Rocks: My Life in and Out of Aerosmith

by Joe Perry

  I did everything at the Anchorage from sweeping the floors to unloading ice cream off the delivery trucks. Most of my work was in the kitchen. I had a little window where I’d place freshly washed dishes and bus up the dirty ones. That window was perfectly placed, giving me not only a great view of all the goings-on in the Anchorage but also a clear view of Lake Sunapee harbor. I can still smell that intoxicating brew of motorboat exhaust and fried clams.

  Everyone came through the Anchorage, including a kid a few years younger than me who stopped by the window to strike up a conversation. His name was David Scott, but he was called Pudge, despite his skinniness. His dad was the commodore of the yacht club.

  “You play guitar, right?” he asked.

  “Right,” I answered.

  “I play drums.”

  “Cool. I wanna put a band together.”

  “I’m in. I also know another guy who plays guitar. He teaches tennis at the yacht club.”

  “Bring him by.”

  That kid was Tom Hamilton, who grew up in New London, one of the towns bordering Lake Sunapee. He had a wry sense of humor, was smart, and liked to party. Most importantly, we dug the same music. Tom and I became fast friends.

  I started hanging out with Pudge and Tom. With a case of beer and the radio blasting, we’d chug off into the middle of the lake. We also started jamming in Pudge’s basement. Often his parents were out of town. But even when they were there they’d let us play long into the night. Because I had a few more notches on my guitar, Tom switched to bass and the Jam Band was born: Tom, Pudge, and I.

  Tom also had a winter band, Plastic Glass, that included a hard-core blues lover, John McGuire. John was a harp player who refused to wear shoes and worshipped black blues. Like Eric Clapton, he held the attitude that the blues should never be corrupted. I didn’t argue, because I loved the blues, but I also loved loud, guitar-based rock, whether it wandered away from the blues or not. And since the blues was an impure form itself—I saw the blues as a beautiful mongrel—how could anyone make the case that the blues should be pure? These were the discussions in which we engaged, young fledgling musicians in half-formed bands, our heads exploding from Pudge’s parents’ whisky or the newly discovered Romilar cough syrup that took us to a place of woozy reflection.

  Sometimes John would share lead vocals with me in the Jam Band. Sometimes he’d play harp. It didn’t take long for us to develop a set list of rocking songs. In no time we were playing actual gigs. One of the early ones was at the Barn, the Sunapee music venue owned by John Conrad, the first gay man I ever encountered. John was also a stone-cold alcoholic who woke every day at noon and began drinking Chablis out of a gallon jug. He sat cross-legged in the Barn’s kitchen, where he held court in the hallowed space that back in the forties had attracted the big bands of Count Basie and Gene Krupa. As John spoke, his favorite employee, Louise, an eighty-year-old woman who was strong as an ox, scrubbed the floors and washed the windows. You could also rent a room at the adjacent hotel, the Conrad Manor, and, if you were so inclined, come to Sunapee during one of John’s gala gay weekends. In these months, just before the Stonewall Riots helped launch gay liberation from Greenwich Village, John, high on wine, was already liberated. He couldn’t have cared less if some tourists recoiled at the sight of men in satin short shorts.

  Beyond the Barn, we played boathouse parties, backyard parties—hell, we’d play anywhere. Pay was nice but not essential. For many summers the Jam Band was the house band of Sunapee. I remember one late September night when we played on a flatbed truck illuminated by the beams of car headlights. It was so cold that it actually snowed. But we didn’t give a shit. Long live rock and roll!

  On a clear summer’s day, looking out at the Lake, Tom Hamilton and I would sit under the shade of a great oak tree and talk about the future. The future concerned music and music alone. Fantasies of being onstage in front of a mountain of Marshall amps. Fantasies of traveling to the Fillmore in San Francisco to see bands with names like Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Fantasies of fleeing our home lives, our parents, our schools, our provincial New England prison.

