by Joe Perry
To secure his position, Raymond had always relied on his long relationship with Steven. At the same time, he realized that I, more than anyone, could no longer support him. So he tried to charm me over to his side. He invited me to his house, where he cooked up a hippie meal of tofu and brown rice. After dinner he broke out his best hash. The talk turned to how he and I should take a firmer hand in running the band. Me and Raymond? No way. I rebuffed his ploy.
Instead he formed an alliance with Joey. But when Raymond called a band meeting to inform Steven, Tom, and me that he and Joey had decided to take a greater leadership role, Joey demurred. Feeling our instant antagonism to the plan, Joey just sat there, acting as if he didn’t know what Raymond was talking about. From there, things got worse.
I was the strongest voice to call for his dismissal. I had the least to lose, because my attitude has always been I’ll do what I think is right for the band and I don’t give a damn about pleasing everyone. My passion was for improving the band. Tom and Joey certainly knew I was right. Steven couldn’t argue the fact. The bottom line was that Raymond was an adequate rhythm player who never improved beyond that. So it was decided. It seemed only fair that, given the fact that Raymond was Steven’s longtime bandmate and close friend, Steven be the one tell him.
“I can’t,” said Steven.
“Then who?”
Tom, Joey, and Steven all pointed at me.
“You tell him,” said Steven.
Steven used to talk about how Raymond was a gang leader in high school. In fact, Steven was one of the guys Raymond used to bully. By recruiting Raymond in his bands, Steven felt like he had neutralized his adversary. His adversary had become his ally and protector, another reason Steven had been so reluctant to fire him and insistent that I do the dirty work.
I’d fired people a number of times in my bands, and it was never easy for me. I decided to do it over dinner at Ken’s, a steak joint on the corner. I tried to be diplomatic. I said it wasn’t anything that he’d done wrong. We were moving in different musical directions. I needed a different kind of guitarist. But Raymond didn’t take it well.
“This is your doing,” he said. “Not Steven’s. Steven would never let me go.”
“The group’s a democracy,” I said. “We took a vote. We all agreed. We need to make this change.”
“Steven didn’t agree,” said Raymond. “He’s always been loyal. He’d never drop me.”
“It looks like he has.”
“Bullshit. I’m going to him directly.”
“Go.”
Raymond went. Given the complex but powerful psychology that had bonded Steven and Raymond, I was afraid that Steven might cave. He didn’t. Like me, he had a vision of our musical future. Raymond wasn’t part of that vision. We needed a guitarist who could fuckin’ play.
We found that guitarist in Sunapee the first summer after we’d moved to Boston. We’d gone back to the lake in the hopes of keeping the old tradition alive. We played some parties and a few gigs at the Barn. We ran into Brad Whitford, who was a friend of Twitty’s, a guitarist in one of Steven’s bands. Brad started hanging out and jamming with us. He fit right in. It felt like he had been there from the beginning. He loved the same music we did, had seen Jimi Hendrix live, and liked to party.
I learned that Brad had grown up in Reading, a suburb of Boston, and was going to the Berklee College of Music. He was a talented player with a deep appreciation of what I was going for. He knew we were a serious band with serious ambitions. He also didn’t have the kind of ego that would drive him to try and outdo anyone. He was content to let me take the lead. He knew how to complement that lead. Brad was also a strong lead player himself. And as the years went on that proved to be a big part of Aerosmith’s sound. We clicked and, just like that, the lineup was locked in. Brad moved into 1325. That was a big deal. Raymond had never lived with us. Now, for the first time, all the members of Aerosmith were living under one roof. That did a lot to solidify the band.
Brad and I became fast friends. He loved beer as much as I did. But beer always took second place to the music. When it was time to work, we worked. We had an unusual way of developing our parts. We rarely if ever talked about what our parts would be. We just listened to each other and played what felt right. It still works today.
One weekend I went home to visit my parents, and the topic of work arose. I was telling my dad about the band and some of the parties we’d been playing.
