Rocks: My Life in and Out of Aerosmith

by Joe Perry

  That breakthrough was facilitated by Jack Douglas. In the studio, he moved into the slot of the sixth member of the band. Just as the Beatles had George Martin, we had Jack. Jack was funny, loose, hip, tough, and New York. He was perfectly suited to our musical sensibility. We loved him. Just as we knew how to play our instruments, Jack knew how to play the studio. Together, we made magic.

  One of Jack’s gifts was simple encouragement. He did this by being present during the incubation stage. We rented a house and jammed in a converted barn in Ashland, Massachusetts, where isolation helped us focus. On many of those early days it was just a matter of Jack listening to us riff and letting us know when we hit on something strong.

  One day at the end of a session, Steven, Jack, and I were standing around discussing the next day’s agenda. Jack said we really needed a kick-ass up-tempo rocker. Demonstrating, he started tapping out a beat on his thighs. I picked up my ’55 Les Paul Junior that I’d just gotten from Johnny Thunders and, without thinking, picked up on Jack’s groove and played the riffs of a song that would eventually be called “Toys in the Attic.”

  “Don’t know where this is coming from,” I said to Steven, “but is this something you can sing to?”

  “I think so,” he said. “I can use the melody from the riff. Just try and throw in a few more chords.”

  Jack helped arrange it and, within minutes, the song was written. When it came time to record it, the band threw in their own stuff and eventually Steven came up with lyrics. The experience reconfirmed that self-editing and unbridled spontaneity were the keys to my writing.

  From Ashland we went to the Record Plant in midtown Manhattan, where we set up camp in a hotel close to the studio. Some of us brought along our girlfriends; others didn’t. I mentioned “Walk This Way,” one of the enduring hits off this record. I’d actually started the song months earlier at a sound check in Honolulu. I’d just replaced my stolen Strat with a new one and was starting to get to know it. Every time I pick up an unfamiliar guitar, old riffs sound new and inspire me to write. At the same time, I’d been listening to the Meters’ “Hey Pocky A-Way,” one of my favorite grooves. A great New Orleans band headed by singer/keyboardist Art Neville and anchored by guitarist Leo Nocentelli, drummer Zigaboo Modeliste, and bassist George Porter Jr., the Meters were cranking out the funkiest shit to come along since James Brown. (The Stones, who had them open their 1975 tour, felt the same.) Their “Cissy Strut” became an anthem for me. Other funksters seemed calculated or over-the-top. But the Meters were naturals, as evidenced especially in their bass and guitar lines. I was looking for a feel-good funk-drenched natural riff of my own.

  As I wrung out this new Strat, I was making sounds that echoed the Meters. I thought it’d be cool to incorporate that kind of funk with some Aerosmith power behind it. At the Honolulu sound check, I turned to Joey and said, “Gimme something funky, like you used to play with your old R&B bands. Just lay it down.” I beat out the tempo I was hearing in my head and Joey did the rest. This was his meat and potatoes. The riff flew out. I knew it needed another section—plus a chord change—that would differentiate it from the usual 1-4-5. So I just got out of my own way and started to play. The music wrote itself.

  That was the music we recorded at the Record Plant. Steven scatted a few lyrics but nothing substantial. Given the power of this music, he was looking for something special. Hours passed, and still no story emerged. Jack suggested we take a break. The guys went to see Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein. Having already seen and loved it, I passed and went up on the roof to chill. Later that night the guys came back, still laughing from the film. Everyone was throwing lines back and forth. Jack did a killer imitation of Mary Feldman saying, “Walk this way,” the old Marx Brothers line.

  “That’s what we should call the song,” said Tom.

  “Give me a couple of minutes,” said Steven, grabbing his pen and yellow pad. “I’ll be right back.”

  When he returned, he was all smiles. “I’ve got it,” he said. The lyrics are a great example of Steven’s knack for the double entendre, something he learned from the blues tradition. The original lyrics, by the way, were written on the wall by the fire escape where Steven sat and composed them. When the record of “Walk This Way” came out, David Johansen told me, “That’s the nastiest song I’ve ever heard on the radio.”

