For guitarist Joe Perry, the thought of Launching a solo career was, by alternate degrees, an exciting and daunting prospect. The time was October 1979, and Perry had just quit Aerosmith after a decade on the road. The band’s bevy of rip snorting, high tensile, multi-platinum albums (Aerosmith, Get Your Wings, Rocks, Toys In The Attic and Draw The Line) had established Aerosmith as one the USA’s major hard rock attractions, their pre-eminent position on the touring circuit well confirmed.

For all that, 1979 had been a difficult year for Aerosmith. The much-delayed Night in the Ruts album had cost over US$1M to produce (most of it spent on wasted studio time). Although it reached US #14 when finally released in November 1979, it was the band’s least successful album in five years. Perry only played guitar on five of the album’s tracks, with the likes of Jimmy Crespo (his eventual replacement), Neil Thompson and Richie Supa contributing the missing guitar parts. In between attempts at recording, the band had spent much of the year touring heavily, working the US festival circuit alongside the likes of Ted Nugent, Cheap Trick and Thin Lizzy.

Needless to say, with such a heavy schedule taking it’s toll in combination with the prodigious drug and alcohol intake of various members, relationships within the band had been strained to breaking point. This period of dissent came to a head with the backstage row between Perry and lead singer Steven Tyler, which resulted in Tyler declaring “I’ll never play on stage with that guy again!”. To compound matters for Perry, the band’s managers had just handed him a $80,000 room service bill!

With no money, no band, no recording contract and no management to back him, Perry set about getting his solo off the ground. He guested on some sessions (David Johansen and Gene Simmons), assembled his new band, the Joe Perry Project, which comprised lead singer Ralph Mormon (ex- Daddy Warbux), bass player David Hull (ex-Dirty Angels) and drummer Ronnie Stewart, and launched himself on the Boston college and club circuit. At that stage the Joe Perry Project was something of a rough ‘n’ tumble affair, an undisciplined, raunchy bar-band playing a mix of Aerosmith song, R&B covers, and Perry originals in the same vein. Yet, playing the club circuit gave Perry the metaphorical shot in the arm needed it order to overcome his recent disenchantment, and to restore his zest for street-level rock ‘n’ roll.

By early 1980, Perry had negotiated a deal with Aerosmith’s label, Columbia Records, who supplied a modest budget for the band’s debut album. With veteran Aerosmith producer Jack Douglas at the controls, the band members entered The Hit Factory in New York; within sex weeks they had completed the album, and come in under budget to boot! Issued in March 1980, Let the Music do the Talking was brimful of exuberant, swaggering funky rock ‘n’ roll. If tracks like Let the Music do the Talking, Discount Dogs and Life at a Glance echoed Aerosmith’s brash, riff-heavy take on arena rock, they were all the more exciting for their fluent dynamics and barley contained rock energy. As the band’s sole guitarist, Perry also pulled out all the stops with his fiery licks on Conflict of Interest, Shooting Star, the funky R&B stomper Rockin’ Train and the whiplash instrumental Break Song. The band issued Let the Music do the Talking as a single, backed with the non-album cut Bone to Bone (an instrumental retake of a song previously recorded by Aerosmith for Night in the Ruts).

With moderate support from Columbia, and virtually no commercial airplay, the album managed to peak at #47 on the US chart, selling a more-than-respectable 250,000 copies in the process. By the stage the Joe Perry Project had hit the touring circuit across the USA. Unfortunately, with his excessive alcohol intake getting the better of him, the volatile Ralph Morman proved incompatible with the road. Notwithstanding his own legendary drug and alcohol abuse, Perry sacked Morman and replaced him with the untried Joey Mala (ex-Revolver) for the rest of the year.

With the band’s touring commitments out of the way by December, Perry found a permanent frontman in the shape of ex-balloon singer Charlie Farren. Farren was also an expert rhythm guitarist and songwriter, which helped lighten the load on Perry all round. Tuned to perfection after a year on the road, and primed to flashpoint by the arrival of Farren, the Joe Perry Project was bursting at the seams to record Plant’s mobile truck and producer/engineer Bruce Botnick, the band cut I’ve Got the Rock ‘n’ Rolls Again inside the elegant but decrepit Boston Opera House.

