Joe Perry on the origins of Aerosmith’s greatest guitar moments –and his 600-strong collection

Joe Perry is a guitar hero with a simple philosophy. “Guitar,” he says, “is a means to an end. So many players get hung up on technique, sometimes losing the forest for the trees. You can learn all these scales and tricks, but it only comes together if it’s something you want to hear again.

“I can appreciate all kinds of music and self-expression. It could be jamming in a band where you play one song for 45 minutes, like Jerry Garcia with the Grateful Dead. But for me, playing guitar is all about what serves the songs…”

As a founding member of Aerosmith – the self-styled Bad Boys of Boston, widely revered as America’s Greatest Rock ’N’ Roll Band – Joe Perry has played his part in some of the most iconic rock songs of all time. In the ’70s they gave us Dream On, Sweet Emotion and Back In The Saddle. In the ’80s, Dude (Looks Like A Lady) and Love In An Elevator.

And in both of those decades there was Walk This Way, originally recorded in 1975 and reborn in 1986 as a groundbreaking collaboration with Run-DMC, which became the first hip-hop single to reach the US top five and put Aerosmith on track for one of the most successful comebacks in the entire history of rock ’n’ roll.

It was way back in 1971 that the classic Aerosmith line-up was established, with Steven Tyler on vocals, Perry and Brad Whitford on guitars, Tom Hamilton on bass and Joey Kramer on drums.

Together, they defined the sound of American hard rock with albums such as Toys In The Attic and Rocks, and as Joe now recalls, the inspiration for having two guitar players in Aerosmith came from two influential British groups – the early Fleetwood Mac, led by Peter Green, and The Yardbirds.

“One of my favourite Yardbirds recordings is called Stroll On,” he says. “It was their version of Train Kept A-Rollin’, and it’s one of the few recordings with Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck playing together. I still get goosebumps when I hear that. The two guitars come in, and to me, that’s the ultimate – that’s rock ’n’ roll! It’s so cool to get two lead guitars together and not get in each other’s way. And even if you can’t tell who is playing, it doesn’t matter. That was always something that stuck with me…”

In turn, Perry and Whitford’s hard-rocking prowess would influence a generation of guitarists growing up in the ’70s, most notably Slash, who told Rolling Stone magazine of the moment the he first heard the Rocks album at the age of 14: “It hit me like a f*cking ton of bricks,” he said. “My life changed.”

In the same interview, Slash added: “When I was learning to play the guitar, Aerosmith gave me the shove. I identified with Joe Perry’s image, both visually and sound-wise. He was streamlined in a way that reminded me of Keith Richards, and had a careless guitar style that was really cool.”

As far as guitar playing goes, Joe Perry is an institution. With any number of Les Pauls, Strats or various off-kilter six-strings in hand, he has rocked and rolled for more than 50 years with Aerosmith – give or take a few years at the turn of the ’80s when he was out of the band after falling out with Steven Tyler.

But all good things must come to an end, and this year the band will resume their farewell tour, titled Peace Out. The tour began in 2023, only to be postponed after Tyler blew out his voice in just the third show.

In the ensuing hiatus, Joe kept busy with his other band, The Hollywood Vampires, fronted by Alice Cooper and featuring two other guitar players, Johnny Depp and Tommy Henriksen. But come September, with Tyler fully recovered, Aerosmith will be back in the saddle once again.

And as America’s Greatest Rock ’N’ Roll Band gears up for that last hurrah, Joe Perry has plenty to say for himself in this wide-ranging interview with Total Guitar. He talks about his evolution as a player and the music that inspired him; his creative partnerships with Brad Whitford and Steven Tyler; the key songs in Aerosmith’s career; and of course, the guitars…

What he says at the outset is that great guitar playing is all about open-mindedness. “It’s about when you think outside the box,” he says. “When you try things and fall into something inspiring, or when you play guitar and somebody says, ‘Well, this is the proper way to play it’, and then you think about it and go, ‘Oh, I never thought of playing it like that!’