  By building an album from the ground up, we were also reshaping the sound of Aerosmith. New instruments can create new sounds. So with the first money I was starting to make, I bought a few guitars, including a six-string bass. Ever since I’d seen Peter Green play the instrument years earlier, I’d wanted one. They were fairly rare back in the mid-seventies, but I was able to find a decent one. Every instrument has secret sounds buried within it. My job was to find those sounds. This bass turned out to have “Back in the Saddle” hidden inside, but I wouldn’t find it until our next record.

  While working on Toys in the Attic, I started experimenting with open tuning. I learned that by listening to the old blues greats who, I discovered, tuned their guitars to various chords for various reasons. Driven by spontaneity, they bent or broke the rules to suit whatever was going through their heads. In this spirit, I started fooling with an open-E tuning that led to “No More No More.” But when we got through arranging it, we had a problem: Our structure called for a solo in standard tuning. To solve that, we arranged the song with a breakdown near the end, allowing me to play the bulk of the song with the E-tuned guitar before switching, in the blink of an eye, to a totally different guitar to take the song out.

  “Sweet Emotion,” another tune from Toys that became a classic, was born out of a Tom Hamilton bass riff that Jack heard and encouraged Tom to expand. When Steven got around to writing the lyrics, he later said they were about his disdain for Elyssa. He was convinced that she was cutting me off from the rest of the band and threatening our future. At the time, I didn’t see it that way. As far as I was concerned, the band was going full steam ahead. The truth was that Elyssa never cut me off from the band. I was playing and writing better than ever. I never missed a rehearsal or a show. It was just that the band couldn’t stomach Elyssa’s high school antics. And I couldn’t blame them.

  Frank called me out to his new house in the Boston burbs. This turned out to be one of the last times I saw him.

  “I miss you, Joe,” he said. “I just wanna spend a little time with you. Come out. Have dinner. And if you wind up having one too many, you can stay overnight in the guest room.”

  That’s just what happened. Despite his physical ailments, Frank’s spirit was in fine form. The first thing he did was ask about my family. I told him that my dad had been undergoing some medical tests and that I was worried. He also wanted to know how I was getting along with Steven. More than anyone, Frank knew that my relationship to Steven was the key to the band’s success. And he encouraged me, for the sake of the group, to be patient.

  After dinner we got to drinking. That was the night he introduced me to the lethal combination of sambuca and coffee. Frank and I kept drinking till five in the morning, at which point he excused himself to go bed. But I couldn’t sleep. The sambuca had me drunk but the coffee had me wired. It was not a pleasant high. The high was further damaged by my realization that this might be the last time I’d ever get to hang out with Frank.

  In the long and troubled four-decade history of Aerosmith, many men have come along to take their turns as managers. I respected Frank Connelly above all of them. He was far from perfect. His links to the underworld could have had disastrous effects. Apparently he had gone to a shady character who had loaned him a small amount of money to help us through a dry period. A few of them showed up at one of our first Boston Garden shows. They threatened to break the legs of our lead singer if we didn’t give them a piece of the band. Leber-Krebs spent most of the show in the room with these guys. Somehow things got worked out peacefully. I’m sure money changed hands. Maybe it was Frank’s strange but powerful
karma that protected us. But one thing’s for sure: Leber-Krebs proved they had the right stuff that night.

  When he died a few years later, I kept picturing him in better days—with his hip shades, his ascot, his wild white hair, and his winning smile. His sister contacted me and said, “You know, Joe, Frank spoke of you often, and I’d think he’d like you to have this.” She gave me Frank’s silver and turquoise ring, the one he wore all the time. That meant the world to me. To this day I keep that ring on my desk along with a photo of Frank. His spirit continues to help me through hard times.

  Back at the Record Plant, we still hadn’t built enough toys to fill the attic. We decided to cover a song sent to us by Zunk Buker, our friend who’d gone to La Jolla. Zunk was a devotee of Dr. Demento, the über-hip DJ. That’s where Zunk heard “Big Ten Inch,” recorded in the early fifties by R&B powerhouse Bull Moose Jackson, who sang that when he wanted to heat up his girl, he’d whip out his big ten-inch . . . record.

