Rocks: My Life in and Out of Aerosmith

by Joe Perry

  Our love of hot Indian cuisine fueled “A Taste of India,” one of the hotter songs on the record. “Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees)” was the initial single and video, the story rendered in a series of images of men trapped in containers and cages being lorded over by voluptuous women. At one point Steven sings in a straitjacket. In the next video, for “Hole in My Soul,” the power ballad that we wrote with Desmond Child, Steven is singing in an electric chair as we follow an abstract narrative tapestry of male romantic fantasies.

  The album took off, and so did we. The 1997 Nine Lives tour, like practically every Aerosmith tour before and after, was wildly ambitious. We’d cover the world. We’d conquer the world. We were back together as brothers in arms. Wendy Laister, who effortlessly made the transition to manager, was handling the operation. She had been a superb publicist and knew us as well as anyone. Together with Burt Goldstein, she could tend to all the critical details of our business—or at least we thought so.

  After all we’d gone through with the making of Nine Lives and the unmaking of Tim Collins, it was an enormous relief when the album took off. The demand for our personal appearances was greater than ever. Once again, the seemingly indestructible Aerosmith machine hit high gear. We played Saturday Night Live in March before flying off to England in May. All that summer we played Europe. The highlight was selling out two big shows at Wembley Stadium, where Jimmy Page and Brian May from Queen turned up to say hello.

  Artistically, I felt more alive than ever. For the foreign edition of Nine Lives we included “Falling Off,” where I got to stretch out and sing one of my own songs. It became one of the encores of our European shows and a source of great satisfaction, especially when fans kept telling me how it reminded them of the Joe Perry Project.

  When the tour was over and we were back home, we faced a new opportunity. We were asked to record a song, “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” for the Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster movie Armageddon. It wasn’t just any song, but one written by the lovely and eccentric Diane Warren, famous for her long string of number-one hits.

  The band met at the Sunset Marquis and listened to the tune. It was a slam dunk. No doubt Steven could sing the hell out of it and we could put the Aerosmith stamp on it musically. Maybe it didn’t have the masculine edge of our other ballads, but it was a beautiful song.

  There was the added inducement that Jerry was going to include several songs from the Aerosmith catalogue in the film. Additionally, “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” would be turned into a video featuring footage from the movie along with that of Aerosmith performing the song. Yet we still weren’t completely sold. We wanted to see the film itself.

  Jerry took us to his editing room and ran some footage with Aerosmith songs dubbed in the background. That blew us away. Our music sounded great over the explosive images. We were also proud that Liv Tyler, Steven’s beautiful daughter, was featured in the film along with Bruce Willis.

  When Jerry Bruckheimer throws a premiere, he pulls out all the stops. This one happened at NASA in Florida, where we got a VIP tour of the entire facility. We saw the holding room where the rockets are housed before launching; we saw the space shuttle itself; and we took turns landing the shuttle in the trainer. One point of paternal pride: According to the instructor, my six-year-old son Roman executed the smoothest landing of anyone.

  Since Diane had written the song for the film, it was eligible for an Academy Award. When it was nominated, we were invited to play it during the ceremony. We’d been to a thousand award shows, but, man, Oscar night was a whole ’nother animal. We were pumped. Then a snag: Seconds before we took the stage we were told that the monitors were down, and we had no choice but to go on. This was being broadcast live to the world. In spite of the breakdown, the band performed the song flawlessly. No one in the audience knew anything was wrong.

  The tent in which the elegantly appointed gourmet dinner was held afterward was decorated like a movie set. With gossamer fabrics floating down from the tent’s high top, it was a dreamlike evening.

  A few weeks later Steven and I were back at Sunapee trying out a few pieces of new hardware. The two of us were walking through the fields of Trow Hill. It was another one of those good times when we could relieve the pressures of the practical world by simply escaping to the woods. It was also an opportunity to shoot off a little steam—literally.

