Joe Perry has recalled the time he saved a decapitated electric guitar from being unceremoniously discarded by Steven Tyler – in the middle of an Aerosmith gig.
In the new issue of Guitar World, Perry takes readers through his guitar gear history, shining the spotlight on a few of his favorite instruments.
One of the guitars that gets an honorable mention is his Gibson Les Paul Junior DC from the mid 1950s. Specifically, the one with the insane pearl fretboard inlay and eye-popping body artwork.
As Perry explains, he actually had two LP Juniors – one of which almost met a grisly end at the hands of Tyler, after a rather gruesome injury that led to the “killer” guitar going sans headstock.
“I actually had two of them in the mid-’70s, like the ones Johnny Thunders and Leslie West played. They’re killer guitars,” Perry says. “It’s just volume, tone and a P-90, and it screams. I was lucky enough to get two of them.
“We were doing a show at a festival and I threw this thing up in the air at the end of a song,” he continues. “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?’
“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. [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.”
Despite Tyler’s attempts to discard the injured Les Paul Junior, Perry’s rescue mission was a success, and the guitar made a full recovery. In fact, it came out the other end with some fancy new additions – and he still uses it to this day.
“I had some marble gargoyles in the backyard of the house I was living in, and I took some Polaroid photos of them and sent them to Gruhn Guitars in Nashville to see if we could incorporate them,” Perry remembers.
“A lot of people think the picture on there is a decal, but it’s all mother-of-pearl inlay work, and it’s still a killer guitar. It sounds great, and it’s one that comes to the studio with me as well as on the road.”
Elsewhere in his Guitar World interview, Perry looks back on the painful memory of selling his ’Burst – and why he’ll never forget the moment it came back to him… via Slash.
For more from Perry, plus new interviews with Alter Bridge’s Mark Tremonti and Myles Kennedy, and a tribute to the legendary Bob Weir, pick up issue 602 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.
