by Joe Perry
When I borrowed the Mayall album and brought it home, my father happened to glance at the cover. Four guys were sitting in front of a concrete wall with some slight graffiti. You couldn’t call their hair long—just a little shaggy. One of the four guys—Clapton—was reading a Beano comic book. They were dressed in ordinary-looking jeans.
“Why would young men want to look like that?” was my dad’s only comment.
I had no answer. I didn’t bother to tell him that Mayall and Clapton, along with the Yardbirds, had cracked open my head and heart to an English-confected blues-based music that was changing my life. I didn’t say that the sounds they made actually gave me a physical charge of energy. I didn’t explain how Clapton’s guitar made more sense to me than any book I had read, in or out of school. I didn’t say how I listened to those records with unrestrained joy and insatiable curiosity.
I saw that those sources and songs were all American—Muddy Waters and Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin’ Wolf, Freddie King and Otis Rush, Ray Charles and Robert Johnson. And because my main man Chuck Berry was the ultimate American rocker, I clearly saw—and felt—that the bottom line was black American blues.
As much as I loved listening to the blues masters, it was the English rockers who caught my attention. They played these old songs with the explosive energy of young men with something to prove. The English students of American blues became my teachers and role models. Because they were white and only a few years older than me, I related. I looked up to them as hip older brothers. Like them, I was searching for the Holy Grail hidden deep inside black blues.
I felt that the line between hard rock and up-tempo blues was blurry. To my ears, excitement and sexuality lurked behind every backbeat and chord change of both styles.
John Alden, my friend who was a drummer, added to my musical education. Because Dave Clark was a drummer, John related to the Dave Clark Five, one of the most important bands in the British Invasion. John and I went to a show—the Caravan of Stars—at the Boston Armory. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was witnessing history. The Beatles had stopped touring, as had the Stones. I had missed them both. So to catch the Dave Clark Five as the last touring act of the first wave of the British Invasion was lucky timing. The place was half empty, but, man, I felt an excitement I’d never felt before. When the show was over, I knew that I couldn’t live life without having a band.
At fourteen or fifteen, I was a loner, yet music kept me from feeling lonely. I was an outsider, and yet music put me on the inside. I was not into team sports. I spent most of my time after school walking the woods with my dog and BB gun or sitting on my bed practicing guitar.
Mom being a girls’ gym teacher gave me special access to the fair sex. When she coached the girls’ basketball or field hockey teams, I’d go along as her assistant. Early on I developed friendships with girls, most of them older. They didn’t look twice when I walked through the locker room to have a word with Mom. They were comfortable with me, and I felt safe in their presence.
This was a huge advantage. At a time when other guys were objectifying women, I saw them as equals—and as friends. When they saw me coming to their games with a guitar under my arm, they saw it as a sign of coolness. Unlike today, not everyone had a guitar then. The guitar was a great conversation starter. But that conversation usually ended up with me singing a Bob Dylan song, as opposed to a hot encounter under the bleachers.
I definitely wanted a girlfriend, but I wanted an electric guitar even more. Every Christmas morning I’d run downstairs hoping to find the object of my dreams. On my fourteenth Christmas, I saw an enormous box waiting for me. It didn’t have the shape of a guitar, but maybe it contained one anyway. It didn’t. It was a Wollensak stereo reel-to-reel tape recorder. I liked it; I liked mechanics and especially mechanics related to music. But I was also bewildered. What the hell was this? The recorder had to have cost as much as an electric guitar. Knowing how desperately I wanted the guitar, why would Mom and Dad get me a recorder instead? Maybe it was their way of telling me, Here’s a way to record your electric guitar. Maybe my main gift—the electric guitar—was hidden in a closet or under my bed. I immediately set out and searched every corner of the house, but it wasn’t there.
“You look disappointed,” my mom said. “We thought you’d love the recorder.”
“The recorder’s great,” I said, “but it’s not a guitar.”
“You have a guitar.”
“It’s not electric.”
“It’s a guitar,” my dad said emphatically. “Be grateful for what you have.”
There was no arguing with that, so I kept quiet. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, especially in light of having received this high-tech tape recorder. But, damn it, I wanted what I wanted.
A year later my dream finally came true. I had saved enough lawn-mowing money to convince my parents to throw in the rest. Mom took me back to Constantino’s music store in Lawrence. There among the accordions, mandolins, and violins was a small selection of electric guitars. There was one Gibson, a 335, the model used by Chuck Berry—just what I wanted. But it was fifty dollars more than a Guild Starfire IV.
“Please, Mom,” I begged.
“The Guild looks fine,” she said, “and the Guild costs less. We’ll take the Guild.”
I took it, held it, stroked it, and came to terms with the compromise. I was overjoyed that, at long last, I could realize those high, piercing sounds that I had yearned to make. Once I got home and plugged it into my small amp, I played for hours on end. The sound made my family crazy but I didn’t care. By then I was gone.