“That’s why guitar sounds the way it does. It took a lot of rule-breaking back in the ’60s, and it still does. So there’s no point getting hung up on getting the right sound – unless it’s the sound you want, and it feels right and inspires you. Other than that, there are no wrong sounds, just the ones that inspire you to do something good…”

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

Let’s start with how the young Joseph Anthony Pereira learned to play guitar…

“My parents wanted me to play piano. It was like everybody had some musical instrument their parents wanted them to play, and mine gave me piano lessons. But that lasted like three months! I mean, rock ’n’ roll – that sound – was always in the back of my mind. I finally got an acoustic guitar in the early ’60s, and I played along with what was on the radio and then put it aside. But when The Beatles came along, I brought that guitar out and I started plinking away on it.”

As I understand it, you are naturally left-handed but learned to play with your right.

“I never knew that there was a left-handed guitar or that you could play left-handed. I remember when I got my first acoustic guitar, my first instinct was to put the pick in my left hand and the guitar neck in my right hand. But I had this instructional record, and it said, ‘Put the guitar neck in your left hand and the pick in your right hand’. So that’s what I did!

“At that point, I didn’t know that there were left-handed guitars or that you could play them that way. I was just young and following directions! And that was it. That’s how I ended up learning to play right?handed.”

What did the guitar mean to you?

“It was something I could always do that was mine. I loved rock ’n’ roll – something about it got me. But back then, rock ’n’ roll was the ‘Devil’s music’, you know? Certainly, pop music had guitar in it, but rock ’n’ roll was different.”

Once you came of age, what sort of local scene were you exposed to in New England?

“The little town I lived in [Hopedale, Massachusetts] was the exact opposite of what was going on in London in the early ’60s. One or two other guys played guitar, but that was it. Most of the other guys played pop songs at high school dances or local clubs.”

Eventually you hooked up with future Aerosmith bassist Tom Hamilton and formed The Jam Band. How did that happen?

“During the school year I’d be in Hopedale, which is like 45 minutes from Boston, and I had a band with group of friends there. We played in clubs, some dances. And one of the guys had an older brother who turned me onto a lot of great music.

“He had stacks of albums, like Elvis, blues, Chuck Berry, and the first live record I ever heard, The Kinks’ Live At Kelvin Hall. But my family was fortunate enough to have a little cottage up on a lake in New Hampshire. We’d go there every summer, and that’s where I met Tom.”

And that’s also where you met Steven Tyler?

“Yeah. I worked at a hamburger place, which is where all the kids liked to hang out. And one summer this guy Steven Tyler came in. He had a band up there, and I’d got the band together with Tom. I’d heard about Steven Tyler, heard his name. We never met, but we ran in some of the same circles for a couple of years. He saw my band play a couple of times.

“But the first time I really interacted with him was when he and his band came into that hamburger joint. They were all dressed like a New York band that was gonna make it. They were loud and doing what they thought rock bands did, and then they started having a food fight. And I remember having to clean up after it! I had to clean their f*cking whipped cream off the wall!”

Come Together

After that rather inauspicious beginning, how did that progress toward the earliest incarnation of Aerosmith?

“I don’t think Steven really took my band seriously. We covered some pretty heavy stuff, like The MC5, and we didn’t care about tuning our guitars. All we cared about was energy and rocking out! That’s not what Steven’s band was about. They would play Beatles songs, and they had harmonies.

“But one summer, I think it was 1970, his band broke up. Steven was a singer and a drummer, and he was really good. Tom and I had plans to go up to Boston to put a new band together. So I talked to Steven.

“By that point, he was thinking of quitting the business. I wanted him to play drums, but he said, ‘I want to be the singer.’ I said, ‘Okay, that’s great.’ And then we found Joey Kramer in Boston.”

Early on, before you found Brad Whitford, you had Raymond Tabano in the band on guitar.