  I got a glimpse of what lay beyond those borders in 1967 when I found myself in a little theater in Boston watching a movie called Blow-Up. I didn’t know anything about Michelangelo Antonioni. All I knew was that the Yardbirds were in the film playing a version of “The Train Kept a-Rollin’,” rewritten for the movie. Even more amazing was the short-lived lineup of guitarists Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. The movie was a strange and startling portrait of a London fashion photographer in which mystery, sex, rock, and rebellion all came together. I had read about the ultrahip Flash scene and now, seated in this art-house cinema, I was watching the scene come alive before my eyes. My ears were even more thrilled when Page and Beck appeared at a critical moment and took over. I’d never heard guitar sounds like that before. Those few minutes of film showed me how to mesh two searing guitars in the same band. Little did I know that I was watching proto-Aerosmith.

  Even though I had come to see Blow-Up because of the Yardbirds, I wound up loving the movie just as much. Cutting-edge music, cutting-edge cinema.

  I loved this Flash art/music scene coming out of England—the energy of cockney East London clashing with the art school dandies, Keith Moon’s bass drum bombs, the mock mod attitude of Kenny Jones in Small Faces. Beyond London, though, I loved this era of lightning-fast changes and quirky metamorphoses. I loved the psychedelic drones, the massive feedback fed by bass-bottomed R&B, the sight of Hendrix praying at the fiery altar of his flaming Stratocaster at Monterey.

  There was a revolution happening right outside my door, and it all seemed connected in a disconnected way—the Kennedy assassinations, MLK, the Vietnam War, Timothy Leary, civil rights marches, and sexual freedom. All I knew was that the music of Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page’s Led Zeppelin captured all that confusion. It was the call of rock and roll—a call I had to answer.

  Everything was changing in the world, but nothing was changing at Vermont Academy. My grades got worse as my musicianship got better and my hair got longer. Having heard Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, I concentrated on my guitar with a new ferocity. In my junior year I took over Just Us, the prep school band, as both lead guitarist and singer. I was making good musical progress, even as I was making no progress in school. My parents protested.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Mom, calling from home.

  “Nothing.”

  “What can we do to help you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “When are we going to be seeing some improvement on your report cards?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Dad called and said the school didn’t like the length of my hair. “They wrote us and said it was too long.”

  “I want it longer,” I admitted.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I want you to cut it, Joe.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You have to. Are you listening to me? Will you cut it?”

  “I won’t.”

  I didn’t.

  My contempt for the conventions that required boring dress codes grew. And so did my hair.

  That summer a kid from California came through Sunapee with some purple mescaline tablets that, at five dollars a pop, provided a gateway to still another territory. Tom Hamilton and I got high together. I can’t report that I saw God or stepped out of my ego like a baby chick stepping out of its egg, but during a walk through the woods the leaves spoke to the wind and the grass had a greenness that nearly blinded me.

  Style was always under discussion. John McGuire, the champion for uncontaminated blues, was still around. He was in Tom’s band in the winter and a part-time Jam Bander.

  “I think it matters what we wear onstage,” I said.

  “What matters is the blues,” said John. “True bluesmen don’t give a shit what they wear. You really wanna wear funny white shoes and play
through Marshall amps?”

  “Are you kidding? Of course. Fuck yes,” Tom and I said, laughing.

  Steven Tallarico, a local rocker, had been coming up to Sunapee for years. His parents had a family connection with one of the resorts, Trow-Rico. Every summer he’d blow in from Greenwich Village with a different band to do two- or three-week runs at the Barn. In most of these bands he was the drummer who sang. His drumming always blew me away. A lot of bands passed through, but Tallarico’s were always the best, especially the Strangeurs. They covered Beatles, Stones, and Byrds songs note for note. Everyone looked forward to seeing the Strangeurs, who actually had a song on the Anchorage’s jukebox, “The Sun.” The tune was professional sounding but too poppy for me. Still, I was impressed that these guys had actually been in a recording studio.

