by Joe Perry
“Where the fuck do you hippies think you’re going?”
“We live here,” I said. “We have a place on the second floor.”
“I run this building,” he said. “I’m the superintendent. If you’re some kind of a weird commune, you can move out. I hate hippies.”
“We’re a band,” I said.
“What kind?”
“Hard rock.”
He thought about that for a second. Then he asked, “How do you feel about James Brown?”
“We love him,” I said.
“James Brown’s the best. I got every James Brown record ever made.”
Turned out that the super’s name was Gary Cabozzi, a thirtysomething ex-marine back from Vietnam with greasy black hair, a big mouth missing a few key teeth, and a take-no-prisoners personality. He was wearing a white wife-beater. Old-school tattoos ran up and down his arms.
As a gesture of peace, I offered him a beer from the six-pack I’d just bought. He accepted the beer and invited us downstairs to his basement apartment, where he lived with his wife, his dad, and his twelve-year-old son. The setup included a damp atmospheric man cave with a beat-up club-size pool table and a fridge stocked with beer. He had more neon bar signs than you’d see in Kenmore Square. The place smelled the way a musty, dusty, damp, smoky barroom should smell. His secondhand stereo sounded great, especially when he blasted James Brown records. His James Brown obsession seemed strange because he was not only partial to the n-word but displayed all the basic prejudices of your classic Boston redneck.
After this first meeting he understood that, rather than peace-and-love hippies, we were basically hard rockers who liked R&B as much as he did. That was our bond. In practically no time, Cabozzi became our biggest booster. We had an open invitation to use his basement to rehearse. Gary became our muscle and our in-house watchdog.
We soon began hearing Cabozzi stories. As a one-man vigilante, he had reportedly deterred all sorts of burglaries in the building. He was famous for scaring off bad guys. Legend had it that he’d been shot in the arm, only to chase the shooter down the street. He caught the assailant and, with his belt, beat him with his good arm to within an inch of the guy’s life.
There were times when life at 1325 looked like a TV comedy—a gang of skinny kids looking to break into the big time. Steven was the chatterbox extrovert, jumping on tabletops to command attention. Tom was the nice guy in the corner, diligently practicing his bass. Joey was the hard-hitting but insecure drummer looking to win our approval. Raymond was the outside cat, the leather-goods merchant doubling as a guitarist. Mark was the facilitator, the driver, the roadie, the folkie and loyal friend. I was the sullen and silent one in the front room, spending all my time looking for the lost chord.
Mark might have been looking for that chord one night when we were all in Tom’s room smoking cigarettes and pot and drinking beer. Mark was fooling around with folk songs on his guitar.
“Anyone smell anything strange?” asked Tom.
“Yeah,” said Joey. “Pot smoke. Cigarette smoke.”
Joey was right, but so was Tom. The smell was something stronger. The haze of smoke was darker than usual. Then came a crackling sound. And then the distinct odor of something burning. That’s when Steven popped in and said, “Smoke’s coming out of Joe’s room.”
I ran to my room, where I saw my coffee table engulfed in flames, inches from the parachute hanging from the ceiling. I yelled for help and within seconds the guys were running back and forth from the kitchen, pouring pitchers of water onto the parachute. Amazingly, we extinguished the fire before it hit the highly flammable parachute and engulfed the whole building in flames. It was another instance of our guardian angel being right on time.
We spent a lot of time reading R. Crumb comics and watching old Three Stooges movies. We might have been cracking up to Moe, Larry, and Curly—or Moe, Larry, and Shemp—one day when Steven came running in, talking a mile a minute about how on his way up the stairs he peeked into the basement apartment and saw this chick sitting on a couch. According to Steven, her legs were spread apart, her eyes were shut closed, and she was masturbating. Like many tales told by Steven, we took this one with a grain of salt.
In the annals of these funky formative years, there is the famous story of the suitcase found outside the building. This story has been told many times. I can only report it from my point of view. The details were blurry to me back then and remain blurry now.
