Joe Perry (musician)

Early life (1950–1970)[edit]

Joseph Anthony Pereira was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts,^[2] and grew up in Hopedale, Massachusetts. His father was an accountant of Portuguese descent from Madeira, and his mother was a high school gym teacher of Italian descent.^[11]


At a very young age, Perry found himself drawn to the ocean. His dream was to one day become a marine biologist and follow in the footsteps of his hero, Jacques Cousteau.^[12] His grades at Hopedale Junior Senior High School were not good, and his chances of eventually going to college were fading. At one point, his parents even tried enticing him with a promise that if he worked to get his grades up, he might be able to intern for a summer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod. However, Joe's academic struggles continued, and in his junior year, his parents made the decision to withdraw him from Hopedale and enroll him at an all-boys preparatory school, Vermont Academy. The boarding school, which housed around 200 young men, was located in Saxtons River, a small town in southern Vermont. The teenaged Joe Perry was not very happy with this plan. It was his parents' hope that, with their son actually living at the school and being embedded in such an educational environment, he would be able to focus more on learning and bring his grades up to an acceptable college entry level.


Many years later, in his memoir, Rocks: My Life In and Out of Aerosmith, Perry wrote about his self-professed learning difficulties during his school years and how it was actually the result of his having ADHD, a condition that had remained undiagnosed until recently. He spoke about it while discussing the book in a 2014 interview with J.C. Macek for PopMatters: "It was looked at as a discipline problem when I was in school. And certainly, over the years, after I left school, I had forged my way into this thing called rock 'n' roll and it was less of an issue." However, Perry now considers the possibility that the learning disability was something of a double-edged sword for his career: "I'm starting to realize that in some ways it's helped my guitar playing and it's hurt my guitar playing in the way that I kind of learned certain things and my ability to retain certain things."^[13]


The time Perry spent at Vermont Academy was vastly different from what his parents had envisioned for him, and it turned out to be an experience that would forever alter the trajectory of his life. Living there was nothing like what Joe had been accustomed to, coming from such a sheltered small town like Hopedale. The students who attended this prep school were from all over the world. Many of them lived in major metropolitan cities like Los Angeles and New York, and unlike Perry, they had been living right in the middle of the "sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll" culture of the late 1960s: "After vacations, guys would come back with bits and pieces of different cultures", Perry was quoted as saying in an interview with the Burlington Free Press. "It was a real education for me and not the kind of learning they (his parents) sent me there for."^[14]


His classmates introduced him to a whole new world, and he soon started discovering things like The Village Voice, the first underground newspaper to extensively cover American culture. However, it was his exposure to this new music that would be the heaviest influence on him. It was so different from anything he had ever heard before. Perry had actually taken up the guitar at the age of ten, and even though he is left-handed, he learned to play with his right.^[11] He said in 2014 that a substantial early influence on his music was the Beatles: "The night The Beatles first played The Ed Sullivan Show, boy, that was something. Seeing them on TV was akin to a national holiday. Talk about an event. I never saw guys looking so cool. I had already heard some of their songs on the radio, but I wasn't prepared by how powerful and totally mesmerizing they were to watch. It changed me completely. I knew something was different in the world that night."^[15] After hearing the music his classmates were listening to, he found himself becoming even more obsessed with his playing. He would sit in his room for hours, lifting the needle off a record that was playing. He then would try to drop it back down in the same spot, so it would be perfectly in sync with the riff he was playing on his own guitar.


Vermont Academy was where he heard Jimi Hendrix for the first time. It was also where he first heard British rock bands like the Who, the Kinks, and the Yardbirds – the band responsible for one of Aerosmith's first and most iconic covers, "Train Kept a Rollin".^[16] It was where Joe Perry went from dreaming about being a marine biologist to dreaming about being in a band like The Yardbirds. Perry said: "This band called the Yardbirds had a sound like I had never heard before, they had guitars that sound like nothing I'd ever heard before. The Stones were pushing the edge with distorted guitars. That was a big influence on me."^[17]