  The first time I encountered one of Tallarico’s bands in person, I was not left with a positive impression. They came into the Anchorage acting like they owned the place. Big fish in a small pond. They were wearing super-glam rock star clothes in the middle of the day when everyone else was in T-shirts and shorts. They took over a booth and stayed for hours. Loud and obnoxious, they ran most of the other customers out of the place. From time to time, Steven would break out in a fake English accent. Their meal culminated in a food fight. Whipped cream was flying everywhere. They left a mess that I had to clean up. I wasn’t happy, but I had no choice. I guessed that was how obnoxious rock stars from New York acted. Little did I know. . . .

  Her typical pose was to position herself in front of the pinball machine at the Anchorage so that sunlight caught the luster of her dark hair. She was beautiful. She wore edgy clothes. She attacked the machine with a certain confidence and aggression not typical of a teenage girl. While she played, I’d sneak peeks from the kitchen. I liked to watch her manipulate the flippers. She was focused. She rocked the machine hard yet instinctively knew how to prevent a tilt. She maintained the game’s high score, frustrating the most determined men. The ceaseless bells and whistles and pings, celebrating her skill at keeping the pinball in play, became the sexy sound track to her little drama.

  The drama continued when she moved over to the jukebox. She stood there casually puffing on a cigarette, surveying her choices. Her choices were inevitably hip and usually English. She favored the same groups I did. When she first spoke to me, it was about music.

  “You play guitar, don’t you?” she asked.

  “How’d you know?”

  “I usually hear about anything that has to do with music. I love music. My dad teaches music at Cambridge High. He plays in a band.”

  “What kind of music?”

  “He can play any kind. He started out playing jazz. Ever hear of Billie Holiday?”

  I hadn’t.

  “Well, he played with her and Dizzy Gillespie. And my uncle’s a famous musician. Ever hear the theme song from Batman?”

  I had.

  “He wrote it. His name is Neal Hefti.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Elyssa.”

  “I’m Joe.”

  “When can I hear you play?”

  “Any time. I’m always playing.”

  I didn’t know it at the time, but Elyssa was also part of a cultural circuitry that included Steven Tallarico. They had known each other since they were little kids. Their parents were friends. Steven’s dad, like Elyssa’s, was a highly trained musician who taught high school music and, in their earlier days, played in jazz bands together. Elyssa even knew that Steven had started out as a drummer.

  “Is he your boyfriend?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, he’s too crazy to be my boyfriend. He’s more like a cousin.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “Steven’s cool.”

  Elyssa went on to say that Steven had spent a year or two at the public school in Sunapee. He moved in with his uncle and aunt because his parents felt that he needed to get away from his big high school that was close to New York City. Their hope was that Sunapee would calm him down. Apparently, though, the plan didn’t work.

  “He’s loud and arrogant,” said Elyssa, “but he’s also a great showman. He goes around saying he’s going to be a rock star in a way that’s kind of obnoxious. But when you hear him play the drums and sing, you believe him.”

  It was hard to know what to think of Steven Tallarico, so I didn’t think much about him at all. He was in his world, I was in mine, and I just didn’t see those worlds colliding.

  POST-PREP

  I recently looked up the meaning of “stoicism.” One definition talks about indifference, passiveness, and endurance. Another mentions “a firmly restraining response to pain.” Was there a stoic part of my personality that, in my late teens, unexpectedly strengthened? Maybe. Looking back some forty-five years to this earlier moment in my life, the description feels right: firmly restraining response to pain.

  The pain was caused by my failure as a student. In spite of my accepting help from tutors and counselors, my schoolwork continued to suffer. I felt like I was beating my head against the wall. When it came to my grades, my father had given up even mentioning the subject. I felt like he had given up on me. He and I drifted apart.

  “Joe is exhibiting passive-aggressive behavior,” one of my teachers wrote my parents. “The fact that he refuses to trim his hair, in accordance with our health and appearance code, is unacceptable.”