One fine day a suitcase was found in front of 1325. Depending on whom you believe, it was retrieved by either Joey or Steven or both. Depending on whom you believe, the suitcase contained only dirty clothes or a little pot or a lot of pot or a little money or a lot of money. Depending on whom you believe, no one touched the money that was never there.
I was ignorant of all this intrigue when one night came a loud knock on the door. When we opened it, three street thugs appeared, one of whom had a gun pointed right at us.
“Give us our fuckin’ money,” he said.
“What money?” asked Steven.
“The money you stole from the suitcase.”
“There wasn’t any money, just some nasty clothes and a little pot.”
“There was a lot of fuckin’ money,” the gun-toting gangster insisted. “There was two thousand bucks. And you took it.”
“I didn’t.”
“Look, you hippie asshole, lying is as good as dying. I’d as soon kill you as look at you. Keep lying and you’re dead.”
The dialogue heated up. The gangster kept pressing, Steven kept insisting on his innocence. I was thinking, This shit could really end badly, when suddenly the back door crashed open and Gary Cabozzi came running through the apartment wielding an enormous sword. Seeing what was coming at him, the second gangster pulled out his gun. The gun was aimed at Cabozzi’s head.
“You got two seconds to shoot me,” said Gary, his eyes shining with murderous rage, “before I’m on you like stink on shit. You better fuck me up before I fuck you up—and do it quick, ’cause the cops are on their way.”
The gangsters backed down. Cabozzi won the day. He said that twenty years later he learned that it was Steven who took the money.
Cabozzi and his basement bar often involved drama. We were rehearsing there late one night when his son ran in shouting, “Call the police! Call the police!” The son’s friend had jumped off the roof. The boys had been huffing—breathing hair spray from a balloon to get high—and the kid thought he could fly. We ran out to see neighbors standing around a body that had landed in the alley between two buildings. It was a shocking sight: Under the harsh streetlights, the boy’s head was twisted in an obscene way. The police arrived, the ambulance arrived, but it was too late. The boy was dead. We went back to Cabozzi’s basement and tried to reconvene the rehearsal, but on that dark night, at that dark moment, none of us had the heart to play another note.
What’s in a name? We weren’t all that concerned, but we had to call ourselves something. This went on for months. In the meantime, we implemented the only plan we had for finding work: Steven and I contacted all our previous connections from our previous bands. Whenever we played back in my home territory, we were Flash, Joe Perry’s new band. Whenever we played in Steven’s home territory, we were Steven’s new band or whatever his last band was called. Whenever we played in new territory, we used whatever name was popular with us that week. We knew we needed something to stick with.
In high school Joey had had a band called Arrowsmith. How about that for a name? Tom thought he was referring to the Sinclair Lewis novel Arrowsmith, mandatory reading back then. Steven and I liked the name but, given our fascination with flying, thought it would be cooler with an aerodynamic spelling. In the final analysis Aerosmith was the only name no one objected to. So we kept it.
Our first gig as Aerosmith was in my part of the state, in Hopkinton, where the Boston Marathon starts, at Nipmuc Regional High. The set was all covers—and sometimes covers of cov
ers, like covering the Stones’ cover of Chuck Berry’s cover of Bobby Troup’s original “Route 66.” We did “Great Balls of Fire,” “Train Kept a-Rollin’,” “Rattlesnake Shake”—all the stuff we’d been practicing.
That night at Nipmuc High, the crowd appeared mildly amused but hardly enthusiastic. Sparks flew, but they didn’t come from the audience. They came from a nasty confrontation between Steven and me.
He kept screaming for me to lower the volume on my guitar. Well, if you’re playing with Marshall amps, as we were, they aren’t effective until they reach a certain volume. That volume is fuckin’ loud—but, hell, rock and roll is fuckin’ loud. I wasn’t cranking the volume to antagonize Steven; I was doing it to achieve the right rock-and-roll balance. We were using the same amps that the bands we admired used in similar-size venues. Sometimes I think Steven looked at this volume thing as an ego competition. My point, though, was always the same: Why be in a rock band if you don’t want to play loud?
