Post by AeroCooper on Oct 5, 2014 6:57:35 GMT -5
Aerosmith guitarist talks of time in Vermont
Brent Hallenbeck, Free Press Staff Writer 7:21 a.m. EDT October 5, 2014
Before becoming a famous rock 'n' roll guitarist, Joe Perry wanted to be a marine biologist. His grades in school, though, weren't about to get him into college, let alone on a path toward a career in science.
His parents decided to send him to a preparatory school to boost his grades. They moved him from his public high school in Hopedale, Mass., to Vermont Academy in the tiny town of Saxtons River.
Perry learned plenty in southern Vermont; he just didn't learn much about marine biology. He learned about the world, especially the world of the late 1960s, with war weighing heavily on his generation and sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll taking over modern life.
"After vacations, guys would come back with bits and pieces of different cultures," Perry said. His Vermont Academy classmates came from New York City, Los Angeles and cities all over the world to Saxtons River, bringing the latest counterculture icon with them, whether an underground newspaper like the Village Voice or an underground album like the debut from The Velvet Underground.
"It was a real education for me and not the kind of learning they (his parents) sent me there for," according to Perry. "I was meeting different people. It just opened my eyes to what I knew I wasn't getting in Hopedale as far as social things and what was going on in society."
That time as a teenager in Vermont shaped Joe Perry's future. Marine biology gave way to rocking out. A life on the ocean grew instead into life on the road with Aerosmith, the band born in Boston in the early 1970s that became one of the biggest arena-rock groups in the world.
Through all his success, including millions of records sold and induction in the Rock & Roll and Songwriter halls of fame, Perry has kept one foot firmly in Vermont. He and his family spend most of their time at their home south of Boston in Duxbury, Mass., but for about a decade have owned a horse farm in South Pomfret, not far from the school in Saxtons River that sent Perry on a course toward rock stardom.
Perry's autobiography, "Rocks: My Life In and Out of Aerosmith," comes out Tuesday through Simon & Schuster. He devotes a fair amount of time in the book he co-authored with David Ritz delving into how his time at Vermont Academy influenced his life. He loved the music he was exposed to at school, and loved the nature Vermont is so well known for.
ROCKS jacket.jpg
The book jacket of “Rocks: My Life In and Out of Aerosmith,” by Joe Perry and David Ritz that comes out Tuesday through Simon & Schuster. (Photo: COURTESY )
"Vermont definitely turned me on to a lot of things," Perry told the Burlington Free Press in a phone conversation from his home in Massachusetts. "When you're learning any kind of art you pick things up from anybody who's doing it, whether they're really good at it or learning like you are. Vermont was definitely what I needed."
Creating a sound
Perry, 64, spent more than an hour on a gorgeous late-summer New England afternoon talking on the phone. He sounded nostalgic as he spoke about his childhood and almost rueful that he became a guitar hero instead of a marine biologist.
He said he had a learning disability, but in the 1960s there wasn't a name for it. "Back then it was just, you know, not getting good grades," Perry said. "It was more of a discipline thing than some other issue. People didn't really know much about it at that point. My parents thought if I had any hope of going to a college I needed a prep school."
He and his parents looked at a couple of prep schools in Massachusetts before settling on Vermont Academy, then a boys' school (now co-educational) of about 225 students in rural Windham County. Young Joe Perry was less than thrilled at the idea.
"I was a junior, I think, or a sophomore in high school. You have your friends and all that, and your routines. It was tough leaving that," he said. "After going up there I figured I'd make the best of it."
He did, just not in the way his parents hoped. "I went up there and fell in the routine," Perry said. "The great thing was kids were there from all over the country. I grew up in a very insulated town. I met my first black kid there (at Vermont Academy), my first Jewish kid. It was a really great experience."
Perry had been playing guitar since he was 10 or 11. The music he was exposed to at Vermont Academy made him obsessed with the guitar. He'd sit in his bedroom lifting the needle off a record and putting it back in just the right place to time his guitar playing with the riffs he heard.