  In his new six-wheeler amphibious hunting vehicle, Steven drove us to a safe place, the side of a remote hill, for some target practice. That’s when his phone rang. The smile of his face said it was good news.

  “ ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ just went to number one,” he told me after hanging up. “They’re saying it’s our first number-one pop hit.”

  “In all these years,” I said, “we’ve never had a real number-one pop hit?”

  “I guess not.”

  Surprised, we were happy as hell and, in celebration, ripped through a couple of magazines.

  But the celebration didn’t last long.

  That spring of 1998 we took the Nine Lives tour to Alaska, where we’d never played before. The cool air was exhilarating, the landscape wild and inviting. It felt like another country.

  The Anchorage fans were so excited that both concerts were sold out. On our day off, Steven and I planned a fishing trip with our tour manager, Jimmy Eyers, an expert outdoorsman. We left our hotel at 6 A.M.—late by Alaskan fishing standards—for the three-hour drive down to Seward, where the boats were moored. Just that drive down would have been adventure enough: the pristine snow-covered mountains, moose by the score, flocks of bald eagles. Halfway to Seward, we stopped at an old house with a sign advertising handmade knives. Steven and I, both collectors, marveled at the display. The most striking one was crafted from a motorcycle chain and pounded down to a perfectly precise edge.

  We got to the boat a little before ten and found our captain. Because we had arrived so late, there wasn’t enough daylight left for us to make it to Jurassic Park, so named because the halibut are as big as barn doors. Less fertile areas would have to do. We got on board and began the ride down to the ocean. The wind was blowing, and Jimmy, Steven, and I were freezing, even in three layers of clothing. But there was the captain, commanding the boat in nothing but shorts and a T-shirt. A few hours later we dropped anchor, dropped lines, and starting pulling in some of the biggest fish that any of us had ever caught. We threw them all back until the captain advised us to keep one—a four-foot beauty of a halibut. We ate it that night in a restaurant in the harbor where they prepared your fresh catch. It was a great meal and satisfying to know we’d caught the fish ourselves.

  The concerts were a blast and the crowds at Anchorage’s Sullivan Arena were delirious. The second night’s show was about over when we broke into our last encore—“Mama Kin.” Steven was doing his thing with his scarf-covered mic stand—whirling it around—when he accidentally smashed it into his left knee, crushing the ACL, the ligament that holds the joint together. We rushed him to an ambulance. The doctors said he’d be out of operation for months. We had to cancel the rest of the tour. We also thought we’d have to cancel the video shoot for “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” but Tyler insisted we keep the plans intact. Still in excruciating pain, he showed up wearing a brace. For the umpteenth time he proved his professionalism by turning in a stellar performance. Because he couldn’t really move, they shot him from the waist up. Having torn up my ACL twelve years before, I could relate to the excruciating pain.

  Come summer Steven had healed up and was ready to go back out. The tour was just about to reconvene when another near-tragedy struck: While Joey was getting his Ferrari filled up at a Boston gas station, a negligent attendant didn’t notice that the nozzle had fallen to the ground with gas pouring out. The result was a hellish explosion in which Joey, running through the fire, suffered third-degree burns and barely escaped with his life.

  Months later, with Joey recovered, we finally completed the Nine
Lives/I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing tour.

  On the business side, the majority of us were not completely satisfied with the way things were going with Burt Goldstein and Wendy Laister. We were convinced we needed a real manager. Howard Kaufman was our first choice. Howard had managed the biggest acts in the business. He was a former accountant who knew the ins and outs of the money game. He understood recording contracts and had vast knowledge of the finances of touring. He was tough and fair. Moreover, he was mellow. He didn’t care about going on the road or involving himself in personal areas. His main concern was our career. One of Howard’s partners, Trudy Green, who would be involved with our day-to-day operation, also had a levelheaded attitude that assured us boundaries would be established and honored.

