“I got a Vox teardrop reissue for $500. I tore everything out and off except for the neck”: Joe Perry on the weirder guitars in his collection

Joe Perry loves guitars. But not just Les Pauls, Strats, and Teles; he loves weird, interesting, custom jobs, too.

This leads us to Dazzle Guitars, an independent guitar maker with whom Perry has hooked up over the last few years to, well, dazzling results.

True to their name, Dazzle’s axes are undeniably eye-catching. What’s more, according to Perry, they sound pretty great, too.

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They’re the sort of guitars that remind you of many different things, but you can’t quite put your finger on it, which seems to be working just fine for Perry, who uses the guitars on stage and in the studio.

As for the rest, we’ll let Joe take it away.

What’s the story with the custom guitars you’ve recently built with Dazzle?

I’ve got a couple. I was introduced to a guy named Cody Henderson, who builds guitars and owns Dazzle.

If you’ve seen any of the shows Aerosmith did in Las Vegas or at Fenway Park in Boston, I played a guitar that basically looked like plexiglass but was milky in color, and it lit up with what looked like Christmas lights on the inside of it wherever there was space on the face of the body.

That one was opaque plastic, and the lights were powered by a battery pack and a transformer. With all that shit taped to the guitar, it would last only a few minutes, so I would only use it for one song.

But Cody also had regular ones without all that, and those look really cool. They’ve got a double cutaway, so it’s a different look. It doesn’t look like a Les Paul or a Strat – but it doesn’t look too wacky, either.

How do they play?

They play great! You can get to every fret, so it’s like an SG in that way, and he put the Vega-Trem vibrato on there. Since we’ve stopped touring, I’ve had a chance to play them, and I’m really impressed with the build quality.

Cody is a player and has his own band, so he knows what it’s like to have an electric guitar in his hands. He knows what it’s like to stand in front of an audience and that you need to make sure everything works. They’re just really cool guitars.

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Is there an off-the-beaten-path guitar you’ve always thought was underrated?

I’m not a guitar snob. I don’t care if it just came off the bench yesterday. If it feels right, sounds right and checks the boxes, I’ll play it. But I’ve always liked Vox teardrop [Mark series] guitars because they're cool-looking.

I remember pictures of Brian Jones playing one back when Vox was handing out equipment left and right, when they started out. I’ve played a couple, and they’re not hot, output-wise, but they definitely have their own sound.

I’ve got a couple of them, but I’m not gonna take a ’60s Vox and start cutting it up; you can’t do that. [Laughs] There were people in the ’70s, me included, who were doing pretty stupid things like that.

Can you reveal some of those atrocities?

Things like getting a goldtop and scraping off the gold, only to find a very plain piece of maple underneath. If we had thought it through, we would have realized, “Well, they know this is gonna get painted over, so why would they put a beautiful maple top on this?”

But you hear these stories of someone scraping off the gold, and there was a great piece of maple underneath, although I don’t personally know of anyone who had that happen. And we’d change pickups out a lot – things like taking out a PAF and putting in a hotter Seymour Duncan.

In your defence, these guitars weren’t considered halcyon in the way they are now. Time has done that.

Looking back, it’s one thing to do that with a “parts” guitar; that’s why I like having the Rat guitar, the Burned Strat. If the Dremel slips and I put a gouge in it, it’s no big deal. But you’re not gonna take a ’57 Strat and start mucking around with it and then totally wreck it, you know?

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I guess if you’re not gonna play it, and something is holding it up, you can change it. You don’t know how much that’ll knock off the value of the guitar, but you’ll get to play it, so maybe it’s worth doing. It’s one of those conundrums.

But I got a Vox teardrop reissue for maybe $500, and I tore everything out and off except for the neck. Me and Cody put a Vega-Trem vibrato arm and trem on it and some P-Rail pickups, and we experimented by putting a boost on it — built-in. It didn’t work out well. [Laughs]

Why is that?

We were losing too much tone, so we decided against it. It actually plays really well, but since Aerosmith has stopped touring, my opportunities to pull out that guitar and play it are few and far between, so it’s sitting in my studio.

I play it quite a bit, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d think it was an average Vox teardrop guitar. But the whammy bar does everything I want it to do, and it sounds great.

If you didn’t have any of your noteworthy guitars and just picked up something random, would that inherent knowhow guide you?

I’m not a technique guy. I play guitar to play the song. That’s it. That’s why the guitar really exploded, you know? It was a lot of fun to go into mom-and-pop guitar stores and find them in every city. If you had a family shop that had been around for decades for a generation or two, there was always something in the back, some weird thing.

God knows there’s enough custom stuff out there, but sometimes you’ll see something you haven’t seen before. Those are the kinds of things I look for. There might be that guitar or amp you find, and you might use it on a track when you’re looking for a particular sound. You just never know!

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.