"I heard the first Jimi Hendrix record there, I heard the first Who record there" at Vermont Academy, Perry said. "This was the pre-Woodstock days; there was a lot of great music coming out then. It just didn't show up in Hopedale. You really had to dig there. I heard some of the early stuff from my friends (at Vermont Academy) who had older brothers who went off to college, and when they came home they brought stuff. That's when I first heard The Yardbirds and The Kinks and those kinds of bands."
Perry was determined to hone his own style. "Some of the bands that I really liked were The Ventures and The Shadows because they were instrumental bands. Instead of listening to a human voice you're listening to a guitar tell the story," he said. "I had this attitude that I didn't want to sound like anybody else. In some ways that held me back in a technical sense. On the other hand, I really wanted to carve out something."
A wide-open door
Perry loved exploring the woods around Saxtons River. He joined the school's ski team and skied at Okemo Mountain. But a few months before he was due to graduate from Vermont Academy, Joe Perry dropped out. This was 1969, after all, when dropping out not just of school but out of society's expectations was in vogue. Vermont Academy had a dress code, and Perry said he left school in part because the administration wanted him to cut his hair. (His locks are still flowing 45 years later.)
"When you joined a rock band you were like one step away from being an outlaw. There was definitely that element to it," Perry said. "You were definitely swimming upstream at that point. There were a lot of kids that didn't buy the whole hippie thing; I kind of picked and chose from their ideology. I liked the freedom aspect of it. I liked the way people were free to do what they wanted, grow their hair long, wear the clothes they wanted. I definitely wasn't a card-carrying hippie. I liked the free-love part."
Leaving Vermont Academy wasn't all about being a rebel. It also had to do with Perry's struggles as a student, which meant he was falling short of his professional ambitions.
"I wasn't getting any better at it, at getting to where I could get a good grade on the test and all that stuff," he said. "It was pretty dismal. But I tried. I wanted to make my parents happy. I wanted to go that way because I wanted to be a marine biologist; I wanted to be a scientist."
He felt he had no choice but to leave school. "The thing was, I could not see me getting into a college and succeeding," Perry said. "It wasn't even a matter of getting into a well-known college or a state college. It was another four years of making it through. It seemed like all my doors were closing of what my options were."
All but one door, that is. "There was a big door that was wide open, and it was music," Perry said. "I got instant results. I could sit down and in 15 minutes learn a new chord. I was fascinated by the whole thing."
"I really didn't know where it was going to lead me. It felt comfortable. It felt right," Perry said. "Rock 'n' roll sunk its teeth in and its claws and there's nothing else I could do. It just called my name."
Dreaming on
Perry returned to Massachusetts and fell in with an energetic singer named Steven Tyler. Tyler had been in four or five bands and helped show the inexperienced Perry how to maneuver his way around the Boston-area music scene. The leaders of the band that would become Aerosmith are known for their combative ways, but their differences complement each other, according to Perry.
451393536.jpg
Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith performs on Day 1 of the Calling Festival at Clapham Common on June 28 in London, England. (Photo: Ben A. Pruchnie/Getty Images )
"That's what made our team," he said. "(Tyler) kind of knew a little bit of the (song) structuring and I didn't have a clue. All I cared about was the energy and how to get the energy across. That's the dynamic of the two of us. If we were both the same it wouldn't have sounded the way it sounded. We were both trying to bring different things to the party. We learned a lot from each other."
He and Tyler had friends who played four sets a night five or six times a week in Boston, performing cover songs and making good money. The two wanted to avoid that pattern that could burn them out quickly; they wanted to make their own music, and they wanted a record deal.
They got one, with Columbia Records, and made it big almost from the start. Aerosmith's self-titled debut spawned the dramatic "Dream On," and the hits kept on coming for decades: "Walk This Way." "Sweet Emotion." "Toys in the Attic." "Dude." "Love in an Elevator."
Aerosmith continues to tour and draw huge crowds, and Perry still feels that excitement he felt when his band first started making waves. "I love having a finished record and right before it hits the streets wondering how people are going to take it," he said. "That's what I'm feeling right now about the book. I've worked on it two years. Any time there was spare time, that's what I was doing."
