Like almost everyone in Aerosmith, Joe Perry released a memoir. His is titled Rocks: My Life In and Out of Aerosmith. He sets the record straight on all of the issues he's dealt with over the years, including his hard drug use, trying to get clean and his stormy relationship with Steven Tyler.
What inspired him to put pen to paper was the 40th anniversary of Aerosmith forming. "When I grew up, people wrote autobiographies when they retired. I never felt like that until about three years ago, when I realized you can write three or four of these if you want."
It took a couple of years to get the process started, but the logistics of it, mostly involving working with publisher Simon & Schuster and co-writer David Ritz (who's known for helping to write Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" and working with Ray Charles and B.B. King), took an additional year. It centered around tours and music, stemming from a strong work ethic, which he inherited from his parents Mary, a gym teacher and Tony, an accountant
"We don't change that much from one generation to the next." He said. The relationship with his parents was very typical of the generation in which he grew up. He had a close relationship with his parents. "I'm sure that 90 percent of the people I talk to about growing up in that era had that same kind of issue. It's just how it was." His parents were, not surprisingly, hesitant about him playing guitar. "Looking back at it from their point of view, it wasn't the career path you'd pick for any security or longevity. Even The Beatles said 'This will last a couple of years, and then Ringo will open a barber shop'". But it did work out for the soon to be Aerosmith crew: Steven Tyler, Brad Whitford, Joey Kramer and Tom Hamilton
The most iconic item out of the book is not a person, but a place: 1325 Commonwealth Ave in Boston's Kenmore Square. It was the "band apartment" they all shared and where Aerosmith was born. The keys to success for them was that they all live together and also have day jobs. "Everybody had to pay their rent, and by living under one roof, we just pooled our money. If somebody made more than somebody else, he just put it in the kitty. It made a lot easier to focus on the original material, getting into the studio and getting a record deal, which is what we wanted to do." Unlike most bands, they avoided covers and treated each gig as if it were a large concert, and they played only on Friday and Saturday nights.
There was one other benefit of living at 1325. "It put us on the fast track to kind of figuring each other out for the upcoming tours we were going to get, which meant spending time together. We learned how to live together pretty quick. Plus we got along and had a lot of laughs. 1325 was a great place to party. That was one of the prerequisites to being in this club called Aerosmith: you had to love to party."
Of course, that "partying" ended in the 1980s, when manager Tim Collins suggested covering their song "Walk This Way" with up and coming rap group Run-DMC. One of the main reasons behind Perry doing his book was to clear the air of any misconceptions surrounding the band, such as the members' drug addictions. "I wanted it to be as truthful as I could get it, and also put the whole drug thing into perspective. The band was really only affected by it for five or six years, when the band started going downhill and drugs started to take over. We got sober in 1983 or '84, and we've been sober ever since then, so the majority of our career, it hasn't been an issue, at least the way it was in 1976. There are so many tales out there, whether it's the ups and downs between Steven and me, why this happens, what that happened. A lot of stuff got misinterpreted or just out there wrong, and I wanted to get the story straight."