  The minute we heard “Big Ten Inch,” we knew we had to record it. The lyrics fit right in with Steven’s fondness for double entendres. Beyond that, we liked the idea of going back to an earlier era and borrowing from another genre. We didn’t want to be categorized as a heavy metal band. In fact, we didn’t want to be categorized at all. We were too eager to discover what was over the next musical hill to confine ourselves to one style. That both helped and hurt us. It helped because it kept our music fresh, but it hurt because record companies tend to pigeonhole acts. One exec said to me, “What am I supposed to tell the stores? Do they put Aerosmith under heavy metal—or blues—or pop?” I didn’t know. That wasn’t my problem. My problem was making good music. And if mixing pop ballads and old R&B with heavy rock was puzzling, maybe it’s okay to be puzzled.

  The great thing about working with Jack Douglas was his sense of song. He knew that “Big Ten Inch,” a period piece, required a boogie-woogie piano. It was swing before swing had its resurgence in the early nineties. Jack had the good taste to recruit Scott Cushnie, who had played in the Hawks, the seminal Ronnie Hawkins band. Scott was so good that when we went on tour later that year he came along and became an honorary Aerosmithsonian, playing piano and singing harmony vocals.

  When you’re finished recording an album, there is a moment when you scrutinize it and have to decide whether it measures up. Well, I’m as scrutinizing as they come. Listening to Toys in the Attic, I felt good. Whatever had eluded us in the first albums had finally been realized. The studio had not only captured our essence but expanded it. I was certain that we had cut an incendiary record. I wasn’t waiting for validation from the record company or the critics. I was betting on our fans. All that counts are the fans.

  I wasn’t surprised when Toys went crazy, but the industry was. No one else was expecting it. The record flew out the door and, in the middle of post-Watergate America, turned Aerosmith into a supergroup. Starting in the spring of 1975, we toured like demons. Not only was Toys a huge hit, its success spilled over onto our first two records. In an astoundingly short period of time we were looking at three gold records. With that wind in our sails, we were excited to hit the road and do live versions of the material from Toys. We were ready to tear it up.

  Leber-Krebs were basically running our show, booking the gigs and putting their new act, Ted Nugent, as our opener. Ted was far more interesting as a character than as an artist. He had a good lead singer—Derek St. Holmes—and a couple of decent rock songs. It was his persona, though, that won over the fans. He was the wildest wild man since Jerry Lee Lewis. You never knew what he was going to do. He’d come out in a loincloth, looking like Tarzan with a beard and crazy curly hair down to his waist. When you weren’t looking, he’d pull out his bow and start shooting flaming arrows across the stage. You’d think he was a drinker but he wasn’t. After the show he’d down a quart of chocolate milk to recharge his batteries so he could service the groupies lined up outside his motel room door.

  I remember the time he’d flown all night from Africa, where he’d gone on a safari, barely arriving on time to open for us. Wearing buckskin covered with dried blood, he came to our dressing room. “Guys,” he said, “you gotta look at this.” He opened a blood-soaked handkerchief containing the claws of a lion he had killed the day before. Then he went out onstage and let loose that wild man from the woods. (In the eighties, he invited Steven and me to his preserve outside Detroit. I’ve never seen a hunter with such finely tuned instincts. He also had a strict policy—if you ain’t gonna grill it, don’t kill it. Ted has a deep respect for wildlife and embodies a primitive relationship—man versus beast—that is something to behold. Few Westerners in the twenty-first century could survive in the middle of the deepest darkest primeval forest. Ted is one of them.)

  Even though we’d become headliners whose ticket sales were rivaling those of Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, and Alice Cooper, at times we were still opening. In Cleveland we opened for Rod Stewart, in front of a crowd that exceeded eighty thousand—the most fans that we’d ever faced. Maybe they were there to see Rod, but you couldn’t tell by their reaction to our set. They wouldn’t let us off the stage.

  This was the same tour when, for the first time, we saw the formation of the Blue Army. It happened in Toledo during one of the shows that Nugent was opening. When our limo pulled up to the gig, the line of fans snaked around the huge stadium. We were told that, hoping for good tickets, they’d been there since the night before. It seemed like every last one of them was wearing blue—blue denim jackets and blue jeans. Most of them had long hair and reddened eyes. Their dedication amazed me. “Well,” I told Tom, “there’s our Blue Army.”

