Aerosmith News

By Scott Tady, Times Entertainment Editor

You can open for Aerosmith.

On each of Aerosmith’s summer tour dates, including June 24 at P-G Pavilion, two contest winners will start the show by standing on stage playing the “Guitar Hero: Aerosmith” video game.

Fret-burning fans can try out by visiting Aerosmith’s YouTube site and uploading a video of themselves playing the game.

Sure, it would be nerve-wracking for any amateur to play for 20,000 fans, so Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry offered some advice.

“Just play to one person,” Perry said. “Pick someone out of the audience who looks like they’re having a really good time. Maybe it’s a good-looking girl or some guy who’s obviously digging it. Or if you want, pick out someone who seems like they’re having a bad time, and you want to reach out to them. Because 20,000 people — all it is really — is a single person; don’t worry about the number. That’s how to take away a lot of the pressure and stress.”

And there you have it — some valuable wisdom gleaned by one of rock’s greatest guitarists, who’s geared up for his band’s umpteenth tour that launches June 10 in St. Louis.

In a phone interview Friday, Perry reported he’s recovering nicely from knee surgery.

“This will be the first tour in three years where I’m not playing in pain so I’m pretty excited,” Perry said.

Perry said Aerosmith will try something new this tour, picking out one of its five most classic albums each night, then playing it sequentially. So for Burgettstown, Aerosmith might pick 1975’s “Toys in the Attic” album, which means spectators would hear, in order, the title track then “Uncle Salty,” “Adam’s Apple,” “Walk This Way,” “Big Ten Inch Record,” “Sweet Emotion,” “No More No More,” “Round and Round,” and “You See Me Crying,” just like on the album. On the next tour stop, Aerosmith might play in order its 1976 album “Rocks”. Each night’s chosen album would be sandwiched between other hits from the band’s storied career.

“We’ve wanted to do this for a long time, and with no new record to promote this was a good time to do it,” Perry said. “People have lived these records for a long time, so we think this will be a great musical experience and create a lot of fun.”

Perry’s also stoked about the tour’s other opening act, ZZ Top, adding he’s “pretty sure” that he and the Texas trio’s guitar god Billy Gibbons will have a few onstage jam sessions.

“ZZ Top is as powerful an act as AC/DC as far as I’m concerned, and they’re cut out of that cloth where they’re not afraid to go outside the box,” Perry said. “Some bands you play with leave in no plans for jamming. You’ll say ‘Do you know this song or that song?’ but it just doesn’t happen. ZZ Top raised the bar for Southern blues-rock and nobody has topped it.”

Perry also praised Pittsburgh, saying along with Ohio and Detroit it was the first place to support the band outside of its native New England.

“You guys were our bread and butter,” Perry said. “It was in Pittsburgh, I remember, where we got our first road boxes.”

Road boxes are those square and sturdy wheeled cases, often black with metal corners and edges, used by traveling bands to transport their equipment.

As if it was just yesterday, Perry recalls driving to the Pittsburgh airport with singer Steven Tyler to pick up the road boxes they finally could afford.

“It was another one of those things that made us feel like we had finally made it,” Perry said. “Instead of having to lug around our equipment, we were like ‘Holy ... there are our road boxes, and we’ve got our names stenciled on them.”

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