He sounded nostalgic as he spoke about his childhood and almost rueful that he became a guitar hero instead of a marine biologist. Perry, 64, spent more than an hour on a gorgeous late-summer New England afternoon talking on the phone. "When you're learning any kind of art you pick things up from anybody who's doing it, whether they're really good at it or learning like you are. "Vermont definitely turned me on to a lot of things," Perry told the Burlington Free Press in a phone conversation from his home in Massachusetts.
He loved the music he was exposed to at school, and loved the nature Vermont is so well known for. He devotes a fair amount of time in the book he co-authored with David Ritz delving into how his time at Vermont Academy influenced his life. Perry's autobiography, "Rocks: My Life In and Out of Aerosmith," comes out Tuesday through Simon & Schuster. He and his family spend most of their time at their home south of Boston in Duxbury, Mass., but for about a decade have owned a horse farm in South Pomfret, not far from the school in Saxtons River that sent Perry on a course toward rock stardom. Through all his success, including millions of records sold and induction in the Rock & Roll and Songwriter halls of fame, Perry has kept one foot firmly in Vermont. A life on the ocean grew instead into life on the road with Aerosmith, the band born in Boston in the early 1970s that became one of the biggest arena-rock groups in the world. That time as a teenager in Vermont shaped Joe Perry's future. It just opened my eyes to what I knew I wasn't getting in Hopedale as far as social things and what was going on in society." "It was a real education for me and not the kind of learning they (his parents) sent me there for," according to Perry. His Vermont Academy classmates came from New York City, Los Angeles and cities all over the world to Saxtons River, bringing the latest counterculture icon with them, whether an underground newspaper like the Village Voice or an underground album like the debut from The Velvet Underground. "After vacations, guys would come back with bits and pieces of different cultures," Perry said. He learned about the world, especially the world of the late 1960s, with war weighing heavily on his generation and sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll taking over modern life. Perry learned plenty in southern Vermont he just didn't learn much about marine biology.
They moved him from his public high school in Hopedale, Mass., to Vermont Academy in the tiny town of Saxtons River.
His parents decided to send him to a preparatory school to boost his grades. His grades in school, though, weren't about to get him into college, let alone on a path toward a career in science. Before becoming a famous rock 'n' roll guitarist, Joe Perry wanted to be a marine biologist.
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