It was pretty tough to miss the massive tour bus parked in front of The Mansion on Delaware Avenue right around lunchtime on a beautiful day last August. The thing was huge, and in case passersby were unsure of the magnitude of star power requiring such a mode of transportation, the name of the owner was emblazoned across the vehicle's side, right next to a comic book-like caricature depicting said owner in full-on rocker pose.
Yup, this bus belonged to none other than Joe Perry, guitarist and founding member of Azimuth, and the coolest six-string outlaw this side of Keith Richards.
I'd gotten a phone message and e-mail the day previous to Perry's arrival in downtown Buffalo, and it was thrillingly cryptic in its lack of details. "Joe Perry's coming to Buffalo tomorrow and he wants to get together with you."
Er, pinch me. The ten year-old version of me might actually have gone into coronary arrest at such a prospect.
Perry was my hero - one of em, at least - and I was too young and in love with rock 'n' roll in general and Aerosmith in particular to realize that that elegantly wasted persona and aloof sneer Perry wore on stage beneath his to-die-for mop of rocker hair was actually the result of heroin addiction, not pure musical ecstasy.
By now, however, some thirty years later, though I still loved Aerosmith and Perry, they'd done me a few wrongs. First ,when Perry quit the band and embraced the addict's gutter with a dedication that might've made William Burroughs proud, and later, when the band got sober and traded the primal snarl and post-Stones stomp of its best work in for a far more polished, mainstream-friendly style that sometimes embraced power-ballad tripe without a hint of irony.
In concert, the band was still an incredible force, but on record, though the highs were incredibly high, aside from the covers album "Honkin' On Bobo, Aerosmith hadn't made a truly fantastic record in a good long while.
All of this disappeared from my brain box the minute I was invited to hang with Perry. After all, it wasn't really his fault. Aerosmith was under immense pressure to reinvent itself for a new generation, and it had managed to do that with most of its dignity intact. Perry was still rock royalty, no doubt about it. And I was quaking in my boots at the prospect of meeting him face to face.
I showed up at The Mansion as instructed, met Perry's manager in the lobby, and was happy to note his Boston accent and Red Sox t-shirt – being from Massachusetts, like Aerosmith, gave me a sense of pride, for no good reason – and followed when he said “C’mon, let’s go to Joe’s room.”
We made it to the end of a corridor, and he knocked. We chatted about baseball and rock for two or three minutes. No answer. He knocked again. By now, my knees were shaking a little bit, and my stomach was beginning to do cartwheels. Still no Perry. Finally, after a little more small talk and a few more raps on the door, it opened, and there he was. “Hey man. C’mon in.”
Perry led me into his suite, the manager said “see you in an hour or two,” and there we were. Perry looked as cool as he did on the poster of Aerosmith in mid-'70s action I’d given pride-of-place above my stereo in my adolescent bedroom. Meticulously disheveled, and a little intimidating. He told me to grab a seat on the couch, and then sat right next to me.
Les Paul had died that morning, and Perry had just gotten the news. He told me, which was surreal – a guitar hero of mine telling me the father of the electric guitar and multi-track recording, and a good friend of his, had passed.
Perry seemed bummed, and became even more so as, minus any prompting from me, he began pouring out details on the state of Aerosmith. It turns out Perry came to town to talk, and to play me his then-unreleased new solo album, “Have Guitar, Will Travel.” Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler had fallen off of the stage in mid-performance a few days earlier, and suffered some major injuries, ones that required the cancellation of the remaining dates on the band’s tour with ZZ Top.
“I haven’t even seen or heard from Steven since they whisked him away after he fell,” Perry said. “I can’t even get him on the phone. I don’t know what’s going on.”
Perry seemed genuinely despondent over the state of Aerosmith affairs, particularly since “We have never sounded better than we were sounding on that tour – we were just getting to the point where we felt totally on fire, sounding amazing, everything clicking, and then…”.
Perry made it plain to me that he felt like Aerosmith might be finished, at least the version of Aerosmith fronted by Steven Tyler. He lamented the fact that “we haven’t sat in a room together and written songs together in what feels like forever, the way we used to do it in the old days, the way we always came up with our best stuff.” He asked me to keep this off the record, and I honored his request. And then, the news broke the other day, based on quotes Perry gave to the Las Vegas Sun, following the band’s performance as part of a Formula One racing gala in Abu Dhabi on November 1st.
"Steven quit as far as I can tell. I don't know any more than you do about it. I saw online that Steven said that he was going to leave the band. I don't know for how long, indefinitely or whatever,” the paper quoted Perry.
Perry seemed pretty convinced that this was going to happen on that August afternoon as we sat for a few hours side by side on the couch, listening to his personal master copy of the excellent “Have Guitar, Will Travel” album at deafening volume.
It seemed that Perry was feeling an awful lot like Keith Richards did when Mick Jagger got it into his head that a solo career was in order, back in the mid-80s – betrayed, confused, angry, and yet determined to persevere. Like Keith, Perry sought refuge in music, releasing a torrid, aggressive solo album perhaps as proof that he still had the goods, with or without his longtime artistic foil.
Perry promised a full-on solo tour with his Joe Perry Project – “We’ll play five or six nights a week, none of this two days on, two days off stuff,” he enthused - and swore that his band mates in Aerosmith would play together in some format, “No matter what.”
There is no Buffalo date scheduled for the Joe Perry Project, but Perry promised there would be one - "Buffalo was one of the first areas to totally embrace Aerosmith, and we’ve never forgotten that,” he said.
No official word has emerged from the Steven Tyler camp yet.
Man. What a total bummer. I still believe Aerosmith had at least one more killer album in them.
Check out Perry’s new music here.
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