(Credits: Far Out / Joe Perry)
Tue 27 January 2026 20:30, UK
There are few guitarists who seemed to have rock and roll swagger dripping off of them as much as Joe Perry did.
Compared to every other British invasion guitarist, Perry seemed to take the same kind of fashion and delivery that Jimmy Page and Keith Richards did and served it up with a healthy dose of American blues and boogie when he started making his first guitar hero moments. But while he was setting the precedent for a lot of American rockstars, some of his favourite bands were pushing things much further than he ever could, even when off the stage.
Because as much as Perry is a great guitarist in every sense of the word, it’s not like he was ever trying to be the same kind of guitar hero as Jeff Beck. He did have a distinctive style whenever he played, but when you listen to his solos compared to what Brad Whitford was doing on the other side of the stage, his approach is far more riff-heavy and focused on locking in with the drums than doing anything too flashy.
He had graduated from the Keith Richards School of Lead Playing, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with that. If anything, it gave him a much better excuse to come out with one hook after the next, but while he and Steven Tyler were joined at the hip a lot of the time, some of the worst moments of their career always came at the expense of their significant others. It was one of the uglier chapters of their career, but Perry simply wasn’t the kind of womaniser everyone else wanted him to be.
There might have been the spirit of the boys’ club among the rest of the band, but Perry wasn’t into the general groupie scene. He wanted to find the right person to settle down with, and while his first wife, Elyssa, may have driven a wedge between him and Tyler for a while, it’s not like his relationship with his second wife was any different. He was a family man, and he was much more comfortable bringing home with him than trying to wrestle with being gone for most of the year.
And if the band themselves were already having a hard time with it, it couldn’t have been easy seeing their idols go through the same problems. John Lennon already had to fight tooth and nail with people who swore Yoko Ono helped break up The Beatles, but if you look at how he handled himself in the face of jaded Beatles fans and open racists who just didn’t like her, Perry saw someone in the same position he was in.
In many respects, Perry thought that the former Beatle helped break down doors for people like him in the rock and roll world, saying, “Everything they went through is typical of any time a group of people form a business; it’s what goes on in any partnership. All that bullshit of Yoko breaking up the band – it was just the misogyny of rock and roll rearing its ugly head. John was ahead of his time [and] he married a woman who was obviously his soulmate.”
Lennon wasn’t about to stop that once The Beatles broke up, either. There were definitely a few wilderness periods where he wasn’t taking care of himself without his other half, but when they settled down in the late 1970s, hearing stories about him baking bread and becoming a house husband while he raised his son Sean helped break down the more toxic masculinity that most rockstars were taught that they needed to have in order to appear cool in the eyes of their fans.
Every Beatle was far beyond that by the end of their time together, and while Lennon was shameful of many chapters of his life, he was never going to apologise for turning his back on music for his family. He had finally found peace, and even if he was getting back into music at the time of his death, it’s nice for people to remember him as the guy who kept his values straight before he went back to the music world.
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