by Joe Perry
The fact that Steven couldn’t finish his lyrics and vocals to complete Night in the Ruts frustrated me to no end. I knew it was hard for him, but the drugs were making it worse. And why was I the only guy in the band willing to put the screws to management and demand a detailed explanation on how in hell we could possibly be broke? Something was fucked up. Everything was fucked up.
Then came the infamous episode during the summer tour of 1979 that has fallen into the realm of mythology. The story has been told a hundred times from a hundred points of view. My point of view is vague. I know it happened during a July gig in Cleveland at an outdoor stadium during the World Series of Rock. Nugent and AC/DC were on the bill, and so were Thin Lizzy and Journey, all opening for us. We played our set. At one point someone threw a small vial of powder onstage. Steven picked it up and shot me a glance. He poured some on the mic and we dared each other to go first. I forget who took the first sniff, but we both sampled it. We were laughing pretty hard over the roll of the dice. Turned out to be weak blow.
When we got offstage I learned that there had been a vicious confrontation between Elyssa and Terry, Tom’s wife. Terry was a great chick. She spoke her mind. I liked her. I hated hearing that Elyssa had thrown a glass of milk at her. Fortunately no one was physically injured, but the emotional damage was nasty as it could be. Steven ran in and started accusing me. I hadn’t even been there when the fight happened, but that wasn’t good enough for Steven. He was saying that my inability to keep Elyssa on a short leash was the problem.
“Let’s get out of here,” was all I said to Elyssa.
That’s the night I walked away from Aerosmith. Elyssa and I went back to Boston. I guess it was loyalty that let me stay with Elyssa. She was my wife, and for what it was worth, I still valued our commitment to each other. Part of me probably knew that what had happened in Cleveland was the last straw. For years Elyssa had caused bullshit that put the band members at odds. But the truth is that the band never sat down and talked about our problems. When we would try to confront each other or explain our feelings, we’d wind up screaming. It was the band that broke up the band, not any outsider. None of us was willing to take a hard look at ourselves and our issues. Rather than look in the mirror, it was easier to lay it flat on the table, snort what was on it, and blame someone else.
I stayed put. I stewed. I thought about it long and hard. I had dozens and dozens of demo tapes that had gone nowhere—mainly because Steven never bothered to put lyrics to them. No matter how intense my relationship to drugs, I didn’t lose my drive to keep making music. The choice I faced wasn’t whether to go on making music or not—it was a foregone conclusion that I would—but whether to make that music with or without Aerosmith. Continuing with Aerosmith meant working with a management team I had not trusted for years. It meant playing with bandmates who had angry resentments against each other. It meant playing with Steven, whose drugged-out ways, though no more extreme than mine, triggered his resentment of me.
The whole operation had become a nightmare. I was tired of the bullshit. I just wanted to get in a van and go play rock and roll. I was willing to play clubs—any clubs. If there were a hundred people, as opposed to a hundred thousand, fine. If there were forty, fine. I’d find a few good musicians and just get out there. No complications, no weird management, no drama. Just music. Just go out there as another rock-and-roll pirate and do what I do.
Because Aerosmith had gotten so crazily complicated, the idea here was to keep it simple. I saw my solo effort as nothing more than a project. Thus the name, the Joe Perry Project, me and a couple of guys. The first guy I thought of was David Hull. I knew him from the old days, when he was with Buddy Miles. Hull was one of the best bass players I’d ever heard. I remembered him as a witty cat and easy to be with. He’d been in a good band called Dirty Angels, and I was convinced he’d fit right into my band. I was right.
I was also right about Ralph Morman, a tremendously soulful singer with a voice that reminded me of Paul Rodgers of Bad Company and Free. I’d met Ralph years earlier when he was with Daddy Warbux, a band once managed by Frank Connelly.
When I saw him again in 1979, he said, “Great to see you, Joe.”
“Hey, man, how are you, Ralph?”
“Not all that great. Been doing odd jobs.”
“Not singing?”
“Not really. You know anyone who’s looking for a singer?”
“Yeah. Me.”
