AEROSMITH - Former Manager Disputes Guitarist Joe Perry's Memoir : "Accuses Me Of Stealing From Charity"

November 27, 2014, 9 years ago

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AEROSMITH - Former Manager Disputes Guitarist Joe Perry's Memoir : "Accuses Me Of Stealing From Charity"

Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry recently released his new memoir, Rocks: My Life In And Out Of Aerosmith, offering his take on the band's history. According to an article by Boston Magazine, the publication was contacted by the Leber-Krebs management company after an excerpt from the book was published, painting the firm in a bad light.

Perry's text is as follows: "My view of Leber-Krebs came down to one word—skeptical. One of the first times I walked into Leber’s office I saw a framed check on the wall made out to his firm for $175,000. Nothing wrong with that, except the money appeared to be for services rendered for the Concert for Bangladesh. Wasn’t the purpose of that event to help starving people? Wasn’t everyone donating his services? I filed my reaction under watch out for these guys. (Now I realize that I may not have understood what the check represented, but at the time I was already thinking the worst.)"

Steve Leber contacted Boston Magazine with the following response:

"I recently read the article Aerosmith: The Early Days, by Joe Perry (October). I’d like to set the record straight and wish you had called me to check the facts before you printed the piece, which essentially calls me a crook and accuses me of stealing from a charity. A copy of the check Joe Perry refers to in his article is attached. As you and your readers can see, it is not made out to me, as Mr. Perry asserts in his piece, but it is, in fact, made out to United Nations Children’s Fund for Relief to Refugee Children of Bangladesh.

Additionally, Frank Connelly was one of my very best friends in the business. I was the head of the music division of the William Morris Agency, and when I signed artists to William Morris, Frank was the first one to help me break out new talent—from Bill Cosby, a new comic discovered at the Gaslight Café, to Simon and Garfunkel, discovered at Gerde’s Folk City.

Frank found Aerosmith and sent me the demo tape—I was the only one he trusted with the group. He knew I would help them break out of the pack. Steven Tyler, as lead singer in other groups, had been turned down by other labels (see Steven Tyler’s autobiography). I agreed to bring Aerosmith to Max’s Kansas City and showcase them for two of my friends, Ahmet Ertegun, chairman of Atlantic Records, and Clive Davis, president of Columbia Records.

Ahmet passed, saying Atlantic already had the Stones and Steven was too close to the Jagger look and feel. However, Clive signed them and Aerosmith went on to outsell the Stones four to one on all albums and CDs. The rest is history. With my partner David Krebs, we went on to help Aerosmith become huge. What Joe Perry never realized, even as of today, is the fact that I was the only manager at the time to get a catalog reversion from Columbia after 20 years, so the band would get their catalog back. That meant that in 1972, they recorded their first album—Aerosmith—which reverted to the band and Leber-Krebs in 1992 as 50/50 partners. Other artists signed their catalogs away to the record companies. We owned the masters together. This was the first deal of its kind.

This is just one factor that none of the guys in Aerosmith ever understand. I saw the value in their catalog and tried to protect them to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. I never got a thank you, but I guess that’s rock ’n’ roll."



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