He said it was important to him that "Rocks" not just be another tell-all. "I'm hoping that Aerosmith fans will read it and like it, but there's a lot in the book that has to do with human nature," he said. "It's not just about rock 'n' roll. It's about any family or any relationship. That's why I took so long to write it."
Perry wanted to explore how bands go through all sorts of life changes from their teen years through middle age, through the addition of girlfriends and wives and children, and manage to stay together.
"I wanted to delve into some of the reasons why some of the things happen and why we're where we are," he said. "We started out as teenagers in one apartment with no responsibility except to each other and this dream. For some reason this dream became reality — and then came the real work."
"That's why I start the book with a question," Perry said. "'How did I get here and get this far?'"
Rejuvenating in Vermont
Perry and his wife of 30 years, Billie, bought property in South Pomfret about 10 years ago and often bring their horses there from their home outside Boston.
"I like that not much changes there" in Vermont, Perry said. "I like the politics there. I truly believe if it had been another time in history it would be its own country. I like the people there. I like the freedom there, the openness. And it's beautiful."
Perry visits friends in Woodstock and occasionally plays music there, as he did at a benefit concert after Hurricane Irene damaged much of the state in 2011. "Whenever I'm up there I always feel healthier, whether it's eating local food or being around mellow people; just breathing the fresh air," he said. "Billie and I both feel like we're rejuvenated every time we go there."
Now that he's in his mid-60s, Perry is starting to sound like a man thinking about taking a step back from the limelight and the rigors of rock 'n' roll touring. He talked about how he was in Los Angeles a few months ago hanging out with one of his major influences, Johnny Winter. Two months later, in July, Winter died at age 70.
"We're getting to that age when you start to really look at, 'What do I do with the rest of it?'" Perry said. "I feel great now but, knock on wood, you never know what the big man has in store for you."
"I can't really say what the future holds," he said, "but I can say Vermont will be a part of it."
Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.
www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/life/arts/2014/10/04/aerosmith-guitarist-talks-time-vermont/16600335/
Brent Hallenbeck, Free Press Staff Writer 7:21 a.m. EDT October 5, 2014
Before becoming a famous rock 'n' roll guitarist, Joe Perry wanted to be a marine biologist. His grades in school, though, weren't about to get him into college, let alone on a path toward a career in science.
His parents decided to send him to a preparatory school to boost his grades. They moved him from his public high school in Hopedale, Mass., to Vermont Academy in the tiny town of Saxtons River.
Perry learned plenty in southern Vermont; he just didn't learn much about marine biology. He learned about the world, especially the world of the late 1960s, with war weighing heavily on his generation and sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll taking over modern life.
"After vacations, guys would come back with bits and pieces of different cultures," Perry said. His Vermont Academy classmates came from New York City, Los Angeles and cities all over the world to Saxtons River, bringing the latest counterculture icon with them, whether an underground newspaper like the Village Voice or an underground album like the debut from The Velvet Underground.
"It was a real education for me and not the kind of learning they (his parents) sent me there for," according to Perry. "I was meeting different people. It just opened my eyes to what I knew I wasn't getting in Hopedale as far as social things and what was going on in society."
That time as a teenager in Vermont shaped Joe Perry's future. Marine biology gave way to rocking out. A life on the ocean grew instead into life on the road with Aerosmith, the band born in Boston in the early 1970s that became one of the biggest arena-rock groups in the world.
Through all his success, including millions of records sold and induction in the Rock & Roll and Songwriter halls of fame, Perry has kept one foot firmly in Vermont. He and his family spend most of their time at their home south of Boston in Duxbury, Mass., but for about a decade have owned a horse farm in South Pomfret, not far from the school in Saxtons River that sent Perry on a course toward rock stardom.
Perry's autobiography, "Rocks: My Life In and Out of Aerosmith," comes out Tuesday through Simon & Schuster. He devotes a fair amount of time in the book he co-authored with David Ritz delving into how his time at Vermont Academy influenced his life. He loved the music he was exposed to at school, and loved the nature Vermont is so well known for.
