The Rolling Stones song that replaced drugs for Steven Tyler in rehab: “The only way I could get a buzz”

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The Rolling Stones song that replaced drugs for Steven Tyler in rehab: “The only way I could get a buzz”

(Credits: Far Out / daigooliva)

Fri 23 January 2026 19:10, UK

Cold turkey is a stark, paradoxical world of intense dread and rather banal boredom. As Jack Kerouac put it, “That feeling when you wake up with the delirium tremens with the fear of eerie death dripping from your ears like those special heavy cobwebs spiders weave in the hot countries…” That’s a feeling you’d do well to avoid in life.

Sadly, it is one that many artists have confronted, and you need some assistance getting through it. Steven Tyler found that vital assistance in the unlikely form of a Rolling Stones song.

His relationship with the band hasn’t always been quite so helpful, though. Mick Jagger once accused Tyler of “impersonating” him. But in fairness to Tyler, he perhaps took the substance abuse even further than his subversive predecessor. Hailing from a generation that had learned from the heathenry of the rock stars that had come before, it was the perennially high frontman’s paradoxical belief that it was, in fact, musicians stepping one toke over the line that killed off the collective revolution of the 1960s, deriding it with individual greed and a stoned paranoia.

As he puts it in his memoir, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?, “And cocaine! Doctors said it was not addictive . . . it was habituating. They didn’t know at the time that the drug would eventually take a sharp turn after a certain day.”

With a sense of soreness, he continued, “Blow, once the life of the party, became the stuff of fear and loathing, the source of devious and secretive behaviour, and the mother of all lies. ‘What, me? No, I don’t have any!’ ‘Sorry, ran out, bummer, man!’ ‘Nope. Hey, I gotta go to the bathroom.’ And that’s where the rock ‘n’ roll bathroom came from,“ he writes.

Concluding, “That’s when people started keeping stuff in two pockets — you had your courtesy bindle you’d share, your sock. And thus sin and doubt entered our happy world.“

This feeling left him jaded, not to mention $6million poorer ($6million i that era is a lot of cocaine). But he was hooked on a feeling, and he feared that getting sober would take that “magic“ away. Were the songs borne from substance abuse? Would I really be a rockstar if I was quaffing green tea rather than fistfuls of amphetamines? These were the thoughts that plagued him and perpetuated the problem.

But at a certain moment, he knew he had to check himself in. Things were getting gravely out of hand. So, he booked himself into rehab. Therein, the true reckoning of what he had done to himself would unfold. Haunted and pained by the harsh reality of sobriety after years of flying high, he turned to his old favourites to get him through. He told Rolling Stone: “When I went to my first rehab, at a place called Hazelden, I brought Exile on Main St. on cassette“.

It had been an album he had loved since his youth. He soon knew it would always be a companion. He continued: “I remember waking up the first morning there and realising I hadn’t been sober once for the past 12 or 15 years, from LSD to heroin and cocaine and acid. The only way I could get a buzz at that point was to listen to ‘Rip This Joint’.“

The electrifying jam offered just enough of a spark of inspiration for him to see things differently and dissipate fears that he couldn’t create adrenalised art without powdered intervention. “All the magic that you thought worked when you were high comes out when you get sober. You realise it was always there, and your fear goes away,” he would later note in his autobiography.

After years of addiction, this unstable track helped Tyler reach a more stable place. As he concludes, “Not long after that, I was walking along the beach, I dropped to my knees, I began crying because I realised that I’d gotten sober.”

While ‘Rip This Joint’ might be the song he is most endeared to, thanks to the buzzing salvation it offered him in his bid for sobriety, it’s not the only Stones song he has said he adores. In fact, he once rattled off a full list of his favourites, and we’ve compiled these pleasures in a playlist below.