by Joe Perry
Like my father, Frank did not want to go into detail about his cancer. All I knew was that he was not as active as before. At the same time, he continued to do us great favors.
It was Frank who arranged for us to rehearse in the visitors’ locker room at Boston Garden. The original Garden, built in the twenties, was sacred ground. It was essentially a boxing arena where the Bruins and the Celtics won their trophies. It was the most electric spot in the city, where all the holy wars were waged. As we prepared to go into the studio we found ourselves in the bowels of the building that housed the arena that was used for wrestling matches during the summer. While we were struggling to put together the songs that would turn up on our first album, Haystacks Calhoun, Killer Kowalski, or Andre the Giant would come limping from the whirlpool to the massage table.
Then came the week that the wrestling matches gave way to the Rolling Stones. I was a fan, but I didn’t have Steven’s holy reverence for the group. The last time the Stones were in town I was standing outside the Tea Party when a friend from Sunapee came driving by, saying that he had a free ticket.
“Get in,” he said. “They’ll blow your mind.”
“I think I’ll pass.”
“Are you crazy?”
“No. The Stones are great. I’d just rather see Fleetwood Mac.”
This time I went to see the Stones with Steven. It turned out to be one of the most famous shows in rock history. Earlier that summer they’d released the blistering two-LP Exile on Main Street. The huge crowd at the Boston Garden couldn’t wait to hear them play those songs live. The air was thick with pot. The buzz was tremendous, everyone sky-high on anticipation. But then came the delays—hour after hour, we were kept waiting. Salvation came in the form of Boston mayor Kevin White, who, looking like a regular Stones fan with his jacket off and his shirtsleeves rolled up, had the cool to explain what was happening. Bad weather had forced the Stones’ plane to land in Providence, Rhode Island, where they got into a scuffle with a photographer. Keith and Mick had been thrown in jail. They’d gotten out quickly but then had to make the drive to Boston, where the crowd was restless. The mayor, fearing a riot, got us to calm down. He said he was lifting the train curfew so public transportation would be running no matter what time the show ended. Then he threw out a couple of footballs and told us to stay loose because, one way or another, the Stones were gonna rock the house tonight.
And man, did they ever. When the Stones finally took the stage they looked like wrecks. They looked the way the Stones are supposed to look. The crowd went nuts. The Stones transcended the boundaries of normal rock and roll. That night they earned the title of the greatest rock-and-roll band in the world. Later I’d come to believe that at on any given night, any band can earn that title. But back in the summer of 1972, the Stones wore the crown.
The next day when we returned to the Garden to rehearse in the locker room, Steven and I first walked out into the arena. All of the Stones’ equipment was gone. We climbed up onstage and lay on our backs for a few minutes, side by side. Looking up into that cavernous arena, we said the same words at practically the same time: “One day . . .”
TWINGES OF LOVE
The months before the fall of 1972, when we actually started recording our first album, were wild. I had my first and only affair with an older woman who, in many ways, turned me out. It began in the improbable town of Framingham, a big suburb twenty miles outside Boston, where Frank had a friend who owned an upstairs restaurant that was temporarily closed. We were allowed to rehearse there. Downstairs was a club where the locals liked to hang. Among them were musicians and actors performing at Caesar’s Monticello, a dinner theater just down the street. Among the regulars was Judy Carne, famous for her stint on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, the national TV show. She was the English bombshell who delivered the “sock it to me” line. She was doing a summer run of Cabaret at Caesar’s.
Judy was far more attractive in person than on TV. Off TV, her language was salty and provocative. Her body was alluring. She had a thin frame, big brown eyes, full lips, and an upturned nose. I saw her as a super-seductive pixie who dressed in the latest Carnaby Street fashions.
She traveled with an entourage whose aura was pure sex. Her bosom buddy was her makeup girl and confidante, a gorgeous curvaceous redhead who gave the guys the idea that she couldn’t wait to get out of her clothes. It was a hot scene. The sexual tension was thick, like a stick of sweet incense. Once word got around that a Hollywood star like Judy was a nightly regular, the place was packed. No live music but loud rock and roll blasting over the sound system. It was the perfect hang for us, a band on the make. In the afternoon we’d rehearse upstairs, then head to the bar downstairs. We had the run of the place because the owner was a friend of Frank’s. He’d go around telling everyone that we were the recently-signed-to-Columbia hot new band. He also ran a betting pool built upon what lucky guy could get to Judy’s super-sexy assistant first.
The real prize, though, was Judy, who held court at her table. It was fun watching the rock-and-roll guys parading around like peacocks and sending drinks over to Judy’s table, battling for her attention. Ms. Carne regarded all this coolly. She just sat back, drank, and watched. We’d been told that she liked good coke, which explained her frequent trips to the women’s room. On her way back from one such trip she stopped at our table. The club owner had introduced us a few nights earlier, when only a few pleasantries had been exchanged. This time she walked right over to me. Someone scrambled to get her a chair. She sat down and, in her charming English accent, said, “How you doing, mate?” Before I could reply she reached over for my vodka gimlet and took a long, slow draw. “Hmm,” she said. “This is really fabulous. May I have one?”
