Joe Perry: Steven Tyler was kind of the local hero because he had the song on the jukebox at the hamburger place where I worked. And Tom [Hamilton] and I heard about him and he'd come up every summer with his band and play.
I remember them coming into the place where we worked ... it was kind of a soda fountain hamburger place, a summer kind of place. I used to do everything from sweep the floor to scrub the grill to make the fried clams and French fries. So I was working out back and they came in one day, him and his band. I guess that's how you were supposed to act when you had a rock band — dress like you came from Greenwich Village and be kind of loud. He's three years older than me, and when you're 16 or 17, that's a big difference, especially when he'd been in the recording studio and his band sounded great. His reputation preceded him. So when he came in he was clowning around, I remember they were sitting at a table down at the other end of the place and throwing food. I had to clean it up when they left.
Tom Hamilton: We used to play at the Barn. And the Barn was the Holy Grail. If you were in a band then, you wanted to play the Barn. It was the place where supposedly a lot of really bad things went on that your mother wouldn't want you to do. So of course we wanted to be there. And Joe and I had a band with a friend of ours named Pudge. Steven was a summer kid. He was from New York. He was in bands that were unbelievable. We used to sneak in to see them play at places that would just be so sold out, there wasn't a chance of getting a ticket. And they did their own songs, they did cover songs ... they covered Beatles and Stones songs and Yardbirds songs, and did them probably better than the original band. So here was this guy that everyone just assumed was going to be a monster someday. And in the meantime, Joe and I were listening to the Who, Ten Years After, Beatles, Stones, Yardbirds, Cream, Hendrix — just our total guitar heroes. And we would get up onstage and try to be that. As far as harmonic theory, and whether the notes were right, we weren't that worried about it. We were just worried about playing loud and fast.
Perry: All the guys in the band lived in one house together. Every room in the house was a bedroom, except the kitchen. So every room also doubled as something else. Tom's room had the piano in it. We weren't unlike so many other kids coming into Boston for school with so much idealism and being away from home for the first time, and living with a bunch of roommates, and seeing who you could meet ... who liked your kind of music, who else was in town, what other bands were playing. That's really what it was about. The only thing was, we didn't go to school. We partied. We were, hopefully, the band you came to hear to party and listen to. It was around the clock, pretty much. You never knew who was going to walk through the door next.
Brad Whitford: We fought always about the volume — every day at rehearsal, every show we did. It's too loud it's too loud it's too loud. And it probably was. The amplifiers were better than the PAs and the monitors. And it made it very difficult for Steven to have to sing in that environment. And we would have a lot of fights about it. Furniture would get thrown around the room. Joe and I might say, "Oh, it's not that loud," when we knew it was pretty loud.
Hey Webmasters! New Photo Album Service Launched - Check it out!
bravenet.com