Rocks
My Life in and Out of Aerosmith
1 of 1 copy available
Before the platinum records or the Super Bowl half-time show or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Joe Perry was a boy growing up in small-town Massachusetts. He idolized Jacques Cousteau and built his own diving rig that he used to explore a local lake. He dreamed of becoming a marine biologist. But Perry's neighbors had teenage sons, and those sons had electric guitars, and the noise he heard when they started playing would change his life.
The guitar became his passion, an object of lust, an outlet for his restlessness and his rebellious soul. That passion quickly blossomed into an obsession, and he got a band together. One night after a performance he met a brash young musician named Steven Tyler; before long, Aerosmith was born. What happened over the next forty-five years has become the stuff of legend: the knockdown, drag-out, band-splintering fights; the drugs, the booze, the rehab; the packed arenas and timeless hits; the reconciliations and the comebacks.
Rocks is an unusually searching memoir of a life that spans from the top of the world to the bottom of the barrel—several times. It is a study of endurance and brotherhood, with Perry providing remarkable candor about Tyler, as well as new insights into their powerful but troubled relationship. It is an insider's portrait of the rock and roll family, featuring everyone from Jimmy Page to Alice Cooper, Bette Midler to Chuck Berry, John Belushi to Al Hirschfeld. It takes us behind the scenes at unbelievable moments such as Joe and Steven's appearance in the movie of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (they act out the murders of Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees).
Full of humor, insight, and brutal honesty about life in and out of one of the biggest bands in the world, Rocks is "well-paced, well-plotted...a mini-masterpiece" (The Boston Globe).
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Creators
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Publisher
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Awards
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Release date
October 7, 2014 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781442377493
- File size: 413289 KB
- Duration: 14:21:01
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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July 14, 2014
In this rock and roll memoir, Aerosmith’s lead guitarist tells the old story of the rise and fall of a guitar hero, although in Perry’s case, the star rises again. Born in a Massachusetts suburb in the 1950s, Perry struggled with a learning disability. Chuck Berry gave him a role model; the guitar, an outlet. To the dismay of his professional parents, he dropped out of high school and knocked around in various bands until he formed Aerosmith. The band became a major 1970s hard-rock group before drug abuse, bickering, and bad management tore it apart. Yet after the breakup, a clean and sober Aerosmith rose again, leaving its mark on the MTV generation. Perry provides evocative portraits of his very American youth wandering through the woods with a BB rifle and water-skiing on Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire, and his stint as a factory worker for Draper Industries. The years of rock and roll notoriety are standard issue—drugs, partying, bad decisions—although the story shines on those rare occasions when Perry details the nuts and bolts of song making. Later chapters covering the manipulations of a Svengali-like producer have their own allure, as do the discussions of the complexity and expense of producing hits. Legal issues and diplomacy might moderate the narrative, but Perry’s book will strike gold with every Aerosmith fan.
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