Joe had one condition for “original” line-up reunion
Nov 1, 2023 17:08:41 GMT -5
aerozhul, SweetPandoraFlora, and 3 more like this
Post by AeroCooper on Nov 1, 2023 17:08:41 GMT -5
Guitarist Joe Perry had one condition for Aerosmith’s “original” line-up to get back together in the mid-’80s
Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry was recently interviewed by Andrew Daly for Guitar World. Daly covered a lot of Perry‘s history with Aerosmith including when Perry along with guitarist Brad Whitford in the late ’70s left the band (lead vocalist Steven Tyler, bassist Tom Hamilton and drummer Joey Kramer) before the both of them eventually rejoined the group in the mid-’80s.
On whether he kept up with Aerosmith while he was out of the band, Perry indicated: “Thinking back on Night in the Ruts, that record was a nightmare. But I have to say, it features some of the best playing Aerosmith has ever done in the studio. I remember checking it out after I left, and I was very surprised they left me on it since I left in the middle of it. If you look at a song like Cheesecake, the slow slide in the middle, we did that live in the studio, and it’s so great. I think it could have been a huge record if we had the chance to tour behind it. But it was not to be. And so I want to resurrect some of that stuff and play it live. I can envision doing the back-and-forth thing with Brad at the beginning of Chiquita; I think it would go down so well.”
In terms of whether Aerosmith kept him from going completely off the rails, Perry opined: “It’s hard to look at something like that out of context, you know? Maybe if the circumstances were better, and if I’d stayed, we could have gone on to make another record. But the thing is that maybe if we’d stuck together, something terrible would have happened that would have never been repairable, meaning we would never have gotten back together. Because even though we didn’t get along, we had a code of honor in Aerosmith. We never got into fistfights; we never stepped over that line to where we couldn’t come back from it. I think we always stopped short of that because deep down, we knew it would be too hard to come back from. So looking back on what led up to that, I think it was the only choice. And now that I think about it, the other thing was that our management was not treating us right, and I couldn’t get any support from the other guys.”
Perry added: “I always felt like we were making a lot of fucking money for everybody, and we weren’t seeing what we should be seeing. And I couldn’t get the other guys in the band to rally, you know? So that was another big part of the issue that I haven’t talked much about. But looking back on it, yeah, it was a big part of it for me.”
Daly noted that given the band’s success, feeling like they weren’t receiving the money they thought they should be getting must have been quite deflating. Perry replied: “It was. And just to show you just where their heads were at, 10 fucking years after the band got back together, I found out that Columbia Records said, ‘Oh, he’s leaving Aerosmith? Well, we’re going to bury his first solo record. We’ll starve him back to Aerosmith.’ I was told that our management at the time didn’t think I was that important to Aerosmith. They figured, ‘Eh, he’s just a guitar player, and so is Brad. We’ll get two other guys and nobody will care.’ That shows you how out of touch they were with what Aerosmith was about.”
Daly commented that it was bewildering that management wouldn’t recognize the importance of Whitford and Perry to which the latter noted: “Yeah, and I always wondered why my solo record didn’t do better. It should have done a little better, considering I had been with Aerosmith and was touring across the States, but it didn’t. And then, with the second record, I was sure it would do better, and sure enough, they buried it. They wouldn’t do anything to push it. It felt good to know that my instincts were right; they just weren’t doing their part to help it along.”
On how the reunion with Aerosmith came about, Perry stated: “It was a combination of things. Like I said, I had sorted out my life and met my wife, Billie, who had to run me through the car wash a few times. [Laughs] Meeting her was interesting because she didn’t really know Aerosmith; she was into punk rock. She’d heard the name, but it was just another logo or whatever to her. We had this massive career in the ’70s, but she knew maybe two songs. So she was a big part of me sorting my life out. But the other guys still in the band had gone through trying to do Aerosmith without me and Brad, and it’s pretty well documented how that went. Even Rick Dufay [the guitarist who replaced Whitford in 1981] said, ‘Listen, you’ve gotta get those guys back in the band. This just isn’t working without them.’ Rick is a really smart, standup guy who was just telling it like he saw it. But Billie encouraged me to get together with Steven, and we hooked up and talked about Aerosmith, and it went from there.”
On whether the reunion would have occurred without his wife Billie, Perry opined: “She put it in perspective for me. When we first got together, we were driving, and Back in the Saddle came on the radio. I pulled over and said, ‘That’s my song. Have you ever heard it?’ She said, ‘It sounds familiar,’ but she really didn’t know it. She didn’t really understand how big we were in the ’70s, you know? But then she went through some of my old boxes and came across old copies of Circus and Creem magazines with us on the cover and old pictures of us playing stadiums, and I think that’s when it hit home for her. I told her we had gold records, but she didn’t understand until she saw the pictures.”
Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry was recently interviewed by Andrew Daly for Guitar World. Daly covered a lot of Perry‘s history with Aerosmith including when Perry along with guitarist Brad Whitford in the late ’70s left the band (lead vocalist Steven Tyler, bassist Tom Hamilton and drummer Joey Kramer) before the both of them eventually rejoined the group in the mid-’80s.
On whether he kept up with Aerosmith while he was out of the band, Perry indicated: “Thinking back on Night in the Ruts, that record was a nightmare. But I have to say, it features some of the best playing Aerosmith has ever done in the studio. I remember checking it out after I left, and I was very surprised they left me on it since I left in the middle of it. If you look at a song like Cheesecake, the slow slide in the middle, we did that live in the studio, and it’s so great. I think it could have been a huge record if we had the chance to tour behind it. But it was not to be. And so I want to resurrect some of that stuff and play it live. I can envision doing the back-and-forth thing with Brad at the beginning of Chiquita; I think it would go down so well.”
In terms of whether Aerosmith kept him from going completely off the rails, Perry opined: “It’s hard to look at something like that out of context, you know? Maybe if the circumstances were better, and if I’d stayed, we could have gone on to make another record. But the thing is that maybe if we’d stuck together, something terrible would have happened that would have never been repairable, meaning we would never have gotten back together. Because even though we didn’t get along, we had a code of honor in Aerosmith. We never got into fistfights; we never stepped over that line to where we couldn’t come back from it. I think we always stopped short of that because deep down, we knew it would be too hard to come back from. So looking back on what led up to that, I think it was the only choice. And now that I think about it, the other thing was that our management was not treating us right, and I couldn’t get any support from the other guys.”
Perry added: “I always felt like we were making a lot of fucking money for everybody, and we weren’t seeing what we should be seeing. And I couldn’t get the other guys in the band to rally, you know? So that was another big part of the issue that I haven’t talked much about. But looking back on it, yeah, it was a big part of it for me.”
Daly noted that given the band’s success, feeling like they weren’t receiving the money they thought they should be getting must have been quite deflating. Perry replied: “It was. And just to show you just where their heads were at, 10 fucking years after the band got back together, I found out that Columbia Records said, ‘Oh, he’s leaving Aerosmith? Well, we’re going to bury his first solo record. We’ll starve him back to Aerosmith.’ I was told that our management at the time didn’t think I was that important to Aerosmith. They figured, ‘Eh, he’s just a guitar player, and so is Brad. We’ll get two other guys and nobody will care.’ That shows you how out of touch they were with what Aerosmith was about.”
Daly commented that it was bewildering that management wouldn’t recognize the importance of Whitford and Perry to which the latter noted: “Yeah, and I always wondered why my solo record didn’t do better. It should have done a little better, considering I had been with Aerosmith and was touring across the States, but it didn’t. And then, with the second record, I was sure it would do better, and sure enough, they buried it. They wouldn’t do anything to push it. It felt good to know that my instincts were right; they just weren’t doing their part to help it along.”
On how the reunion with Aerosmith came about, Perry stated: “It was a combination of things. Like I said, I had sorted out my life and met my wife, Billie, who had to run me through the car wash a few times. [Laughs] Meeting her was interesting because she didn’t really know Aerosmith; she was into punk rock. She’d heard the name, but it was just another logo or whatever to her. We had this massive career in the ’70s, but she knew maybe two songs. So she was a big part of me sorting my life out. But the other guys still in the band had gone through trying to do Aerosmith without me and Brad, and it’s pretty well documented how that went. Even Rick Dufay [the guitarist who replaced Whitford in 1981] said, ‘Listen, you’ve gotta get those guys back in the band. This just isn’t working without them.’ Rick is a really smart, standup guy who was just telling it like he saw it. But Billie encouraged me to get together with Steven, and we hooked up and talked about Aerosmith, and it went from there.”
On whether the reunion would have occurred without his wife Billie, Perry opined: “She put it in perspective for me. When we first got together, we were driving, and Back in the Saddle came on the radio. I pulled over and said, ‘That’s my song. Have you ever heard it?’ She said, ‘It sounds familiar,’ but she really didn’t know it. She didn’t really understand how big we were in the ’70s, you know? But then she went through some of my old boxes and came across old copies of Circus and Creem magazines with us on the cover and old pictures of us playing stadiums, and I think that’s when it hit home for her. I told her we had gold records, but she didn’t understand until she saw the pictures.”
In terms of whether he was surprised that his wife Billie hadn’t really heard music Aerosmith‘s stuff, Perry indicated: “Well, it’s not like I walked in saying, ‘Hey, I’m the guy from Aerosmith,’ with my Aerosmith T-shirt on. [Laughs] It was just a chapter in my life, but it was over at that point. But that’s when she said, ‘Why aren’t you guys still together?’ I explained the whole thing to her, and we went to see them in Boston when they were doing a gig, and she met Steven, and it all went from there. I could have done another solo record, put another lineup together and toured some more, but we were in a lull, and Aerosmith’s other guitar players weren’t really working out. So we got back together, but I had one condition: we had to have new management. The rest is history.”