by Joe Perry
If, like nearly every other rock-and-roll band, we were on the outskirts of acceptable society, that didn’t mean that we lacked social and economic drive. In the world in which we placed ourselves—call it an antisociety—we yearned for recognition and sustenance. We were determined not to have real jobs. We wanted to keep the party going. In this particular moment in time—a year after the breakup of the Beatles and the disaster at Altamont—rock culture was in turmoil. But then again, I viewed rock and roll as the sound track to what was happening in society. The songs were the anthems to our rebellion. If a tornado was heading our way, so much the better. Hadn’t I been thrilled to see Jeff Beck destroy his guitar in Blow-Up? Didn’t that feel right to me? The insane energy of the music made musicians do insane things. Culturally, I was down with free love. But I can’t say that I was a card-carrying hippie.
We found a pad in the center of the student ghetto called Allston-Brighton. Our place was on the main drag at 1325 Commonwealth. Undergraduates would catch the trolley that ran from downtown to Boston College right in front of our building.
To get to the second-floor apartment you could take the rickety stairs or an elevator the size of a small cage. I took the big room in front—supposedly a living room—and turned it into my bedroom. It had lots of windows. The trade-off was that we could use it as the party room because it had the biggest couch. Soon, though, every room turned into a party room. My sense of interior decor had me hanging a parachute from the ceiling. Tom took the dining room as his place to sleep. He liked it because an upright piano sat in the corner. Mark Lehman took the bedroom next to mine. In the back of the apartment was a kitchen, another bedroom, still vacant, and, at the end of the hallway, the only bathroom. Because the hallway was used to store our amps and equipment you’d have to walk sideways to enter the bathroom. At this point, our lives were all about twists and turns.
Our first priority was to round out our band. I was on guitar, Tom on bass, but what would the rest of the lineup look like? Did we want a trio? A four-piece band or a five-piece band? And what would those pieces be? We decided not to decide. Better to choose the cats based on the quality of their playing rather than on a preconceived idea of the band’s final configuration. No matter what that configuration, though, we’d need a drummer. You can’t stand in front of a mountain of Marshall amps and play loud rock and roll without a kick-ass drummer. At the same time, the seeds of the kind of band I wanted had been planted in my mind. That’s because I’d been lucky enough to see some of the best live bands in the world at their peak.
Through a friend of a friend we met a kid named Joey Kramer. He came from Yonkers, New York, and was a student at the Berklee College of Music, but was considering dropping out. His current gig was with an all-black R&B band whose members called him their white soul brother. He said he was interested in auditioning, so we set up a time at the student union at Standish Hall at Boston University. Playing behind Tom and me, Joey seemed comfortable. I immediately heard how his R&B chops would give a rock band a unique funky punch. Musically, we meshed. But Joey was on the fence about leaving school. Tom and I loved his feel but we made no decision. After all, he was the first cat we’d auditioned. It was still an open oyster.
A few weeks later—this was after Labor Day—we trucked back to Sunapee in Mark’s hippie van for a party that Pudge was throwing at his parents’ lake house. The first person I ran into was Steven.
“What’s up, man?” I asked.
“I’m living in a boathouse on the lake. I may spend the winter up here. You guys find a place in Boston?”
“A big place.”
“Where?”
“Commonwealth.”
“And you’re working?”
“Not yet. Just trying to get it together. We started auditioning drummers. But the slot’s still open. You interested?”
“Yeah, that would be cool. It would be great to play together, but I just wanna sing.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” I said. “A singing drummer. I remember you singing from your drum set and it was great.”
“I just wanna stand up front and sing. I love the drums but I don’t wanna fuck with ’em anymore. Wanna concentrate on being a front man.”
“Well, we auditioned a drummer who plays kick-ass R&B and could fit the bill. If you wanna just sing, he could fill the drum spot.”
“It’s something to think about,” said Steven. “You have room in your apartment?”
“Lots of room. Three bedrooms.”
“All right, cool. I’ll come down. Sounds like more fun than winterizing the cabin.”
I had thought about asking Steven if he wanted to hook up with us. He definitely had the chops, whether on drums or vocals. Plus he had been doing this for a while and had more experience. But the fact was, as good as his four or five bands were, they weren’t able to keep it together and make it to the next level. They always broke up. He even left his musical partner of at least four years behind. But I figured if there was something off about him, I could deal with it. It would be worth it to have him in our band. Bottom line, there was something about him I liked. It was like meeting a long-lost brother. Looking back, I can certainly put my finger on it, but back then it was just a vibe. So I asked him to join the band and Tom was all for it.
Back in Boston I called Joey and said he had the gig. I told him we had a lead singer.
“Who?” he asked.
“Steven Tallarico.”
“He’s from Yonkers,” said Joey. “We went to the same high school. We were in Battle of the Bands together. I love that guy. He’s one of the best fuckin’ singers around. This band’s gonna be outta sight. Man, if Tallarico is in, count me in too.”
When I told Tom about the conversation with Joey, he was into it. Things were coming together.
Next morning the phone rang. It was Steven.
“I was thinking, man, that if I’m gonna join your band I gotta bring along my bass player.”