“Steven said, ‘I know this guitar player called Raymond…’ Steven always wanted to have two guitars, and I was okay with that, so I said, ‘Let’s give it a try.’ Raymond was in the band for about eight or maybe 10 months, but that was it.”

From there, Brad joined the band, and Aerosmith got rolling.

“Well, we did a lot of high school dances and stuff, but we never got into working the local Boston scene. Back then you had to play five nights a week, four sets a night, and cover whatever the Top 20 was. But Boston was a good place to be, because a lot of the English bands that we really loved would come down to Boston before they went to New York. So I got to see bands like Fleetwood Mac.”

What was the feeling in the band in that early period?

“It was a really exciting time. Steven knew a lot about songwriting. I didn’t think that was as big a deal as having a band together and a gang of guys with the same vision of making music. The performing part came later, along with being on a record label, and going into a studio…”

You’re only as good as your next record…

The first album, titled simply Aerosmith, had some great, rocking songs including Mama Kin, later covered by Guns N’ Roses. But the biggest song that on that record was of course Dream On…

“Steven had been working on this riff for a while. He had it in his pocket for years. His father was a Juilliard graduate who taught music and played piano, an exceptional player, and Steven learned a lot from him. So Steven had this tune he was constantly working on, but it got to a point where I don’t think he really wanted to play piano on it, so we transposed it over and picked up the same vibe on guitar.

“It was real chords, so when you hear that song, the first thing you hear is guitar. Then we added Mellotron, and it’s now an integral part of how we play it live. But back then, we didn’t want to lug a piano around, so it worked.”

That song is a great early example of the interplay between you and Brad Whitford.

“When we finally arranged the song, there were certain parts where I felt I could do a better job on it and others where Brad could do a better job. That’s why we split up the guitar, and some of my favourite parts of the song are the parts that Brad plays. That’s how we followed it – whatever seemed to work, that’s who filled the spot. And whoever wrote the basic guts of the song, that’s who’d get to play the solo. That was the unwritten rule of how things evolved.”

With the second album, Get Your Wings, things got a little weird for you and Brad when two other guitarists, Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, were brought in to play solos on the opening track Same Old Song And Dance and a cover of Train Kept A-Rollin’.

It was a decision made jointly by the album’s producer Jack Douglas and executive producer Bob Ezrin – the latter having used Hunter and Wagner when working with Alice Cooper and Lou Reed. This must have been a difficult time for you and Brad.

“The record label was ready to drop us after the first album wasn’t a hit. We had already struggled to get the record deal, and they were ready to drop us. You think that once you get a record deal, you’re set. But that’s just the start. The second record, man, it’s a bitch! So the label said, ‘We’ll give you another go as long as you bring in Bob Ezrin’.

“He was one of the top producers at the time – and I’ve gotten to know him well now – but we were under their thumb. Jack Douglas was brought in to do the day-to-day stuff, but and Bob would come in every couple of weeks to listen to what was going on, but he kind of handed it off to Jack.”

“Of course we were on the fence about bringing in sidemen to play some of the stuff, but we kind of made a deal with the Devil because we wanted our shot at a second record. Brad and I weren’t happy about it, but that’s what it was going to take to keep us on the label and keep us going, so we did what we felt we had to do.

“For better or worse, we opened that door, but that was certainly the last time. After that second record came out, they re-released Dream On, it was a hit, and suddenly we had the power. Then it was a whole different story.”

After that difficult experience with Get Your Wings, how did you approach the sessions for the third album Toys In The Attic?

“I’d learned a lot about what I wanted to do and what the fans responded to. I wanted to make music that the fans would want to come and hear. I always saw myself that way – I always was a fan first. I still am. I don’t take anything for granted. And you’re only as good as your next record, man!”

Toys In The Attic was Aerosmith’s first masterpiece and is now acclaimed as one of the all-time great hard rock albums. It was also the band’s commercial breakthrough. You had a vision, knew what you wanted, and executed it. What gear defined that period for you?