“You aren’t drinking too much, are you, Joe?” he asked.
I knew that he was haunted by his father’s drinking—and the way his dad had drowned.
“You don’t have to worry,” I said. “We work really hard. I’ll have a few beers, but I never let drinking get in the way of work.”
When he asked me about pot, I could tell him the truth—that I didn’t like it very much and never bought it. Hard drugs were not yet part of our scene. Someone might have a little coke or a few pills, but alcohol was basically my only recreational tonic.
During that encounter with Dad, I noticed that he lacked his usual energy. He looked a little pale. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t. My father was the strong, silent type and I knew that if anything was wrong, he didn’t want to be questioned about it.
My fears were validated when my mother called me in Boston a few weeks later. A phone call from Mom was rare. I usually kept my parents abreast of my activities with a postcard or a letter, a tradition I’d started in prep school. A call usually meant bad news.
After a few pleasantries, Mom told me why she was calling: “Your father’s cancer has come back.”
“That’s terrible,” were the only words I could manage.
“He fought it off once,” she said, “and he’ll fight it off again.” Besides, cancer treatment had improved dramatically. “We’re hoping for full remission.”
I was shaken but responded in probably the same way Dad did. I shut down my emotions. I put them in some hidden compartment of my mind and double-locked the door. I carried on.
Girls were always a good diversion when it came to avoiding my deeper and darker emotions. But when it came to courting, I wasn’t a player and still suffered from a negative self-image. I still saw myself as the skinny guy in the corner. But I was starting to realize that some girls liked the skinny guy in the corner, especially if he played guitar. I found a few girls to spend the night with me, but none with whom I’d want a long-term relationship.
Judy Nylon was different. I met her on Newbury Street, where she worked as a hair stylist in a shop that had a big Harley-Davidson sitting in the window. These were the days when men and women were going to the same places to get their shags styled. Gender-bending was the order of the day. Judy was very worldly, a cut above most of the other girls I’d met. I was attracted to her style and knew she had things to teach me. So I found myself hanging out at the shop on a regular basis. On an average day, after taking care of band business at 1325, I’d stop off at the liquor store for a bottle of cheap wine and wander down to Judy’s shop and watch her work. The owner, a young Italian guy who became my friend as well, liked having me around. At day’s end Judy and I would go to her loft, which was filled with art books, underground magazines, and novels. She had great taste in literature and a special fondness for Jack Kerouac. Reading more of his work, I felt a tremendous bond with the Beats.
The Newbury and Charles Street scene was another kind of adventure. It was where Judy and her crowd gave me a glimpse into fashion. The whole band had a fascination with clothes. Other bands might not give a second thought to what they wore onstage. Not us. The British Invasion had marked us sartorially as well as musically. Going back to the day I first viewed Blow-Up, I was excited by the relationship between rock and fashion. In some sense, rock was fashion, almost as though you played your clothes and wore your music. I remember being given a pair of custom-made white boots from Carnaby Street. They were covered with embroidered flowers and seemed to say everythin
g I needed to say about art. I didn’t take them off for two years.
Flowing silk shirts, flowing velvet scarves, bell-bottom pants—I was always on a search for clothing that supplemented the freedom I was feeling in the music. I felt that having a look that separated us from the audience heightened the experience. Sometimes that meant dressing down by performing without our shirts. Because we were thin and devoid of well-defined musculature, we fit the mold of what real rockers were supposed to look like in the early seventies.
There were several strange interludes to our musical journey that didn’t involve music at all. The first involved advanced psychology. Tom’s sister, Cecily, went to a fancy girls’ school, where she was able to get us a gig. One of Cecily’s closest friends at school had a father who was a renowned Harvard professor. When the prof heard about this struggling rock band, he thought we’d be great subjects for his study on motivation. He offered us ten dollars a day and said it would take a couple of weeks. Were we game?
