Rocks: My Life in and Out of Aerosmith

by Joe Perry

  Tired of running at full speed—partying, touring, recording—I knew I needed a break. I asked Elyssa to find a place in the Caribbean where we could stay for ten days and get away from it all. We needed to chill from our little heroin jones. So we flew down to Montserrat, where we rented a beautiful three-bedroom cottage, complete with original Picassos on the wall, tucked into the side of the mountain overlooking the sea. It was as close to paradise as I was likely to get.

  But there was trouble in paradise. I had brought a few hits of dope that let us get through the first days smoothly. When my supply was exhausted, though, my body rebelled. I’d kicked before, but those other times had been while I was on the road, when I was fully occupied with the band. This time there was nothing that intense to distract me, so the withdrawal was rough. But with the help of the local rum, I toughed it out.

  My spirits lifted when I learned that George Martin, the famed Beatles producer, was staying at a bed-and-breakfast on the island. I sent word to him. He was happy to see me, and together we surveyed the mountaintop property where he was planning to build a studio. He pointed to a cow in the middle of a pasture and said, “That’s where the board will be.”

  “It’d be great to record here,” I said.

  “And I’d be honored to host you,” said George, ever the English gentleman.

  We went back to town, where, in an open-air bar by the beach, we drank rum as George regaled me with Beatles stories. I listened attentively, but my mind began to wander. My body was still hurting.

  Over the next days I sought relief through nature. I went into the jungle, wearing my leopard-print swim trunks and brandishing my ten-inch hunting knife. Playing the part of the hunter-gatherer, I feasted on wild bananas and swung on vines like Tarzan.

  Feeling increasingly edgy, I went back to our cottage and made the mistake of calling my dealer in Boston. When I had left, he’d complained about the city being dry.

  “The situation’s changed,” he said. “I have an ounce of China white waiting for you.”

  That was all I needed to hear. Suddenly the Montserrat sun was too hot, the food too bland. There was only one beach, and it was too small. There was no TV. I found every excuse imaginable to cut short our vacation. I kept envisioning that China white. Just like that, I booked the next flight out. Elyssa and I packed in a flash and ran to the airport. It turned out George Martin was on the same flight, and we had another engaging conversation and a few more drinks as we flew through a cloudless sky over the Caribbean.

  The second the plane touched down, Elyssa and I raced over to the dealer’s house.

  “Man,” he said, “you just beat the storm.”

  “What storm?”

  “A blizzard’s about to hit.”

  By sheer luck, we’d slipped in just in time. Within hours, the Great Blizzard of February 1978 blanketed Boston. Logan Airport went dark for days. The city was completely shut down. Elyssa and I got home in time to watch the storm outside our living room window. After snorting up a combination of heroin and coke supplied by my man, we were numbed out, impervious to the chaos caused by Mother Nature.

  THE RUTS

  Later in 1978, George Martin reentered our lives when we were asked to be in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a movie produced by Robert Stigwood, the producer of Jesus Christ Superstar, Grease, Tommy, and Saturday Night Fever. The thing was a mess. I believe the Stones wisely turned down the role that was given to us. The cast included Steve Martin, Billy Preston, and Earth, Wind & Fire. Along with Alice Cooper, we were villains. As a matter of fact, we were labeled the Future Villain Band. Peter Frampton was the hero. That made sense since Frampton Comes Alive was a huge-selling album and Frampton was up on the charts as a solo artist. Management told us that we’d get to murder both Frampton and the Bee Gees in the movie. We were game. I checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel as “Richard Burton,” a good move since room service presumed that Liz Taylor was with me. When I picked up the phone to order a drink, they were at my door before I had time to put the phone down. The Hollywood movie experience was . . . well, Hollywood. Unbelievable waste. Hurry up and wait. Oceans of booze, drugs in the trailers, endless takes and retakes, total confusion about the script. I didn’t know if all films were made like this, but we felt at home.

