by Joe Perry
My parents wanted me to take dance lessons where the waltz and the fox-trot were still being taught. Dance class was hell—the boys on one side of the room, the girls on the other. Awkwardness ruled. My hands sweaty, my heart heavy, my eyes fixed on the floor, I hated every minute but was determined to stick with it because it was a chance to meet girls.
My parents urged me to choose an instrument for the school band. The school band bored me and so did the instrument I was given—the clarinet. I later learned that the clarinet was the high-pitched voice of my parents’ generation of music. Jimmy Dorsey and Benny Goodman played the clarinet. I didn’t give a shit about the clarinet. After a few weeks I turned in the instrument and went back to begging.
“Get me a guitar—please. I need a guitar.”
My parents finally relented. One blessed day a guitar arrived. The box came from Sears. I knew by the shape that it contained a guitar. My heart beat like crazy. I pulled out the instrument. The first thing I did was look for the cord that would let me plug it in. There was no cord. My heart sank. I knew it wasn’t electric, but the fact that it was a guitar—an actual guitar!—was reason enough to celebrate.
Yet I still wanted electricity; I wanted volume; I wanted to try to make the sounds I heard on records by Bo Diddley. When I looked in the window of the record store and studied Bo Diddley’s album Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger, he was dressed in a black cowboy hat, black cowboy shirt, black boots, and double-holster pistols. He was standing in a corral. A horse stood nearby. In front of Bo was a streamlined electric guitar. Right then and there I saw the connection between rock and roll and the outlaw life.
The even bigger revelation, though, was the noise I could make with my first guitar. Getting even close to hearing the sounds in my head was more exciting than putting on a cowboy hat or leather jacket. The sounds coming from these six strings made me grateful to my parents for putting this instrument in my hands.
The instrument was a $12.95 Silvertone student model that came packaged as part of a complete kit. I took the box up to my room. In addition to the guitar there was a red, white, and blue strap, a small illustrated manual, a 45-rpm instructional record, and a plectrum, commonly known as a pick. Where to start?
Even watching my teenage neighbors play guitar, I never paid attention to which hand was doing what. So being left-handed, I naturally took the neck in my right hand and strummed with my left. It didn’t sound like anything. When I put on the record, I was instructed to do the opposite—put the neck in my left hand and the pick in my right. That’s what I did. After a quick lesson in tuning, I began fingering the strings. My fingers quickly grew sore, but I kept on. Something was sounding like chords. It didn’t matter how sore my skin was—the sound of chords was enough to keep me going for hours.
A lifetime later, people are always asking me why, as a lefty, I play right-handed. My answer goes back to my first guitar. Playing those first chords, I was naively following that instructional record. Little did I know that I was playing backward—and would do so for the rest of my life. I ask myself today: What kind of guitarist would I be if I had not conformed to a method designed for right-handers? I have no idea.
All I know is that, backward or not, I was learning some basic chord changes. I could start playing along with pop songs. Then came the unfortunate day that I leaned the Silvertone against the wall. I was playing tag with my younger sister and accidentally knocked it over, breaking off the headstock. Bummed out, I put the pieces in a box and the box in the closet. There it stayed for close to a year until . . .
The Beatles!
The Beatles exploded in 1963. When I first saw their name in print, an adult told me that their name was incorrectly spelled. That made it even better. They represented a new kind of show business. We were used to seeing Topo Gigio on The Ed Sullivan Show, but the Beatles rocked the TV set off the living room floor. The Beatles were raucous and exciting. They were unfettered energy. When the Beatles appeared on Sullivan, it was like a national holiday. The Beatles represented the start of the British Invasion, and smashed down a door through which I was ready to walk. There was an undercurrent of sexuality that felt primal in its rhythms and hit me—a thirteen-year-old—right in the groin. In a subtle but powerful way, this band completed the picture. What I had heard at those teen parties started making more sense to me. With every song I heard, the connection between sex and music was becoming clearer.
