JOE PERRY - Leavin' Steven!
by Martin Popoff

Aerosmith is on some sort of one year break, but fortunately, no-longer-toxic twin Joe Perry's got the rock 'n' rolls again, unleashing a bluesy, slide guitarin' self-titled solo record that shakes the roots much like Aerosmith's last record, the experimental and tribute-like Honkin' On Bobo, did - largely to fan indifference, the elephant in the room being disappointment in that the lion's share of the records was covers.

"I'm pretty sure I've played everything in one form or another for the guys in the band," figures Perry, on whether any of the garagey traditional rockers on Joe Perry had ever been proposed as Aerosmith titles. "A song like 'Hold On Me', I think I've had that, with lyrics as well, and it sounded like it sounds now, when I played it for them. And then there are other things, like 'Shakin' My Cage', where actually, just that first initial guitar riff, I had a different arrangement and a different song and with no lyrics or anything, that we actually worked on for Honkin' On Bobo, and it just never gelled. Sometimes you just throw it against the wall and if it's right, it sticks. If it doesn't, it doesn't, and that's just the process you go through to write songs. You try stuff out and sometimes you end up with something that is worthy of a second listen and sometimes you don't. In the case of that song, we worked on it and it just never fell into place. So I just took that initial riff and built a totally different song around it. So, yes, a few of them have been exposed to the band, and for various reasons they didn't get used, or there might not have been room on the record."

"Then a song like 'Ten Years', I never really put that out there as a song for the band to play. It's too personal and too much of a family heirloom, so to speak. But I can give you another little anecdote. I had the music for 'Lonely', which I actually had the chorus for. But I didn't have a verse or a real arrangement, and then one night, probably in August or September, there was a commercial on TV that had the Johnny Cash song, 'I've Been Everywhere', (sings it). That was on a commercial, and I heard it real late at night, and I said, wow, that's a real cool premise for a song, so that's kinda where the lyrics for 'Lonely' came from - I've been everywhere too."

JOE PERRY - Leavin' Steven! Page 2