Steven Tyler and Peter Frampton in ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ (Photo: Universal Pictures)

Back in ’78, RSO kingpin Robert Stigwood — the man behind such box-office smashes as Grease, Bugsy Malone, and Saturday Night Fever — somehow convinced ’70s luminaries like Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees, George Burns, Sha Na Na, Carol Channing, and actual Beatles cohort Billy Preston to appear in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The discombobulated movie musical, composed entirely of bizarre Beatles covers — including Speak-&-Spell-voiced robots bleating and bleeping their way through “She’s Leaving Home,” Alice Cooper as a cult leader doing a spoken-word rendition of “Because,” Steve Martin as the silver-hammer-wielding Dr. Maxwell, and Preston parading through “Get Back” in a gold lamé uniform and matching go-go boots — now stands as an amusing artifact of a very wacky era.

But at the time, the rock opera, which later ranked at No. 76 on VH1′s “100 Most Shocking Moments in Rock and Roll,” was a commercial failure, barely breaking even at the box office and nearly wiping out RSO’s massive profits from Saturday Night Fever and Grease. It was even more of a critical disaster. For several of the movie’s stars, the film was an act of mass career suicide, caught on camera. (It should be noted that when the Bee Gees regained control of their catalog, the Sgt. Pepper soundtrack was the only album that they did not include.) Hardly any participant in the film emerged totally unscathed.

Except, of course, Aerosmith.

Aerosmith starred in Sgt. Pepper as the Future Villain Band, who in the movie’s most watchable and definitely most rockin’ scene battled good guys Billy Shears (Frampton) and the Henderson Brothers (the Bee Gees) while cranking out a hard-charging, ferocious rendition of the Abbey Road classic “Come Together.” Considered one of the best Beatles covers ever recorded, the single hit No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remained on the chart for 12 weeks total.

“I think the critics kind of left us alone on that. We didn’t get slammed, so we got out of it clean,” Aerosmith guitarist/founder Joe Perry tells Yahoo Entertainment now with a chuckle, 40 years after the movie made its New York premiere on July 21, 1978 (it bombed the box office nationwide on July 24). “It kind of exposed us to another part of the entertainment industry, and some of the fans — Peter Frampton fans — got to see us be Future Villains. So far as our career, I think we narrowly escaped it hurting us. Which… is about the best I can say.”

Perry admits that initially, Aerosmith didn’t want to participate — and only agreed to be in the film after one major plot change. “When we first were presented with this movie, we were totally against it. We just thought that the whole thing was going to be hokey, and we were just not cut from that cloth. We were very skeptical about it, and kind of even contemptuous about it. And they had Peter Frampton killing [Aerosmith frontman] Steven [Tyler] in the first script. We said, ‘Well, if you want us to do it, you’ve got to change the script. It’s got to be the other way around.’ We didn’t really consider Peter Frampton worthy enough to take us down, just because we thought his music was a little light. So they said, ‘We’ll change it!’”

[Editor’s note: In the actual film, both the Future Villain Band and Billy Shears survived. Billy’s love interest, a girl named Strawberry Fields, was not so fortunate, although she underwent some sort of miraculous reincarnation during the final musical number, thanks to an act of divine intervention by Preston. Ah, the ’70s…]

A good-vs.-evil battle on the set of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ (Photo: Universal Pictures)

Aerosmith knew even then that Sgt. Pepper would not be winning any Oscars, but it was still an offer they ultimately could not resist, for a couple of reasons. “We did it for an adventure, just to do it. They said, ‘Come on out, all expenses paid!’ — throwing money around like crazy,” recalls Perry. “A lot of people thought it was going to be what it was, and saw it for what it was, but it gave us a chance not only to cover one of our favorite Beatles songs, but to work with [legendary Beatles producer] George Martin. And that, of course, was the real hook for us.

“Probably one of the most flattering things about it was when we were in the studio with [record producer] Jack Douglas, and George Martin came down. We were running the song down, and we were waiting for him to tell us, ‘Well, you should change this, you should do that.’ We were waiting to hear some words of wisdom. And he said, ‘Just keep playing what you guys are playing, it sounds fine.’ We were a little stunned. I know that’s one of the things we’re proud of, that we were able to do it. And it carried its weight. To this day, people love it when we play it live.”

Four decades later, Perry says, “I think that that movie really was a window into the times, and looking back at it, it’s really fascinating.”

But in the years since, Aerosmith has crossed over into other unexpected and interesting pop-culture realms, always with the band’s credibility intact. For instance, there was the 1986 hip-hop remake of their own “Walk This Way” with Run-D.M.C., which not only revitalized Aerosmith’s career and established Run-D.M.C. as pop-crossover MTV stars, but opened the door for countless rap-rock collaborations to come.

