Straight talk

Joe Perry gets a wake-up call after a rocky year with Aerosmith

by Brett Milano

What's Joe "Fucking" Perry doing awake at 7:30 in the morning? Actually, he's not. It may be the crack of dawn in the Aerosmith lead guitarist's hometown. But it's early afternoon in Madrid, where Perry's calling from, on the day after wrapping up a six-week European tour, just a week before Aerosmith are due to kick off a summer in American with multiple dates in New England. Since the band have been off the road for two years, local fans can be assured that they've worked out the kinks in Europe before coming home.

"It takes a couple of shows to get it right," reports Perry. "Every couple of nights we slowly remember how to play `Dream On.' Oddly enough, the new songs come faster because we've been playing those in the studio. For the older ones we go back and listen to the live tapes. The show's a little more theatrical this time -- it's still guitar-driven, but we have a keyboard player who throws in those little pieces of ear candy that we like. The lighting's a little more atmospheric. That's it, though -- we're not trying to compete with Kiss or anything."

Aerosmith competing with Kiss in 1997? Stranger things have happened, like the notion that Aerosmith (and Kiss, for that matter) might still be a band worth caring about after all this time. In Aerosmith's case, the current tour is largely about recovery. Not from drugs and alcoholism -- despite recent rumors, Perry swears they did that for keeps back in the '80s -- but from a year that's produced more tabloid headlines than musical acclaim. If the allegations (made in the local press by ex-manager Tim Collins) that Aerosmith's members had fallen off the wagon weren't true, the rumors of major band infighting certainly were. And there was the well-publicized saga of the recent Nine Lives album, which had to be recorded twice before the band and new label Sony were satisfied. What does it take to get the band back into gear?

"It takes us getting back on stage and doing it," Perry notes. "Tim Collins used to tell us, `Don't worry about the rest of the stuff, just play.' Oddly enough, our original manager used to tell us that as well. For me it's as simple as standing on stage and looking at the guys I've been working with for 28 years, and thinking about the idealism we had in our apartment back at 1325 [Comm Ave]. After making every mistake in the book three times, right to the point of the band falling apart, you appreciate what you have. We've had the right people in our path, God's will, whatever you want to call it. And nobody died in a car crash, so we were just really lucky."

Still, the band could have been luckier with Nine Lives, a good Aerosmith album whose best tracks have a messier, bluesier approach than anything they've done since the wasted years. It bounced in and out of the Billboard Top 10 in a matter of weeks and currently stands at #28 -- hardly a flop, but not the multiplatinum megahit that its predecessor, 1993's Get a Grip, was.

"I'm happy with the way it's going," Perry responds. "I think everyone's expectations were pretty high. But I stand back and say, `Hey, wait a minute -- we're not the new young thing on the block.' We've always been a band that sells records by playing live. So to me, the record is our marching orders for the next two years."

Besides, Perry doesn't seem overly fond of Get a Grip, which was Aerosmith's biggest hit but also the album that relied most on heavy production and song doctors. "I'll tell you, those songs that were more produced were the ones that didn't work live. What people like to hear from us is the raw edge. So we never sat down and said, `We should get closer to what Get a Grip was' -- nobody wanted that."

In fact, the band attempted to do an all-blues album before Nine Lives got underway. "We talked really seriously about that, and it was supported by the label. But as we got closer to the idea, I started thinking, `Wait a minute -- I don't know if I want to hear a whole album of Aerosmith doing blues.' There was enough about the last couple of albums that I wanted to fix, and I didn't want to waste any time."

It's well known at this point that Aerosmith and/or their label scrapped the first version of Nine Lives, which was recorded with Alanis Morissette's producer Glenn Ballard and without drummer Joey Kramer, who was knocked off balance by his father's death. But what exactly was wrong with the unreleased album?

"Mostly the fact that the band wasn't playing on it," answers Perry. "It was us with another drummer, and recording in the style where you'd overdub each guitar part and each vocal part six times. Some of those songs had 96 tracks on them. You'd think it sounded like good music, but when you closed your eyes you wouldn't see the band playing in front of you. The second [released] version was us playing live in the studio, doing it the old way. I mean, if we needed to edit the tape, we didn't use a machine, we cut it with a razor blade. And when Joey returned, he came back with a personal vengeance, a fire up his ass that added a whole other dimension."

Then there were the nasty drug rumors, which have plagued the band for the better part of the past year. "If you want to know why the rumors started, you'll have to ask the people that started them," offers Perry. "As far as I can tell, it's been pretty well documented that Tim Collins went to the press and said that he thought certain people in the band were relapsing. And to my knowledge he never said anything like that until the day we asked him to leave. So you can draw your own conclusions.

"On one level it's nobody's business, but I know we set ourselves up for it by going public with our sobriety [in 1984]. We had to do that because nobody wanted to hire us. So we went public, which brings along its own set of demons. Then these rumors come out. . . . The last thing we wanted to do was to use the media as a courtroom, but the hardest thing was keeping our mouths shut when our friends and our families knew that it wasn't true. But if you listen to the record, or if you see the way we play on stage, I don't think you can agree with the rumors."

Then again, certain songs on the album -- notably "Crash" and "The Farm" -- make enough reference to drug hangovers to make you wonder what the band have been up to. "Well, you sing about what you know. You draw on those experiences, whether they were yesterday or 10 years ago, it's all part of your mental vocabulary. You don't have to wake up with a hangover to know what it's like. Angst can be just as bad as chemical imbalance. We're all normal people, we feel that stuff that everybody feels -- frustration, being out of control."

The real problem, he adds, is that relations within the band were reaching an all-time low, particularly his friendship with singer Steven Tyler. And this time Perry didn't feel that he could quit the band for five years, the way he did in 1979.

"It's funny, because it's not like everything started on a certain day. It's not like on May 25, all of a sudden, everything turned to crap. The seeds had been planted years ago, there was a slow building of frustration. But because we had the experience of 1979, we were determined not to let it happen again. As far as Steven and I being inseparable, well, that's true whether we're talking to each other or not. You can't stop someone being your brother just because you're having a bad day. We go through our stuff, but we haven't lost our love for each other."

If anything caused grumbling in Boston, however, it was the band's failure to promote the new album with any in-person events at their own club, Mama Kin. Floundering in recent months, the club was rumored to be on the verge of closing. (Mama Kin has just hired an new booking agent and seems to be on the upswing.) It didn't help any that the only Boston event to promote the release of Nine Lives was a satellite hook-up to the real promo party in New York.

"I haven't even been home since Christmas," Perry says in the band's defense. "The time we've had has been so short, we haven't been able to do anything the way we want. Usually we spend three weeks doing pre-production for a tour. This time we rehearsed for three days. And the fact that the record was pushed back really jammed everything. I know people think, `They're big stars, they can do anything they want.' But if you have to be in Germany to play a festival on the fourth of May, that's the wall and you can't move it.

"We did Saturday Night Live the day before we left, made two videos and I can't tell you how much press and TV. In terms of promotion, we sat at the drawing board before the album came out and planned events for New York, LA, and Boston. It turned out we could do New York and that was it. So we had to make the choice. Mama Kin is close to our hearts, we've been involved trying to get things right. And we're going to do something when we get back. I can't tell you what yet, but we'll let Boston know we're still homeboys."

Aerosmith play the Ballpark at Old Orchard Beach in Maine on June 30. They'll be at Great Woods in Mansfield on July 11 and 12. Call 423-NEXT for ticket info.