After auditioning a few drummers, I settled on Ronnie Stewart, who was working at a music store in Boston. I told him that he’d better keep his day job because there were no guarantees.
I put the guys up at the Holiday Inn and used the Aerosmith Wherehouse for rehearsals. I figured that since I was a one-fifth owner of the place, why not use it? I’d leave little notes on the blackboard.
“Mind if I use the Wherehouse the rest of the week? You guys aren’t using it—even though you could use the practice.”
My former bandmates would answer with notes of their own.
“Sure, go ahead and use it. You need to practice a lot more than us.”
For all the tense feelings on all sides about my leaving, there was room for good-natured ribbing. The connection remained.
I’d washed my hands of the Night in the Ruts album and wasn’t there for its completion. Because I was out of the band, I couldn’t believe that that all my guitar parts—both leads and rhythm—remained on the record. I was told that when Steven finally did show up to do his vocals he was smoking crack. It certainly didn’t sound like that, though. He finally wrote the lyrics and finished the album. This crack thing was something new to me. I didn’t know anything about it. It was just coming onto the scene.
On the cover of the Ruts record they used that photo of us as coal miners. I was half-surprised that they hadn’t edited me out of the shot.
Ruts came out in November, the same month that the Joe Perry Project had its first gig. It was at the Rathskeller, the student union at Boston College. I wasn’t all that surprised to see Steven before the show. He’d come by to say hello and wish me well. I appreciated that. Later I learned that he didn’t stick around to hear any of the music, but Brad Whitford was there and stayed for the whole set. The crowd reaction was strong and the reviews were great. A few weeks later we played the Paradise in Boston and tore it up. We were on our way.
Writers were saying that the decline of Aerosmith left a void that was being filled by young rock bands like Van Halen. I liked Van Halen. They made a great rock record. As a guitarist, Eddie Van Halen was an obvious prodigy and an amazing technician. He led a hungry band with the goods to back up their claim as the next big thing. David Lee Roth’s wit and humor were a perfect foil for Eddie’s brilliant playing.
I was happy with the Joe Perry Project. I was happy digging my new sense of freedom. I was gratified that fans and critics were raving about us, and I was eager to jump in the bus and hit the clubs. I felt like I was on fire.
The fact that I didn’t curb my excessive highs didn’t lower the flames. That heat burns inside me no matter what. I always knew this to be true, but in the transition period between Aerosmith and the Project, I was never more aware of my overwhelming drive to make music no matter what. The music was coming out of me in torrents. I had to start recording.
Columbia had been reading the press on the Project and was interested in giving me a solo deal. Their hesitancy, though, had to do with timing. All too aware of Aerosmith’s history of taking forever to make a record, they thought I’d follow that same pattern. But I swore the opposite. I had the songs, the lyrics, the band. I was ready to rock. I could turn out a complete record in five or six weeks. Miraculously, they took me at my word, and I delivered.
I recruited Jack Douglas, who was just as ready as I was. He wanted to do it at the Hit Factory in midtown Manhattan. The contrast between the torturous ordeal of recording Aerosmith and the seamless groove that characterized the Project was remarkable. We ripped
through the basic tracks in less than a week.
The songs I wrote were largely autobiographical. “Let the Music Do the Talking”—the title track—spoke for itself. It was just how I was feeling. I didn’t need to talk. Didn’t need to explain how much I wanted to be on my own, working on my own timetable, free to work at my own speed, which was plenty fast. “Conflict of Interest” was inspired by my feelings about the shady side of the music business. I was going straight back to my roots, as demonstrated by the R&B-heavy “Rockin’ Train.” Songs like “Life at a Glance” and “Ready on the Firing Line” were constructed around riffs that had been bouncing around my brain for months. I had to get them out of me, and Jack proved the perfect producer to facilitate that process. He kept saying that some of the nine tunes I wrote could have saved the Aerosmith Ruts record from going down the toilet. The best part of it was the certain knowledge that I was moving in an upward direction. My lyrics for “Shooting Star” say:
No one knows much time has passed
That I’ve returned from space at last
A lot of wounds that hurt and bleed
The scars of which you’ll never see
My brand-new ship is stellar bound
To search out a place I’ve never found
Where I go only time will tell
There’s a lot of space between heaven and hell
Another great thing about this “brand-new ship”—the Joe Perry Project—was that I was not only writing lyrics but singing again as well. I shared lead vocals with Ralph Morman on two songs and sang lead alone on another two. I had no illusions that I was a Steven Tyler or a Freddie Mercury. I was simply following the adage of the old bluesmen, who believed that every guitarist should sing his own songs. But I also knew that the larger point was to pour myself—all of myself—into my music. That meant my voice as well as my guitar. Both were extensions of me.