  The script was flipped so Frampton would kill Steven. We said no. That seemed wrong. Instead we killed the Bee Gees and it was a character called Strawberry Fields who shoved Steven off the stage and killed him. The Future Villain Band then killed Strawberry Fields. It wasn’t exactly Citizen Kane.

  We realized that our involvement with this could look cheesy, but we looked at it as another adventure. The real hook was being able to work with George Martin on our cover of “Come Together.” We flew to New York to work at the Record Plant. Our idea was not to stray too far from the original. We had too much respect for John Lennon’s classic to go changing it just for the sake of change. We ran it down and waited for the arrival of George Martin.

  When the tall and elegant Mr. Martin arrived, we said quick hellos over the intercom and ran down the song for him. We sat there nervously, waiting for words of wisdom from the genius producer.

  “It sounds good, boys. Please proceed.”

  We were shocked. We figured he’d have a lot to say—either adding or subtracting from our interpretation. But he had no suggestions whatsoever. So we kept playing until we formulated a good basic track.

  When we went to the control room to greet him face-to-face, he was the same genial gentleman as ever.

  “Keep doing what you’re doing, boys, and I shall see you shortly.”

  And with that he left.

  When the movie came out, no one could believe how bad it was. No matter, we had a blast at the premiere. Chevy Chase, sitting directly behind us, kept the wisecracks coming and was more entertaining than the movie itself. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band went from being a potential blockbuster to a bomb within days of release. The critics started calling it “Stigwood’s Folly” because supposedly the budget ballooned from a few million to $30 million.

  Before we left L.A., we got dressed up as coal miners, our faces smeared with dirt, for some publicity shots. The shoot took place in front of a cave in the Hollywood Hills, an old location for a thousand and one cowboy flicks and sci-fi shows. At my suggestion, we climbed to the top of a sandpit and rolled down, getting so gritty that it later took hours to wash the sand out of my hair.

  “Come Together,” the Aerosmith version released as a single, went to number 23 on the pop charts. We were working on Live! Bootleg, an album of old shows that we intentionally wanted to sound bootlegged. A couple of those tracks were recorded off the air onto a cassette. It had hiss all over it. We left on the hiss because the hiss was real. But I’m not sure Columbia ever understood our concept. They wanted a clean sound, but we wanted to keep it real. That’s the thrill of a real bootleg. Leber-Krebs had us playing the biggest venues in the country. We called it the Bootleg tour.

  That was the summer of 1978, the same summer Steven married Cyrinda at Sunapee. In September came word that Keith Moon, one of the great drummers in all rock, had died an alcohol- and drug-related death. I mourned his passing and kept partying. At twenty-eight, I still felt invincible.

  The tour went on. We were headquartered at the Whitehall Hotel in Chicago. A Learjet took us to the usual spots where we’d been playing for seven or eight years—Detroit and Toledo, Cincy and Madison, St. Paul and Indianapolis. No band covered more American soil. No band worked the heartland any harder. Other bands might come through once every two or three years, but we were there, in your face, every few months.

  It was at the Whitehall that Brad and I borrowed Steven’s cassette recorder to fool with some riffs. We went to my room, where Elyssa and Brad’s wife, Karen, were also hanging out. As we were playing, they were discussing Steven’s lascivious behavior the previous night. He had met a girl at the bar and, in full view of everyone,
started making out with her—to the point where they should have gotten a room. As Elyssa and Karen recounted the story, they themselves had a few drinks and didn’t hold back on any of the salacious details. Brad and I stuck to our guitars and, when we were through laying down our ideas, returned the recorder to Steven.

  The kicker was this: I forgot to take the tape out of the machine. Later that night Cyrinda arrived. I’m not sure who turned on the tape machine, Steven or Cyrinda, but the cassette got played. You could hear Brad and me jamming, but just as clearly you could hear Elyssa and Karen detailing Steven’s escapade. Steven and Cyrinda listened to the entire tape. That’s when their floor of the Whitehall Hotel exploded.