“I always felt like we should sound like one of us was playing a Fender Strat and the other was playing a Gibson Les Paul. We liked the idea of having two different guitar sounds. I think a lot of people, when they think of us in those years, are us playing Les Pauls. But I recorded a lot with Strats. I was definitely a stone-cold Gibson man, but I seemed to gravitate more toward Strats and that variety of tones.

“The bottom line is that it all comes from your hands. But with a Strat, I always felt like you could get a little more out of it. Plus, you had the vibrato, which you could use as a sound effect, and musically I always felt like it was like one more colour on your paint palette. And just ergonomically, a Strat is laid out so well – the volume knob is right there, it’s a little thinner, you’ve got the toggle switch. It seemed like you could go more places with a Strat.”

But as you say, many people always associate you with Les Pauls in the ’70s, particularly your famed ’59 ’Burst.

“That was an important guitar, but I wasn’t glued to it. When it was time for a Les Paul, yes, that was it. And I didn’t really have that many Les Pauls then, though I look back at pictures and it seems like I had a dozen! But that was the guitar. As far as a Les Paul, yeah, that was it. I loved the way the neck of a Les Paul felt, the thickness of it.”

Toys In The Attic has so many great songs, so many great guitar moments – the funky riff in Walk This Way, the cool talkbox intro in Sweet Emotion, the frantic riffing in the title track. What do you remember about writing and recording that stuff?

“We were under pressure to write sh*t in the studio, but I had riffs waiting around to play for Steven. Walk This Way happened in a soundcheck one day. I always had things ready for Steven to see if it was something he could wrap his head around. If it was, that’s what we’d end up working on. And then everybody would throw it into the pot and we’d go from there.

“I remember sitting on a little combo amp and coming up with the riff for the song Toys In The Attic. The producer Jack Douglas had said, ‘We need another rocker’. So I sat down on a Marshall 2x12 and came up with the Toys riff. Anyone who plays guitar will understand that you don’t always know where a riff comes from, but you’ll just be tapping your foot, and suddenly you’re playing, and you just hope the tape is running because you’ll probably forget it.”

Many fans feel that Rocks, the follow-up to Toys In The Attic, is Aerosmith’s finest hour. Again, it features a ton of classic tracks and great guitar work from you and Brad. Can you remember writing the riff for Back In The Saddle and why you chose to play a six-string bass on that song?

“Oh yeah. When I saw the Spinal Tap movie, that scene where they had three bass players, I had to laugh. But I also remember seeing a band with two bass players – maybe it was Peter Green with Fleetwood Mac, during one of their jams, when he would put down his Les Paul and pick up a six-string bass.

“I remember thinking it would be cool to have that in our little corner of the woods, so I tracked one down and wrote that Back In The Saddle riff with it. Very often, you buy a guitar not just because it looks great or sounds great, like a ’68 Les Paul, but because there’s just something about it that makes you work a little harder to play it, and through that, you might have a new song.”

And that’s how it was with Back In The Saddle?

“It was. I’ve collected a lot of cool guitars over the years, and they inspire me to do something I might not have done otherwise. And with that guitar, you can get a lot of great sounds because it’s basically a bass, but it’s got two extra high strings, so you can play chords on it. But it’s the kind of instrument that’s not going to work for everything, so when we played it live, we tried to do it without it, but it didn’t work. So, Brad plays the solos live, and I use the six-string bass. It all works out.”

Another killer track on Rocks is Last Child, a Brad composition.

“Brad wrote some of my favourite songs in our catalogue, and he played some of my favourite solos. His style is so different to mine, but if you listen enough to our stuff, you can tell the difference between Brad’s sound and mine.”

That’s an important point, as Brad should be considered Aerosmith’s co-lead guitarist. You interchange so well and, in many ways, created a template many bands have followed.

