Jimi Hendrix. Stevie Ray Vaughan. Duane Allman. There are plenty of guitar legends, but not many are still alive and touring.

Aerosmith's Joe Perry is one of the few classic rock axemen still around to tell his tales, though he endured years of hard living to get here.

On the eve of the band's tour kickoff in Columbus with co-headliners M?tley Crue, I chatted long distance with the now long-sober family man about the changing face of the music business, and how Aerosmith always seems to escape the industry's fickle, throat-cutting jaws in one piece.

Can we expect anything new from Aerosmith on this tour?

At this point, every tour is like a challenge for us, to mount it up. I never know what to expect, with the way the music business has changed. Each has its own set of problems.

We're playing with a band [M?tley Crue] that I still think of as a baby band, but they got a generation of fans turned onto rock 'n' roll through their music, they're a formidable show.

You know, we're going in with all the guns loaded. The friendly competition between the two bands means the audience gets a better show. That's why we like to do these packages with other headliners, like we did with Lenny [Kravitz] or Kiss. It gives the audience a really good night.

It costs a lot of money to put up a show like this. Tickets are expensive! We want to give fans as much value for the dollar as we can.

This tour, we're going to go out there and top what we did last time. We'll change the set around. We'll go out there and give the fans the skeleton set of the songs we know they'd be disappointed if we didn't play, but we'll also going to bring in some of the old songs.

How do you keep your finger on the pulse of what fans want?

We just listen to what everybody has to say. We're fans first. We know what we like, but we're entertainers. We've seen so many bands that will go out there and go, "We're not going to play that because it's really not our sound." And I say, "Yeah, but it was your biggest hit. Your fans want to hear it."

We come from a totally different school. We're out there because fans want to see us, and for no other reason. We listen to feedback from every resource we can. Now with the Internet, there's a pretty good cross-section of fans out there.

We did a poll last year of most requested songs. We were a little surprised by where some of the songs ended up on the most-wanted list.

Which ones surprised you?

Like, say, "Angel." It ended up not even being in the Top 30, and that really surprised us. That was a really big, big single for us. It kind of steers you in that direction again, to go back and maybe play a few songs that people want to hear from the early, early days which we just have never played live, or at least haven't in recent memory.

Columbus is your first stop on this tour, right?

Yes. We're really looking forward to coming out there. I don't know if people know it or not, but we're setting up the tour there and we'll be in town for awhile. So you may see us at the movies, you may see us out on the town!

August 31, 2006

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