Rocks: My Life in and Out of Aerosmith

by Joe Perry

  Picking out the songs and laying down the tracks was a blast. We covered classic numbers by Willie Dixon (“I’m Ready”), Sonny Boy Williamson (“Eyesight to the Blind”), a couple by Fred McDowell (“You Gotta Move” and “Back Back Train”), Big Joe Williams (“Baby, Please Don’t Go”) and Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac (“Stop Messin’ Around”). We also slipped in some vintage soul—“I’ve Never Loved a Man,” Aretha Franklin’s first hit on Atlantic from 1967.

  I knew the project was blessed by the delta gods when, one day, while having my first cup of coffee, I glanced at the local paper and saw that Johnnie Johnson was playing at the House of Blues in Cambridge. Johnnie, who’d been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the same day as us, had been Chuck Berry’s original piano man and co-architect of the Chuck Berry sound. Before this, I had been determined to make this a guestless album, and the rest of the band had agreed. So many people had asked to sit in, but I felt it should just be the band. But Johnson was too good to pass up. He was among the greatest blues-based boogie-centric keyboard cats of all time. I asked John Bionelli to see if he was willing to come out to the Boneyard.

  Two hours later a limo pulled up to my house with the great Johnnie Johnson aboard. He came to play.

  “I’m a jazzman,” he told us. “I do that for love, but they pay me to play rock and roll.”

  “No problem,” I said. “Just pick any keyboard you want. We have a Steinway upright if that suits you.”

  “Give me anything electric and I’ll be fine.”

  That’s just what we did. Johnnie tore up two tunes—Smiley Lewis’s “Shame, Shame, Shame” and “Temperature,” a song that harp genius Little Walter, Muddy Waters’s favorite harmonica player, had recorded back in the fifties. Within ninety minutes, Johnnie had the job done. For the rest of the afternoon, we sat around and listened to his great war stories. Because I knew he liked cigars, before he got into his limo to head back to Boston I slipped a thousand dollars into a five-hundred-dollar box full of Montecristo Cubans and handed him the package with my thanks. Holy shit, Johnnie Johnson had recorded in my house!

  Johnnie’s fabulous playing started to get Steven in the mood. Although we weren’t writing, he was still having problems coming to work. In fact, I recorded placeholder vocals on practically all the songs until Steven finally decided to show up consistently. Once he got into it, however, he jumped in with both feet. He brought Bo Diddley’s “Road Runner” to the party and cut loose. For Tyler, when he’s into it, the blues is rare red meat.

  Our approach was to show our appreciation of the blues by attacking the genre with everything at our disposal. The album is the blues filtered through our ears and our lives. Early in our lives, we had heard Them covering Big Joe Williams’s “Baby Please Don’t Go.” The Porch Ghouls happened to be in town and were in the studio when we cut it. It was a magical live take. It was also us covering a cover. You can’t get any more perfect than that.

  I first heard the blues through the Englishmen who were reinterpreting the genre themselves. As a teen, I started looking at the writers’ credits and searching back to hear the real thing. This project was a continuation of the tradition. We called it Honkin’ on Bobo, a title I loved, suggested by Steven, because, well, it just sounded like the right title for a blues album. It was our version of Lennon’s Rock and Roll album.

  There was only one original, “The Grind,” which grew out of a riff that Tyler and I had worked up with Marti Frederiksen. Everything else belonged to another time and place.

  Honkin’ on Bobo got us back on the road with fresh product. During the tour that followed we played “Baby Please Don’t Go” in classic blues fashion. It never came out the same way twice and was always a highlight. Cheap Trick, an inspirational presence, opened in many of the venues. Winding our way around the country I was able to stop off at South by Southwest in Austin and catch Little Richard in concert. After the show, I went backstage to pay my respects. It’s always humbling to stand before one of our immortal pioneers. He lived and breathed the gospel of rock and roll. He looked ageless. Richard walked me back out to my bus and, in formal fashion, proceeded to bless it. No blessing has ever been more appreciated.

