Joe Perry is running late. This isn’t unusual behaviour for an A-list rock’n’roll musician. But the Aerosmith guitarist isn’t being a diva. It turns out his wife, Billie, found a dove with a broken leg near their Florida house and is trying to rescue it. Perry has been trying to find a box to put it in to keep it safe and calm it down.
“She’s got the touch,” he says of Billie when he arrives, apologising for the delay. “One time she found a baby rabbit up in New England, and it was nearly frozen solid. She took it inside, massaged it under warm water and brought it back to life. In another century I would have had to protect her from the people with the torches and the burning flames.”
The 72-year-old Perry wears the mantle of guitarist with one of America’s most famous, successful and occasionally combustible bands lightly. Where his Aerosmith bandmate and fellow former Toxic Twin Steven Tyler is a yapping mouth in human form, Perry is quieter, more thoughtful, even a little shy.
Things might have been different in the 70s or early 80s. Back then, Perry and his bandmates were permanently enveloped in a cloud of chemicals and had the glazed looks to prove it. But despite their enthusiasm for hard drugs and the rock’n’roll lifestyle in general, they still managed to deliver a string of stonecold classic albums that turned excess into success: Get Your Wings, Toys In The Attic, Rocks, even Draw The Line (supposedly underwhelming but really not).
Perry quit Aerosmith in 1980, but his return four years later marked the beginning of a remarkable second act which was as successful as the first, with albums such as 1987’s Permanent Vacation, 1989’s Pump and 1993’s Get A Grip turning them into global superstars, not just American ones. If Aerosmith’s work rate has slowed down in the 21st century – just three studio albums since 2001, including the blues covers set Honkin’ On Bobo – then Perry has kept himself busy, juggling a solo career with the million-dollar supergroup Hollywood Vampires, which he founded in 2012 with Alice Cooper and Johnny Depp.
While in the background Billie pops in to tend to the stricken bird, Perry gets ready to look back on the metaphorical and literal highs of his head-spinning career. “We just wanted to make some noise,” he says of Aerosmith’s early days. They’ve done just that, and way more.
Before you took up guitar, you wanted to become a marine biologist. Why?
Every summer we went up to the lake area in New Hampshire where my parents had a little cottage, and I just loved being in the water. I did everything I could do to spend time underwater. As a kid I used to watch [oceanographer and filmmaker] Jacques Cousteau, I wanted to be part of his team. I had a chance
