by Joe Perry
I got further confirmation of our rising popularity when, a few days later, we played the field house at Boston College. The frenzy over our music turned into a riot. Fans who couldn’t get in used railroad ties to smash in the doors. Shattered glass showered us as we huddled in the dressing room. The riot was ongoing. When we got to a brand-new Boston nightspot called the Box—where the old Psychedelic Supermarket had stood in the sixties—fans were lined up around the block. With over twenty-five hundred screaming music fans crammed together and hundreds more beating on the doors to get in, the police revoked the Box’s license and closed the place down. I was told that the band posed a danger to civil decency—a statement that was music to my ears.
When your record comes out, you have high hopes. You’ve worked your ass off, you’ve heard the stuff a million times, the mixes are swimming around your brain, and you’re convinced there are least three or four hits on the album. Your girlfriend—in my case, Elyssa—is telling you how great it is. When you play it for your friends, they say the same thing. You’ve sold yourself big-time and anything less than a smash will be a disappointment.
Get Your Wings came out in the first quarter of 1974, complete with an image of our new winged logo on the cover. We’d worked the road before and played every gig like it was our last. But now we were playing bigger venues before bigger crowds.
The touring never stopped. We never stopped playing Detroit, never stopped playing Columbus, Fort Wayne, Cincinnati, Cleveland. We felt like if we could win the heart of America, the rest of the country would follow. Back in Boston, the tables finally turned and instead of opening as a baby band we got booked into the Orpheum as headliners. Blue Öyster Cult opened for us.
But other than those theaters in Boston and Detroit, we were still an opening act. Name ’em and we opened for ’em: REO Speedwagon, Argent, Suzi Quatro, in our never-ending search for new fans in new parts of the country.
Our first full-tilt rock-and-roll tour had us as the openers, followed by the New York Dolls in the middle slot and then the headliners Mott the Hoople, hot with their huge hit “All the Young Dudes.”
Until now, the English groups hadn’t given us much respect. They tended to be arrogant, distant, and downright hostile. Mott was different. They were great guys, a solid rock band that blew me away the first time I saw them at the Tea Party in Boston. As arena rock performers, they showed us the tricks of the trade.
By then David Johansen, the charismatic lead singer of the New York Dolls, and I were buddies, and Elyssa had become friends with David’s wife Cyrinda Foxe, a glamorous woman who, as part of the underground world of Andy Warhol, had appeared in Warhol’s Bad. David and I had spent time together running the streets of his ultrahip New York, visiting art dealers, drug dealers, and performance artists of every ilk. David was a pioneer, an early rock anarchist.
On this tour, the Dolls clung to that New York arrogance that had served them so well in the Big Apple but nowhere else. There was also resentment. By then we thought we were a better band. But because they were press darlings, we had to open for them. The Dolls, who acted like the headliners, also resented opening for Mott. They demanded cases of champagne, went on late, and often didn’t bother to show up at all.
This was my first time seeing how hard drugs could stop a band in its tracks. I knew that on their first trip to England in 1972 their first drummer, Billy Murcia, had died a drug-related death. Back then, they were already on the highway to hell. They were on that highway when, at the Holiday Inn in Florida, I looked out the window and there in the hot summer sun I saw their bass player, Killer Kane, stagger by the pool in the stage clothes he had worn the night before—thigh-high furry platform boots, torn leotard, a stained and ripped leather jacket. His face was covered in sweat, his makeup running, his lipstick smeared. He could barely walk as he screamed out, “Where’s the nearest liquor store?” He needed to get his morning bottle of blackberry brandy that, even at his young age, was the only thing his stomach could handle. He was clearly killing himself.
My heart went out to Johansen, who was trying to keep it together. Yet, seeing that the Midwestern and Southern audiences didn’t relate to his band, David was consumed by bitterness and left the tour halfway through.
