Aerosmith's Hard-Knock Rock
San Antonio Express, TX
January 19, 2006
It has been 19 years since he was drooling drunk, but Joe Perry still confesses a weakness for the sauce.
Calling from a tour stop in North Carolina, Aerosmith's chiseled-cheek, boogie-riff guitar hero is joking about his namesake brand of Rock Your World hot sauces. These days, the lean and clean 55-year-old rocker is more likely to slather his ribs than pickle his liver.
"Yeah, definitely," he says with a laugh. "I'll eat all the hot sauce I want, because it doesn't stop me from playing onstage (laughs). I've always gravitated toward (cooking), and I figured if I'm going to eat, I'm going to eat well. I've had my share of Burger King in the early days, but I can remember having these big cookouts at my parents' place and always making sure the steaks and hamburgers were just right.
"It must be my Mediterranean blood. I'm half Italian and half Portuguese and only one generation from the Old Country, so I'm sure that's a big part of it. The one thing I kind of get upset about though is when people bring their bottles (of hot sauce) for me to sign and they're still full."
Draining bottles is something Aerosmith did with death-defying frequency throughout the 1970s. More motley than Crüe, more toxic than Poison and packing more guns than roses, this Boston-baked train wreck set a staggering standard for bloodshot blackouts and coke-caked excess.
Done with smoke and mirrors, Perry lines up 30 years' worth of Aerosmith hits at the AT&T Center on Wednesday when he is joined by monkey-man vocalist Steven Tyler, co-guitarist Brad Whitford, bassist Tom Hamilton and drummer Joey Kramer. Expect surprise rarities along with "Walk This Way," "Dream On" and "Sweet Emotion."
Aerosmith is peddling its latest dual disc, "Rockin' The Joint — Live at the Hard Rock Hotel," which offers video and audio of an intimate 2002 Las Vegas performance in front of 3,000 lucky fans. The performance includes the long-lost gems "Seasons of Wither" and "No More, No More" alongside an old-school cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Rattlesnake Shake" and the first-ever live recording of the No.1 smash, "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing."
For his part, Perry is pushing his self-titled fourth solo album, which features a locked-tight cover of the Doors' "The Crystal Ship" along with Woody Guthrie's "Vigilante Man" and a host of original, blues-marinated shuffles, including the Grammy-nominated instrumental track, "Mercy."
The nomination "really hit me from the side," Perry says. "I've been living with that song for so long. It's one of those riffs I've wrung inside and out. I think I first laid it down 10 years ago as a potential song for Aerosmith. We tried rearranging it every which way in order to put vocals on it, and as it happens so often, sometimes the riffs are so strong on their own it's hard to find space for vocals."
By the late 1970s, Perry had a hard time finding space for the unholy madness consuming Aerosmith. A bona fide, stadium-sized monstrosity, Aerosmith was riding the rails to legend thanks to the smash success of the 1975 masterpiece album, "Toys in the Attic" and the subsequent releases, "Rocks," "Draw the Line" and the lesser-liked, 1979 death-knell, "Night in the Ruts."
Inevitably, Perry quit the band in a blinding black cloud of threatening violence, shouting and snorting. Whitford soon followed, leaving the respective parties to struggle for sanity and commercial viability.
"We'd been busting our asses making Aerosmith into what it was for 10 years, and we'd never really taken time off to clear our heads," Perry says. "The machine was bigger than us, and we should have just taken a year off.
"Instead, it blew up and we melted. There were some times when I'd get back to Boston after being on the road and my first marriage had broken up, where I'd move into one of those places where you pay $25 a week to live. It wasn't quite a homeless shelter, but it was a pretty hand-to-mouth existence. It was a really hard time leaving the shelter of Aerosmith, but I was gonna make my own way one way or another. It was a good lesson."
Another good lesson came in the shapely form of one Billie Paulette, a model whom Perry met during the video shoot for his 1983 song "Black Velvet Pants." Together, the couple steered toward sobriety and is today pushing 23 years of married bliss. Upon their meeting, Billie figured Perry was a long-haired, moonlighting rocker dude and had no idea he was adored by zillions of Aerosmith fans.
"That's true," Perry recalls. "It didn't really sink in. She just paid it lip service and said, 'yeah, yeah, yeah.' Then she realized we had songs on the radio, and I think she was going through some of my old stuff and found boxes of old magazine clippings and stuff. She realized that we were indeed a stadium act."
Enshrined in 2001 in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and having sold more than 100 million albums, the all-original brotherhood of Aerosmith is today richer in more ways than money. Asked if Aerosmith will get back to the swaggering, innuendo-driven songwriting genius of Tyler and Perry minus the outside hit makers, the guitarist hints at hope.
"That's what we've been talking about doing for the next record, but it's hard to set rules," Perry says. Begged further on behalf of hard-core fans, a humble Perry gives some ground.
"It's nice to hear that," he says of the gushing. "If you can put that down in writing and I can hand it out to the boys, we might have something."
