With Aerosmith's live work sidelined by the coronavirus — Joe Perry is slowly acclimating to being a guy who stays home. Perry, who in recent years has been working nearly non-stop with Aerosmith, the Hollywood Vampires, and his solo band, being a homebody is proving to be as relaxing as it is confusing.
Ultimate Classic Rock reported the guitarist called in to Boston's WBUR and offered up his thoughts about the ongoing pandemic: “I would say this is as close to a world war as you could get, in a lot of ways. If you tick off the boxes, it is a world war. Basically, it has shut down the touring business for an indefinite period of time. As soon as I realized we weren’t gonna be playing for at least months, if not a year, it was almost like I felt like I was on vacation for the first time in 30 years. I didn’t have to think (when I got home), 'Well, I don’t need to unpack my bags because I’m leaving in a week.'”
He touched upon how he and Aerosmith would respond if venues suddenly gave bands the all-clear to hit the road, admitting, “If they somehow wanted to open the shows — and I doubt they would do it — we wouldn't push our luck. We also feel like we don't want to be the ones responsible, the ones to say to people, 'It's okay to come in. Take your chances. Wear masks. Come in and rock out!'”
Perry went on to say that he believes we're all still a while away from returning to a normal concert-going experience: “I don't see 5,000 people in an arena or theater. It's too contagious. It doesn't take much to pass it from one place to another. It would take a lot to get me on a plane to Vegas at this point. We’re pretty healthy as far as 70-year-olds go. Whatever we do onstage, with Steven (Tyler), as physical as he is, that stuff doesn’t bother us, but it definitely puts more pressure on your immune system, and we’re in that (danger) zone.”
Joe Perry recently explained to us that early on he realized that Aerosmith provided a very specific thing for rock fans: “I always felt after the first generation went around and we started seein' the audience change from being our age to the next, I realized that we had to stick to our guns and it wasn't gonna be any, like, I mean all of a sudden punk is there, or disco, or whatever. Does that mean we gotta change our whole thing? It was kinda, like, 'We're gonna do our stuff.' I mean the first time was saw Kiss, we saw Kiss go down in the most amazing way. The audience loved 'em. So, we just stuck to our guns and kept writing songs and turned the guitars up.”