Naturally, I ordered her a drink. I was shocked that, in this crowded club of guys dying to approach her, she had approached me. At the same time, I wasn’t shocked enough to pass up the opportunity to get to know her. We started chatting, the drinks kept coming, we moved closer to each other, our conversation grew more intimate, and soon the rest of the club seemed to disappear. By evening’s end she asked me to drive her home in her Cadillac. We went to her luxurious house. That night we got little sleep.
Judy took me to a new dimension of hedonism. She had a doctor’s bag filled with high-quality cocaine, one variety more potent than the next—bottles, pills, powders, syringes, everything 99 percent legal. She had managed to get prescriptions for everything, even the coke. She always looked her best, walking around the house in an X-rated version of the R-rated lingerie she wore in her show. She got a kick out of telling me that her voluptuous redheaded makeup girl—the chick that the men at the club were pining for—was really her makeup boy. Judy loved to laugh. She had a voracious appetite for life’s pleasures. At thirty-three, she had earned her PhD in sex and drugs. At twenty-one, I was her willing pupil.
One evening near end of her run in Monticello I was driving her back from Boston when I got into a minor accident, causing her to sprain her ankle. The ER doctor recommended that she stay off her feet for two weeks. She liked the plan, checked us into the Copley Square Hotel, and freely shared her pain medicine with me. We supplemented those pills with goodies from the doctor’s bag. When that supply ran low, she knew who to call. She had made connections with local dealers with products far above my pay grade.
Judy had no pretense about love and romance. She told me that her boyfriend was in Africa making a movie. After her engagements on the East Coast, she’d be heading back to L.A. to be with him. They had an open relationship.
My relationship with the band was a little strained by this episode. While living with Judy at the Copley Square, I had to curtail rehearsal time with Aerosmith. Judy required all my tender loving care. Steven kept calling, wanting to know if he could come over. On several occasions before the car accident, Judy had hung out with the band and was extremely generous with her stash. I now sensed that Steven wanted to get into her doctor’s bag—and maybe g
et into something else. I never invited him over. Forced to stay off her feet, Judy was naked most of the time and didn’t want company. I had no interest in a threesome and neither did she. We just wanted to be alone.
One night she felt strong enough to go out on the town. Her friend Bette Midler was playing Lennie’s On-the-Turnpike, a jazz club on Route One in Peabody. This was the year that Midler’s first album, The Divine Miss M, had been released. Barry Manilow was her musical director and the show was as campy as campy gets. I dug it. Afterward we went to her dressing room and Judy introduced me as her friend.
Bette slowly looked me up and down before saying, “Well, I can certainly see why.”
I may or may not have blushed, but I certainly felt strange. Never before had a woman described me as an object of erotic appeal. Such moments do wonders for a guy’s confidence. It gave me a boost, as it would any kid from the suburbs.
The other major change in my life had to do with Commonwealth. After two years, we decided to close up shop at 1325. By then the guys had gravitated to their girlfriends—Brad with Laurie, Tom with Terry, and Joey with Nina. Steven and I moved into a three-bedroom basement apartment on Kent Street in Brookline that had been smartly refurbished by our friend Henry Smith, with whom we shared the place. The move happened during the end of Judy’s two-week recovery at the Copley Square. Once I was settled in, I went off with Judy on her last East Coat gig—a ten-day engagement in Philly. The band wasn’t happy, because I’d be missing more rehearsals. But this was the end of my time with Judy and I wanted to enjoy it as long as I could.
One night before I left for Philly, Steven and I were alone in the Kent Street apartment. He wanted to show me how to shoot coke.
“Have you ever done it?” he asked.
“Never,” I said. “You actually put a needle in your arm, like with heroin?”
“Yeah, it’s the ultimate high. You gotta try it.”
I hated needles. The whole shooting-up thing turned my stomach. But after Steven’s selling job, I was up for it.
“You’re gonna love it,” he said. “Watch me first.”
I sat and observed. He was fastidious about the process. He painstakingly sterilized the needle and spoon. He placed a tiny amount of coke in the spoon and, as a final precaution, heated it up before injecting me. Within twenty seconds, the top of my head turned into a blinding light. The rush of euphoria was far too intense. My heart felt like Man O’ War’s hoofs galloping across the finish line. I started to grit my teeth. Steven saw that I wasn’t having fun.
“Maybe I gave you too much,” he said.
A few days later I was in Philly with Judy. I went to her cabaret shows every night, but after the third or fourth performance I got a little bored. Judy was onstage and I was alone in her dressing room when I noticed a vial containing a few grams of pure coke. The stuff looked like ice crystals. I glanced down at her trusty doctor’s bag and noticed some opened syringes. The devil on my shoulder whispered, “Give it a try. This time you’ll love it.” I heeded the devil and went through all the motions Steven had taught me, taking care with each step. I don’t know whether it was my needle phobia or injection inexperience, but I somehow turned myself into a blood donor. Blood was spurting everywhere—my clothes, the counter, the floor. I made one horrible goddamn bloody mess.
When Judy arrived, her first concern was for me. “Did you hurt yourself?”
When I told her what I had tried, for the first and only time she raised her voice at me.