“The two biggest influences on this band, at least from my point of view, are The Yardbirds and early Fleetwood Mac. They both had two guitar players, and I always thought, ‘What would they do?’ And, of course, it’s always fun to start that way, but you end up finding out that you don’t sound like them – you sound like Aerosmith, you know? But you gotta start somewhere…”

Flying solo

Aerosmith had continued success in the late ’70s with the albums Draw The Line and the in-concert double Live! Bootleg. There were huge tours with headlining shows in stadiums. But in 1979, during the recording of the Night In The Ruts album, you quit the band and formed a new outfit, The Joe Perry Project. At that point, did you overhaul your cache of guitars?

“There’s a lot of guitars that are associated with me, like that red 10-string B.C. Rich Bich, which I’m holding up in the air on the Live! Bootleg record. I didn’t play it that much with Aerosmith, maybe a few times for a couple of songs, but I used it a lot on my first Project album [1980’s Let the Music Do The Talking]. It’s funny – for the relatively few times I played it, I got a lot of recognition for that guitar.”

And you weren’t much of a collector then anyway, right?

“That’s true. I really wasn’t into collecting guitars. At that point, I had a few Les Pauls, a few Juniors or Strats, but that was it. Honestly, the guitar I miss the most from that era is the Strat I recorded Walk This Way with, which went the way of the wind when I left the band. But right around then, I wanted to clear the decks and clear my head. I took most of my Aerosmith guitars, put them in road boxes, and left them there.”

Aside from the red Rich Bich, what other guitars were critical to your early ’80s work outside of Aerosmith?

“I started playing a left-handed Strat, my main guitar, while I was away from the band. But I did bring out the clear-body Dan Armstrong and the Rich Bich. I recorded the first couple of Project albums with an Ampeg V, like the 50-watt kind. I wanted something close to a Marshall, and that was pretty much it.

“I didn’t get into collecting amps until the late ’80s or early ’90s. Brad turned me onto this guy on the West Coast, who lived in San Diego and had a house full of great old Marshalls and combos. That’s when I started collecting old amps.”

You rejoined Aerosmith in 1984 and have stayed put ever since, but you’ve made a number of solo albums. Do you have a favourite?

“Well, some of them – I think I’ve got seven or eight of them now – I just needed to do. I felt like I had to get a record out. When I listen to some of them I kind of cringe. But there’s one with a couple of tunes I really loved.

“The red one [2005’s self-titled Joe Perry] hit the mark. So for some of the solo records, I listen to one or two songs and go, ‘Man, I just wasn’t in the right space for that.’ But the red album has the song Mercy that got nominated for a Grammy. So that’s probably my second favourite solo album after the first one with Project.”

The Resurrection

When the band reunited in 1984 were you confident you could get back to the top?

“I don’t know, man. When I look back at it, we were lucky to have one shot. I’ve seen so many bands come and, for whatever reason, they’re gone. But when we got back together that summer in ’84, we had to buy ourselves out of our deal with Columbia – we were in debt for $300,000. They said they’d laid out so much money, and blah blah blah, so we had to buy our way out of the record deal before we could even sign with another label.”

And nobody wanted to touch the band anyway, right?

“Yeah, nobody wanted to sign us at that point. We’d burned too many bridges. So, we went out on the Back In The Saddle Tour, and the fans were there for us. We went out without a record company or an album. We had nothing, man, just the fans. And we had to see if we could get over the old bullsh*t and work together as a band again.

“The fans were there for us, and by the end of that summer we found that we could make it through a tour without killing each other! We buried a lot of hatchets in the ground instead of each other’s heads! I’ve always said that if we had our wits about us – which was hard because we were so burned out from seven years of album, tour, album, tour, album, tour – we would have just taken a break or a vacation.

“We would have taken a few years off. We didn’t have to tour so much, but we did and we burned out. And in those four years that we were apart, by the time we came back to the band it was a whole different scene.”

The comeback album Done With Mirrors was not a huge success, but then you had the collaboration with Run-DMC on Walk This Way, which introduced Aerosmith to a whole new generation. And then you had multi-platinum albums with 1987’s Permanent Vacation and 1989’s Pump. Did the band feel at home in the MTV era?

