Joe Perry Born: Aerosmith's Guitar Force Emerges

Joe Perry forged one of rock's most enduring guitar partnerships alongside Steven Tyler in Aerosmith, blending blues grit with arena-sized riffs across five decades. Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1950, he grew up listening to the blues and British Invasion bands that filtered through Boston radio. He met Tyler at a Sunapee, New Hampshire, ice cream parlor in 1969, and within a year they had formed Aerosmith and moved into a communal apartment in Boston's Allston neighborhood. The band's early albums, Toys in the Attic and Rocks, established them as America's answer to the Rolling Stones, with Perry's bluesy, swaggering guitar complementing Tyler's elastic vocals. "Walk This Way" and "Sweet Emotion" became classic rock staples. But drug addiction devastated the band in the late 1970s. Perry and Tyler were nicknamed the "Toxic Twins," and Perry left the band in 1979 to form the Joe Perry Project. The split lasted five years. Aerosmith reunited in 1984 and, improbably, staged one of rock's greatest comebacks. Their collaboration with Run-DMC on a 1986 remake of "Walk This Way" bridged the gap between rock and hip-hop, producing one of the first successful rock-rap crossovers in music history. The video received heavy MTV rotation and introduced both acts to audiences that had never heard them before. Perry and Tyler went on to produce multiplatinum albums through the 1990s, including Pump and Get a Grip, and Aerosmith headlined arenas worldwide for another three decades. Perry's guitar tone, built on Les Pauls run through Marshall amplifiers, influenced a generation of hard rock guitarists.