My parents might have admonished me with “Turn that down!” when I blasted “She Loves You” on my 45 record player, but they never forbade me from listening. Hell, for all I know, they may have liked it. Much later on my mom told me that my dad’s favorite Beatles song was “Hey Jude.” They never told me to stop as I tried to work out every last Beatles song on my guitar. I was the diligent student, strumming to “I Saw Her Standing There” while my sister, Anne, and I sang the lyrics.
It was the Beatles who caused me to ask my father to epoxy my broken guitar back together. When he was able to do it, I was off and running. By then I had been rubbing elbows with other friends who had guitars. That gave me the chance to play on higher-quality instruments. The difference was remarkable. Now I needed a better guitar—and an argument to get my parents to buy me one.
When my parents had wanted me to play clarinet, they had made me take lessons. The same was true when they urged me to play piano. So when I presented my case for a better guitar, my promise to take lessons broke the ice. Mom and I went to Constantino’s, a music store owned by her cousin in Lawrence, where she bought me a decent acoustic. Naturally I still wanted an electric, but I was glad to get my hands on any upgrade.
My parents were trying to protect me from the rising teen culture that, more and more, was defined by screaming electric guitars. The culture of motorcycles, tattoos, deviants, and delinquents was abhorrent to upwardly mobile people like the Perrys. Our town prided itself on being clean and white. Rock and roll was seen as dirty and black. Our town put a premium on conformity. Rock and roll was about rebellion. It was the sound track of the upcoming political, social, and sexual revolution. It was going to have the power of a tidal wave—and no one saw it coming.
In the early sixties we moved to a single-family home in a more rural part of town. I loved that it was surrounded by four acres of dense forest. It was also a ten-minute walk to the first tee of the golf course that my dad and mom, along with other fanatical golfers, had built with their own hands. It was in that house on Mill Street that I got increasingly obsessed with procuring an electric guitar.
At every birthday and Christmas I looked for the one gift my parents knew I wanted above all others. It was never there. How could I get one? Pray? Not really. I wasn’t the praying kind. Even though we attended the neighborhood Catholic church as a family, we were hardly devoted believers. We went to Sunday services because that was what a good upstanding American family did. Neither God nor Jesus nor Mother Mary nor the holy saints spoke to me. I didn’t seek or feel their spirits. I felt bored. I also felt the imposition of a certain moral code. I didn’t know how to fight it, so I absorbed it. That code, which insisted that premarital sex was wrong, led to a whole battery of weighty emotions.
Strange, but even a kid like me who didn’t take his Catholicism seriously was seriously impacted by it. As my body began awakening to sexual feelings, I thought those feelings were wrong or negative or even evil. I was confused about what it would mean to act on those feelings. I did know, of course, that Catholicism requires you to confess your sins. Masturbation is seen as a sin. To confess it is to wipe the slate clean, even if you have to do time in purgatory. Well, I have heavy time to do in purgatory.
The line separating the sanitized white-bread culture of Hopedale and the funky rock-and-roll culture of the wider world was blurred. I loved my parents. My parents loved me. I loved music. And my parents, despite their doubts, allowed me to listen to all the music I wanted to. Driving over those two-lane highways to Lake Sunapee, my parents let
me play the guitar in the backseat to my heart’s content. If I wanted to figure out the guitar licks to Chuck Berry’s “School Days,” they didn’t stop me. And if I sang lyrics about dropping coins in slots and hearing something hot, lyrics about hail hail rock and roll that will deliver me from the days of old, I wasn’t restrained. My sister, Anne, smiled and sang along. My mom and dad continued discussing their upcoming tennis match or dad’s golf handicap. The guitar was not taken from me—not once, not ever—and became, like my dog and my BB rifle, my constant companion.
Aiming to keep my promise about lessons, I took down the name of an elderly gentleman that my folks knew. He lived around the corner and played flamenco guitar—whatever that was—and was willing to teach me. The man was kind and patient. I was fascinated to watch his fingers move over the frets. In our first lesson, he showed me some basic positions. He mentioned scales. As he and I played a few notes together, I was thrilled by the richness of his tone. It was strong and true and satisfying to the ear.