ROCKS jacket.jpg
The book jacket of “Rocks: My Life In and Out of Aerosmith,” by Joe Perry and David Ritz that comes out Tuesday through Simon & Schuster. (Photo: COURTESY )
"Vermont definitely turned me on to a lot of things," Perry told the Burlington Free Press in a phone conversation from his home in Massachusetts. "When you're learning any kind of art you pick things up from anybody who's doing it, whether they're really good at it or learning like you are. Vermont was definitely what I needed."
Creating a sound
Perry, 64, spent more than an hour on a gorgeous late-summer New England afternoon talking on the phone. He sounded nostalgic as he spoke about his childhood and almost rueful that he became a guitar hero instead of a marine biologist.
He said he had a learning disability, but in the 1960s there wasn't a name for it. "Back then it was just, you know, not getting good grades," Perry said. "It was more of a discipline thing than some other issue. People didn't really know much about it at that point. My parents thought if I had any hope of going to a college I needed a prep school."
He and his parents looked at a couple of prep schools in Massachusetts before settling on Vermont Academy, then a boys' school (now co-educational) of about 225 students in rural Windham County. Young Joe Perry was less than thrilled at the idea.
"I was a junior, I think, or a sophomore in high school. You have your friends and all that, and your routines. It was tough leaving that," he said. "After going up there I figured I'd make the best of it."
He did, just not in the way his parents hoped. "I went up there and fell in the routine," Perry said. "The great thing was kids were there from all over the country. I grew up in a very insulated town. I met my first black kid there (at Vermont Academy), my first Jewish kid. It was a really great experience."
Perry had been playing guitar since he was 10 or 11. The music he was exposed to at Vermont Academy made him obsessed with the guitar. He'd sit in his bedroom lifting the needle off a record and putting it back in just the right place to time his guitar playing with the riffs he heard.
"I heard the first Jimi Hendrix record there, I heard the first Who record there" at Vermont Academy, Perry said. "This was the pre-Woodstock days; there was a lot of great music coming out then. It just didn't show up in Hopedale. You really had to dig there. I heard some of the early stuff from my friends (at Vermont Academy) who had older brothers who went off to college, and when they came home they brought stuff. That's when I first heard The Yardbirds and The Kinks and those kinds of bands."
Perry was determined to hone his own style. "Some of the bands that I really liked were The Ventures and The Shadows because they were instrumental bands. Instead of listening to a human voice you're listening to a guitar tell the story," he said. "I had this attitude that I didn't want to sound like anybody else. In some ways that held me back in a technical sense. On the other hand, I really wanted to carve out something."
A wide-open door
Perry loved exploring the woods around Saxtons River. He joined the school's ski team and skied at Okemo Mountain. But a few months before he was due to graduate from Vermont Academy, Joe Perry dropped out. This was 1969, after all, when dropping out not just of school but out of society's expectations was in vogue. Vermont Academy had a dress code, and Perry said he left school in part because the administration wanted him to cut his hair. (His locks are still flowing 45 years later.)
"When you joined a rock band you were like one step away from being an outlaw. There was definitely that element to it," Perry said. "You were definitely swimming upstream at that point. There were a lot of kids that didn't buy the whole hippie thing; I kind of picked and chose from their ideology. I liked the freedom aspect of it. I liked the way people were free to do what they wanted, grow their hair long, wear the clothes they wanted. I definitely wasn't a card-carrying hippie. I liked the free-love part."
Leaving Vermont Academy wasn't all about being a rebel. It also had to do with Perry's struggles as a student, which meant he was falling short of his professional ambitions.
"I wasn't getting any better at it, at getting to where I could get a good grade on the test and all that stuff," he said. "It was pretty dismal. But I tried. I wanted to make my parents happy. I wanted to go that way because I wanted to be a marine biologist; I wanted to be a scientist."
He felt he had no choice but to leave school. "The thing was, I could not see me getting into a college and succeeding," Perry said. "It wasn't even a matter of getting into a well-known college or a state college. It was another four years of making it through. It seemed like all my doors were closing of what my options were."
