Joe Cool

A lot of women would probably like to say they’ve spent the past few weeks in bed with Joe Perry—and I’ve done it … with his autobiography, that is.

What a cool dude. It’s less a tell-all bio than it is a tell-all-like-it-is bio. He doesn’t exaggerate for effect, neither does he pass judgment on his bandmates (particularly, the wild and crazy Steven Tyler), but he does say what he thinks. It’s more than he’s said in forty years; he’s as famous for his silence as he is for shooting lightning from his guitar, so reading about Aerosmith’s volatile history from his point of view was a gift of no small value. He’s honest, too, about his relationship with drugs, with his family, and with the music biz. A smart, smart man. Truly, you’d never know from interviews how deeply he runs; he’s not the most articulate guy on the planet, but as with most introverts, he’s much more eloquent in writing. It helps that he had a coach in David Ritz, but his voice is definitely present and he gets his point across in straight-shooter fashion.

Now more than ever, I like to read about my heroes. How they were as kids, what they dreamed and how they fit—or didn’t fit—in. Mr. Perry’s story had me shaking my head: young Joe wanted to be a marine biologist except that he came with a learning disability that messed up his grades and drove him to quit school two weeks before graduation because he knew he couldn’t survive college. Music, however, had been his passion practically from the cradle, though he was born to accountant and gym teacher parents. So where did he come from? Clearly he was meant to walk a particular path, hard as it has been; he’s as surprised as anyone that he lived to tell the tale, but his life turned out so vastly different from the way he envisioned it through a diving mask that it just makes me wonder …

We walk the path we have come here to walk. Markers are put in place to guide us, and we do have a say in how we get where we end up, but even if we’re not all following our bliss, we are working to plan. That plan is to experience what we agreed to experience before we stepped into this dimension. Joseph Anthony Perry did not set out to become “Mister Joe-fuckin’-Perry” of Toxic Twin notoriety and global rock star fame, but it’s obvious to me that marine science was going to distract him from the lessons he came to learn, the people he was meant to meet, and the fans he was meant to inspire

Twists and turns are universal to us all. Dark matter carries us between the stars, through the asteroid fields and into orbit around our individual suns; though we can’t see it, we are nonetheless moved by it, some to stellar status and some to humbler, but no less powerful, effect. Maintaining your cool throughout the journey takes monumental effort, but man, the lead guitarist from the most dysfunctional rock band in history has done it.

Rock on, Joe.