  We played Tokyo Dome at the end of 1999. This was the year of Y2K. Many people fearing a worldwide computer collapse stayed home New Year’s Eve. Slips of paper were placed under the doors of our hotel room telling us to stay off the elevators an hour before and after midnight. Even though Japan is one of the world’s safest countries, we had extra security. Everyone was on edge. No one knew what might happen. In the end, nothing happened—except for Aerosmith putting on an end-of-the-century New Year’s show for some of our favorite fans in the world.

  Taking stock at the end of the twentieth century, we had much to be grateful for. We had survived every kind of personal and professional storm imaginable. Our hope was that it would be smooth sailing ahead. We were entering a new millennium with renewed hope.

  I would love to tell you that, for the next decade, harmony was the theme. But the truth is that the Aerosmith way of life would never change.

  PART 6

  ROCKIN’ IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  PUSH

  It was 2000 and we needed to get started on a new record. After discussing the long and checkered history of Aerosmith producers, Steven and I thought we should produce it ourselves. I suggested that Marti Frederiksen work as our engineer. Steven wanted to bring in Mark Hudson as well. I wasn’t thrilled, but Steven always felt he needed someone he could rely on to back him up. We had worked successfully with both these guys in the past, and they were enthusiastic about coming aboard. There weren’t any discussions about studios. It was just presumed that we’d get the ball rolling in the Boneyard, by now a world-class facility with just the right mix of vintage gear to offset the cutting-edge computers.

  After we laid down the basic tracks over the next few months, we decided to turn our guesthouse, just a few hundred feet from the main house, into the mixing room. That way we could keep working on tracks and still check on the mix. Marti set up a Pro Tools rig in the family room of our main house so we wouldn’t have to stop recording to edit the Pro Tool files. Perry Margouleff brought in experts to tune the rooms. Paul Caruso, my friend and main engineer, not only helped record the CD but was instrumental in connecting these three studios that were equipped with black-and-white TV monitors and speakers, enabling instant communication. To get a natural reverb sound, we even recorded guitars and vocals in our private steam shower.

  In the beginning, the teams broke down to Joe/Marti and Steven/Mark. Before long, on a record we’d eventually call Just Push Play, Mark and Marti became coproducers. Marti and I clicked on all the hard rock items. We ran off riffs with amazing consistency. Steven and Mark had their own collaborative methodology. Mark was a Beatles freak. Every composition had to be measured in relation to a Beatles song. That could be maddening, but that was Mark’s motivation. Because both he and Steven were hyper-extroverts, they often fought each other for attention. I remember them riding down the driveway of my house in Steven’s car. You could hear the two of them shouting at each other, both trying to be heard above Steven’s blasting stereo.

  The screaming drove me crazy. But if that’s how they wanted to deal with each other, so be it. More importantly, I was excited because, after all the records we had made in Miami and Vancouver and New York and L.A., this one was being done at home.

  For the next ten years, the Boneyard was where the creative process usually started. Steven and I always referred to it as the Net—the place where we caught ideas. It was also where Just Push Play began.

  Here’s how it worked: Marti, Mark, Steven, and I wrote the songs and played the demos. Then Brad, Tom, and Joey would come in to cut their parts—one player at a time instead of the band playing together. That bothered me, but that’s just how it evolved. That’s also when, in my view, things began to break down. I started feeling disconnected from the other guys in the band and thought they should have more of a chance to be involved. There was also limited spontaneity and virtually no room for variation. Tom, for example, had to learn the parts that Marti had written. I argued that Tom should be given the freedom to play what he felt, but the other three producers wanted it done their way. It was beginning to not sound like an Aerosmith album—and I didn’t like that feeling. The more we worked, the more controlling my coproducers became.

  Up until now, with the exception of Ballard, none of our producers had been interested in songwriting. But in this case, Marti and Mark wanted a hand in the songwriting as well as the producing. That moved the focus from a collaborative Aerosmith record to one that was self-serving for Marti and Mark. Steven had no objections because he knew that these two producer-writers would help him with lyrics.