Why not? We were looking for any connection we could find. Harvard and Cambridge weren’t exactly our stomping grounds, but maybe we’d find some gigs over there. Besides, ten dollars a day could help pay our beer bill. We signed up and found ourselves taking every kind of test known to man—Rorschach, IQ, oral tests, essay tests, the whole gamut. They even filmed us sitting there working up our answers.
In terms of analyzing our motivation, I didn’t see any great mystery. Our motivation was music first and money second. One fed the other. Without music there was no money, and without money it was hard to make music. I still don’t quite understand why the good professor needed two weeks to see something that could be explained in two seconds. I didn’t mind, though. I liked being able to say that, although our tenure was short, Aerosmith went to Harvard. (By the way, we were never shown the results of the tests. I’d give anything to see them now.)
Another strange side trip: A group of college-age gay guys wanted to make a student film about us. Their intentions seemed purely artistic, and, again, hoping that the release of the movie might help spread our nonexistent fame, we went along with it. The boys filmed us rehearsing and performing. At their suggestion, they shot us working out in a gym, hardly our natural habitat. They had us wearing exercise outfits as we huffed and puffed on stationary bikes. We felt like we were re-creating a scene from the Monkees TV show. The film, like the Harvard study, remains locked away in an unmarked vault.
I was sure that Mark Lehman would be with us for the long run. He was the sixth member of the band, the guy who did everything with us but play onstage. When it came to keeping the enterprise on course, Mark was the man. He did more than his fair share of the heavy lifting, including carrying Marshall amps that weighed a ton. We all pitched in, but Mark did the lion’s share of the work. In his Keep On Truckin’ R. Crumb–decorated step van he literally drove us to where we wanted to go—bigger and better gigs.
Mark suffered from mood swings, but his awareness of those swings seemed to be his salvation. Occasionally he would lose it and fall into anger or frustration. Usually, though, he saw these episodes coming and, to protect us from his emotional imbalance, he’d spend a couple of days locked up in his room. If there happened to be a gig during a dark mood, we knew to stay out of his way. We could almost see the cloud over his head.
Steven was not an easy person to live with. Every day we were learning more about his peculiarities. When it came to telling people what he thought of them, he had no filter. When it came to hurting people’s feelings, he had no restraint. I suppose that a confrontation between Mark and Steven was inevitable, but until it happened I really didn’t see it coming.
Mark had cooked up one of his brown rice and vegetable specials, a meal we all loved. We were especially grateful because we saw that, though he was struggling through one of his dark episodes, he still cared enough for us to prepare dinner. It was during dinner when Steven got up to go to the fridge to look for something. That’s when he exploded.
“Goddammit,” Steven shouted, “how many times have I told you assholes that you have to label your shit? There’s a bottle of juice that’s not labeled, and that fuckin’ pisses me off.”
As Steven spoke, he gave Mark a look of vicious suspicion. That’s when Mark lost it. He jumped to his feet, knocking over his chair. He pounded the table so hard that the glasses and bottles and plates went flying. Then he grabbed his huge cooking knife and threw it into the floor with such force that it drove into the wood, inches from Steven’s foot. He stormed out of the kitchen, screaming, “I quit!” before slamming the door to his bedroom so violently that it came off its hinges. Without another word, he packed his bag and was gone the next day. We were shocked. We’ve never heard from him again. To this day I mourn his absence and regret that, on this crazy path we were following, our friend Mark Lehman became Aerosmith’s first roadkill.
Not only did we miss Mark as a brother-in-arms, we also missed his arms. We had to take up the slack in the heavy-lifting department. On more than one occasion, I downed a couple of speedy diet pills in the morning before heading out to rent a U-Haul. Then came the long ordeal of loading up our shit, driving seven or eight hours to some gig in New Hampshire where we played a three-hour show in a high school, only to reload and drive back to Boston, still buzzed on speed. By the time we finally made it to 1325, the sun would be rising. When it came to transportation, we needed a better solution than the U-Haul.