“That won’t work,” I said. “You’re looking to join a band that Tom and I have already started. And Tom’s the bass player. That’s nonnegotiable.”
“Well, if I can’t have my bass player, I want to bring in my friend Ray Tabano to play guitar.”
“We already have a guitarist,” I said. “Me.”
“Ray can play rhythm guitar. If you get to keep your bass player, it’s only fair that I get to keep my guitarist.”
I thought about the idea of a second guitarist. Some of my favorite and best-sounding live bands, like Fleetwood Mac and the Yardbirds, had two guitarists. Might be interesting to try it. Although I hadn’t met Raymond or heard him play, he figured to be good. Steven’s bands always had great players.
“Okay, man,” I said. “We’ve got a deal. I just need to hear Raymond play.”
I could hear in his voice that Steven was serious about joining. I was certainly serious. He said he was ready to go but needed a couple of weeks to go back to Yonkers and get his stuff.
Steven announced his arrival with a loud knock on the door. When I opened it, he was all smiles. “I’m here, you motherfuckers,” he said, “and this band is about to burn!”
I liked hearing that. I liked that his ambition matched ours. He dug the apartment. It was quickly decided that he and Joey, the boys from Yonkers, would share the bedroom in the back. We were ready to roll except for the fact that I hadn’t met Steven’s friend Raymond Tabano, the guitarist about to join our band.
“You’ll meet him tomorrow,” said Steven. “He and his old lady just opened a leather shop right here in Boston. We’ll drop by there tomorrow. They’re custom-making a bag for me.”
The shop, the Yellow Cow, was on Newbury Street, Boston’s hip equivalent of Cambridge’s Harvard Square on the other side of the Charles River. Raymond was a big guy, over six feet, with thick brown hair down to his waist. He was into a Southwest look. Lots of turquoise. Like Steven, Raymond was older than me. He seemed to have his shit together
. Also like Steven, he was a ball of energy.
I liked his place, not only because of the heady smell of leather but because the leather goods themselves—the jackets, pants, and wallets—were artfully designed to attract those counterculture consumers with the money to buy the hippest merchandise on the street. The fringed bag they made for Steven was especially cool.
Raymond was friendly while his wife was withdrawn. The shop was just getting started, and I’m sure she was afraid that the band would take up all his time. From the opposite side, I had the same apprehension. Would he put the shop before the band?
“The band comes first,” he told me. “Count on me, man. I’m with you all the way.”
I was eager to hear Raymond play. We were all eager to start rehearsals. That meant finding the right place. Mark and his Keep On Truckin’ step van was our chief mode of surveying the city. We spent a lot of time rambling around town, meeting girls in front of the dorms, and, when we were lucky, bringing them back to the apartment. Mark was always cruising up and down Comm Avenue and Beacon Street. He liked picking up hitchhikers on their way to or from BU. Some of those hitchhikers became regulars and would chip in with a buck or two for gas. Mark was always making a new friend who could help us. His makeshift taxi service became a metaphor for the band. We picked up money wherever we could.
I signed up with an employment agency that put me in touch with a Catholic Italian family who ran a maintenance company. They hired me to clean a synagogue in Brookline. Three times a week I swept the floors and washed the windows. During the Jewish High Holy Days, I helped set up extra chairs and hang decorations. The work wasn’t exciting, but it was dependable. I did it for a year. Steven found work at a bagel shop but he didn’t last long.
After searching for a place to rehearse, we finally made a connection at the West Campus dorm of BU. The dorm master said we could use the basement if we agreed to play a few live shows on campus. We said sure. Rather than lug our stuff back and forth from the apartment, we left our equipment in a closet in the basement under lock and key. This got to be a hassle when the college kids started setting off fire alarms in the middle of the night. We’d have to throw all our shit in the closet, lock it up, and head up to the street and wait for the all-clear. Sometimes this happened two or three times in the same night. Musical coitus interruptus.
In these early days, Elyssa Jerret was living with her parents in Brookline, the next town over. When I visited her the first time I was surprised to see that the Jerrets lived in a rented apartment, a perfectly nice place, but nothing that matched the high-society image they conveyed to the world.
Still platonic friends, Elyssa and I once spent the night together in that West Dorm basement. Rather than take the time to load up all our equipment in the closet, one of the band members would volunteer to sleep on a blanket on the floor and guard the stuff. On the night I volunteered, Elyssa stayed with me. I couldn’t help but hope it was her way of turning our friendship from platonic to physical. I was wrong. She held back on the big prize. And naturally, that made me want it even more.
The initial rehearsals in that BU basement were rough. We spent half the time getting to know each other and the other half learning how to play the songs. Except for Steven, who’s always something of a bull in the china shop, we were walking on eggshells, learning how to communicate. Working with Steven was frustrating. He was a perfectionist to the point of madness. He would scrutinize the smallest part of a song to death. He liked to go on and on, discussing a chord change or a transitional riff, and then demand that we play it for a half hour. It was clear that he was used to being a leader—but so was I. I was starting to get a vision of what this band could be, and that didn’t include sounding like robots. When you play in a rote manner, it can kill the spontaneity that leads to magic energy.