Soon I found another guy who gave lessons, Steve Rose, considered the best guitarist around. He was probably nineteen and had a band called the Wild Cats. I’m not sure I knew the word avant-garde then, but that’s how I saw Steve. He was ahead of his time. His hair was a lot longer than anyone else’s, he had a decided swagger, and, most importantly, he could play. His licks were smoothed-out and self-assured. When I later learned something about the blues and listened to masters like Freddie King, I saw where Steve was coming from. At the time I met him, though, I simply saw him as someone a lot further down the road than I was. His siblings and parents were musical. In fact, the family home was set up like a music store. They were a dealership for several instrument makers. Besides taking lessons there, you could buy a piano or saxophone. You could also hire the family to play at your bar mitzvah or wedding. Steve Rose was the first businessman/musician to come into my life.
He taught me the names of chords and walked me through the Beatles fake book. He kept saying that his main job was to teach me to teach myself.
“All you need is a different guitar,” he said.
“Which one?”
“This is the one.” And with that he pulled out a Fender catalogue and pointed to a Stratocaster, the wildest guitar I had ever seen. But given its price tag, he might as well have told me to buy a Bentley.
One Friday night I went to see Steve’s band. It was inspiring to hear guys I knew playing the hits of the day. During a break, Steven took me backstage and showed me his latest acquisition.
“It’s handmade,” said Steve.
When he opened the case and I saw the instrument, I felt the stirrings of a hard-on. The smell—the heady aroma of new wood mixed with plush felt lining—was as stimulating as the instrument.
“Isn’t that what George Harrison plays?” I asked.
“It is,” said Steve. “A Gretsch Country Gentleman. Double-cutaway hollow body. What do you think?”
“I think I’m in love,” I said.
I left Steve’s with extreme guitar envy, realizing that not only did I love the instrument in its many configurations, I actually lusted for guitars. It was a lust, unlike the lust for sex, that carried no guilt, no mixed feelings, no fear, and no confusion. It was a lust that has strengthened over the decades and even now, a half century later, burns with the same flaming heat that engulfed me as a
boy.
PREP
I was a high school sophomore with no interest in high school. My grades weren’t getting any better. I took advantage of all the extra help the school had to offer. Because my parents were so conscientious, I had been given every sort of test—academic, physical, and psychological. I had been given tutors. I had taken preparation courses to help me with college entrance tests. Yet nothing seemed to help. That’s when my parents decided that I needed more hands-on attention. If I were to get into college, I’d need a prep school, a boarding school, a place where I could finally realize my intellectual potential.
I wasn’t happy about leaving my friends and my family. It took me a while to get over it. My parents made it clear I had no choice in the matter. At the same time, the idea of skipping out of Hopedale and living in a dorm free of my parents’ supervision was appealing.
The shift was seismic. Vermont Academy, in Saxtons River, was considered an excellent all-boys prep school with a fine faculty and high academic standards. Unfortunately, neither the faculty nor the standards interested me. I was drawn to the misfits like myself.
The misfits were many. For the first time in my life, I was in the middle of a multiethnic mix. There were Jews, blacks, Latinos, WASPs, and budding hippies. There were kids who took their studies seriously and kids who ran wild. There were spoiled kids from rich families who’d drifted from prep school to prep school. They were also wise guys who, because of my ethnic looks, liked to call me Kike Catholic. Never having been exposed to prejudice before, I laughed. It rolled right off my back. And when they saw it had no effect on me, they stopped the taunting. I got along with everyone.
My parents proved to be right about prep school. I would learn all kinds of new things, but not the things that my mother and father had in mind. For example, a kid from New York City brought the Village Voice, with long articles about a musical group called the Velvet Underground. Another kid from New Jersey had the Underground’s first album. A kid from California had a joint and gave me my first hit. I didn’t love it or hate it. I was more interested in how it helped me hear a radical East Village rock band called the Fugs.
There was a dress code at Vermont Academy—chinos and corduroys, blazers and loafers. In defiance, I wore my shirt outside my trousers and made sure that my shoes were scruffy.
I didn’t become the super student that my parents were hoping for, but I did encounter books—like On the Road—that spoke to me. I couldn’t explain why Jack Kerouac’s writing seemed to have nothing and yet everything to do with the lyrics of Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan. My connection with Kerouac was Dad’s brother Uncle Bing, who had lived on the same street in Lowell with him and had known him since childhood.
I met other guys who turned me on to the Young Rascals. A white kid from Colorado was listening to James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” A black kid from Harlem was listening to the Four Seasons’ “Rag Doll.”
Vermont Academy was where I learned to party. There was one time an older kid indoctrinated me into his ritual of getting high—or low—on Robitussin, the cough syrup laced with codeine. One Saturday afternoon I followed him around from dorm room to dorm room, where he’d finagle underclassmen into giving us their cough syrup. Given Vermont’s cold climate, everyone suffered from coughs and everyone had Robitussin. By the end of the day, we had an ample supply. The Saturday night football game became a lot more interesting.
Sports were mandatory. I joined the ski team. We had our own slope on campus. I was good enough to compete but always messed up the time trials on purpose so I wouldn’t have to race. I got all the benefits of being on the ski team, including trips to Okemo Mountain, one of the great ski areas in Vermont.