  The name stuck. The Grateful Dead had their Deadheads; now we had our Blue Army. At first glance the crowd looked mostly male, but we could see plenty of females out there. In those days of general admission, the guys muscled their way to the stage. The screams of the women, though, let us know we had a big following among the ladies—and they were all wearing blue.

  The Blue Army was crazed to the point where promoters had to start building fences between them and the stage to hold them in check. I had a feeling they wanted to carry us off on their shoulders and parade us around the town square.

  The mystical connection between us and our fans was reinforced forever one night in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A no-smoking policy had been passed just before our arrival, in an attempt to prevent pot smoking. The Blue Army defiantly lit up the moment the lights went down. A couple of dozen guys were handcuffed and hauled off. Infuriated, we sent our tour accountant to the police station with a briefcase full of cash. We bailed out everyone. Word quickly spread around the country: Aerosmith looked out for their Blue Army.

  When we came home and sold out the Boston Garden on two straight nights, we were elated. Only a couple of years earlier Steven and I had lain on our backs and daydreamed of doing that very thing. To us the Garden was the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, and the Vatican all rolled into one.

  And yet in the midst of this frenzy, my bandmates were deeply unhappy with me because of the way Elyssa was causing trouble. She couldn’t let a week go by without instigating some kind of he-said/she-said gossip. Her wisecracks were often brutal and offensive, her skill at pushing buttons uncanny. So I found myself in the middle: determined to be loyal to my girlfriend yet equally loyal to my band.

  Elyssa had worthy adversaries. Tom Hamilton’s wife, Terry, whom I admired, was, like Elyssa, witty, pretty, and tough. Terry wouldn’t take shit from anyone. When Elyssa pushed, Terry pushed back. Of course the same was true with Steven, whose push-and-pull relationship with Elyssa went back to childhood. In a strange way, Steven was both the brother I never had and the brother Elyssa loved to tease. The verbal jostling was further fueled by the drugs we were consuming. The stronger the stuff, the less civilized the exchanges.

  If I sided with the band and accused Elyssa of making trouble—as I did on many occasions—it would turn our household into a nightlong nightmar
e. Our most dramatic fight happened when I told her that she couldn’t come on the road for a ten-day run of shows. By then her relationship with the band had turned poisonous. After the tour, Elyssa was still enraged about not accompanying me. We started arguing all over again, but when she pulled me over for a kiss, I thought the fight was over. Instead, she bit my lower lip. I felt a slight pinch and put my hand up to my mouth. I tasted blood. She’d bitten completely through my lip. “You’re fucking crazy,” was all I could say before calling a cab to take me to the hospital. When I got home all stitched up, she was sweetness and light. Knowing she had crossed a line, she’d turned into Mother Teresa. With the help of pain pills and a couple of shots of Jack Daniel’s, I passed out. When I woke up the next morning, we reconciled.

  For all the turmoil between us, the original infatuation I had for Elyssa still held. The bottom line was that I loved her—at least according to my understanding of love as a twenty-five-year-old man. Like a heroine in a fifties film noir—the female character known as the black widow—Elyssa was crafty and maddening . . . and always ready to twist the knife.

  It was a sunny day in L.A. The band was there to do a TV show and Dad happened to be there on business. I was eager to see him and invited him to lunch. I was ensconced in my favorite bungalow at the famous Beverly Hills Hotel. Dad brought along a business associate. We ate eggs Benedict on an outdoor patio with palm trees and lush foliage all around us. He was proud to show me off to his friend. Given Dad’s courageous battle with cancer, I was proud of him. A few months earlier he had had a lung removed—yet there he was in suit and tie, trying to look strong, forging ahead, making plans for the future. I didn’t detect fear in his eyes, only determination. Our conversation was upbeat. He wanted to know all about the band—the new album, the tour, our growing popularity. Given all the bad report cards I’d presented to him during my childhood, it felt good to give him a good report about my career. We didn’t say the words—that wasn’t our style—but we sensed the powerful love that we felt for one another. It was a good moment in the sun. I saw him as a successful businessman. He saw me as a successful artist. We had done one another proud. What I didn’t know, though, was that this would be the last time I’d see him in good health.