  Making this blues-intense period even more special was the release of Antoine Fuqua’s documentary Lightning in a Bottle, in which Steven and I appeared along with heavyweights like Hubert Sumlin, B. B. King, and Buddy Guy. We play Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee” before breaking into “Stop Messin’ Around,” with me on vocals and Steven on harp.

  On another break during the Canadian leg of the tour, Steven joined my family and we took an excursion on our bus to Drumheller, a town in the badlands northeast of Calgary, Alberta, where we spent the day digging for dinosaur bones.

  Then, in September 2004, Steven’s battle with hepatitis C took him out of commission. He could no longer perform, and the Aerosmith operation suddenly ground to a halt.

  Looking back on the process of recording Honkin’, I realized that Steven’s lack of interest probably had much to do with his health problems. He already knew that he had contracted hep C and had to be worried about the upcoming treatments. That would take the wind out of anyone.

  While Steven was out, I went down to the Boneyard and kept working. It had been years since I’d cut an album of my own and figured it was time. The record that emerged, called simply Joe Perry, was coproduced by me and my engineer Paul Caruso, who understood my musical mind and soul as well as anyone. Except for a cover of Woody Guthrie’s “Vigilante Man” and the Doors’ “Crystal Ship,” a composition I had long loved, I wrote all the songs. With Paul on drums, I sang and played bass, guitar, synth guitar, and keys. My muse was Billie, who, hearing the music drifting upstairs from the studio, was taking care of the business end of things.

  When the record came out there was time for only two promotional concerts—one at Webster Hall in New York and another at Harpers Ferry in Boston, where, in a display of camaraderie that I deeply appreciated, my Aerosmith bandmates came to support me. Later that year one of the tracks, “Mercy,” was nominated for a Grammy in the category of Best Rock Instrumental. I lost to Les Paul. I called him in the hospital, where he was fighting pneumonia, and told him that, if I could, I would have voted for him.

  The mid-2000s was a time of intense health concerns. Steven, whose mood volatility was always off the charts, was going through a divorce. He had serious foot and throat problems. In March 2006, for example, our national tour was curtailed for another medical emergency—Steven required throat surgery.

  This issue of Steven’s throat was one that had been bothering us for years. He used to say, “You can change guitar strings, Joe, but I can’t change vocal cords.”

  “That’s true,” I’d reply. “So why are you shouting and screaming on your off days? Why aren’t you resting your voice?”

  Time and again, he brushed me off, saying that wasn’t the issue. But I knew it was. The problem only got worse when Steven refused to rest his voice. You could never keep him quiet.

  When he went to the hospital to have a blister on his vocal cords removed, Billie and I were with him the morning of the operation. His doctor said that Steven had a million-in-one voice, a uniquely large voice box. But even after the successful operation, the pattern didn’t stop. His solution was that we’d play fewer gigs, to rest his voice. We were quick to agree. But then he refused to stay quiet on his off days. On top of that, he rarely took advantage of ear monitors that both reduce the volume of the band behind him while enabling him to sing with more dynamics and less strain. This is one of the many tools today’s singers have at their disposal to preserve their voices. As we musicians get older, we need to make adjustments.

  But Steven is stubborn. Steven is a shouter. During our off days he’s always shouting—shouting on the phone, shouting at the road crew, shouting at the top of his lungs about anything and everything. He claims his talking voice is different than his singing voice. But h
is form of talking is often just shouting. My concern is much more than the reduced number of gigs we play during a tour. At this point, it’s limited to two shows a week. My concern, as a brother, is that one day Steven will wake up with laryngitis that will not go away. And it’ll be too late.

  Back then I was hurting as well.

  Since my ACL replacement, my knee had gotten considerably worse. It was painful to walk, let alone move onstage. But I had this bullheaded attitude, common to the human male, that I would simply ignore the pain and keep on keepin’ on. Responsible physicians wrote responsible prescriptions for responsible pain medicine. For the most part I administered the medicine responsibly. My only interest was in managing the pain to the point where I could play and perform. But once an addict always an addict. In slow but certain ways I could see myself enjoying the pain pills a little too much and, once in a while, ingesting more than was needed. I still had no interest in hard drugs like coke or heroin, nor did I go back to booze. But I did lean on Percodan. Percodan worked. Its mixture of aspirin and oxycodone is powerful medicine. I was grateful for the relief and I liked the high. I tried to forget the fact that Percodan is habit-forming.

  In late June the band was in our rehearsal studio getting ready for the Root of All Evil tour with Mötley Crüe scheduled for later that summer. During a break, Steven came into my office.

  “I got something good,” was all he said.

  I wasn’t sure what he meant until he locked the door. He quickly took out two pills and crushed them up. They looked like oxycodone. I knew he’d been taking pain pills for his feet and he knew I’d been taking pills for my knee, but we hadn’t discussed the issue or exchanged our prescription drugs.

  Now I looked at the crushed line and said, “Oh, man, I don’t want to start this shit. If Billie finds out she’ll kill me. Even worse, she’ll leave me.”

  “Okay,” said Steven, “I can dig it. But just this once.”

  I hesitated. And then I hesitated again. But then my addictive mind took over. My addictive thought was I don’t want to see it go to waste. So we snorted the stuff up and went back to rehearsal.

  A week later on the Fourth of July we had a big concert with the Boston Pops at Hatch Shell by the Charles River. It was a huge honor. More than a hundred thousand people would be there. There would be fireworks and cannons set off by the National Guard. I remembered seeing such a show at the Shell back in the seventies and being blown away. I was really up for it.

  I arrived with Billie and the boys and was ready to play. Before the show I went to Steven’s trailer. He was in the back bedroom with his girlfriend Erin Brady, the woman he began dating after the end of his marriage to Teresa. Erin worked for the promoter Live Nation in their accounting department, where, among other things, she collected the ticket money for our shows.

  “I got something to show you,” he said. He locked the door and laid out two lines.

  “I asked you not to do this, Steven,” I said.

  I wasn’t worried that it would affect my playing. I’d played many shows on painkillers. I just didn’t want it in front of me. And yet . . .

  I snorted it up.

  Seconds later, Billie walked into Steven’s trailer looking for me. This was unusual. Billie always gave Steven and me our time alone before the show. She obviously had picked up a vibe. She began pounding on the locked bedroom door as we were cleaning things up.

  “What’s going on here?” she asked when we finally opened the door. “Why is the door locked?”

  “We were just talking about what to give the crew for Christmas,” said Erin. “We’re thinking of giving them engraved knives.”

  Looking around the room, Billie said, “Isn’t it a little early to be talking about Christmas?” It was July, after all.

  With that, Billie turned her back and walked out to my dressing room, where she packed up her stuff and called for the car to take her home. She knew damn well what I had done. She knew I’d been taking medication for my knee, but she’d made it clear that if I ever took it further she would split. Now she had caught me red-handed. She was leaving and I was freaking out. I’d let down my wife, who was also my best friend. I felt like shit. I felt like I couldn’t go on. But it was time for the show. A long line of policemen were waiting to accompany me to the stage.

  “If you leave,” I told Billie, “I won’t go on.”

  “Yes, you will,” she said. “You’ll go on. I’m outta here.”

  I stood my ground. I refused to go onstage.

  Seeing that I was serious, she said, “Okay, I’ll stay. But just for the show. After that, I’m leaving you.”

  An emotional wreck, I managed to get through the show. On the ride home with the kids in the car, Billie remained quiet. But that night, for the first time in twenty-three years, she took her pillow from the bed and slept in another room, where she stayed for five days. I apologized profusely. But she wasn’t having it. I was unable to sleep in our bed alone, so I moved a chaise lounge to the bathroom, where I tried to sleep. Seeing that I had vacated our bedroom, days later Billie moved back in—but kept me out. It was hell.

  As the days went by, we didn’t fight, but the silence between us was deafening. Finally she called my manager, who agreed that I needed to go to rehab. Then there was a conference call with two of my doctors. One said, “I think Joe can stop on his own. Forcing rehab on someone who is capable of quitting on his own can cause even greater trauma. I wouldn’t recommend that.”

  Billie didn’t agree and was still furious. “The only reason I’m not leaving you and moving to Florida,” she said, “is because of Roman. Tony’s off at college in New York, but Roman is looking forward to making the transition from homeschooling to high school here. Now more than ever, he needs his family intact. His well-being is more important than anything. If I have to fake it, I will.”