“My ears are bleeding,” Steven would complain after a show.
“Let ’em bleed.”
“Next time, you’re gonna turn that shit down!” Steven screamed.
I didn’t respond. I didn’t have to. I knew there was no way in hell to lower the volume and keep the band on the edge. Plus I had to keep my guitar loud enough to hear over the drums. I was going to keep the volume where it needed to be. And I did. Besides, if Steven cared so much about his voice—as he often claimed—why was he always abusing it by screaming after the shows?
That first gig, like the suitcase incident, revealed Steven’s inclination to grab things that weren’t his. That night he stole a Nipmuc High T-shirt out of a student’s locker.
“Why would you want to go and do some dumb shit like that?” I asked him.
“Why not?” he asked. “It’s just a souvenir.”
We had the same problem at another one of our early gigs. We were hired by the Officers’ Club at the Navy Yard at Charlestown, Massachusetts, to play on Tuesday nights, a good time because it didn’t get in the way of our weekend engagements. They asked us to play a couple of songs they could slow-dance to. The pay was our usual rate, plus they gave us a three-course meal and two kinds of wine. We were scheduled to play there for three straight months. After one night, Steven and Raymond were on their way to the office to get paid when they spotted a slide projector by the door. When no one was looking, they stole it. A week later the Officers’ Club called to say that our services were no longer required. This was a blow, because we badly needed the work.
We managed to find some out-of-town gigs. There were a number of famous small to midsize rock clubs that booked groups like the Allman Brothers as well as up-and-coming bands like us. In this era these clubs were always rocking, packed to the rafters with young kids the same age as the musicians they were cheering.
One of these shows was at the fabled Alex Cooley’s Electric Ballroom in Atlanta. When we got to our dressing room, the groupies were waiting, already stark naked and ready to romp. These were full-service ladies eager to give it up in a variety of ways. One of the chicks approached me. I shook her off. I didn’t demur out of prudery, but only because the rock version of a Roman orgy held no interest for me. I went off by myself with a bottle of Rebel Yell and watched the backstage show. A few minutes later, when I was walking out, I saw something that cracked me up: Standing over a wastebasket, Raymond Tabano was pouring Jack Daniel’s over his Mr. Important.
“I’m cleaning it real good,” he said, “ ’cause I don’t want to bring anything home.”
When we came off the road with a little money, I applied a portion of it to my new hobby—mixed drinks: piña coladas, black Russians, and Irish coffee for that first morning jolt. I bought an inexpensive blender and a bartending book. I developed a certain expertise. It became part of my domestic life at 1325.
Usually I’d eat giant fast-food burgers, but there were times when Mark would whip up great hippie feasts. His years of communal living taught him the art of good simple cooking. He showed us how to roast brown rice before boiling it.
Steven also knew something about communal life. This was hardly his first experience of sharing a home with a band. His thing was food labeling. Every can of mustard and container of yogurt bore the name of its owner. Kitchen duty was always a high priority for Steven—who did what and when. Serious weekly discussions were held about who had been negligent about leaving dirty dishes in the sink. Then there was the monthly ritual of Steven and Joey cleaning their back bedroom. They’d empty it out completely and scrub it from floor to ceiling.
Even though I didn’t share their mania for cleanliness, it was understandable. The apartment was hardly hospital-sterile. In fact, one of our weekly activities was roach hunting. We’d turn out the lights in the kitchen, wait ten minutes, and then, armed with Raid, fly swatters, and squirt guns filled with bleach, ruthlessly attack the creepy buggers until we got ’em all. Naturally, the next night they’d be back in even greater numbers.
From the start, our strategy for survival was simple: Operate on two tracks. The first track was local. That meant take any gig you could get—any local high school or college dance, any gig that might pay us a few hundred bucks. Do that as long as you need to do it. Don’t turn down anything. Just keep playing.
