Rocks: My Life In and Out of Aerosmith

Joe Perry · David Ritz

Oct 2014 · Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

Joe Perry’s New York Times bestselling memoir of life in the rock-and-roll band Aerosmith: “An insightful and harrowing roller coaster ride through the career of one of rock and roll’s greatest guitarists. Strap yourself in” (Slash).

Before the platinum records or the Super Bowl half-time show or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Joe Perry was a boy growing up in small-town Massachusetts. He idolized Jacques Cousteau and built his own diving rig that he used to explore a local lake. He dreamed of becoming a marine biologist. But Perry’s neighbors had teenage sons, and those sons had electric guitars, and the noise he heard when they started playing would change his life.

The guitar became his passion, an object of lust, an outlet for his restlessness and his rebellious soul. That passion quickly blossomed into an obsession, and he got a band together. One night after a performance he met a brash young musician named Steven Tyler; before long, Aerosmith was born. What happened over the next forty-five years has become the stuff of legend: the knockdown, drag-out, band-splintering fights; the drugs, the booze, the rehab; the packed arenas and timeless hits; the reconciliations and the comebacks.

Rocks is an unusually searching memoir of a life that spans from the top of the world to the bottom of the barrel—several times. It is a study of endurance and brotherhood, with Perry providing remarkable candor about Tyler, as well as new insights into their powerful but troubled relationship. It is an insider’s portrait of the rock and roll family, featuring everyone from Jimmy Page to Alice Cooper, Bette Midler to Chuck Berry, John Belushi to Al Hirschfeld. It takes us behind the scenes at unbelievable moments such as Joe and Steven’s appearance in the movie of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (they act out the murders of Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees).

Full of humor, insight, and brutal honesty about life in and out of one of the biggest bands in the world, Rocks is “well-paced, well-plotted…a mini-masterpiece” (The Boston Globe).

Ratings and reviews

Maybe I'm just a sucker for the dirty details and bask in schadenfreude, watching the mighty fall. But I have always been a fan or Aerosmith, and with every fall I yearned for a revival. Yet in this book, I did not feel that same sense of pride, or even joy for the band as it played out. And while Steven's book went "balls to the wall" with odd, surreal tangents, filthy "true" stories, and sometimes - hurtful accusations, Joe's autobio comes across as a little too soft, and occasionally boring.

Great read but cannot see 90% of the pictures on my galaxy s8 plus. Bummer. Would be cool to bump into him in St A C L Key FL.

I enjoyed reading of Perry's passion as a young guitarist and his drive to play music. A little too much Tyler, but I guess that it couldn't be the story that it is without him.

About the author

Lead guitarist Joe Perry and singer Steven Tyler wrote the majority of the songs that form the backbone of Aerosmith’s catalogue. In 2013, they were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.