The only singer Joe Perry loved as much as Steven Tyler: “He’s not interested in ego”
Sometimes you take a look at a rock group and think that they’re bound to have had several personnel changes over the years due to the amount of huge personalities within their ranks, but with Aerosmith, they’ve remarkably managed to keep a relatively similar lineup since forming.
Everyone who appeared on the band’s debut album is still there, which is a remarkable feat considering they’ve been active since 1973. Many bands will have experienced plenty of permanent departures in this sort of lengthy timeframe, or even in some circumstances had to deal with the unfortunate passing of a member or two, but Aerosmith are still intact in the same incarnation they were when they debuted over 50 years ago.
Granted, some individuals have left and returned in that space of time, but what’s ultimately kept them together is a strong bond and a musical kinship that can’t be replaced, and while they’ve not released any new material since 2012, you’d imagine that Aerosmith will remain together with this version of the lineup until one member is forced to quit or passes away, and that one departure would spell the end.
You might think that frontman Steven Tyler would perhaps have had a massive ego on him that was hard to navigate, and this is perhaps what drove guitarist Brad Whitford to leave for three years at the start of the 1980s, eventually rejoining at the same time that Joe Perry was reinducted into the band.
Like Whitford, Perry was there at the start, and even though he left in 1979 for five years, he was eventually drawn to come back into the fold, and remains there to this day as the lead guitarist of the band he was an integral part of the formation of.
However, this hasn’t stopped him from working on other projects, and most recently, the studio inactivity of Aerosmith has led him to end up joining Alice Cooper to form his star-studded supergroup, Hollywood Vampires.
Hollywood Vampires is evidently a different beast from being in Aerosmith, but it’s also significantly different for Cooper as well, and Perry claimed in a 2025 interview with Guitar Player that working alongside him is refreshing when you compare it to what he’s been used to in his main project. “He didn’t have to put on that persona,” Perry said of Cooper. “He got a chance to just be a real rock singer and talk to the audience, so it was a whole different thing for him.”
He continued by saying that being a larger-than-life personality isn’t something that Cooper indulges in, and that the end product is what he cares about most. “The process of making albums with Alice was really easy,” he claimed. “He’s not interested in ego; his ego is in his back pocket… for him, it’s about whatever is best for the band, it’s a reflection of his personality, and he’s just a really good guy… Of all the lead singers that I’ve worked with, I have to say that he’s neck and neck in terms of most fun, and that’s not to cast aspersions on some of the other guys… He’s just got a great sense of humour.”
While he would undoubtedly have had a fantastic five decades working alongside Tyler in Aerosmith, something that he evidently still cherishes to this day, having someone completely different like Cooper to bounce ideas off of would have been a breath of fresh air for someone who has, for the most part, been a loyal servant to one particular project throughout his career.
