pure unstepped-on melodic sensibility. Get that record, it’s all in there.
Joe couldn’t carry a tune to save his life and I thought, Oh, my god, these guys really suck! Oh, shit, these guys are so bad, they’re so out of fuckin’ tune, it’s embarrassing! I’ve got to get out of here!
They were playing this great Brit fret-burning blues, but they were horrible. They were out of tune, out of time—and I’m an animal of the beat, I have the ears of a bat. If a drum beat is a hundredth of a second off, I become unstable. I rant, I rave, it has to be fixed or the world will stop spinning on its axis. I drive my band crazy with this shit.
I was sitting there in the audience right next to Elyssa looking at Joe play. He had his Keith Richards moves down. The menacing hatchet-face scowl and bent knees as if the riff was so heavy it was weighing him down. The cool-chop look slightly undercut by his horn-rimmed glasses, white tape in the middle, hair down to his shoulders.
Goes into the second verse. . .
He do the shake
The rattlesnake shake
Man, do the shake
Yes, and jerk away the blues
Now, jerk it
Then—and this is the moment—Joe lurches into the guitar break: BOOAH DANG BOOAH DUM. Fuck! When I heard him play that, ah man, my dick went sooo hard! He blew my head off! I heard the angeltown sound, I saw the light. I was having that moment—the moment. Remember the scene in the movie The Miracle Worker about Helen Keller and her teacher? For a million years they’d done the hand signal thing. Then one day, out by the water pump, she signs W-A-T-E-R. At that moment, the levee broke.
Then he played the Yardbirds number “Train Kept a-Rollin’,” which became our top-this-motherfucker closer. Like me, an old Yardbirds fan—hence our mantras: “Train Kept a-Rollin’ ” and “I Ain’t Got You.”
My ear was a little more finely tuned than these guys’, but what I saw was this rough, raw, uncut rock ’n’ roll thing, the X-factor, the wild thang that runs through rock from Little Richard to Janis Joplin. Now that’s what was missing from the other bands. It’s not something you learn, it’s something you are. You play what you got. I’m thinking, with me make-believing rock star (which I could do so well) and Joe channeling Beck-Keit-Page, who could stop us? Who? They were in a very raw, rough state—but so what? If the horse doesn’t want to be ridden with a fucking bit in its mouth the whole time, what the fuck, let it go. If you’ve got this monstrous animal, let it run.
It was so fucking great it made me cry, and then the thought came into my mind just like the midnight train steaming into the station: What if I take what my daddy taught me, the melodic sensibility I’ve got, with the broken glass shards of reality that these guys wove together? We might have something.
Oh, yeah! When they did “Rattlesnake Shake” the fuckin’ energy coming off them was radioactive, they had the juice that all the bands I’d ever been in before couldn’t touch. The sacred fire! With all the acid and Tuinals and crystal meth, we couldn’t get to what they were doing on the natch. Right there what was beaming through was the white-hot core of Aerosmith. I went, “Ye-esss! YES!!!” I heard that high ecstatic voice, locusts were singing in my brain! And then I knew we’d have our day.
My whole life I’d been searching for my mutant twin—I wanted a brother. I didn’t want to be in another band without a brother. I needed a soul mate who would go “Amen!” Someone I could say “Fuck yeah!” to when I heard a million-dollar riff. In all the bands I’d been in from ’64 to ’70 there’d always been that one thing missing, the essential ingredient. Joe was the missing link. I wanted that Dave Davies–Ray Davies (that was real blood), Pete Townshend–Roger Daltrey, and of course, Mick-Keith thing. I’d never had that.
We’re polar twins. We’re total opposites. Joe is cool, Freon runs in his veins; I’m hot, hot-blooded Calabrese, a sulphur sun beast, shooting my mouth off. JOE’S A CREEP . . . I’M AN ASSHOLE. He’s the cowboy with the brim of his ten-gallon hat pulled down, the Hell-it-don’t-matter-none dude. But goddammit, is he always going to win? Am I always going to be the one with egg on my face? Of course, contrariness is the way the great duos have always thrived. Mutt and Jeff, Lucy and Desi, Tom and Jerry, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Shem and Shaun, Batman and the Joker.
Right off, there was teeth-grinding competitive antagonism. The internal combustion engine that drives us. It’s in our DNA, part of our chemistry. The two-way thing going on . . . combination of the two. When I met Joe, I knew I’d found my other self, my demon brother . . . the schizo two-headed beast. Joe comes up with a great riff and immediately I think, “You fuck, I gotta top that motherfucker. I’m gonna write words that’ll burn up the page as soon as I lay them down!”
But you know what? Antagonism, pure nitro-charged agro, fuels inspiration. Do I have to explain these things to you? And you can’t control animosity, can you?
We’ve been chained together for almost forty years, on the lam, like Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones. Writing songs together, living next door to each other, touring, sharing girls, taping, getting high together, cleaning up together, splitting up . . . getting back together. There is a love there, no matter what. As soon as the anger gets resolved, we’re bosom buddies, nothing can ever drive us apart, but something inevitably comes up and I say, “Whoa! Wait a fuckin’ minute!”
Nobody can make me as crazy as Joe. No one drove me to the coffin for a reminder of the pied piper dream more often than Joe. Not ex-wives, not ex-managers—and you know how mad they can make me. Joe Perry is fucking Joe Perry—nothing I can do about that. Nothing I want to do about it. If he walked out onstage covered with vomit and shit and a needle hanging out of his arm, people would still applaud him and scream because he does the guitar god better than anyone. He’s the real deal. Not that the real deal is always the best deal.
Also the doomed, self-destructive rock star thing . . . straight out of the old Rock Star Handbook. Which is why I’ve got to keep my eye on him. Someone has to! Women love him; they have to live with his shit, his sniveling, smoking, and doping too much. I see him from the outside. Joe fucking Perry is the ultimate . . . but I’m the one who can see the shadow over, under . . . and inside him.
And there is a fucking Cloud of Doom passing over his head. My relationship with Joe is complex, competitive, fraught, really sort of fascinating in a hair-raising kind of way. There’s always going to be an undercurrent, ongoing tension, periods of homicidal hostility, backstabbing jealousy, and resentment. But hey, that’s the way the big machine works.
We’d joined that illustrious company of brawling blues brothers: Mick and Keith! Ray and Dave Davies! The Everly Brothers! That’s us, the Siamese fighting fish of rock! Awright! Bring it on.
But whatever happens, when we go on tour it fuses us together, we become the big two-headed beast. I see Joe every night and I go, fuck, that’s it, I get it! This is why we do it! And why I love it. Everything kind of washes away. All of that.
After that night, the Rattlesnake Shakedown, I was ready to make it happen. Tom and Joe were still in high school when I first met them, thinking about going to go to college. I had already burned my boats. I was never going back. I said to myself, Fuck it, I’m going to take a chance and move in with everybody.
Now, I knew we could do it. I loved sixties music; Brit rock stars were the shit. I wanted that sound so bad. And almost as much as I wanted the band, I wanted that lifestyle. I wanted it more than anything. I could taste it. The band was going to be the sixties Mach II . . . the Yardbirds on liquid nitrogen.
We’d all move to Boston and get down to the serious business of becoming famous. We had everything else, now all we needed was the fame to go with it. And being that I’m a little more crazed than most people, once I saw the light, I went for it hell for leather. My bags packed, at the end of that summer I said good-bye to my mom and dad, going, “Okay, here we go, this is the shit.”
The day we drove down—and here you have to stretch out the syllables—d-r-o-o-o-o-ve