ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON AUG. 13, 1993
By Steve Newton
Vancouverites may wonder what it is about this town that makes a big-time Yankee rock band like Aerosmith want to come all the way from Boston to make records here. It is the scenery? The night-life? The days when it doesn’t rain?
When Joe Perry calls from San Francisco, enroute to a gig at the Pacific Coliseum on Saturday (August 14), it’s time to find out for sure.
“People have always asked that,” explains the swarthy guitar hero, “and it’s not the fact that you have Robson Street and the Bread Garden. I like those places–and the view, and the air, and running through Stanley Park–but what it really is is the people. I mean, Little Mountain is a good studio, but a studio is a studio, and what they do have is the people who make us feel comfortable and help us get what we’re after.”
Although Perry also points to the work of engineers Mike Fraser and Ken Lomas, producer Bruce Fairbairn gets most of the credit for helping Aerosmith get what it wants in the studio. As well as helming the group’s latest chartbuster, Get a Grip, Fairbairn put the magic touch on 1989’s Pump (which won a Grammy for best rock performance for “Janie’s Got a Gun”) and 1987’s platinum comeback album, Permanent Vacation.
“He kind of lets us do what we do best,” Perry says of the Fairbairn connection. “He helps us clear away the chaff and really focus on what the strength are. And he isn’t afraid to tell us what he thinks about what works and what doesn’t. A lotta times, especially with a band like ours, theres a real danger of people comin’ in and goin’, ‘Wow! That’s great guys,’ ’cause they don’t wanna upset us or piss us off. But Bruce doesn’t have any compunctions about comin’ and sayin’, ‘That sucks, guys.’
“And he’s also a musician,” adds Perry, “so he comes and throws in ideas and a lot of off-the-wall things. Like for Pump we talked about doin’ all the odd instruments, and he said ‘Well, I was listening to the radio the other day and I heard this guy [Vancouver multi-instrumentalist] Randy Raine-Reusch. Let’s give him a call.’ So he facilitates that kinda stuff and becomes like part of the band for a while.”
Although it might seem that a wealthy group such as Aerosmith (35 million units sold) has nothing but fun when it comes time to visit its favourite Canadian city and do some recording, that’s not the case. As Perry relates, the making of Get a Grip was no holiday in the sun,.
“We were workin’ so hard we never went out,” he says. “I didn’t even go to the movies when I was there, I was at Little Mountain every night. In fact, we wanted to go and visit [Vancouver songwriter] Jim Vallance in his new studio, but we didn’t even get a chance to do that till the day we were leaving.”
From the killer sound of Get a Grip, all those hours locked away at Little Mountain Sound’s West 7th locale were worth it. More than any of the other made-in-Vancouver releases, Get a Grip captures the raw, gritty feel that so many Aerosmith fans went crazy for in the mid-’70s.
“It kinda feels like that’s where the band is goin’,” says Perry of the return to the Rocks-era sound. “The first song we wrote for the record was ‘Fever’, and that was the kinda flavour that it was goin’ towards. But it’s not so much that we tried to get back to what the ’70s sound of Aerosmith was, as just to get to the kind of music that we love to play.”
In the late’ 70s, Aerosmith’s much-publicized battles with drugs and alcohol–which led to Perry and singer Steven Tyler being touted as “the Toxic Twins”–nearly finished the band off. Perry and co-guitarist Brad Whitford left the group to pursue solo projects, and drug-addled Tyler carried on with replacement players for the uneven Rock in a Hard Place.
But looking back, Perry doesn’t blame rock ‘n’ roll for his life-threatening dance with dope.
“I don’t think that rock ‘n’ roll ever got me into drugs,” he says. “I definitely was a candidate before I was doin’ rock ‘n’ roll. I think what it allowed me to do was have the money to buy the best drugs. It just happens that in that lifestyle you’re kinda expected to do it. If you want to spend the day sleeping off a hangover you can get away with it, and if you want to spend the day goin’ out and tryin’ to cop drugs, you can do it. Because nobody expects much from you until you walk out on stage at nine o’clock at night.
“But I like to think that rock ‘n’ roll was the first drug I ever took,” adds Perry. “It made me feel like I never felt before, so ultimately that’s the drug I’m ending up with, because it’s an instant attitude change for you. If’ I’m having a bad day and I want to change that, I can put on some music and it helps, ya know.”
The very first band to give Perry a serious rock ‘n’ roll buzz was the early Fleetwood Mac, with Peter Green on guitar. He also cites the Jeff Beck Group, the Who, Zeppelin, and the Beatles as having been strong influences. But what bands get him cranked up in 1993?
“Well, the Yardbirds and old Fleetwood Mac,” he says with a chuckle. “And I really miss Stevie Ray Vaughan, the stuff he left us is great. There aren’t that many new bands that I’ll sit down and put their record on, but it’s really interesting what they do. You know, Pearl Jam and Nirvana and Soundgarden–all those bands. Alice in Chains. They’ve got a really good sound, and most of them have a melody you can hum to, ya know.”
Megadeth, another of today’s most popular hard-rock bands, isn’t one that gets the friendly thumbs-up from Perry these days. That group was opening for Aerosmith until a few weeks ago, but the two acts parted ways on less than good terms.
“For some reason they weren’t too happy with the, uh, accommodations,” says Perry. “We gave Dave Mustaine, who’s the leader of Megadeth, the same stuff that we gave Axl Rose and the Black Crowes and Skid Row and all the other bands that have opened for us, but for some reason he didn’t think that it was enough. He felt that he should be co-headlining the shows, and [there was] just a whole bunch of stuff that he decided he wanted to change after they came on the tour with us. He just wasn’t happy about what was goin’ on, I guess.
“But Jackyl is workin’ out great,” say Perry of the band’s current warmup act. “They’re like a real basic, hard-rock rock ‘n’ roll band, than they have a good sense of humour–they bring the chain-saw out eery night, and the audiences really enjoy it. So there’s no bullshit with those guys. They’re havin’ a good time.”
To hear the full audio of my 1993 interview with Joe Perry–and my 1988 and 2010 interviews with him as well–subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 500 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with rockers since 1982.
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