  The two of them came running up to our room. Steven, who thrives on this kind of drama, demanded that the four of us listen to the tape in its entirety. I didn’t want to. I couldn’t have cared less, but Steven insisted. He listened to it over and again. Cyrinda went batshit. Steven accused Elyssa of spreading evil gossip and trying to destroy his relationship. And while Karen and Elyssa were clearly guilty of gossiping, their facts—the very facts that Steven was looking to deflect—were completely accurate. The madness went on for hours, Cyrinda screaming that Steven was a cheater and liar while Steven screamed that we were the real culprits, whose aim was to undermine his relationship with Cyrinda. Another typical night of Aerosmith fun and games.

  Leber-Krebs were managing foreign bands who wanted to make it in the states. They lured these groups with the prospect of opening for Aerosmith while they shopped them a record deal. Most of the bands wound up on Columbia. From a business angle, we didn’t give this much thought. But we did get to hear a lot of the up-and-coming new groups. Some were good, others great. None, though, was greater than AC/DC, still one of my favorite bands of all time. During the one summer that AC/DC was on our tour, they pushed us hard. We had to be on our toes.

  My hand was still fucked up from the explosion in Philly. I was battle weary and so was Steven. He’d swing the microphone stand around his head and mine like he was going to strike, but I never worried about that. No matter how vicious the animosity between us, a physical altercation was never a threat. The line of civility between us was thin, but it existed. Something powerful kept both of us from crossing it.

  That winter Nugent opened for us at Madison Square Garden. Nugent and Aerosmith were also on the same episode of The Midnight Special, a TV show featuring top pop and rock acts that came on after Johnny Carson on Friday nights.

  The next night we were back in Philly, the first time at the Spectrum since Steven was nearly blinded and I got blasted by the M-80, a firecracker so dangerous that it’s now outlawed. We had our doubts, but we felt, why let one crazy fan wreck it for fifteen thousand others? Besides, it was around Thanksgiving, a good time to feel gratitude for all our fans. They had even bought a billboard near the venue apologizing for what happened last time. We hadn’t been onstage longer than a half hour, though, when a missile was launched from the crowd—it was either a whiskey or a beer bottle—and landed right in front of Steven and me. Glass shattered everywhere. Steven’s face got cut. As we left, he was bleeding profusely. That was it.

  Nineteen seventy-nine had to be one of the lowest years of my life. Approaching twenty-nine, I felt disgust on all sorts of levels. I realized that my marriage had hit a dead end but I didn’t have the wherewithal to end it. I realized that the band’s drugging and drinking—including my own—was out of hand, yet no one felt any compunction to curb it. Musically, the band was on cruise control. We were playing the same shit we’d been playing for years. If Steven and I had found a way to deal with our differences, that would have helped. But we were further apart than ever. He saw Elyssa—and my willingness to lose myself in my relationship with her—as the cause of Aerosmith’s problems. The band members never addressed those problems. We never had open and frank discussions about what was wrong. Instead, Elyssa was used as the scapegoat for many Aerosmith issues.

  I was never part of the boys’ club. I had no fondness for the after-the-show blow-job room. While I liked losing myself in chemicals, losing myself in anonymous sexual mayhem was not my style. I’m a one-woman man.

  The insanity of our tour-record-tour-record cycle was going into its eighth year. What was required was creative renewal. We needed fresh energy and new ideas. That’s when we started planning the next record.

  The struggle was more monumental than ever. The five of us were able to come up with a bunch of song ideas. That happened at the Wherehouse in Waltham. Then when we went to Media Sound in New York to record the tracks, Steven was there to help out with the arrangements and the recording. I thought we cut some of the best tracks we’d ever done. The guitar interplay between me and Brad broke new ground. Everyone was at the top of his game. When it came time for lyrics and vocals, though, Steven began to drift away.

  Slowly, progress ground to a halt. I started to get annoyed, then aggravated, and then out-and-out pissed. I’d been working these tracks along with Tom, Brad, and Joey. They were hot. For example, I was switching between a bottleneck to a six-string to a lap steel on something called “Cheesecake.” But nothing could be finished without Steven. Weeks went by. Then months.

