The wild tale of Joe Perry’s personal cocaine roadie
Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, a tale as old as time, the three pillars that keep the notorious genre standing, and a way of life that Aerosmith were happy to live by.
Aerosmith was never an easy band to be in. One of the most important things that the majority of artists keep close to their chest is authenticity, and it was generally the case that their said authenticity was frequently called into question. Whenever people listened to Aerosmith, regardless of what kind of style or sound the band were going for, they were often criticised for ripping off other musical outfits, one of the biggest of which was The Rolling Stones.
“We’ve always just played our music and haven’t given a shit. Still, the ‘Cheap imitation of The Rolling Stones’ criticism was constant. And it hurt for the first couple of years,” said Steven Tyler when discussing the frequent comparisons. “It was constantly Mick Jagger this and Mick Jagger that, that I copied him, and Janis Joplin too. Mick was the cheapest, easiest shot. ‘Well, he looks like him, so let’s write about that’.”
Guitarist Joe Perry agreed that the comparisons were deeply frustrating for a band that put a great deal of effort into constantly championing the styles and sounds that they grew up adoring and trying their best to create something unique and exciting, firmly believing that anybody who took such pot shots wasn’t listening to their music.
“You could tell that they weren’t listening because we definitely weren’t sounding like The Stones,” said Perry, offering candidly, “We steal from everybody […] Amateurs copy and pros steal, and we’re professionals. We make no bones about the fact that we took from the people that came before us.”
Heaps of criticism aside, there is no escaping the fact that the band had a great deal of success. A lot of their big hits, such as ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’, ‘Love in an Elevator’ and ‘Dude Looks Like a Lady’, are all massively enjoyed by fans of rock music around the world. Not to mention, Aerosmith certainly enjoyed their success when it came around by holding up those three pillars of rock music and living their lives in line (pun intended) with them frequently.
One of the three factors that Aerosmith seemed attached to was drugs. Like the majority of rock bands who were touring during the 1970s and ‘80s, Aerosmith were taking drugs every night and allowed them to be a pivotal factor in their lives. In his book, Does This Noise In My Head Bother You? Tyler said that he estimated he would have spent around $6million on drugs. When this figure was put to Perry, he believed the lead singer was quite conservative in his estimation.
“Sounds a little low to me!” he said, “It’s really hard to say, I mean I know there were many months were I couldn’t tell you how much I spent back then”.
It’s true, Joe Perry had a real attachment to drugs, so much so that he hired his own personal cocaine roadie who would stand to the side of the stage and give the guitarist a line whenever he ventured over for “technical reasons”. The first time the roadie was brought up was in Tyler’s aforementioned book, and Perry confirmed it was true in an interview which followed.
You tend to hear a lot of stories about musicians who find innovative ways to take drugs when performing on stage. Some weren’t very subtle, others were a lot more secretive with their approach to such substances; however, it’s rare you hear of an artist hiring a stagehand to make taking drugs on stage all the more easy. After all, in Perry’s world, if you have to spend your time thinking about being in a world-famous rock band, you don’t have time to also think about where your drugs are and if they’re easily accessible.
“Yep,” he concluded, “We’ve done everything […] Stuff happens, man, and we’ve done it and managed to survive. We’re really lucky”.