I couldn’t help but draw comparisons between the Dolls and Aerosmith. After all, we were going after the same audience. Yet there were big differences between us. We had our makeup and our scarves and our attention-grabbing stage outfits, but we avoided the gender bending. That just wasn’t us. For the most part, our fans were college kids or working guys who liked to party to hard rock and roll. We wrote, recorded, and played to please that audience. So, unlike the Dolls, we didn’t run the risk of coming on like elitists. We also thought we knew our limits when it came to drugs and drinking. This, of course, would prove to be a lie, but it was a lie that, at the time, I believed. I’d get high but not fall-down high. I’d get loaded but not to where I couldn’t play. In fact—at least in this beginning stage—you could argue that the booze and the blow could not only be felt in the music but amplified the character of the music. I’m convinced that later on, when we got better drugs, the music got better as well.
If you’re an addict—and Aerosmith would eventually prove to be a band of addicts—the drugs will take you out. Ultimately the drugs have to be put down. Either you kill them or they kill you. But for a twenty-two-year-old like me, it took a very long time to come to that realization. It was the easiest thing in the world for me to look at the dying Dolls and say “That’ll never happen to us. We’re too professional to put on a sloppy show. We’re too concerned about our fans to disappoint them. We give them our best every night. We’re rocking harder than ever, and all the drugs are doing are putting more fuel in our tank. The drugs aren’t killing our motivation; they’re adding to it; it’s all working together. Besides, waving a bottle of Jack Daniel’s guarantees us a huge response from our fans.”
This was the same period when I had a front-row seat at both the death of the Dolls and the birth of Kiss. Kiss, whose first album had just come out, was slated to open for us in Marion, Ohio. It was a weird venue. The promoter put us in a dinner theater setting. Even though he had removed the chairs and tables, you could still smell the baked fish from the buffet.
I was always curious to hear a new band, figuring I could learn something from the competition. And I usually did. The guys in Kiss were wearing tight pants, leather jackets, and the kind of seven-inch black platform boots you could buy in the Village. The big thing, of course, was how they painted their faces. In comparison to the Dolls, though, who wore tutus and dresses, that was hardly shocking.
While it was true that Kiss’s road crew and ours didn’t get along—there was at least one nasty backstage fight—I had no problems with Gene, Paul, Ace, or Peter. I liked them. All of their tunes were good basic rock and roll. Even more importantly, they were pushing the envelope when it came to putting on a show. Their drum riser moved up and down, something of a novelty. Gene was also either breathing fire or eating fire—I can’t remember which. Rockets had not yet started firing off of Ace’s guitar, but even at this low-tech starting point, the audience loved the gimmicks. You couldn’t deny that Kiss was introducing something novel to rock and roll.
Most musicians were competitive about their bands. I know we were, but I never took it personally. Hearing Kiss for the first time, I was quick to judge. Obviously, unlike us, they didn’t come from Fleetwood Mac–rooted blues rock. They didn’t come from the Yardbirds or Led Zeppelin. Kiss saw rock as extreme theater. It wasn’t the Dolls’ theater—the theater of ironic high camp—but a far more popular theater, the Saturday afternoon movie theater of cartoons and horror films. Kiss married rock to comic book superheroes. Brilliant!
Even though we headlined, Kiss got twice the response we did. The crowd, lukewarm for us, went nuts for them. After watching all this, I hit the roof. I went back to the dressing room and freaked out. I was pissed.<
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First, the Dolls get all this press love without even knowing how to tune their guitars, and now Kiss is getting all this fan love by putting on a circus show. Meanwhile, we’re busting our asses trying to write songs and play them right. What the fuck!! We’re banging our heads against the wall. What do we have to do to make it—paint ourselves blue and have monkeys flying out our asses? Isn’t it supposed to be about the music?