Despite its lowly chart placement of #100 (June 1981), the album remains the perfect synthesis of the Project’s primal bar-band chops, arena rock aspirations and finely honed sense of rock ‘n’ roll dynamics. Hull and Farren contributed a couple of blazing, yet accessible rockers apiece, including Buzz Buzz (Hull) and East Coast, West Coast (Farren) which were respectively lifted as the A and B-sides of the album’s single. Farren also co-wrote, with Perry, the title track and the suitably named No Substitute for Arrogance. As for Perry, he contributed two of his strongest compositions to that time in the bluesy Soldier of Fortune, and the astonishingly agile South Station Blues which had started out as a 30 second piece called Shit House Shuffle that Aerosmith used to loosen up with.

With the album failing to sell, and Perry falling deeper into debt, the only recourse was to go on the road, which the band did for the rest of the year (supporting the likes of Heart, ZZ Top and J. Geils Band). By early 1983, despite the rightness of the band’s playing. Farren, Hull, and Stewart had all handing in their notice, leaving Perry to pick up the pieces. When things fell into place, Perry described the new line-up (Cowboy Mach Bell on vocals, Danny Hargrove on bass and Joe Pet on drums) as a bunch of “young guys who don’t give a shit, like wild men, fuckin’ pirates. They just get in the van and go”.

Naturally it comes as no surprise that, in a respect of the legendary Aerosmith penchant for one- the-road excesses, the members of this Joe Perry Project are said to have gleefully abandoned all notions of decency. If the breathless reports of the day to be believed, a roaring drunk Bell took to periodically parading around in the nude, creating havoc. Meanwhile, Perry was not unfamiliar with the Keith Richards state of rock ‘n’ roll revelry mode – pumped full of sufficient substances to not always know what was going on around him. The band’s roadies also joined in the rabble-rousing all of which combined to get the Project banned from a string of Holiday Inn and locked up in jail on several occasions.

The stuff of which rock legends are made, to be sure, but no necessarily conductive to business (even show business). Amongst all the road madness, the band’s tour manager, Tim Collins, managed to secure the Project a new record deal with MCA. This last ditch effort to keep the band in the public eye failed, with the 1983 MCA album Once A Rocker, Always A Rocker falling by the wayside unpromoted and unheard.

It barely sold 40,000 copies. It’s certainly the band’s most uneven album. Nevertheless its raw, under-produced and basically live sound helped lift tracks like the neo-faces raunch of Black Velvet Pants, the riffy King of the Kings and a playful cover of the old T-Rex glam classic Bang a Gong (Get it On) out of the mire. Possibly the album’s prime cut is another of Perry patented blues shuffles, Never Wanna Stop, in which the guitar gets to show off his bottleneck slide technique to full advantage.

On the touring front, Perry’s former axe partner in Aerosmith, Brad Whitford, joined the project for a run of dates at the end of 1983. Having also left Aerosmith, and with his own Whitford St. Holmes Band failing to get off the ground. Whitford contributed an amazing burst of energy to the Project’s on-stage attack. Unfortunately, with no record company support forthcoming and the band’s reputation in tatters, Collins found it increasingly difficult to book gigs. The band continued to play intermittently into 1984, but by March it was all over for the Joe Perry Project. By then Perry (on the verge of being hounded into jail by the relentless I.R.S.) had patched up his differences with Steven Tyler, and the former Toxic Twins talked about getting back together.

The reformed (and drug-free) Aerosmith went on to unleash a string of hit albums (Permanent Vacation, Pump and Get A Grip, their first American #1) that saw them in direct competition with a bunch of newcomers they had influenced in the first place. Then, after 10 years with the Geffen label, Aerosmith returned to Columbia Records for a deal worth a staggering $30M. If the band’s hit-making wasn’t already confirmed, then the icing on the cake came in 1998 with the world-wide #1 smash hit I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing (from the feature film Armageddon).

As for the Joe Perry Project, all that remains are three underrated albums, a bunch of tightly coiled energetic rock songs (the best of which are compiled right here on this CD) and, no doubt, a mess of faded memories. The story of the Joe Perry Project is a classic tail of high hopes and expectations, of rock ‘n’ roll excesses, of excruciating lows and missed opportunities. Were it not Perry’s tenacious will to survive in the face of overwhelming odds, the this compilation may well no exist.

IAN McFARLANE, JANUARY 1999

Pictures from the album.

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