All but one door, that is. "There was a big door that was wide open, and it was music," Perry said. "I got instant results. I could sit down and in 15 minutes learn a new chord. I was fascinated by the whole thing."
"I really didn't know where it was going to lead me. It felt comfortable. It felt right," Perry said. "Rock 'n' roll sunk its teeth in and its claws and there's nothing else I could do. It just called my name."
Dreaming on
Perry returned to Massachusetts and fell in with an energetic singer named Steven Tyler. Tyler had been in four or five bands and helped show the inexperienced Perry how to maneuver his way around the Boston-area music scene. The leaders of the band that would become Aerosmith are known for their combative ways, but their differences complement each other, according to Perry.
451393536.jpg
Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith performs on Day 1 of the Calling Festival at Clapham Common on June 28 in London, England. (Photo: Ben A. Pruchnie/Getty Images )
"That's what made our team," he said. "(Tyler) kind of knew a little bit of the (song) structuring and I didn't have a clue. All I cared about was the energy and how to get the energy across. That's the dynamic of the two of us. If we were both the same it wouldn't have sounded the way it sounded. We were both trying to bring different things to the party. We learned a lot from each other."
He and Tyler had friends who played four sets a night five or six times a week in Boston, performing cover songs and making good money. The two wanted to avoid that pattern that could burn them out quickly; they wanted to make their own music, and they wanted a record deal.
They got one, with Columbia Records, and made it big almost from the start. Aerosmith's self-titled debut spawned the dramatic "Dream On," and the hits kept on coming for decades: "Walk This Way." "Sweet Emotion." "Toys in the Attic." "Dude." "Love in an Elevator."
Aerosmith continues to tour and draw huge crowds, and Perry still feels that excitement he felt when his band first started making waves. "I love having a finished record and right before it hits the streets wondering how people are going to take it," he said. "That's what I'm feeling right now about the book. I've worked on it two years. Any time there was spare time, that's what I was doing."
He said it was important to him that "Rocks" not just be another tell-all. "I'm hoping that Aerosmith fans will read it and like it, but there's a lot in the book that has to do with human nature," he said. "It's not just about rock 'n' roll. It's about any family or any relationship. That's why I took so long to write it."
Perry wanted to explore how bands go through all sorts of life changes from their teen years through middle age, through the addition of girlfriends and wives and children, and manage to stay together.
"I wanted to delve into some of the reasons why some of the things happen and why we're where we are," he said. "We started out as teenagers in one apartment with no responsibility except to each other and this dream. For some reason this dream became reality — and then came the real work."
"That's why I start the book with a question," Perry said. "'How did I get here and get this far?'"
Rejuvenating in Vermont
Perry and his wife of 30 years, Billie, bought property in South Pomfret about 10 years ago and often bring their horses there from their home outside Boston.
"I like that not much changes there" in Vermont, Perry said. "I like the politics there. I truly believe if it had been another time in history it would be its own country. I like the people there. I like the freedom there, the openness. And it's beautiful."
Perry visits friends in Woodstock and occasionally plays music there, as he did at a benefit concert after Hurricane Irene damaged much of the state in 2011. "Whenever I'm up there I always feel healthier, whether it's eating local food or being around mellow people; just breathing the fresh air," he said. "Billie and I both feel like we're rejuvenated every time we go there."
Now that he's in his mid-60s, Perry is starting to sound like a man thinking about taking a step back from the limelight and the rigors of rock 'n' roll touring. He talked about how he was in Los Angeles a few months ago hanging out with one of his major influences, Johnny Winter. Two months later, in July, Winter died at age 70.
"We're getting to that age when you start to really look at, 'What do I do with the rest of it?'" Perry said. "I feel great now but, knock on wood, you never know what the big man has in store for you."
"I can't really say what the future holds," he said, "but I can say Vermont will be a part of it."
Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.
www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/life/arts/2014/10/04/aerosmith-guitarist-talks-time-vermont/16600335/