The Cleveland Plain Dealer
John Soeder
Joe Perry is holed up in a hotel room on the top floor of the Ritz-Carlton with a portable stereo blasting. The phone rings, but Aerosmith's lead guitarist doesn't answer it. Lost in the music, he taps a bare foot on the carpet instead.
A few minutes later, the phone rings again, to no avail. Perry remains fixated on "Heaven and Hell," a song off his new solo album, "Have Guitar, Will Travel." It comes out Tuesday.
"I write songs that make me feel good, songs that I'd want to hear if I were sitting in the audience," he says. "That's the bottom line: I'm a rock fan first."
It's mid-August when he pays an impromptu self-promotional visit to Cleveland, on his way back home to Boston. A week earlier, Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler fell off a stage runway in Sturgis, S.D., and injured his shoulder and head, which brought the band's co-headlining tour with ZZ Top to a grinding halt.
Two days after I meet Perry, Aerosmith's remaining tour dates are officially called off.
"We're still in shock," he says, gazing out a window toward the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Aerosmith was inducted in 2001. For the finale of this year's induction ceremony at Cleveland's Public Auditorium, Perry traded guitar licks onstage with Ron Wood, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck.
"Something always happens with Aerosmith," says Perry, 59.
"Something always happens to bring it back, too. It's been that way since the band first got together."
His thin, compact frame is folded into a desk chair, with a shock of gray punctuating his otherwise dark hair and chiseled face. He wears a lizard-skin jacket, a Longboat Key T-shirt and loose pants.
On the unmade bed is a paperback copy of "Crazy Horse: The Life Behind the Legend," a biography of the Sioux leader.
The weekend before Perry came here, he was in Chicago, where he jammed on back-to-back nights with Jimmy Buffett (Aerosmith and Buffett have the same manager) and Jane's Addiction (Perry and Jane's Addiction frontman Perry Farrell are pals).
"My head is still reeling," Perry says. "Anybody who can play 'Margaritaville' one night and 'Jane Says' the next night, you gotta figure he has his ear to the ground."
Filtered through Perry's heavy Beantown accent, the title of Buffett's greatest hit amusingly comes out: "MAHHH-ga-ree-ta-ville."
I ask Perry if it's reassuring to know there's a place for him in musical settings outside Aerosmith.
"I've always known on some level that I'd be able to go out and have a life away from Aerosmith," he says.
The band's hits range from "Dream On" in the '70s to "Love in an Elevator" in the '80s to "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" in the '90s. Aerosmith has managed to remain popular in the new millennium, too, scoring a Top 10 single with "Jaded."
Perry quit the group in 1979 and recorded three albums with his own band, the Joe Perry Project. He rejoined Aerosmith in 1984.
"When I left, I had no doubt I could do whatever I needed to do to make a living or be creative or get my ya-ya's out, so to speak, away from the band," he says.
"With our comeback, we were so busy trying to rebuild the band and rebuild our image. We did everything we could to bring it back. We didn't want to muck around with solo projects. . . . Now, I can have a solo career parallel to Aerosmith."
Perry released a self-titled solo album in 2005. His latest effort is more ambitious musically and heavier thematically.
"You have a lot more freedom when you can say, 'I like the way that song sounds, even if it's pretty dark and it doesn't fit alongside "Love in an Elevator," ' " he says.
When plans to record a new Aerosmith album were put on hold before the ill-fated tour, Perry got busy on "Have Guitar, Will Travel" in his own studio at home. The supporting cast includes a German singer who goes by the name of Hagen, discovered via YouTube by Perry's wife Billie.
Perry offers to let me hear some of his new songs, then goes fishing through his bags. He pops a CD-R of the stomping first single, "We've Got a Long Way to Go," into the stereo.
"Too loud?" he asks.
I shake my head. Coming from Perry, it seems like a purely rhetorical question anyway.
The guitar solo cooks, even if it's slightly unnerving listening to a Joe Perry solo when Joe Perry is sitting right next to you.
The private listening party continues with "Heaven and Hell," a 7-minute epic complete with twinkling glockenspiel. The lyrics reflect Perry's interest in metaphysical topics.
"If you believe in heaven, you have to believe in hell," he says. "There's no good without the bad."
I'm not sure how we got on the subject, but Perry mentions that when he was growing up, he always wanted to be a marine biologist.
He cues up a few other tunes, including the hard-rocking "Scare the Cat."
Perry hopes to promote "Have Guitar, Will Travel" with a Joe Perry Project tour. As far as his other band goes, Aersomith is set to get back in the saddle with two gigs in Hawaii later this month.
"I just take stuff as it comes," Perry says.
"I've been humbled enough times in my life to know I'm not in control. A lot of this stuff just happens. You can make the choice to take advantage of it, or you don't.
"I have to make music. That's what I do."
