Aerosmith’s tour manager once stole one of Jeff Beck’s pedals at a gig – and Joe Perry was mortified

Joe Perry of Aerosmith has reflected on the time a tour manager stole one of Jeff Beck’s pedals for him, and he was not a happy bunny about it.

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But what’s the one way to a guitarist’s heart? More pedals. And there’s no gift quite like a Klon Centaur, which is exactly what Perry gave to Beck to patch things up, but more prominently, to feel a little less guilty about the whole thing.

In an interview in the March 2023 edition of Total Guitar, Perry recalled how the fiasco occurred following an evening spent backstage at a Jeff Beck show during the band’s early days: “I didn’t talk to Jeff then but he was using an orange Coloursound [fuzz]. We’re driving home and our road manager pulls this orange Coloursound out of his jacket. He said ‘Well, he had six of them so I just picked it up for you!’ I got really pissed off. I said, ‘No, we don’t do that! That’s not us!’ But we were still pretty hand to mouth, and back then getting equipment going back and forth across the pond was a big deal. What was I gonna do – ship it to him?”

He continued, “I had it for about three weeks and then it got stolen from me. I was actually kind of happy to see it go. So I always felt bad about it. So later on, me and Brad [Whitford, Aerosmith guitarist] were some of the first guys to get some Klon Centaur pedals. We each had three or four of them.

“I took one of my original ones and after the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame soundcheck I told Jeff the story and said, ‘I just want to adjust the karma here, so I want you to have this.’ I think he was pretty surprised to get it and I was really happy to give it to him,” he said.

Beck sadly passed away last month (January), since then a huge mass of artists have comforward to share their tributes to the late guitarist.