Reviews were good. Given the enthusiasm for the record, I expected it to perform better than it did. My lawyer, Bob Casper, did what he could from New York, but I was essentially managing the band. Casper was trying to free up some money from Leber-Krebs, but ultimately he came up against the same stone wall.
No matter what Columbia did or didn’t do for the album, no one could suppress the fire of our live set. We were smoking, playing a mix of some of the new things we’d just recorded and also a few Aerosmith numbers, like “Walk This Way” and “Same Old Song and Dance.” Yet for all my enthusiasm for my new band, it wasn’t without drama. Few bands are. This first drama was especially improbable because it involved me, a guy not exactly known for sobriety, going off on Ralph Morman for being drunk. In my mind there’s operative drunk and then there’s fall-down, I-can’t-perform drunk. When I hired Ralph, he was in control. Now he was on the verge of becoming an out-of-control drunk. One night when he showed up an hour late to a gig in a state of wild inebriation, I hauled off and decked him. That’s how enraged I was. That’s how determined I was to keep the Project on track. We were off to a great start and I was bound and determined to maintain a high musical standard. That meant firing Ralph and finding another singer. For a while I became that singer, and that was fine. But I needed a singer who could deliver some of the songs I loved to play. I was a guitarist more obsessed with guitars than ever. I’d go out there with two guitars—a left-handed Strat that had a left-handed Telecaster neck and a midnight-blue Travis Bean L500 with dual pickups. I felt like I was rediscovering my guitar again.
I was surely feeling free from the dysfunctional depression that had dragged down Aerosmith. I was also feeling that I had something to prove—that I could do it alone. On the road, I was feeling more than a little liberated by being away from Elyssa. The marriage continued to be a strain. My heroin snorting hadn’t stopped. I was hooked on the drug. That became clear during that first Project tour when I ran out and had to go to a doctor for Darvon and Catapres, meds that helped me cope with my withdrawal.
Come the spring of 1980, I was hard-pressed in all areas. I saw the band as a success and wanted to build it up. The first tour had been all clubs. The next tour would be theaters. I also thought about hiring a keyboardist and maybe a second guitarist to give me a little relief. Up until now, it had been all on me. Then my money got funny. I wasn’t earning anything close to what I’d made with Aerosmith, but I was making decent dough. However, back in Boston, Elyssa, who refused to get a driver’s license, was taking limos to the supermarket. She was living it up like in the pre-Project days. I tried to tell her that this was no time buy porcelain vases and silk sheets. There was a good chance we’d have to sell our house. In no uncertain terms, I’d made it clear that we’d entered a period of austerity. But Elyssa didn’t get it—or didn’t want to get it. In the meantime, the IRS was sending special-delivery letters about hundreds of thousands of dollars of back taxes. By then I was broke and badly needed the fee for a weekend where we were booked at a club. Elyssa came along. She had something she wanted to tell me in person. She was pregnant.
All this was on my mind as we pulled into Austin, Texas, for one of the last gigs of the tour. Then came the call.
“Sorry, Joe,” said the booking agent. “The gig fell through. The club’s closing.”
“The weekend of our gig?”
“The very weekend. I’m sorry.”
“I thought we had a guarantee.”
“We did. But when a club closes, all guarantees are off.”
We were up there in the Travelodge with nothing to do and nowhere to go. When I tried to use my credit card to book us plane tickets home, the card had maxed out. So had my drugs. And so had the drugs that helped me withdraw from my drugs. If it hadn’t been for my lawyer Bob Casper and his willingness to front me ten thousand dollars, I might still be in Austin.