Aerosmith/Lenny Kravitz
Where: AT&T Center, East Houston Street at SBC Center Parkway
When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday
Tickets: $45-$125 at Ticketmaster outlets
January 19, 2006
It has been 19 years since he was drooling drunk, but Joe Perry still confesses a weakness for the sauce.
Calling from a tour stop in North Carolina, Aerosmith's chiseled-cheek, boogie-riff guitar hero is joking about his namesake brand of Rock Your World hot sauces. These days, the lean and clean 55-year-old rocker is more likely to slather his ribs than pickle his liver.
"Yeah, definitely," he says with a laugh. "I'll eat all the hot sauce I want, because it doesn't stop me from playing onstage (laughs). I've always gravitated toward (cooking), and I figured if I'm going to eat, I'm going to eat well. I've had my share of Burger King in the early days, but I can remember having these big cookouts at my parents' place and always making sure the steaks and hamburgers were just right.
"It must be my Mediterranean blood. I'm half Italian and half Portuguese and only one generation from the Old Country, so I'm sure that's a big part of it. The one thing I kind of get upset about though is when people bring their bottles (of hot sauce) for me to sign and they're still full."
Draining bottles is something Aerosmith did with death-defying frequency throughout the 1970s. More motley than Crüe, more toxic than Poison and packing more guns than roses, this Boston-baked train wreck set a staggering standard for bloodshot blackouts and coke-caked excess.
Done with smoke and mirrors, Perry lines up 30 years' worth of Aerosmith hits at the AT&T Center on Wednesday when he is joined by monkey-man vocalist Steven Tyler, co-guitarist Brad Whitford, bassist Tom Hamilton and drummer Joey Kramer. Expect surprise rarities along with "Walk This Way," "Dream On" and "Sweet Emotion."
Aerosmith is peddling its latest dual disc, "Rockin' The Joint — Live at the Hard Rock Hotel," which offers video and audio of an intimate 2002 Las Vegas performance in front of 3,000 lucky fans. The performance includes the long-lost gems "Seasons of Wither" and "No More, No More" alongside an old-school cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Rattlesnake Shake" and the first-ever live recording of the No.1 smash, "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing."
For his part, Perry is pushing his self-titled fourth solo album, which features a locked-tight cover of the Doors' "The Crystal Ship" along with Woody Guthrie's "Vigilante Man" and a host of original, blues-marinated shuffles, including the Grammy-nominated instrumental track, "Mercy."
The nomination "really hit me from the side," Perry says. "I've been living with that song for so long. It's one of those riffs I've wrung inside and out. I think I first laid it down 10 years ago as a potential song for Aerosmith. We tried rearranging it every which way in order to put vocals on it, and as it happens so often, sometimes the riffs are so strong on their own it's hard to find space for vocals."
By the late 1970s, Perry had a hard time finding space for the unholy madness consuming Aerosmith. A bona fide, stadium-sized monstrosity, Aerosmith was riding the rails to legend thanks to the smash success of the 1975 masterpiece album, "Toys in the Attic" and the subsequent releases, "Rocks," "Draw the Line" and the lesser-liked, 1979 death-knell, "Night in the Ruts."
Inevitably, Perry quit the band in a blinding black cloud of threatening violence, shouting and snorting. Whitford soon followed, leaving the respective parties to struggle for sanity and commercial viability.
"We'd been busting our asses making Aerosmith into what it was for 10 years, and we'd never really taken time off to clear our heads," Perry says. "The machine was bigger than us, and we should have just taken a year off.
"Instead, it blew up and we melted. There were some times when I'd get back to Boston after being on the road and my first marriage had broken up, where I'd move into one of those places where you pay $25 a week to live. It wasn't quite a homeless shelter, but it was a pretty hand-to-mouth existence. It was a really hard time leaving the shelter of Aerosmith, but I was gonna make my own way one way or another. It was a good lesson."
Another good lesson came in the shapely form of one Billie Paulette, a model whom Perry met during the video shoot for his 1983 song "Black Velvet Pants." Together, the couple steered toward sobriety and is today pushing 23 years of married bliss. Upon their meeting, Billie figured Perry was a long-haired, moonlighting rocker dude and had no idea he was adored by zillions of Aerosmith fans.
"That's true," Perry recalls. "It didn't really sink in. She just paid it lip service and said, 'yeah, yeah, yeah.' Then she realized we had songs on the radio, and I think she was going through some of my old stuff and found boxes of old magazine clippings and stuff. She realized that we were indeed a stadium act."
Enshrined in 2001 in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and having sold more than 100 million albums, the all-original brotherhood of Aerosmith is today richer in more ways than money. Asked if Aerosmith will get back to the swaggering, innuendo-driven songwriting genius of Tyler and Perry minus the outside hit makers, the guitarist hints at hope.
"That's what we've been talking about doing for the next record, but it's hard to set rules," Perry says. Begged further on behalf of hard-core fans, a humble Perry gives some ground.
"It's nice to hear that," he says of the gushing. "If you can put that down in writing and I can hand it out to the boys, we might have something."
Aerosmith/Lenny Kravitz
Where: AT&T Center, East Houston Street at SBC Center Parkway
When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday
Tickets: $45-$125 at Ticketmaster outlets
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