The solution came in the form of a band of West Coast hippies riding around in a Ken Kesey–style Prankstermobile, a fire-engine-red converted school bus that they were eager to sell. Totally retooled to accommodate this traveling circus, the thing was jerry-rigged to run on propane as well as gasoline. All seventy-two seats had been removed and a few benches installed, leaving lots of room for our amps. In the back was a little kitchen and propane stove. The bus turned out to be a white elephant, but at the time it seemed perfect. The only problem was—where to get the money to buy it?
I went back to Mom. When it came to the band, my parents had been our angels. Throughout the years, they’d come to all our gigs when we played within thirty or forty miles of Hopedale. Once they saw how deadly serious I was, they supported me without reservation. They realized that I hadn’t given up on my music career and never would.
“The gigs are out there, Mom,” I said, “and renting a U-Haul truck is expensive.”
“So it all comes down to transportation?”
“That’s it. Would you please cosign for a loan?”
“How much do you need?”
“They’re asking twenty-five hundred dollars for the bus.”
“And it actually runs?” she asked.
“Runs great. We had it checked out.”
“I’ll talk to Dad and let you know, Joe.”
Once again, my parents came through. I met them at the bank and we took out the loan. Unfortunately, they had to pay off the loan. We couldn’t make the payments.
The bus turned into a nightmare. We’d have to drive around Comm Ave. for over an hour to find a place to park—and that was the least of our problems. Because it had been refurbished by nonmechanics, the wiring was a mess and the engine put together with spare parts. The breakdowns were nonstop. Were it not for Gary Cabozzi, the bus would have been a total loss. It turned out that, among his other talents, Cabozzi was a trained mechanic. He took it upon himself to keep the thing running.
Imagine this: Freezing winter night in Boston. Blizzard blowing in. Wind and snow and icy streets. Cabozzi under the hood of the bus, trying to get it going.
“Fuck these motherfuckers who fucked up this engine,” he told me. “They didn’t know their ass from their elbows.”
“You better come in, Gary,” I said. “You’ll get sick if you stay out here.”
“I’m not even feeling the cold.”
“Man, how’s that possible?”
“I just fried up some chili peppers in olive oil, made a sandwich out of ’em,
and washed ’em down with a couple of cold beers.”
The recipe worked. Cabozzi stayed out there for two more hours until he was able to turn over the engine.
Cabozzi became an integral part of our operation, taking over Mark’s role—and then some. He not only helped us load and unload the amps, he became security. During a gig at Boston University, his participation expanded even more—much to our shock.
There must have been three hundred students at the show. We were rocking out when we broke into James Brown’s “Mother Popcorn.” That’s when Cabozzi exploded. Pushing people out of the way, he ran to the front of the bandstand and went into a crazed James Brown dance routine. After thirty seconds, he actually jumped onstage and did every split and twirl in the James Brown catalogue. It was a bizarre sight: This three-hundred-pound giant with missing teeth and greasy hair, giving himself over to unrestrained contortions. The kids gave him a thunderous ovation. He was ecstatic. And so were we . . . at least that first time. When he broke into his James Brown routine at the very next gig, we had to take him aside and say, “Hey, Gary, the first time was fun. But enough’s enough.” He understood and cooled it.
Big excitement: In the winter of 1971 we got a call from the assistant to Steve Paul, the man who managed Johnny and Edgar Winter and owned Blue Sky Records. He wanted to see us play live. He was putting us on a bill with Humble Pie and Edgar’s White Trash at the Academy of Music in New York City, a two-night stand with two sets each night. As the third band, we’d open the show with a fifteen-minute set. This was heady stuff. Steve Paul had connections. Steve Paul could take us to the next level.
The pay was only a couple of hundred bucks, but it was worth it just to see our name on the marquee. Rick Derringer was in Edgar’s band and Steve Marriott was in Humble Pie, who were still at the top of the heap on the strength of their latest live record, despite Peter Frampton’s leaving for a solo career. This was our first chance to rub elbows with the guys we wanted to be. The only problem was that Tom’s bass amp was in the shop and we didn’t have time to get it out. We were told that the crew would get us one.