“I know you like that rock and roll,” he said, “and that’s fine, but let’s first learn the fundamentals. Once you get the basics down, you can take it wherever you like.”
I didn’t like the way this was going. It reminded me of piano and clarinet lessons. I had no interest in spending years learning songs that I didn’t like. I wanted to get to the heart of rock and roll. But I had made a commitment to my parents and was determined to stick with it. Forty-five minutes a week was a small price to pay for my new guitar.
The following week’s lesson was on a Tuesday. The school bus that brought me home passed by my guitar teacher’s house. I had brought my guitar to school and, anxious to get to my lesson, I asked the driver to drop me off at my teacher’s house. When the bus pulled up, I saw that a hearse was parked out front. It didn’t take long to learn that the hearse had come for my teacher. He had suffered a fatal heart attack the night before. There was no more talk about guitar lessons after that.
The Lake Sunapee summers became a staple of my childhood. It was just me and Mom and Anne in our cabin all week until Dad drove up from Hopedale for the weekend. Waiting for him to arrive on those Friday nights, it was always an anxious time for me. I kept playing my guitar, but the guitar didn’t make me less nervous. Dad should have arrived by eight, but now it was nine, now it was ten, and I grew afraid. I was scared that Dad wouldn’t come, scared that, as it had his father and my teacher, death would snatch him away. A car wreck would kill him. So when he finally arrived, at midnight, I ran to the door and hugged him with all my might.
Those summers were all about the water, the woods, and the guitar. I lived inside the lake, every day diving deeper, my imagination absorbed by the underwater life swimming around me. I bought scuba-diving magazines and fantasized about adventuring to the Great Barrier Reef in a sea of coral splendor off the coast of Australia. My BB shot improved considerably. I stalked through the bushes, pretending to be living in an earlier period of history when man hunted his food and survived on his ability to deal with the wild.
At summer’s end, I felt a certain dread. I didn’t want to leave Sunapee. Hopedale meant school and school meant misery. My performance hadn’t improved. I liked reading, but reading about diving gear. I liked flipping the pages of music magazines and stopping at every ad for every guitar. My own playing had advanced to the point that I could play most of the pop songs of the day. In terms of the instrument itself, I focused on what I wanted: a semi-hollow solid-body Gibson cutaway. I liked the full shape. I had seen Chuck Berry play variations on classic Gibsons. I loved the sexy shape of those models. Looking back, I realize it’s probably due to my Italian DNA. A full-body Gibson 335 brought to mind a picture of the full-bodied Sophia Loren, my voluptuously curved, big-breasted dream woman, the one who kept adding time to my future debt in purgatory and confessing to the priest every Saturday, “Father, this week I saw a woman on TV . . .”
Chuck Berry continued to be my imaginary mentor. Of course, Elvis made an impression. Along with a hundred million other kids, I had loved “Hound Dog” and “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Jailhouse Rock.” Elvis was cool. There was nothing about him that I didn’t like, but it wasn’t until later in life that I came to appreciate him fully. As a kid, Chuck was the first musician whom I saw in a heroic light. His language, both in his lyrics and riffs, made sense. Whenever he was on television, I ran to our Sylvania console. As a performer, he had the looks and the moves. He had the duck walk. He had the attitude, the swag, the internal combustion. He sang as well as he played. He also had the brand of guitar—a Gibson—that I wanted.
“If you want it bad enough, you’ll work for it,” said Dad, who, unhappy with my poor grades, seemed to be distancing himself from me. Because he had done well in school and advanced himself in the professional world, he expected me to do the same. He couldn’t deny that I was a good kid. I wasn’t a bully, I didn’t get in trouble, and I did as I was told. Yet despite my best efforts, I couldn’t be the kid he wanted—the kid who made all A’s. Instead I was a kid who kept bugging him for an electric guitar. And in his mind, that meant a switchblade in your right pocket and a greasy comb in your left.
