Joe Perry, the renowned guitarist of Aerosmith, reportedly collapsed just offstage during a performance with his supergroup Hollywood Vampires. The band, comprised of Perry, Alice Cooper, and Johnny Depp, were performing a set at the Ford Amphitheater at the Coney Island Boardwalk in Brooklyn, New York, when Perry hunched over on a riser onstage, and then walked off.
According to eyewitnesses, he then collapsed offstage, went into cardiac arrest around 9:30 p.m., and was administered CPR by EMTs while his bandmates continued the show without him. He was then rushed to Coney Island Hospital for further examination. Police say he is currently in stable condition. “If you notice one of our brothers is not onstage with us, he was very sick before show,” Cooper told the confused crowd. In a video posted to Facebook on Saturday afternoon, the 65-year-old Perry looked a bit worse for wear. Perry has been candid about his long history of drug use with Aerosmith, and in 2008, frontman Steven Tyler confessed that Perry had snorted so many prescription pills that he couldn’t play his instrument. The guitar god has, he claims, been clean from drugs in recent years, and it’s not yet known what caused the health scare.
— Marlow Stern