As a sophomore, I found myself hanging out almost exclusively with the outsider seniors, the ones who smoked and drank and listened to loud rock. They pointed me in the direction of the best band put together by Vermont Academy students—Just Us. Seeing that I was a passable guitarist with enough chops to play some lead, I was admitted. If their version of “Twist and Shout” was closer to the Isley Brothers’ original than the Beatles’ cover—the version I had learned—I quickly adapted. The band gave me a certain status among the deviant population.
Back home over the holidays, my parents asked me, as parents do, about my new life at Vermont Academy.
“What do you have to say about your new school?” asked Mom.
“It’s okay.”
“Well, are you liking it?”
“Liking it okay.”
“How you getting on with the other kids?”
“Okay.”
“How about your teachers?”
“They’re okay.”
“Joe,” said Dad, showing some frustration, “can you give us a little better idea of what’s going on up there other than one-word answers?”
I couldn’t. I didn’t. When it came to discussing things, I resorted to the stock teen jargon of monosyllabic responses. I knew that the real excitement I had discovered at prep school—the turn-on to the radical new music coming out of London, New York, and Los Angeles—wasn’t anything they wanted to hear about. They wanted to hear that I had fallen into a good-grade groove, that I was passing tests with flying colors and finally fulfilling my potential as a student.
I wish I could have explained to them what was happening inside my mind, but I couldn’t even come close. I cloaked it all with an “it’s okay” or “everything’s fine” or “there’s nothing to worry about.” How could I say that the one thing that kept me from the boredom of school was this new band called the Jimi Hendrix Experience and their new single called “Hey Joe,” which had me wandering around in a daze, amazed at what this guy was doing with a guitar. Hendrix thrilled me and motivated me but mainly obsessed me and convinced me that this instrument was at once the simplest and most complicated source of wild creative pleasure that I could ever imagine. When I listened to Cream’s “I Feel Free,” it made me feel free.
Sex, of course, was the other pleasure that I had in mind. Wasn’t it time that I lost the burden of my virginity? As the other guys in school boasted about their exploits, I could only sit in silence. I wasn’t interested in boasting—boasting was never my style—but I was horny and hungry for experience. At seventeen, I remained unconfident in that area, and my seduction skills were nonexistent. Being in an all-boys school further lessened my chances.
Vermont Academy required that we each adopt a hobby. I chose photography. I liked it not only for its artistic and mechanical properties but because it fulfilled the requirement of belonging to a club. It also allowed me to maintain my loner status. I took photography seriously and learned how to develop my own prints in the darkroom and even roll my own 35-mm cartridges. Best of all, it gave me an excuse to wander the woods.
Fall in Vermont is paradise on earth. The natural world takes on a startling radiance. Each tree becomes a wondrous piece of sculpture. With camera in hand, I never tired of walking through the woods and snapping pictures. No matter how much film I brought, it was never enough. I wanted to photograph everything I saw. And then I saw her.
She was one of the few girls who lived in Saxtons River, and I was fortunate to meet her. There were precious few girls in this all-boys environment. It turned out she went to an all-girls prep school and was on a break. She had long, chestnut-colored hair and light brown eyes. Her faded blue jeans fit her snugly. I couldn’t deny that she was looking at me as I passed by her small woodsy house. She was raking leaves off the lawn. I wanted to say something but, as usual, words failed me.
“You go to school at the academy?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m Betsy.”
“I’m Joe.”
“I think I’ve seen you on my way home from school.”
“Oh,” was all I could manage.
“You taking pictures of the birds?”
“I’m taking pictures of everything.”
“Does that i
nclude people?”
“Well . . .”
Seeing that I was shy, she said, “I’m just messing with you.”
“I’d like to take a picture of you,” I said. “I really would.”
“You don’t have to take a picture of me, but if you’re interested in nature photography I can show you some cool spots. I grew up in these woods.”
“I’d love that.”
As we walked along the hidden trails, she spoke more than I did. That was fine with me. Every now and then we’d stop so I could take a picture. She was in every single one. As much as I loved the sight of the distant mountain covered with snow, I loved the sight of her face even more.
Our encounters went on for some time. They almost always involved walks through the woods. I would have gladly gone all the way had Betsy allowed me, but just having a female friend was a precious gift.
Summertime at Sunapee continued to be the highlight of the year, not only because I could return to the lake and the land that I loved so deeply, but because the area was alive with music. I got a job at the Anchorage, the local burger joint, where the jukebox, one of those great old monstrosities from the fifties, was always rocking great music. There was something about jukebox speakers that gave music an extra buzz. Maybe it was the blinking lights; maybe it was the robotics of the eager arm grabbing the disc; maybe it was the needle pouncing on the vinyl. Whatever it was, the jukebox was beautiful. Because I worked there, my boss would give me a fistful of quarters. Every week after the jukebox guy put in the latest 45s, I became the de facto DJ at the Anchorage. It was one job I didn’t mind. I couldn’t go wrong: the Mamas & the Papas’ “Monday Monday” or “California Dreaming,” The Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer,” the Stones’ “Paint It Black,” the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City.” The music made my kitchen chores tolerable and gave them a rhythm. The French fries fried quicker to Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” and the cheeseburgers grilled greasier to the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.”