That's how a band comes together, you know?
00:50:20.000And I can't tell you any other way than that magic.
00:50:23.000And every inch of the way, the reason it doesn't feel like I'm 70, and I don't feel the time, and it feels like yesterday, we just started, is because every time I'm on stage, I'm singing those same fucking songs again.
00:50:45.000Anyway, so to answer your question, second album sounds a little bit more raunchy, more in tune with Joe's guitar, and I think we found our sound second album.
00:53:26.000When he got a new lawyer and Paul was with Linda.
00:53:29.000You know It's it's what happens back then you get your confidence today, too, right?
00:53:35.000I mean the record business has been that way always because artists are impulsive and they're not business wise and People come along and exploit that.
00:57:31.000But the funniest fucking thing is we would do, all three of us, and I think that's missing now, but all three of us, you know, to do American Idol, you got to go to Des Moines, Iowa.
00:57:44.000And in a gym, and you're all set up with a whole crew and, you know, three people with these microphones, you know, the 12-foot mics hanging down over your head like this, and 12 cameras and high-def up your wazoo.
00:58:00.000And 50, 40 people a day would come through.
00:58:04.000All these 16-year-old, 17-year-old little trollops with, you know, red lipstick on and push-up bras and going, to dream the American dream.
00:58:34.000There's something about American Idol.
00:58:35.000We like really talented people, but we also like people who are delusional.
00:58:39.000Yeah, and we, trust me, it took me about two weeks to get into it because I told myself, I am never going to tell some young girl who can't sing that she can't sing, get the fuck out of here.
01:04:17.000But for the longest time, you would never be able to have this kind of conversation because of the same people that would tell you to turn it up a notch on American Idol.
01:04:42.000And for you to speak your mind like you do, your truth, and have someone across from you speak their truth in their words, in any language they want, and not be edited or audited, is unreal.
01:04:54.000Isn't that weird, though, that that's unusual?
01:05:50.000Use the ones that are really coming out of your head.
01:05:52.000Don't hold them back and give me some watered-down version of what your real thoughts are so I have to decipher it and sort of put it through a filter and try to figure out what did Steven mean by that.
01:06:37.000So six years ago, I would talk to people and I'd go, you know what, fuck you.
01:06:41.000I'm going on Rogan next week and I'm going to fucking say your name.
01:06:44.000I mean, I just built a house up in Laurel Canyon.
01:06:47.000These fucking guys, I'd come home and I had a water wall and, you know, this guy Lee and people would come and go, don't tell fucking Tyler.
01:06:57.000And I wanted to lean back so the water wall wouldn't...
01:07:56.000The hardest thing is to know direction, to look at people's feelings, know what they're about, why they're about, what guy in the band should do this interview, what interviews to do.
01:09:16.000And then, because they did that, I went and wrote Walk This Way, the lyrics, had them in my bag, finished the whole record, got in a fucking cab, went to 321 West 40, the record plant in New York.
01:09:31.000Got out of the cab, went upstairs, went, I got it!
01:13:56.000Yeah, mine was 94. I have a buddy, 93 actually, I have a buddy of mine who had one done though and his knee is really fucked up to the point where he is about to get a replacement and he actually got a hip replacement on one of his hips because of the damage in his knee.
01:14:12.000Yeah, because if the knee is going in, then this is pushing that way.
01:15:35.000And I'm pretty close to the cutting edge of this stuff.
01:15:38.000Yeah, I've had a bunch of doctors on my podcast talk to me about it, particularly Dr. Neil Reardon, who does a lot of work down in Panama that they can't do in the United States yet.
01:15:48.000And he did Mel Gibson and Mel Gibson's dad, who was 92 at the time and on death's door in a wheelchair.
01:16:29.000And it's one of those things where, according to the doctors that I've spoken to, the longer you can hold out, the more likely you are to never need surgery.
01:16:38.000Especially when it comes to replacements.
01:16:40.000They're able to do a lot with hip replacements now, with Regenikine and stem cells.
01:24:43.000But, you know, not on a large scale, but I'll meet people backstage and they, you know, it took me like 25 years to be able to go, you know, I just don't remember.
01:25:12.000Your genes really take a long time to change, and they think that we essentially have very similar genes to people that lived roughly 10,000 years ago.
01:25:20.00010,000 years ago, that's essentially how people lived.