“Well, you had to get a great video for your single and all that sh*t. The whole industry had changed. Touring was different. It had become more of an industry, so it wasn’t just about a great song but also having a great video. Then you could go out and sell tickets.”

Songs like Dude (Looks Like A Lady) did the trick, though.

“With Dude, I loved AC/DC. That band still f*cking knocks me out! Their early albums – pick any album – they’re all great. So, with Dude, I was thinking about an AC/DC song. And it’s funny, it doesn’t sound like an AC/DC song, but there you go!

“I remember around that time Steven had gotten a sampler, which had just come out. He pressed a button, and you could shorten things, and another button would make it repeat. So suddenly you’ve got this cool rhythm thing, and we were fooling around with that. That riff you hear at the start came from Steven fooling with the buttons, and we captured that stuttering riff. We built the song from that.”

And how about Love In An Elevator, another big hit?

“With that one, we were in Vancouver working on the record and we had this guy following us around with a video camera. He was trying to capture those moments when you’re searching for the right riff, lyric or whatever, and you get hit by lightning.

“So we had the camera going, and fortunately, we’d keep the tape or audio to get that moment, because you never knew when it would hit. So that’s why you see those moments when you watch The Making Of Pump video.

“With Elevator, I remember we had the four or five chords, but we needed a riff that worked, and we ended up getting that on video. When you need something, sometimes it’s right there, but other times, you don’t know where the f*ck it comes from!”

The solos in Love In An Elevator are classic, too.

“While doing Pump, sometimes we’d work on Saturdays, but we’d usually take Sunday off. So Steven, me and our wives decided to head to Vancouver Island, and I got food poisoning. But by the time we came back to the studio, I was feeling better, I’d stopped throwing up, and the first thing we did was work on the solo for Love In An Elevator.

“Half of it was pretty much the first take, and then we probably put a few edits in. It’s one of those songs that, to this day, when I do it live, I stay as close to the record as I can.”

The Gearhead

With the 1993 album Get A Grip, you were becoming experimental with gear and sounds. What prompted that?

“That was the beginning of the period when I really got into amps. I remember telling Brad that I was having trouble getting the sound I wanted, and he said, ‘It would help if you got some really good amps!’ So that’s when I really got into that stuff. But with a song like Fever, the beginning has sound effects.

“I recorded that in my studio while fooling around with some rack-mounted stuff. By then, I’d really learned how to go to the next level because I wasn’t happy with some of the quality of the recordings to that point. I was learning how to produce, engineer, and get really good sounds, along with what gear to use. I got into that a lot.

“On the first record, I didn’t know any of that stuff, and I’d ask producers and engineers, ‘How did you get that sound?’ So I learned about it, and Get A Grip was when I started to learn how to use it.”

Aerosmith haven’t made an album since Music From Another Dimension in 2012, but you’ve recorded and toured with the Hollywood Vampires. Do you approach that band much differently from a guitar perspective?

“I don’t feel like there’s any set rules. It’s all about experimenting. If I’m gonna go in and record, or someone wants me to do an overdub or a solo, it all depends on the song. But there’s no pressure to do anything other than see a smile on somebody else’s face in the band.

“Some bands have hard and fast rules about how the guitars have to sound or who needs to be the only one playing a solo, but it’s all about the song. Above all else, it’s about what’s right for the song. And the other guys in the band are great players. Both Johnny [Depp] and Tommy [Henriksen] are formidable. You’re all part of the game.”

But it’s different from Aerosmith.

“It’s such a different set of… I don’t want to say rules, there are no rules. But there’s a certain freedom to just go in there and just do what you do. And Johnny, he’s a musician first. He always wanted to be in a band, so watching him blossom in the studio is great. Man, he can really play!”

A year or so back, you said that there are no bad tones. I love that idea. It’s freeing…

“When you just think about what works for the song, there are no bad tones. Dude (Looks Like A Lady) was inspired by Steven using samples, and it turned into this effect that when we play live a keyboard player triggers it. But what inspired that song was chord changes, a riff and a guitar. The melody came after. And it’s a song that people love to hear.”

Another thing that should be talked about more is that you’ve become a mad scientist when it comes to pedals and amps.

“Oh, man, that’s one thing I’m constantly doing – looking at new pedals. Electro-Harmonix has come out with a ton of great stuff. I don’t know enough about all the circuitry to tell you the difference between one distortion and another in that way. All I know is that if your preamp isn’t hot enough, it’s not going to drive the power amp enough to get the kind of distortion that you want.”

You came up in the days when most players pushed their tube amps for distortion, but now you’ve got pedals to do it for you. What has that been like?

“Well, that classic sound and those early effects back then were interesting. You had your clean sound, and then you had that dirt, like the distortion. All of that happened by accident, and according to the legend, depending on who you believe about amps falling off trucks or whatever, distortion came from that, and they said, ‘Well, okay, let’s use it anyway!’

“We’re talking about old songs like Rocket 88 [widely considered to be the first rock ’n’ roll record, sung by Jackie Brenton with Ike Turner on guitar] and Rumble [Link Wray’s 1958 instrumental featuring innovative use of distortion]. And then somebody came along with valve amps with certain transistors, capacitors, and transformers that get distorted when you take it to 10. It’s magic!

“So, from the ’50s to the ’60s, it became like its own voice, and of course, Marshall and the other English amp companies jumped on that because you had these guys who wanted more volume. People still chase that sound that Clapton had with the Bluesbreakers.

“Ted Nugent once said to Eddie Van Halen, ‘If I had your gear, I’d sound like you’. But he plugged in and sounded like Ted. So if it’s amps or pedals, I don’t think there’s any place where you can say, ‘I’ve found the perfect tone’, because there are no bad tones.”

It’s also important to remember that many tones people are chasing through vintage gear came about when that gear was new years ago.

“Right, so you can go back and find the exact same amp and same guitar, and now they’re all 50, 60, 70 years old. That’s not the same. My point is that those instruments, back then, were pretty new.

“Big legacy companies like Gibson and Fender are now starting to make guitars that are as good as the ones they made back when they were first invented. I’ve played some new Gibson and Fenders that really nail it. And the boutique companies, money aside, have hit the nail on the head and are making great instruments, too. So I’m always looking at guitar magazines and the latest pedals.

“There are some pedals that, for example, if you’re dealing with a Klon, it would be tough to decide between them during a blindfold test. So think again if you need to spend a whole bunch of money on an original Klon to get that sound. There’s some affordable stuff out there that can do the same thing.”

50 years. 600 guitars. And one billion streams…

You’ve dedicated 50 years to Aerosmith, and in all that time you’ve amassed a huge collection of guitars – in excess of 600 at the last count. But is there one guitar that means the most to you these days?

“There’s a Strat that has changed a bunch since around 2001 that I call the ‘Burned Strat’. It changes every six months, kind of for the fun of it. But there are some legitimate sonic reasons that I’ve got set up with a left-handed neck, like the length of the strings from the nut to the tuning pegs, all these little things.

“And I’ve got this great set of Seymour Duncan pickups that can switch back and forth between single-coil and P-90 sound. They’re great, and I’m surprised you don’t see them talked about more in guitar magazines.”

And when you look back on all that you have achieved, how do you measure the importance of what you’ve accomplished from a guitar perspective?

“I recently saw that Dream On went over one billion streams. One billion. That’s insane! I never imagined that would happen. And the first thing you hear when that song comes on is my guitar. That means a lot to me. The space between when I got my first Silvertone guitar and when I recorded Dream On seemed like a minute. So for that song to be over a billion and reach as many people as it has, that’s pretty special.

“When you start, you can’t imagine these types of things, so to have it reach so many people, and for us to be ready to get back out there again for this tour, I don’t take any of that for granted. That’s the biggest thing – at my age, you learn not to take anything for granted and enjoy it.”