If you’ve seen Joe Perry do his thing with his Project, The Hollywood Vampires, or Aerosmith over the last few decades, then there’s more than a fair chance you’ve seen him playing a mouth-wateringly beautiful black Gibson Les Paul Junior with hard-to-miss mother-of-pearl inlay.
Of course, the guitar didn’t ship that way from Gibson's factory back in the ‘50s, nor was it that way when Perry got hold of it in the late ‘70s. In fact, Perry never intended it to be that way at all, but after he busted the headstock during an Aerosmith show – and after Steven Tyler nearly fed its remains to the ravenous audience – Perry was forced to pivot.
This leads to the Junior’s revival, and its current state. As for the details, we’ll leave those for Joe to reveal below.
What’s the story behind your black Gibson Junior double-cutaway with the hard-to-miss pearl inlay?
Yeah. We were doing a show at a festival and I threw this thing up in the air at the end of a song. This was before wireless, so it went to the end of the patch cord and came down on the neck – and the headstock snapped off.
I knew we could fix it, you know? I got it back and gave the pieces to my guy, and the show went on
I remember thinking as it was going up in the air, “Wow, I can’t believe it. That looks so cool.” And then, on the way down, I was thinking, “Holy shit, what did I do?” [Laughs]
After it came down and was broken, Steven grabbed it and wanted to throw it out into the audience, so I had to wrestle him for it. [Laughs] I knew we could fix it, you know? I got it back and gave the pieces to my guy, and the show went on.
Did you add the pearl inlay after you repaired the headstock?
I had some marble gargoyles in the backyard of the house I was living in, and I took some Polaroid photos of them and sent them to Gruhn Guitars in Nashville to see if we could incorporate them. A lot of people think the picture on there is a decal, but it’s all mother-of-pearl inlay work, and it’s still a killer guitar. It sounds great, and it’s one that comes to the studio with me as well as on the road.
I still have its brother, and that one is all original except for the chrome Grovers that pretty much everybody put on their ’50s and ’60s Gibsons if the tuning pegs started to rot, which they did quite a bit.
You’ve got hundreds of guitars. Given your love for tinkering and open-mindedness regarding tones, do you think you’ll ever find one guitar to rule them all?
My rat guitar, the Burned Strat, pretty much checks all of the boxes. It takes a guitar a while to settle in because they’re not designed to play with really light strings. I’m making generalizations here, but Strats and Les Pauls were designed to have heavier-gauge strings. I bet when you took a Tele out of the box in the ’50s, it had flatwound strings on it. [Laughs]
I’m sure Joe Bonamassa could tell you more about that than I could, but they were designed to have heavier strings – and not really roundwound. But over the years, we’ve managed to adapt and deal with that, so it takes a while if you’re gonna use the vibrato bar, and not just to divebomb. It takes a while for the guitar to settle in.
Have you found that since you’ve gone to lighter strings and the Vega-Trem that the Burned Strat has come into its own?
Yeah. The lighter the strings, the harder it is to get that to work. When you get a Strat-style guitar with that type of bridge, it takes a while for things to settle in. I don’t know… maybe that’s part of the voodoo, if you want to put it that way. So, with that guitar, if I’m doing a show, I can do things where I can trust it and count on it.
I know it’s gonna stay in tune. Of course, you never know if you’re gonna break a string, and with a floating bridge, when that happens, you’re fucked. [Laughs] It’s a roll of the dice, but I trust that guitar. I would use that one, even when I have access to all of my stuff.
At the end of the day, when it comes to “desert island guitars,” it’s a matter of taste. It’s not one-size-fits-all.
I get guitar magazines all the time. I get Guitar World, and I look at the back pages for new pedals and whatever else, just messing around with different speakers and things
Right. It’s about what you’re looking for as far as the song. I’m driven by the song, you know?
I have a couple of hardcore rules, like when you’re playing live, you follow the singer. And if the song starts to sound like a trainwreck because somebody fucked up, just follow the singer and it’ll be less noticeable.
Hopefully, there’s a certain amount of charm to having a trainwreck onstage. [Laughs] If anything, it proves we’re not playing to a tape. The other thing is, like I said before, there are no wrong sounds. There might be a wrong sound for a particular song, but you keep searching until you find the right one. I have guitars that I paid $100 for, and they’re on some of our biggest hits. They worked in that particular situation.
Has anything new, gear-wise, caught your ear or eye?
I get guitar magazines all the time. I get Guitar World, and I look at the back pages for new pedals and whatever else, just messing around with different speakers and things. They all go down in the book, you know, in the back of my mind. I’m not organized enough to actually have everything in files on a computer, but I know where to get a particular sound or feel. It’s all built around what works for the song.
- This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