As years went on and I crossed paths with Kiss many more times, we all became really good friends, especially Gene, and my attitude changed. In a certain way, Aerosmith and Kiss grew up together. There’s a definite link between their audience and ours. A lot of critics attacked them—and still do—for being too gimmicky. But I came to see them as genuine innovators who understood the only thing that really matters: satisfying the fans. Through their showmanship, they turned on millions of young kids to rock and roll. For that fact alone, they deserve to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I write them in on the ballot every year. It pisses me off that—until this year—the self-appointed gatekeepers who control entrance to the Hall have locked them out. Those gatekeepers are part of the same critical elite that looked down on us in our early (and later) years. I can understand why snobbery is part of the world of classical music or ballet or opera or even jazz. But rock and roll? Hell, when Chuck Berry said, “Roll over, Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news,” wasn’t he telling the snobs to fuck off? Wasn’t he saying that rock and roll was busting down the doors and letting everybody in? And Cheap Trick, one of the best and hardest-working rock-and-roll bands in the land, aren’t even on these people’s radar.
In recent presidential elections, you see candidates pouring all their money into Ohio, the most critical swing state. Well, back in 1974 our agents must have been thinking the same way: Crack Ohio and you’ll crack the rest of the country. It was a campaign to break us out as a national band. We thought we might be making some progress when Rolling Stone saw fit to mention our second album, saying that we were playing with “pent-up fury” and that we “maintained an agile balance between Yardbirds and Who-styled rock and seventies heavy metal.” I especially liked this line: “They think 1966 and play 1974.”
We played the outdoor Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park—fifty thousand people strong—where Rory Gallagher opened for us. He was a hard-drinking Irishman with his own brand of blues rock that captivated the crowd. In between songs, he’d belt down another Irish lightning that seemed to add to his energy. He kept playing and playing, way beyond his cutoff time. Afraid of inciting a riot, the promoters let him go on—at our expense. When he finally left the stage, the crowd, wanting more Rory, started throwing cans and bottles. We set up among the flying debris. The debris kept flying during our set. Brad got hit and a broken bottle cut Joey’s arm, but in defiance, we held our ground and played, only to be cut off by the curfew. I remember it as the only time that we were blown off fair and square in true rock-and-roll style. That night Rory Gallagher was just too good to stop.
In our own camp, the friction between Steven and me never stopped. After every show, the dressing room became the battleground. Tom, Joey, and Brad would watch as we went at it—Steven the perfectionist versus Joe the anarchist. Ironically, our contrary energies gave Aerosmith the edge over many other bands. But that knowledge didn’t take the sting out of the fights. Steven would often start off by coughing so hard that he was able to spit out pinkish phlegm. “It’s blood!” he’d cry. “I’m coughing up blood for this band!” My answer was, “That wouldn’t have anything to do with that sandpaper version of coke that you snorted up before the show, would it?”
Listening to these arguments, outsiders might have thought that we were on the verge of murdering each other. They also might also have thought that the band was about to break up. But the opposite was true. This was a period when we were motivated beyond reason. Come hell or high water, we were going all the way.
PART 3
THE CLASSIC ALBUMS
TOYS
Experimenting with alcohol—and then drugs—was a minor distraction in the first years of Aerosmith. Even earlier, substances were incidental to what I was doing as a teen—struggling at school, working at the factory, learning the guitar, and forming baby bands. I used drink and drugs to get me past points of shyness and reticence. They afforded me certain comforts. I could hide behind them or I could stand in front of them. I considered them a friendly, useful tool. Because I was shy and never liked crowds, I faced this paradox: I possessed an iron confidence in my talent but had a bit of a complex about showing it off. Later I’d learn the term performance anxiety. At the time, I just called it nerves. All the way back to my days with Flash, I’d count on a shot of Jack Daniel’s to both loosen me up and calm my shakes. It always worked to the point where I was never without a pint in my guitar case. It was always one shot—no more, no less.
As the age of hedonism hardened in the seventies, drugs became more prominent—and so did our skepticism about the government’s view of them. Pot was called a “gateway” drug, while we knew from experience that it did little more than mellow you out. In contrast, legal alcohol fueled all sorts of violence and deadly crashes. We didn’t believe anything the government said about drugs.
