For most of the 1970s, Joe Perry lived the textbook rock god life: stadiums, substances, screaming fans, the whole circus. Yet the woman who has been married to him since 1985 met him without even knowing what ‘Aerosmith’ was. In a world obsessed with fame, that detail cuts straight through the mythology.
Perry has often described how Billie Paulette Montgomery entered his orbit as a punk leaning art student who barely recognised his hits and only later grasped how huge his old band had been. For a guitarist who had every reason to be cynical about groupies and trophy wives, her lack of interest in his legend was not a red flag – it was the green light.
Joe Perry, guitar hero in free fall
Before we get to Billie, it is worth remembering just how big Joe Perry already was. As Aerosmith’s lead guitarist, his riffs on songs like Walk This Way, Sweet Emotion and Back in the Saddle turned him into one of rock’s most admired players, regularly listed alongside Hendrix, Page and Clapton in discussions of the most influential guitarists.
The breakthrough came with the 1975 album Toys in the Attic, the record that turned Aerosmith from scrappy openers into headlining American rock royalty. Classic Rock has described it as the milestone that hoisted the band into the rock pantheon, selling more than eight million copies and distilling their edgy riffs, sleaze and swagger into hits like Walk This Way and Sweet Emotion.
Its follow up, Rocks, only supercharged that momentum. According to the band’s own history, it was among the first albums ever to ship platinum on release and has since gone quadruple platinum, a snarling snapshot of Aerosmith at their most raw and dangerous.
By the late 1970s the Toxic Twins were shorthand for cocaine fuelled excess and Aerosmith were not just famous, they were a travelling ecosystem of dealers, groupies and drama. Then it all crashed. The drugs stopped being a creative shortcut, the fights escalated, and in 1979 Perry walked out of Aerosmith to form the Joe Perry Project, trading stadiums for clubs and superstardom for something that looked a lot more like free fall.
A punk outsider walks into the wreckage
Somewhere in that chaos came Billie Paulette Montgomery. Biographical profiles agree that the pair met in 1983 on the set of Perry’s video for the Joe Perry Project single Black Velvet Pants, began dating soon after, and married in 1985, eventually raising two sons together, Tony and Roman, alongside Billie’s son Aaron and Joe’s eldest, Adrian.
When Perry tells the story, it plays like a punk rom com dropped into a rock horror film. He has recalled how Billie came out of Boston’s underground punk scene, had no use for big logo arena bands, genuinely did not know what an Aerosmith was, and watched his credit card come back cut up on their first dinner date so she simply paid the bill herself. Later, as the Joe Perry Project faltered and he weighed joining Alice Cooper’s band, she listened to Aerosmith, asked why a band that good was not together and bluntly told him to call Steven Tyler; years on, Perry says he leans on her judgement and has no doubt he would not still be alive without her.
That combination is about as far from the cliché of a 1980s rock wife as you can get. She was sharp about money and business but unimpressed by the trappings of fame, far more interested in whether the band actually sounded good than in who was on the laminate. For a guitarist coming off a toxic first marriage and a collapsing career, that outsider’s eye was volatile medicine.
‘She didn’t know anything about Aerosmith’
In a Radio dot com interview promoting his memoir, Perry called it a major miracle that Billie came from punk and underground music, had studied art, and genuinely did not know about Aerosmith when they met. He said she had heard a couple of songs on the radio at most, and only years later, rummaging through boxes in their house, did she stumble across 1970s magazines and a few gold records, while he explained that he keeps that stuff out of sight because he believes you are only as good as your next record.
Perry also admitted that he feels bad for athletes and entertainers who achieve serious fame and then spend the rest of their dating lives wondering if someone loves the person or the celebrity. With Billie, that question never really came up; she met Joe the struggling club guitarist, not Joe the arena headliner, and by the time she understood how huge his band had been, she was already in too deep for it to matter.
That is why he is careful to say she was not naive. In terms of Aerosmith mythology she was blissfully uninformed, but emotionally she was several steps ahead of the wreckage, able to separate the broken business of Joe Perry from the musician still trying to plug into something real.
Marriage, guitars and the Billie Perry imprint
Over the decades that followed, the Perrys quietly built the sort of domestic setup that barely exists in rock biographies. Joe has described himself as a one girl guy who finally found the right partner in Billie, writing in his memoir about a thirty year marriage still going strong and about the Gibson Les Paul that carries her picture on its body, which he points to onstage before pointing to his wedding ring when fans ask who the woman is.
Instead of anchoring themselves in a single showbiz capital, they have bounced between homes in Massachusetts, Vermont and Florida, chasing ocean time and rural quiet, while Billie works behind the lens as a photographer and keeps fans updated from the road. It is a strangely wholesome picture for a man once sold as the ultimate bad influence.
Her fingerprints are literally on his tone too. On a tour of the Gibson Custom Shop in Nashville, Billie slipped away to pitch a wild new stain idea to the head painter, secretly commissioning what became the Joe Perry Boneyard Les Paul with a dramatically flamed maple top in the green tiger finish she designed, first given to Joe as a surprise Christmas present before being released as a signature model.
Guitar nerds rightly obsess over the pickups and woods in that instrument, but the backstory is the kicker: one of the most recognisable Les Paul finishes of the past few decades was dreamed up by a woman who once did not even care about arena rock, but cared very much about how her husband’s guitar should look and feel under stage lights.
What their story says about fame and music
Strip away the gossip value and the story of Joe and Billie Perry plays like a quiet manifesto on how to survive success in music. A few lessons jump out for anyone who has ever chased a career with a guitar in hand.
- Real connection cuts through fan culture. If your partner met you at the top of the charts, suspicion is built in. Billie met Perry when his solo career was sputtering and his credit cards were dying, and that timing has mattered far more than any platinum plaque.
- You are only as good as your next record. Hiding the gold records in boxes is not false modesty, it is survival. Measuring yourself by what you are working on now instead of what you did in 1976 is the only way to keep creating instead of embalming your own legacy.
- The right outsider can save the band. It was a punk art student, not a manager or label executive, who asked why a killer band was not playing together and pushed Joe Perry to call Steven Tyler. That nudge helped unlock one of rock’s most lucrative second acts.
- Partnership shows up in the gear. From the Billie portrait guitar to the Boneyard Les Paul, you can literally see their relationship in the instruments Perry plays. The message is simple: if your life offstage is solid, it bleeds into the tone that comes out of the amps.
Closing riff
In an era when many of his peers are remembered more for wrecked marriages and ruined health than for their records, Joe Perry is still out there, guitar in hand, sounding lean and dangerous. Somewhere inside that sound is the steady presence of Billie Paulette Montgomery, the woman who once did not know what Aerosmith was, but helped keep its guitarist alive and honest enough to become a legend on his own terms.