I found another singer—J. Mala, who’d been with Revolver—who stayed with us for a short while. Mala was replaced by Charlie Farren, a world-class singer/songwriter who’d been fronting a local Boston band, Balloon. The lead-singer slot was something of a revolving door that started spinning really fast. We played the Palladium in New York and were glad to get a two-month tour as the opening act for Heart. That was enough for me to keep my head above water—barely. Things got weird, though, when my father-in-law claimed to have found a threatening note on the windshield of my car back in Boston. It was from drug dealers saying to pay up or else. I didn’t know—or I had forgotten—who they were. All the more reason to stay out on the road.
The gigs kept coming, but with so many hungry dogs on my heels needing to be fed, I felt like a pauper. The Project was making decent money, but I owed so much cash that every cent was spoken for before I could get it.
I was talking to Jack Douglas about doing another Project record during the time he was working with John Lennon and Yoko Ono on Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey. It was Jack who called me to say that John had been shot and killed. I was numb. I didn’t know what to do, what to say, how to react. I had met him briefly at the Record Plant, but I never knew the man. Without him and his Beatles I wouldn’t have been doing what I was doing. I saw him as a searcher, a brave artist. He could have lived off those Beatles songs for the rest of his life, but at the end of his life he was still making daring and important music. He had written some of the best pop songs of all time, yet he was a true rock and roller. John was, is, and always will be, one of my great inspirations.
While I was out with the Project, Steven had replaced me with Jimmy Crespo, who was supposed to resemble me. The band was having a terrible time. Steven was collapsing onstage. The thing seemed to be falling apart. Six months after I had left Aerosmith, Brad Whitford couldn’t take it anymore and quit. He joined forces with Derek St. Holmes, Ted Nugent’s vocalist, to form Whitford St. Holmes. I wished Brad well and meant it. Later on Brad would come out and play occasional dates with the Project. It was always great to have him onstage with us, both for me as a friend and the fans for the rock and roll. I welcomed him. As guitarists we’ve a
lways been totally compatible and instinctively know how to complement each other.
Stories kept coming in about Aerosmith’s attempt to make another album, the one that would eventually be called Rock in a Hard Place and the only Aerosmith record on which I’m totally absent. The band recruited Jack Douglas to produce. It took them over two years and cost nearly a million and a half dollars. Jack told me that it was the same old story—months and months of Steven procrastinating about his lyrics and vocals. I can’t tell you how relieved I was not to have been in the middle of that mess.
Yet I was facing a financial nightmare of my own. At the time, I blamed the old Aerosmith management, who I was convinced were withholding money that I was owed. My fear was they wanted to squeeze me until I’d rejoin the band. I thought they were acting like dicks. But, if I were to have been honest about the situation, I’d have had to see my own culpability. I certainly see it now. Back when the money was pouring in, I should have complained louder about the lack of accountability, but that’s all I did—complain. I could have quit earlier. I could have hired my own independent accountant. I could have gotten my financial act together if I had asserted myself, but I didn’t. I floated on the high of the band’s huge success. The truth is that I didn’t have any idea what I was making or spending. I never gave a second thought to taxes. All those years, I assumed Leber-Krebs were taking care of the taxes. As the son of a highly professional and well-respected cost accountant, I realized that I was sliding into financial chaos. I also realized that if I’d ever needed my dad’s help and guidance, I needed it now. And he wasn’t around.
But arrogance remained my middle name. Years before, when Steven started introducing me to the crowds as Joe Fuckin’ Perry, he was referencing that arrogance. That arrogance was a cover-up for all the emotions I didn’t want on display—fear, vulnerability, uncertainty, anger, and confusion.
Bob Casper, the lawyer who had helped me out in the past, was gone. In his place was Don Law, the cat who ran the Boston Tea Party and went on to become the top promoter in the city. I looked to Don to save me, money-wise. I was on the verge of losing my house. But Don could only do so much. There was a decent advance for the second Project album on Columbia. I turned all my attention to writing and producing that record. Had it not been for the prospect of another major musical effort on my part, I might have lost it.