As Aerosmith spent our first three or four years on the road, establishing ourselves as rockers to be reckoned with, each of us became connoisseurs of the drugs of our choice. This was particularly true of Steven and me. We looked at the more exotic drugs the way wine cognoscenti viewed vintages of Beaujolais or pinot noir. I liked coke. I had a couple of dealers who once in a while would bring me excellent stuff, which would be quickly consumed. Then I’d be cool until the next shipment hit town. I’d compare it to going to a party expecting to drink beer and having someone walk in with a bottle of twelve-year-old single malt. You have a few hits and then it’s gone. You don’t wrap your life around it; you enjoy it in the moment and then let the moment go.
Once in a great while I’d save a line of coke if I knew I’d be writing. But if the coke wasn’t there, I’d write anyway. I wrote what has become my most famous riff—“Walk This Way”—totally straight. The goal was always to access that place and spirit where riffs flew off my guitar. I had tried it Steven’s way—grinding away at an idea, beating it to death, going over it again and again. But for me that killed the magic. I sought spontaneous inspiration. At certain times, certain drugs could trigger that inspiration. Truth be told, at least for a while, the drugs worked. I could write both stoned and straight, yet I’d be lying if I said that a couple of beers or a couple of lines didn’t lubricate the process.
Writing was on our minds as we began our third album, Toys in the Attic. When I think of the toys, I think of guitars and the all the cool and ever-improving paraphernalia that goes along with the instrument. At the time, I was deep into Strats, and like all Strat fanatics, I faced the problem of what happens when you get crazy with the whammy bar that creates vibrato: The instrument goes out of tune. (Just listen to Hendrix’s live recordings.) I got the idea that I could correct the situation by designing a bridge-and-nut combination on the bar that would control the vibrato and keep the guitar in tune. With scraps of wood, a neck from a broken guitar, disparate spare parts, and a battery of hacksaws, files, and electric drills, I went to work. After toiling deep into the night for weeks at a time, I finally put together a bulletproof whammy bar and actually got the thing to work. It was so jerry-rigged, though, that I was unable to mount it on a real guitar. For that, I needed the expertise of a machinist or engineer. Realizing that I should be writing rather than redesigning, I abandoned the project. Ironically, a few years later Floyd Rose, using the same principles I was toying with, manufactured the first locking vibrato arm.
My lifelong obsession with guitars reached a new level when, in this same period, I acquired my first ’59 Les Paul. The Les Pauls that Gibson produced that year are the greatest vintage crop the instrument has ever known. I wasn’t int
o collecting guitars—that would come later—as much as I was looking for the instrument that expressed what I was hearing in my head. Brad Whitford and I shared this passion for the right sound and listened closely to figure out how we could most effectively complement one another. Since Aerosmith was and will always be primarily a live band, it was the live interaction between two guitars that interested me most.
Three-piece groups—like Hendrix, Cream, and Jeff Beck—sounded great on record because, in many instances, they would overdub other instruments. But live—at least to my ears—they could sound somewhat empty. To honor the song, which is always the goal, we wanted the fullest sound possible. That’s what Brad and I were going for. It wasn’t an ironclad rule, but we generally concluded that if one of us was playing a Strat, the other should be on a Gibson. In my heart, I’ll always be a Les Paul guy, but as I moved into the middle seventies, I also couldn’t resist the Strat and the creative flexibility of the whammy bar.
Together, Brad and I fooled with dozens of pickups, pedals, and amps in an attempt to broaden our tone. Through his technical training at Berklee, Brad had developed a sophisticated musical vocabulary. I definitely learned from him, carefully listening to his progressions and closely watching his fingers. At the same time, he gave me all the space I needed for those riffs that jumped off my guitar out of pure instinct rather than premeditated design.
All this experimentation came to fruition on Toys. Our first two albums were basically comprised of songs we’d been playing for years live in the clubs. With Toys, we started from scratch. It was our first album that was written from the ground up. Making this record, we learned to be recording artists and write songs on a deadline. In the process, we began to see just what Aerosmith could accomplish. With everyone throwing in ideas, Toys was our breakthrough.