On the second track, keep looking for a break. Maybe an agent or a manager would notice us and get us a deal. Maybe a promoter would spot us and book us into some big venue.
So here came Zunk Buker, a friend of ours from Sunapee who used to hang out at the lake. A couple of years our senior, Zunk had become a well-established pot dealer. He was always crisscrossing the country in campers and vans, buying and selling premium product in considerable quantity on both coasts. He did this for several years, making good money. After making his first million, he and his business partner settled in La Jolla, California, where they decided to go into concert promotion and produce rock shows in San Diego. He had recently promoted a Steve Miller concert in San Diego.
“Hey, Joe,” he said one day on the phone, “I hear you guys have a band. Come out here so my guys can meet you. I want you to check out our setup.”
Next thing I knew I was heading west. This was my first long plane trip and my first taste of California. Zunk met me in San Diego, where he had just concluded some business. His spread in La Jolla blew my mind. Palm trees out front. An ocean view out back. In the driveway of his glass-and-steel house was an array of hot rods and custom choppers. Parading around the pool was a lineup of suntanned blondes in short shorts and bikinis.
“The real fun starts tonight,” said Zunk. “There’s a surprise coming.”
The messenger arrived in the late evening looking like Raquel Welch. She was greeted as a conquering hero. When she reached into her purse and pulled out a giant condom, I understood why. The condom was stuffed with cocaine.
“This isn’t street shit,” said Zunk. “This is primo. This is high-octane. This is a rocket ship to the moon.”
He took out a buck knife and cut down the length of the condom. The blow spilled out on a coffee table, around which everyone gathered while Zunk prepared the lines. Before long, the lines were gone, and I was enjoying life on the moon.
Later that night there was talk of promoting a concert for us, but I can’t remember the details. This was a new high for me, and my cognitive skills were definitely diminished. I did, however, get the idea that Zunk was eager to promote our band. He had the money and the means.
The next morning I woke up and, for the first time, suffered a bloody nose. That’s one of the many downsides of potent blow. When I went to the bathroom I saw Zunk opening the hallway closet, whose every shelf was lined with cash. That was the upside of selling potent blow.
They fixed me with a going-away present—a footlocker holding a pound of grass and case of Coors, which back then was unavailable on the East Coast. We said goodbye and I flew home, convinced that Zunk and his partners would soon b
e booking us in major California venues. When I reported the good news to the guys in Boston, they were as excited as I was. Because we never wanted to think of ourselves as strictly a Boston band—in those days the only Boston band to break out was J. Geils—we liked the idea of jumping to the West Coast.
“How long do you think it’ll be?” asked Steven.
“You know Zunk,” I said. “He moves fast.”
The cops moved even faster. The week after I left La Jolla, Zunk was busted. They raided the house and hauled off the whole crew. If I had stayed over, I would have wound up in prison. That’s the real side of selling potent blow.
We were back on the first track, the local grind, where our next challenge became Raymond. The guy had the right look. He wore handmade colorful headbands, leather pants, and an elaborate Indian breastplate. He played rhythm guitar in the classic style. He had also made an important contact at WBCN, Boston’s hip FM station. He got their best DJ, Maxanne Sartori, to play one of our two-track demos over the air. Those were the days when DJs could play whatever they wanted. Maxanne put us in her mix and became a key supporter.
Raymond had his strengths, but he also had his problems. The biggest was that he was either chronically late to rehearsals or didn’t show at all.
His wife would call us at rehearsals wanting to speak with him.
“He isn’t here,” I’d say. “Isn’t he at the shop?”
“No. He told me he was with you guys.”
His pattern of playing both ends against the middle went on for months. Clearly he wasn’t spending time practicing his guitar, and he sure as hell wasn’t rehearsing with the band. The band was far from his top priority. After a few of these incidents, I knew that we’d have to replace him. But because Raymond was a big guy with a reputation as a brawler, he was intimidating, and no one wanted to tell him that he was out.