  Billie’s words were devastating. This was the most critical challenge our marriage had faced. I was relieved that she wasn’t leaving, but I also knew that I couldn’t continue living under the same roof with my wife and not share a bed. That’s the first step to breaking up. I wanted to save our marriage. Deep down I sensed that Billie felt the same. It was obvious our relationship required concentrated repair. It would either collapse or, as a result of this crisis, it would grow stronger.

  Thank God it grew stronger. We recommitted to one another. I committed to having a knee replacement as soon as the band schedule permitted. Until then, I would manage the painkillers and watch out for Steven. His issues were his and mine were mine. The fact that we had snorted together had knocked some sense into me. I could only hope that it did the same for him.

  Steven has a side that can be evil and cruel. He knew what he was doing that night. He was always jealous of my relationships with women. He saw my weak spot and took advantage of it. It’s easy for Steven to manipulate people. I, of all people, should have known that. I also should have known that, given the wrong circumstances, the addictive side of my personality could take over. Ironically—and almost tragically—my attempt to relieve my pain only caused more pain: pain suffered by me, and pain suffered by my wife.

  In between the pain there was the pleasure of knowing that our band was still going strong. We had been in Elmore Leonard’s Be Cool, which starred John Travolta and Uma Thurman. Even cooler than that was an invitation to hang out with Chuck Berry.

  I had met Chuck, my guitar idol, only once—on an airplane ride in 1976. We spent that time comparing our Pulsar watches. Thirty years later, in October 2006, the band was in Chuck’s hometown of St. Louis when I was invited to his eightieth birthday party at his nightclub. At the same time, former vice president Al Gore invited us to dinner at his home. After Billie and I had watched Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, we urged Steven to see it. We thought it would be cool to get an edited version to show the fans as they were entering our concerts. We had begun to do just that. Gore was kind enough to invite Steven and me to dinner the same ni
ght as Chuck’s party.

  What to do: the politician or the guitarist?

  Not a close call.

  Before the party, Chuck and I had met for lunch, where we shot the shit about guitars. Apparently Chuck’s son Butch had showed him my tribute to him in Rolling Stone, where I called him “the Hemingway of rock and roll.”

  The night of the party I got to the club early and couldn’t wait to jam. Chuck was cordial but also a little prickly. He brought me onstage and called for an unfamiliar tune in a Chuck Berry key. Anyone who has played with Chuck will find this story familiar. Even the keyboardist, who’d been with him for years, was confused. All I could do was play a little rhythm. I guess I passed the acid test, because the next song was “Round and Round,” a familiar song for which I got to play some lead and afterward hear a few words of praise from the master. That was enough to make my day—and my year.

  The next time Aerosmith came through St. Louis, Chuck and his family showed up at my dressing room before the show. I was floored. His son Butch said this was the first rock-and-roll show Chuck had ever wanted to attend. He just wanted to talk, and talk we did. Naturally it was all guitar talk—about Chuck’s affinity for the Gibson and all his many early influences, including country music. It was just picker to picker. He sat there sipping on a Virgil’s root beer. When he got up and left, I was careful to keep the empty bottle. Since then, that bottle has become a permanent part of my dressing room decor, a talisman from the man who, along with Bo Diddley and Little Richard, first rolled the rock that changed the world.

  Another happy coincidence: That winter I was with my family during a snowy week in Vermont when we invited Steven to come up and spend a couple of nights with us. It was a magical time when the chaos of the noisy world was becalmed by a blanket of freshly fallen snow. We were driving through the quaint town of Woodstock when Billie noticed that the town hall movie theater was showing a film about a reggae band, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars. It turned out that the director lived nearby and this movie was his labor of love. As we sat down, we didn’t know what to expect. Within seconds we were drawn into a story that blew our minds. The narrative involved the struggle to lead a great mass of refugees back to Sierra Leone, a country that had been traumatized by the slaughter of innocent citizens. The central story focused on a band that was trying to cut a record. These were the All Stars, who had heartbreaking tales of their own. Their music was magic. When the film was over, we talked to the director and exchanged numbers.