Joe Perry > Quotes

“I don’t think a son can ever be prepared for the loss of his father. When it happened, I could feel my heart break in two. A sadness washed over me unlike any I had ever experienced. It wasn’t that my father and I had enjoyed the closest of relationships. For a good portion of my life we struggled to communicate. For years we had lived in different worlds. But the unspoken love between us was powerful. And maybe because it was unspoken, it carried an even greater weight.”
― Joe Perry, Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith

“Tyler. “We should cover that tune. Whose original is this?” “What the fuck are you talking about, Steven?” I said. “That’s us.” “Is it?” he asked. “Hell yes, it is.” “Where was I?” “In the booth, singing.”
― Joe Perry, Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith

“starting from the place of let’s-write-a-hit is the death of creativity.”
― Joe Perry, Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith

“consider Chuck Berry the Ernest Hemingway of rock and roll. He was strong, simple, and manly—a force of nature who created a musical lexicon all his own.”
― Joe Perry, Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith

“I definitely wanted a girlfriend, but I wanted an electric guitar even more.”
― Joe Perry, Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith

“Every instrument has secret sounds buried within it. My job was to find those sounds. This bass turned out to have “Back in the Saddle” hidden inside,”
― Joe Perry, Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith

“Back at the Gramercy Park Hotel, I was still buzzing”
― Joe Perry, Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith

“In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.”
― Joe Perry, Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith

“the process turned into a competition among coproducers angling for songwriting credits,”
― Joe Perry, Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith

“My earliest memories all involve being drawn deep into nature, where I welcome, rather than fear, getting lost. I welcome the mysteries that lurk at the bottom of the sea and live inside the dark forest of night.”
― Joe Perry, Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith

“When the record of “Walk This Way” came out, David Johansen told me, “That’s the nastiest song I’ve ever heard on the radio.”
― Joe Perry, Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith

“If you had something to do with the writing of the song, it was split evenly. That took the pressure off any credit disputes and let the creativity flow. And since the band would ultimately play the song, no matter how it started, it always ended up sounding like Aerosmith.”
― Joe Perry, Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith

“ultimately resulted in Geffen becoming a billionaire, largely on the huge success of Guns N’ Roses, Whitesnake, and Aerosmith. It’s always a kick in the butt for artists to watch label owners get rich beyond reason on creative work that those owners were lucky enough to market. If you think they’d give bonuses to the people who helped make them so rich, think again.”
― Joe Perry, Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith

“In the final analysis Aerosmith was the only name no one objected to. So we kept it.”
― Joe Perry, Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith

“Reading was the only subject at which I excelled. I would much rather be reading James Fenimore Cooper than dealing with participles in French. My poor school performance was puzzling because my parents saw that I possessed intelligence and curiosity. Marine biology became a passion. When I asked them to drive me to Boston to hear lectures by Jacques Cousteau, my first hero, they were happy to do so. They took me to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, a paradise for a kid in love with water. I was obsessed with learning from those men who explored the deep. I wanted to go deep. I was told that if I kept up my grades I could come back one summer and intern at Woods Hole. That never happened. My grades were below average. That became the great mystery of my childhood: Why was I having”
― Joe Perry, Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith

“It was ridiculous that all five of us were never in the same room at the same time—a point I should have insisted upon.”
― Joe Perry, Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith

“This is the one.” And with that he pulled out a Fender catalogue and pointed to a Stratocaster,”
― Joe Perry, Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith