Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry gently puffs on a small cigar while talking music in a local radio studio.
He isn't supposed to be smoking indoors. But no one is about to tell Joe Perry, one of the gods of rock guitar, to stub it out. Instead, the on-air staff gives him an overturned Starbucks coffee lid to use as an ashtray and lets him speak.
"He's a legend," said DJ Stash, after interviewing Perry for 98ROCK. "We tried to make him comfortable and get out of his way."
Legends get to light up wherever they want. That's just one of the perks. Then there's the big, black tour bus sitting in the nearby parking lot. A promotion for the "Guitar Hero: Aerosmith" video game, which features Aerosmith's music, the bus has Perry's name and his ax-wielding avatar emblazoned on the side of it. When Perry rolls into the parking lot, you know it.
In the past couple of months, Perry has spent a lot of time in his tour bus, tooling up and down the East Coast to promote "Have Guitar, Will Travel," his new solo album with the Joe Perry Project. The album, which will be released Tuesday, and the coming tour in support of it both came about after a series of illnesses and accidents sidelined Aerosmith.
Earlier this year, Aerosmith was gearing up to record a new album - its first of original material since 2001's "Just Push Play" - and hit the road. But the studio sessions had to be postponed when Perry's artificial knee became infected, and it was scrapped altogether when singer Steven Tyler caught pneumonia.
Then this summer, when the band set out on its first big tour since 2007, Tyler spun around, lost his balance, fell off stage and broke his shoulder (coincidentally, while singing "Love in an Elevator"). With Tyler down for the count, the tour had to be canceled. That left Perry with a lot of free time on his hands.
"I had no intentions of making this record - until the Aerosmith record was postponed," Perry said. "With the postponing of the album and then the tour, I didn't sit still for a minute. ... It's kind of like every man for himself for a while."
Perry hunkered down in his basement studio to record "Have Guitar, Will Travel." It's his fifth solo album since he started the Joe Perry Project in 1980. Some of the songs on this newest album had been sitting around for several years waiting to be recorded, but most were written on the fly.