I wanted the electric guitar so badly that I set out to do something I hated—mow lawns—to save up money. It was only the image of the Gibson that got me through the monotony of mowing. I sweated through the work, Chuck Berry’s “Almost Grown” playing inside my head. I sweated each day at school, never knowing when I’d be called to the principal’s office, where I’d be chastised for inferior grades and told that I needed tutoring and extra time in study hall.
When I turned fourteen in 1964, the major event in my life was the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night. I was already obsessed with the band’s music, but the film ignited my obsession. I loved every minute of that movie—four rebels running from the stage to the hotel while being chased by hordes of screaming girls; four outsiders bonded by their music, their humor, and their determination to live life on their own terms. That was what I wanted. I left the theater with one thought: I need to have a band, I need to play in a band, I need to find some guys who love music as much as me and form a band.
That band would require electricity. In spite of my odd jobs—mowing lawns, shoveling snow, selling greeting cards, throwing newspapers—I still hadn’t put away enough money for the electric guitar. Meanwhile, I was intrigued that the Rolling Stones’ first album, out that same year, was practically all covers of blues and rhythm-and-blues songs. They did Chuck Berry’s “Carol” and Jimmy Reed’s “Honest I Do.” Unlike the Beatles, the Stones, like the bluesmen before them, sang about how they lived on the edge. Compared to other groups coming out of England like the Dave Clark Five, the Stones were painting a picture that was darker, wilder, and more dangerous. Musically, their original song lyrics spoke to issues of the time that still hold up today.
I began playing along with these records and, still without an electric guitar, I formed my first band, Chimes of Freedom. The name came from a lyric by Bob Dylan, another artist I had recently discovered. Dylan caught my ear because his voice was unconventional. I heard his voice as conversational—he seemed to be talking as much as he was singing. He felt authentic. I liked when he went from guitar to harmonica. Most important was his message. Every time I heard their lyrics I would discover something new and different, like the Rolling Stones. I took their words as poetry that didn’t have to rhyme. I also learned that you didn’t have to have a Paul Anka or Barbra Streisand voice to make great music. You could grunt, growl, or talk your way through a song.
The drive to play music at any cost became the central force in my life. Once I put together my first band, that urge never diminished. Ironically, that drive came from my father, who preached, If you want something badly and work hard enough, you can get it. Talent was never mentioned as part of that equation. Looking back, I know I had a modicum of talent, but hard work was the key.
I never dreamt of becoming a big star
and playing in front of tens of thousands of people. I never dreamt of glory, or fame, or even fortune. I just dreamt of playing music and, more specifically, playing in a group. It was the group feeling that I loved so much. It was the group miracle that I sought—the sheer thrill of three or four or five musicians conducting a raucous conversation with their instruments.
My cohorts were Dave Meade, playing his big brother’s bass; John Alden on drums; and sometimes Bill Wright on tambourine and guitar. We covered the Byrds, the Beatles, Dylan, and Chuck. We had no real gigs. Our repertoire consisted of just a few songs. We found the courage to set up in a distant corner at some living room party. Even that made me nervous, but it also gave me comfort; I knew that I wouldn’t have to dance. You could say that it was at those parties that I lost my musical virginity years before I lost my sexual virginity. To play out loud before a group of partygoers, even if they were only thirteen-year-old girls, was an act of courage. It took additional courage to play the guitar and sing, because I didn’t think that I was very good. Yet I learned the songs off the records and was able to create a rough facsimile of what I heard. None of the girls laughed or booed. None of them made fun of me. They appreciated my willingness to get up there and play for them. Their appreciation added to my courage.
Dave Meade’s big brother had a record collection that widened my world. He was a college student with advanced taste in music. In his collection were five albums that changed my life: John Mayall’s Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton; Having a Rave Up with the Yardbirds; Chuck Berry Is on Top; the Kinks’ first live record; and a “best of” John Lee Hooker album.