The time Joe Perry snapped the headstock of one of his favourite guitars: “Steven wanted to throw it into the audience – I had to wrestle him for it!”
Having spent over five decades on stage, Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry has seen just about everything a rock ‘n’ roll career can throw at him. But few moments have been as simultaneously horrifying and hilarious as the time one of his favourite guitars went airborne… and came down in pieces.
Speaking to Guitar World, Perry looks back on that chaotic night and the instrument at the centre of it: his black 1956 Gibson Junior double-cutaway with pearl inlays.
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“I’m pretty sure it’s a ‘56,” says the guitarist. “It’s one of those Juniors that started off with cherry stain, but it wasn’t a burst – it was just a cherry stain. It’s got one P90. I actually had two of them in the mid-Seventies, like the ones Johnny Thunders and Leslie West played. They’re killer guitars. It’s just volume, tone and a P90, and it screams. I was lucky enough to get two of them.”
That luck would soon be tested.
“We were doing a show at a festival and I threw this thing up in the air at the end of a song,” Perry recalls. “This was before wireless, so it went to the end of the patch cord and came down on the neck – and the headstock snapped off. I remember thinking as it was going up in the air, ‘Wow, I can’t believe it. That looks so cool.’ And then, on the way down, I was thinking, ‘Holy shit, what did I do?’ [Laughs]”
Things got even more chaotic when frontman Steven Tyler tried to toss the broken instrument into the audience.
“After it came down and was broken, Steven grabbed it and wanted to throw it out into the audience, so I had to wrestle him for it,” Perry laughs. “I knew we could fix it, you know? I got it back and gave the pieces to my guy, and the show went on.”
Elsewhere in the chat, Perry highlights some of his other favourites from his legendary collection of over 600 guitars. One standout is a custom Gibson BB King Lucille, designed in honour of his wife, Billie Paulette Montgomery.
“I got that in the ‘90s,” Perry explains. “The main reason for that guitar is that I love history, and I was looking back and fascinated by what they call ‘nose art’. Pilots would have artwork on the nose of their planes in World Wars I and II, and it would be pictures of their favourite movie starlet or their wife, and they’d name the plane after them. I thought, ‘Why not do that with my guitar?’”
The artwork, which features Billie’s face on the lower bout, was painted by Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer’s drum tech John Douglas. Perry remembers her reaction: “She had no idea this was going on! Billie just stood there for a second, and they came out with this guitar case and said, ‘Close your eyes.’ We opened it up, and she turned beet red.”
“Long story short, she wouldn’t come out when I’d put the guitar on; she’d kind of leave the side of the stage because she was so embarrassed about it. She’s not somebody who looks for the spotlight, but she got used to it,” says Perry.
The post The time Joe Perry snapped the headstock of one of his favourite guitars: “Steven wanted to throw it into the audience – I had to wrestle him for it!” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