I’d heard stories about how, at Steven’s insistence, his former band partner Don Solomon would endlessly repeat a pattern to the point that Don wound up taking his bass to the bathroom, where he’d sit on the toilet, thus achieving a musical version of multitasking.
Repetition is all well and good when you’re learning scales and techniques, but it does nothing to get the creative juices flowing. My idea of a rehearsal was to play a song front to back a bunch of times, letting everyone throw in different ideas. Not only does this allow the band to learn the song, but sometimes, with new ideas kicking in, a new song is born.
Yet often at our rehearsals we’d never get to play a song all the way through. Steven would stop every few seconds because, in his mind, someone made a mistake. No doubt, Steven’s scrutinizing helped bring the band along on a technical level. But it drove me crazy. I’d have ideas in my head that, given the stop-and-start methodology, would get lost. I knew Steven had a lot to teach us, but my instincts about rock and roll carried as much weight. Between the two of us this would soon give Aerosmith its unique sound.
Then there was Steven’s volatile relationship with Joey. Because Steven was a great drummer himself, he didn’t hesitate to obsessively criticize Joey. Much of this was good. But much of it was painful for Joey. It was really tough to watch this. The son of an abusive father, Joey was facing another kind of abuse. Steven could be more than demanding in his attempts to school Joey; he could be emotionally brutal.
This was our early dilemma: We didn’t want to be a cover band but we had to play covers, not only because we had no inventory of originals but because getting work meant playing familiar songs the kids could dance to. We would put our own touches on these songs and make them as unique as we could. The competition was stiff. There were bands everywhere playing every kind of music. I wanted us to stand out. I wanted us to come up with something new. I was convinced that the diverse musical backgrounds of everyone in our band could create something original. But that would take time.
There were early indications of strong musical chemistry between Steven and me. Back at 1325, apart from the other guys, we started jamming as a duo. We worked by feel, not talk, and when it got good we kept it going. We had a little mic and tape recorder. Because my riffs tend to be melodic, Steven would scat along with them. At the beginning of our collaboration he stayed off the piano—that would come later—and concentrated on percussion and vocal.
The first song Steven and I wrote together was on Mark’s water bed. I had my guitar and Steven played percussion on his thighs. His rhythms inspired my riffs. My riffs inspired his vocal lines. The result was “Movin’ Out,” which bears the traits of many Joe-Steven songs to come. The guitar lays down the lines; the licks are thick; and in a sudden burst the singer starts telling the story in unison with the instrumental drive. From the start of our partnership, the assumption was that I’d provide the musical foundation and Steven would write the lyrics. Because he was the singer, and a highly verbal guy, it seemed logical. He had to act those songs; he had to believe the script; so who better to write the script than Steven?
Steven was—and remains—a painfully slow lyricist. He’s super glib as a conversationalist, but when he has to fashion words to fit a melody, it takes him forever. The more we worked together, the slower he became. Early on I saw that it was something I’d have to get used to. I never did. I write in a rush. I don’t over-critique what I write. I usually just let it rip.
The beginning of my relationship with Steven involved more than music. We became buddies. There was the obvious cultural bond. We were both rebels with a reckless streak. He had a greater affinity for sugary pop. I was glad to see that he had left most of that in Yonkers. I had a greater affinity for roughhewn rock. We both loved the Yardbirds. We both loved the blues. We both loved the look coming out of London. We both loved wandering through the woods back in Sunapee and water-skiing on the lake. Like me, Steven was deeply drawn to nature and felt at home in the wild. And unlike me, he was familiar with the wilds of New York City and was the first guy to show me around Greenwich Village.
We went one weekend—just the two of us.
“Ever been to New York?” asked Steven.
“Not since I was a little kid,” I said.
“The first thing I do is head to the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station and drink Guinness. So that’s what we’re gonna do.”
That’s what we did. That same night we walked through Greenwich Village. I’d finally arrived in that fabled Land of What’s Happening.
“I’ll show you where I buy my espadrilles,” said Steven.
We went to an incense-burning Indian store, where we bought roped sandals. I wanted to go to Max’s Kansas City and hear the Velvet Underground, but they weren’t performing that night. Steven started talking about all the times he had heard the Underground before. In fact, Steven had been talking since we left Boston. Steven never stopped talking. There was a propulsive energy and a manic charm to Steven’s talking. In some basic way, Steven is his talking. His talking fills in all the gaps and can actually make it easy to be with him—mainly because you just kick back and listen. That’s usually what I did. His talking can be brilliant. His verbal riffs, like musical riffs, are adventures in extravagant storytelling. His talking has a rhythm and rhyme all its own. But in the end his talking wears your ass out. He sucks up all your energy. Yet his insights are original and his language bombastic. Many times I would say, “Write that stuff down. It would make a great lyric.” He never would. I heard many songs slip through our fingers. Mostly his talking was entertaining. But holy shit, when will he ever shut the fuck up?
One afternoon the band came home from a rehearsal to be greeted by a mountain of a man sitting on the stoop in front of 1325. I mean, this guy was three hundred pounds of pure mean. If he were a dog, he’d have been part pit bull, part Rottweiler, with a Budweiser sign painted on his side.