01:25:23.000They lived in these small groups of people.
01:26:08.000Yeah Yeah He makes a lot of sense that there's been periods of you know Massive loss of life and you know cataclysms and comets passing by.
01:28:25.000It's possible that they're schizophrenic.
01:28:26.000It's possible that they have memories that they've concocted over the years and enhanced, and it's gotten them attention, and it's putting them in documentaries, and it gets them interviews on television programs, but that there's no evidence.
01:28:38.000And the problem with all these people is they all have this same feeling about them, and they're not...
01:28:44.000There's very few of them that come across as rational and objective.
01:28:48.000Most of them come across as there's something wrong.
01:28:54.000If you talk to them about other things in life, if you had a chance to talk to them for a long period of time, sit down with them for three hours, ask them about ghosts and psychics and all kinds of other shit, they almost all believe in that stuff.
01:30:02.000Well, it's more likely that we found fire, and our diet changed, and hunting, and then the stoned ape theory, which is a very fascinating theory.
01:30:10.000The stoned ape theory is Terence McKenna's theory that human beings found psilocybin mushrooms.
01:30:17.000And that through the use of psilocybin mushrooms, which in low doses increases visual acuity, produces these ecstatic states, that it might have helped us develop language and communication and creativity.
01:30:29.000And this, in turn, was the reason why the human brain doubled in size over a period of two million years, which is the greatest mystery in the history of the fossil record.
01:30:58.000I feel like, you know, just because there was an ice age, that took part, that took, it was like how many hundreds, hundred thousand years was the ice age?
01:31:05.000Well, there's been a bunch of Ice Ages, but the most recent one ended somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000 years ago.
01:31:17.000Well, when the Ice Age exists, we have to remember that some parts of the world aren't experiencing the Ice Age, and then humans thrived in Africa during parts of the Ice Age.
01:31:24.000I mean, there's a lot of human beings that live all over the world.
01:31:27.000The real question is, where did they start?
01:31:29.000Most likely from Africa, but they could have possibly started from some other places, too.
01:31:47.000And biologists, people that really understand the human genome.
01:31:51.000They really understand the differences between people that emerge from China versus people that emerge from Western Europe versus people that emerge from...
01:32:20.000And so you get, I was aboard the secret UFO. I saw the magnetic controller that makes us travel through the cosmos and bend time and space.
01:34:11.000Because the second I see one, the second, that will make clear shit like, you know, The song I wrote called Back When Cain Was Able, and it was about a mothership and shit.
01:34:24.000Way before I knew anything about UFOs.
01:34:26.000Did you ever see anything when you did psychedelics?
01:34:36.000Some people have though, and the idea is that there are things that are out there in neighboring dimensions that you're really not capable of accessing them.
01:35:06.000And he goes on a lecture tour, and you've got to pay money to see him, and he's in a documentary, and there's a lot of those people out there, man.
01:37:18.000They don't even believe that free will is an actual thing.
01:37:20.000I mean, I've heard Sam Harris argue it pretty successfully, that there is no such thing as free will, that you are an accumulation of your genetics, your life experiences, all the things that have happened to you, the people that you've come in contact with.
01:37:38.000And how much of your behavior is shaped by millions of adoring fans and people screaming and cheering you on and singing songs that move people and literally change generations, give people goosebumps when they hear them.
01:37:50.000I mean, all that stuff has shaped who you are.
01:37:53.000I mean, all that stuff changes who a person is.
01:37:56.000And who you are now and the way you behave now is in many ways shaped by your life experiences as much as it is by your genetics.
01:38:04.000And you wouldn't be this person if you hadn't lived that life.
01:38:07.000And the decisions that you make from this moment on right now leave the studio and have a conversation with someone will be shaped at least in part by this conversation and mine will be by my conversation with you.
01:38:18.000This is what the idea behind determinism.
01:38:20.000Okay, so I would ask was who said this?
01:38:23.000There's many many people that come up with this concept, but I've heard it that it was really argued to me by Sam Harris the most successful.
01:38:52.000Well, you know, primatologists actually believe that chimpanzees have entered the Stone Age.
01:38:56.000This is one thing that's being considered now, that they've started the use of tools on a regular basis.