  Joey was unhappy because he didn’t think he could get the drum sound that he needed in the Boneyard. I disagreed but had to yield. Joey had domain over his own sonics. That meant going to still another studio to record the drums. The result was even more disconnection because a good part of the drum sounds were samples anyway.

  A band like Aerosmith is about energy. It was ridiculous that all five of us were never in the same room at the same time—a point I should have insisted upon. I take my share of the blame but, looking back, I realize that I was fighting a losing battle. Most of the arguments were three to one, and I was the one.

  The writing process was also marred. Marti and his wife and kids had been living in the guest wing of our compound for months. Because he was a coproducer, cowriter, and friend, I wanted him to be as comfortable as possible. With only four or five songs without lyrics, he and Steven decided to go up to Lake Sunapee for the weekend. They said they would focus on completing the lyrics.

  “If you guys start writing something new,” I told Marti and Steven, “call me and I’ll run up there.” It’s only a two-hour drive from my house to Sunapee.

  “Sure thing,” they said.

  When they returned, they had written “Jaded.” The song was undoubtedly commercial. I heard it as a hit and saw it as the first single off the album. But what had happened to Marti and Steven’s promise to call me if they’d begun to write?

  Steven gave his usual excuses.

  “I thought you said you wanted to have a weekend alone with Billie,” he said.

  “You know I never said that, Steven. I said call me if you start writing something new. You guys were supposed to be going up to finish lyrics.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “You heard what you wanted to hear. You make up your own truths to suit yourself. But what else is new?”

  Marti’s attitude also puzzled me. In just a few short weeks he’d moved from working with me to excluding me from his work with Steven. When I confronted him, he said, “I would have called you, man, but Steven didn’t want to. He said it wasn’t necessary.”

  That hurt. And yet it had been become a pattern. Steven had displayed a cavalier attitude that undermined our partnership. Strong partners—like Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards—have each other’s backs. Once in a great while they may wander off and compose alone or with another writer, but the understanding is clear: When it comes to their band’s material, their partnership is paramount. They’re a team. Steven only viewed us as a team when it suited him.

  Meanwhile, Steven had thrown Mark Hudson out of his house. Evidently the
vicious Steven-Mark arguments got to be too much. Until now Mark had always been Steven’s friend, but during the course of this production it became clear that Steven was co-opting Marti, the guy he initially never wanted to work with. In essence, both Marti and Mark were writing songs for Steven. That’s why, after all was said and done, I viewed Push as an album that lost its focus. Instead of concentrating on an Aerosmith record, the process turned into a competition among coproducers angling for songwriting credits, with Steven leading the charge. The band became incidental. After months of good feeling between Steven and me, the positive vibe was slipping away. By now I knew enough to realize that when push came to shove, he couldn’t be trusted.

  Certain songs—like “Trip Hoppin’ ”—seemed a desperate and ridiculous attempt by Steven to be hip. “It’s a phrase that all the kids are using,” he said, always enamored of street jargon. “I don’t care,” I said. “For an Aerosmith record, the song sucks.” But Steven and Mark were certain that this phrase would resonate with young listeners; they wouldn’t hear of eliminating it from the record. Marti agreed with me, but I could never get him to back me up in a room with the others. Marti’s main weakness was his inability to stand up for himself. His main drive was to be a songwriter, and he knew that the best way to achieve that was by getting close to the singer.

  The final product reflected the differences between Steven and me that had been there since the beginning: He’s more pop; I’m more rock. Yet we both wanted quality singles. Still, I believe that starting from the place of let’s-write-a-hit is the death of creativity. And that’s the place from which Steven, Marti, and Mark were starting. If we had recorded it together—the five of us in a room—it would have sounded like an Aerosmith record. In spite of how it came together, there were a few good Aerosmith songs on Push.