“Why the fuck would you do that?” she yelled.
She quickly saw that I didn’t need to be told that I’d made a mistake. She apologized for her outburst and helped me clean up the mess. That was it for shooting up. I never shot up again, in spite of the fact that people thought you needed needles to do heroin. Needles and I don’t mix.
My last days with Judy were bittersweet. After her engagement in Philly, we drove back to Kent Street, where she stayed with me for a few days. I asked if she could stay a few days longer. I was feeling twinges of love.
“Come on, Joe,” she said, “I have my career and my boyfriend. You’ve known about that from that start. Besides, what do you expect me to do—live in your funky apartment and have babies?”
It seemed a little harsh. My heart was a little broken. The lease on her Caddy wasn’t up, so I had the use of her fancy car to console me. After dropping her at the airport, I drove up the back ramp of the Boston Garden to meet the band. I hadn’t been to rehearsals for weeks. I’d been on a grand adventure. The thought of all that stimulation—sexual and chemical—had me in a deeply reflective state of mind. I had aged at least ten years. When I got to the rehearsal space I figured the guys would be glad to see me, but all I got were dirty looks.
Before Judy, I had embraced only two of the three pillars of the unholy trinity of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Judy provided the sex part with such intensity that I felt like I’d made up for lost time. Many men—myself included—harbor fantasies of such affairs. A free-spirited woman with an affinity for unabashed sex and good coke may be seen as a gift from the heavens. The Judy Carne chapter was short but powerful. Soon after she left, another woman took her place and stayed. That surprised me, delighted me, and ultimately drove me to the brink. It was the start of a new chapter, one in which massive success and spectacular failure fought for center stage.
MAKE IT
In many ways, moving to Kent Street marked the start of a new chapter. For the first time, Steven and I were living together alone. This allowed us to become closer friends. Using old barn wood, Henry Smith transformed what otherwise would have been a dreary basement apartment into a work of art. In addition to the bedrooms there was a hangout room, where we’d throw small parties, and a kitchen with floor-to-ceiling windows for fresh air and lots of natural light. Ever resourceful, Henry even found a way to jerry-rig the fuse box so we never got an electricity bill. Our across-the-alley neighbors were navy guys whose ship had been dry-docked. With plenty of time on their hands, they’d come over and party with us.
In contrast to 1325, with its open-door policy, Kent Street was a lower-key scene. Tucked away in that basement, it didn’t even have a number on the door. It was an out-of-the-way hideaway that not everyone knew about. Kent Street was where everything changed between me and Elyssa, after years of maintaining a platonic friendship.
Steven and Elyssa had their own friendship and connection from childhood, a kind of kissing-cousin playful rapport. For my part, I had always desired her while respecting the friends-only boundary she had established from the start. When she broke up with Joe Jammer, her guitar-playing boyfriend, I renewed my hopes that she might turn my way. But it didn’t happen. I was just glad that we were friends. Besides, given the fact that Boston is a hot college town, I was not lacking in female companionship.
Then came the night when, after a local Aerosmith gig, she came back to Kent Street with Steven and me. All three of us were surprised when we woke up the next morning with the realization that during the night things had been radically altered. Elyssa had come to my room and slept in my bed. We became lovers. For me this represented a dream come true. Elyssa was both a cool chick and a hot pistol, a woman beautiful enough to find work as a model. She also possessed a quick wit. With her acid tongue, she had no reservations about saying anything to anyone. When she was on, she could be really funny.
From then on we were a couple. Three or four nights a week she’d come to Kent and spend the night. On one of those nights Steven had to bang on the thin wall that separated his bedroom from mine and yell, “Keep it down in there.” Three months later, Elyssa and I moved into an apartment on Beacon Street. Later we moved to a larger place in Brookline where, incidentally, Maxanne Sartori, the DJ who’d proved so critical to our career, lived next door. It was there that I turned the extra bedroom into a practice room with a little four-track recorder.
In 1972, Aerosmith cut our first record—a learning experienc
e. I’d never been in a recording studio before, and this little one at the far end of Newbury Street—Intermedia—had probably just been converted from eight to sixteen tracks. My main concern was getting the sound right. I wanted our stuff to sound real—live and loud. I wasn’t interested in fancy. We were, after all, a garage band, and I wanted a garage band vibe. What I quickly learned, though, was that a recording studio can be cruel: It spits out exactly what you put in.
Columbia told us that our producer was Adrian Barber. He had a good reputation because of his work on the early Cream records. In some ways this was the easiest record we made and in other ways the hardest—easiest because we were playing songs we’d been rehearsing and performing for two years; hardest because we didn’t know what we were doing. I figured that Barber would push a few buttons and that what we played would come out sounding like a record. Wrong. Our playing was tight, yet too tight. We sounded neither spontaneous nor explosive, two of our best qualities. My attempts to explain this to Barber went in one ear and out the other. It wasn’t entirely his fault. I didn’t have the right technical vocabulary to say what needed to be said. In the end, Barber and his assistants simply set up mics, got an acceptable take, and moved on. After each take, Steven and I sat behind the board, trying to learn as much as we could, but Adrian had no interest in conducting a class in recording.