  Two wars were raging at once. The first, the macro war, was the 1968 culture war in which long hair was a symbol of rebellion against the previous generation of hopeless conformists. The second war, the micro war, was more subtle—the war within me. I felt like a caterpillar half in and half out of the cocoon. I saw the enemy as school and school regulations, but not my parents. They were more confused by my behavior than adamant about keeping me away from the counterculture. My desire to make my parents proud never dissipated: I always wanted to please them, but not being able to—especially in the one area, academics, that they valued most—caused me inner grief. I wanted to escape the whole messy swamp of confused feelings but didn’t know how.

  After spring break of my senior year, I went back to Vermont Academy feeling sick at heart. I didn’t want to be there. In my mind, I was back at the Boston Tea Party, the synagogue converted into a psychedelic club on Berkeley Street, where I had seen the Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart singing and Nicky Hopkins on piano. Seeing Beck’s guitar reignited my obsession with getting just what he had—a Gibson Les Paul. My electric Guild felt wrong. I didn’t see how much longer I could keep playing it, not after hearing what Beck did with his Gibson. After the show I waited around the stage door. I just wanted to shake his hand. These were the early days of his slow-growing fame, when he was playing clubs that might be half-empty, and I was the only fan hanging around backstage.

  “You’re great, Jeff,” was all I managed to say when he finally made his exit.

  “Thanks, man.”

  He expressed no interest in further conversation, which was fine, since I had nothing more to say. He seemed very moody, very distant, very mod—all the things I admired most about the mysterious blues cats from London. Their passion for their masters, all Americans, had helped get their masters gigs at the same Boston Tea Party, where I saw Muddy Waters with Otis Spann. It’s also where Buddy Guy made his dramatic entrance using a long cord that went all the way to the street, a trick he had learned from his master, Guitar Slim. I was learning by listening, learning by watching, learning by studying even the smallest gestures made by these guys, English and American, black and white, who had taught their guitars to talk in a secret language that seemed as easy as a conversation and as inscrutable as a riddle.

  Vermont Academy, which actually had ivy growing up its walls, had me climbing the walls because those walls were so far away from the Boston Tea Party. I didn’t relate to the teachers, except for one—an English instructor, who invited me to his home, where he lived with his wife and young kids. He had longish hair—not
hippie long, but longer than his colleagues’. He also had open-minded attitudes. He was interested in the younger writers and poets associated with the antiwar movement. He knew I played music and liked to hear my opinions about certain bands. We’d discuss Dylan, the Stones, Pink Floyd, and the Byrds. I was also intrigued that he had a pistol license. I was surprised that a liberal teacher was also a gun owner. When he talked about his feelings about the Second Amendment and the weighty responsibility that comes with owning a gun, I listened carefully. He became a mentor.

  As winter turned to spring, my hair grew longer. It was now below my shoulders. In April I came down with a bad case of the flu and was sent to the infirmary, where I stayed for over a week. A couple of friends came by to visit.

  “Once you get out of here,” said one, “they’re gonna make you cut your hair.”

  “When you go to sleep,” said another, “keep one eye open. They may cut your hair in the middle of the night.”

  We all laughed.

  I knew the guys were right to warn me. For a long time I had ignored the mandate. Not only had my parents been put on notice, I’d been called to the headmaster’s office at least four times.

  After a week or so, I was back on my feet. I was in no mood for prep school lectures. And yet that’s exactly what was waiting for me.

  I went back to my dorm room and sat there, doing nothing for the next three or four hours. A few of my friends dropped by to see what I was going to do. I considered the situation. The school had rules. Vermont Academy had traditions to uphold.

  I had been vocal in my defiance of those traditions—at least when it came to cutting my hair. After I left the infirmary, my first class was history, and the teacher let it be known that he would not allow me in the room if I had not cut my hair. The man served as one of the dorm masters. He wasn’t a bad guy. He had even helped tutor me. I didn’t dislike him. At the same time, I had no intention of obeying him. If going to his class with long, uncut hair meant a showdown, then it was time for the showdown.