01:39:01.000They think that they're learning from each other, and they think that if they are evolving, right, and if human beings evolve over a period of millions of years, we are actually watching chimpanzees evolve in real time.
01:39:20.000So they think that, who knows, with a series of mutations, of natural selection, with a bunch of different things happening, what a chimpanzee is today, most likely it will be a different thing in two million years.
01:41:03.000What a ghost is might be this thing that you can't capture, you can't put it in a box, you can't weigh it on a scale, but you get a feeling when you're in a place where something horrible happened and you can feel it.
01:41:13.000It's not impossible to imagine that that's the case.
01:41:17.000And Rupert Sheldrake was the guy that I told you believed that, and he's a scientist, and some people would argue against it, but that he believes that things have memory.
01:41:26.000And then it's possible that even this table has memory.
01:41:29.000All the people that have sat where you sat.
01:41:42.000I think when they find out the memory in water, I also got to tell you, for the billions of babies that were, this is terrible right now, strangled, people with their heads bashed in, murdered, wars, billions,
01:42:15.000And the negative experiences are outweighed by the positive experiences.
01:42:18.000For the most part, most of the time, life is pretty good.
01:42:22.000Most of the time, life is not filled with war.
01:42:24.000Life is not filled with cannibalism and murder and animals eating you most of the time.
01:42:29.000So most of the memories accumulated in these individual areas were probably positive.
01:42:34.000But sometimes the idea behind like haunted houses and shit like that is that something so extreme happened that the remnants of that experience are trapped in the very fiber of the room.
01:42:45.000I don't know if I believe it, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.
01:42:48.000I don't either, because I'll tell you, who thinks about it?
01:43:34.000So about five, six years ago, Dean LaPolt and I just started looking at that, and she's beautiful, blonde lawyer, woman, great woman, very smart, very intelligent.
01:43:44.000Speaks over here at Brandeis or somewhere.
01:43:47.000She's my lawyer, was my manager for the longest time, but she and I decided to go to Washington and start flashing this shit around saying, you know, what's fair and what's not?
01:45:12.000Like when you used to do concerts back in the day, you used to get paid for your record, even if you got fucked over, you got some money from the record, but then you would get all the money for the concerts, right?
01:45:20.000But, well, not unless we were own managers.
01:45:24.00090-10 means we take 90% out, 10% of the gig goes to there.
01:45:28.000So you make $800,000 an ID. But now the record company gets it.
01:49:29.000This guy, I said to him, what do you mean I don't like you, but I love you?
01:49:34.000Seems that I'm always thinking of you.
01:49:36.000Where the fuck did you come up with that line?
01:49:38.000Like I've said to Paul, you know, what was this, you know...
01:49:42.000He says, well, I was sent to New York to do some kind of publishing thing with lawyers...
01:49:48.000And I was sitting in a hotel in New York right before I went in and I thought, I wrote those lyrics.
01:49:53.000Somehow, him being a young black man with songs 50 years ago, in New York with lawyers, probably white, not just saying, He was put in a situation where he had the magic.
01:50:55.000But what's happened is it's become the norm.
01:51:00.000Well, what's become the norm is that people recognize that you can't do that with movies, right?
01:51:04.000They recognize that if you're stealing movies, it's illegal.
01:51:06.000Like if you get caught with a BitTorrent account, you got a bunch of movies on there and you're letting people download them, you can get prosecuted.
01:53:29.000They were signed to the manager and the manager had a secret deal with Sony.
01:53:35.000But you hear that about boxers having shitty creepy managers.
01:53:40.000You hear it about musicians, comedians, everything.
01:53:43.000I hope there's kids out there right now listening to this that want to become lawyers and say, it should be the wild, wild west with these guys.
01:53:56.000You know another way when I would say things to him like, You know, what about these lawyers that took on a case, they find out after a year and a half, the case is still going on, grand jury, but they find out that the guy that they're handling really murdered the girl.
02:00:35.000Isn't he a president for this time, though?
02:00:37.000I mean, this is the time we were talking before the show about people trying to drag people down and social media and there's so much hostility and people looking to be angry and insult.
02:01:46.000I think the world is getting better overall.
02:01:48.000I think there's terrible moments that have always existed throughout human history.
02:01:52.000But I think overall, if you look at the period of time we live in now, You know, and Steven Pinker wrote a great book about this, and there's a lot of evidence.