  This was when Leber-Krebs decided to hold one of their rare meetings to review our financial status.

  “The band is broke,” said Krebs, “and you’ll have to do some festivals in between recording your new album.”

  We had never done that before. When we toured, we toured; when we recorded, we recorded. That was our ironclad ritual. When I objected to changing the long-established routine, David Krebs said we had no choice. Beyond being broke, each of us owed money for our in-room hotel charges from the previous tours.

  I wondered how in hell that could be. We’d headlined some of the biggest festivals in the history of rock and roll. We’d been selling out arenas for years. We’d made untold millions. Where did all of it go? And what about the merchandise and publishing money?

  Krebs gave a long answer that sounded like double-talk.

  “If what you say is true,” I said, “at least show us the paperwork that proves your point.”

  Nothing he had made any sense to me. And it got worse.

  “Joe, you personally owe $180,000 in room service charges.”

  “If we’re so broke,” I said, “how am I going to get that kind of money?”

  “Make a solo album,” he suggested.

  That thought had never occurred to me before. I had never thought about doing a record on my own any more than I had thought about leaving the band. At this moment, though, I did have one thought: Come hell or high water, I was getting my own lawyer and putting him on the case.

  Meanwhile, we still had to finish the album that would be called Night in the Ruts. We went to work every day, spending a fortune on hotel bills and studio time with nothing to show for it. We were still waiting for Steven to do his job—write the lyrics and sing them. I couldn’t comprehend why Steven was taking so fuckin’ long. A fruitless pattern was set: We’d wander into the studio in late afternoon. We’d hope Steven might have completed a song, but he hadn’t. So we waited some more. By early evening the dealers would show up, letting us sample their best stuff with the hopes of scoring a big sale. No problem there. We’d get high and the party would start. And still no Steven. Tired of waiting and disgusted with the band’s inability to complete the record, I packed up and went back home to Boston.

  With the Leber-Krebs money mess in mind, I called a lawyer to intervene on my behalf. I needed my own representative. I needed to know where the money had gone. We had several meetings and my hopes were high. But my hopes were soon dashed when I saw how Leber-Krebs totally overpowered my lawyer. It was the same scenario as when I had introduced Elyssa’s attorney cousin into the mix. Given Leber-Krebs’ powerful position in the music business, lawyers were easily intimidated. My lawyer stopped discussing an audit, leaving me in the dark about where the money had
gone. I still couldn’t comprehend being broke.

  Back in Boston, Elyssa and other friends encouraged me to go out on my own. What a concept! The notion became more and more appealing. It felt like freedom. I’d be free not to give a shit whether Steven showed or not. The band’s dysfunction had come to a junction. Bluesman Robert Johnson might have sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads, but I was feeling like I had no soul left to sell. My soul had been smoked up, snorted up, drugged up, fucked up. My soul was in tatters. I wanted off the road but management said we owed so much money that we couldn’t afford to stop doing what we had been doing ever since the start of our musical enterprise. We had to keep playing, keep touring, go back to the Midwest, back to California, back to Texas, playing big venues, big festivals, to big crowds of fans who wanted to see the band.

  We had to keep going at any cost. There was no way to stop the machine. There was no way to get off the merry-go-round. But another real problem was that I was addicted to excitement. After all, that was what we had worked for. We were living the dream.

  I had to keep going, going, going—until I finally realized, when push came to shove, I could do whatever I wanted. I had a choice. I could just fuckin’ quit.

  PART 4

  THE PROJECT

  OUT

  I had been harboring an illusion for a long time that I didn’t want to shatter. The illusion was that, no matter what, I could put up with the band and the band could put up with me. The illusion was that I could stay with this band while also staying with Elyssa. I was pissed off by her high school antics, but maybe deep down part of me approved of her misbehavior. Whatever my ambivalence, I stood by and watched her verbally attack the guys and their wives and girlfriends. When I talked about leaving the band, Elyssa had no ambivalence about supporting me. She was certain I could make it on my own.