JOE PERRY

Joe remembers going to the family dinners as a child where his
uncle would play Portuguese folk songs on his home made guitar.
His parents got him a clarinet and piano lessons but after
listening to Ike and Tina Turner and Roy Orbison and Elvis on the
radio in the late 1950s  he wanted to emulate the sounds he
was hearing so he talked his parents into getting a guitar and
started playing around with it for a while. When he heard the
Beatles when they came out in 1964 playing guitars he grabbed his
from the closet and started to get interested again and First
time Joe saw a live Rock & Roll band was at his high school
dance. He soon got together with some friends and started playing
some Beatles and Byrd songs. But it was the hard rock that really
got to him. Joe talks about the new bands coming over after the
first British Invasion died down that he gravitated to that were
coming over. “This band like the Yardbirds had guitars like I
never heard before. The Stones were pushing the edge with
distorted guitars. That was a big influence on me”