“To me, that’s one of the proudest things I have in my scrapbook,” says Perry of that groundbreaking duet. “I think we got maybe one or two fan letters that said, ‘How could you guys do this, you’re a rock band, what are you doing playing with those guys?’ But that was it. We got so much more positive out of it. And it didn’t matter; to us, it was about the music.”

The group got a little more flak from rock purists when Tyler signed up to be an American Idol judge in 2010, but even that career move showed that Aerosmith can adapt to the times.

“As far as Steven going on American Idol, it kind of shows how much the whole music scene has changed,” Perry muses. “I don’t think that people look at us anymore as having sold out. Maybe they did for a bit, but it still didn’t stop our old fans from coming to see us. Once in a while we’d get a tweet or something on social media that people will say, ‘I’m not gonna come to Aerosmith concerts anymore because Steven did that [TV show],’ but those things are so few and far between, it doesn’t matter anymore.

“I think it’s more of an indication of how society in general has changed and how they think about music, as opposed to back in the ’70s, when we were this hardcore, thumb-your-nose-at-the-rest-of-the-world kind of band. I still consider us to be that, actually. We still play ‘Train Kept a Rollin” and ‘Toys in the Attic’ and all those kickass songs, as well as the singles and the ballads, so it just shows that we’ve managed to kind of hold onto our fans.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

When Aerosmith reunited in 1984, five years after the acrimonious departure of founding guitarist Joe Perry, the result was the greatest comeback in rock ’n’ roll history. Following Aerosmith’s culture-shifting, zeitgeist-capturing “Walk This Way” collaboration with then-rising hip-hop duo Run-DMC, which went to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, the group’s ninth studio album, Permanent Vacation, went five times platinum and further solidified their MTV-superstar status some 30 years ago. It also solidified the tumultuous yet enduring artistic partnership of the “Toxic Twins,” aka Perry and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler.

But there’s an even more enduring partnership in the legendary guitarist’s life: his marriage of almost 35 years to Billie Perry, whom he met in 1983 after he cast her in a music video for his band the Joe Perry Project. (“I still can’t get enough of her,” he gushes sweetly.) Interestingly, Billie hardly knew anything about her husband’s arena-rock past back then, but it was her words of encouragement that led to Aerosmith’s historic reunion. Without Billie, Aerosmith probably never would have gone on to become the most successful American hard rock band of all time, with 150 million albums sold.

Joe and Billie Perry in 2006. (Photo: Kevin Mazur/WireImage)

“She thought that if I got a break, I could maybe have a career in the business,” Perry tells Yahoo Entertainment with a laugh. “She didn’t really know about the band. She was into underground punk and all that, and she wasn’t into ‘bands with logos.’ But I kept telling her, ‘I had this band, and we played some big shows in the ’70s!’ … Anyway, she was going through a box of my old stuff, and she found Rock Scene, or Circus, one of those [classic rock magazines], and she saw an article in there, and Steven and I were on the cover. And she said, ‘Wow, he really did have a band!’

“Right after that, we were driving in Boston and I think ‘Back in the Saddle’ came on. I said, ‘That’s the band. That’s my band!’ I turned the radio up, so she had heard a couple of the songs, but she didn’t put the two together. … I had been out of [Aerosmith] for, like, three years by then. And she said, ‘Why aren’t you playing with these guys? What’s the matter with it?’ I started thinking, going, ‘I don’t feel as crappy as I did before about the band. Maybe I’ll give Steven a call.’ She definitely pushed me towards it — because she didn’t know what she was getting into, by any means!”

The Perrys have been the ultimate rock ’n’ roll power couple ever since, and Perry, now 67, says that when he collapsed backstage two years ago at a Brooklyn concert with Hollywood Vampires (his supergroup with Alice Cooper and Johnny Depp), Billie and his children were his main concern. “I just remember waking up. I think it was a lot harder on the people around me, especially my wife. I feel terrible about that, about having them have to go through that and see that,” he says. Luckily, despite reports that Perry had suffered a cardiac arrest, Perry says it was a mere case of “fatigue and exhaustion,” and he quickly recovered. “I got checked out at the hospital, like every test they could … I checked out OK, I mean, really good. … They thought it was my heart, they thought it was my lungs, and all that checked out.”

Related: Joe Perry’s tips for staying young

Incredibly, Perry returned to the road with Hollywood Vampires in record time — “I think I missed four shows, maybe six or seven days” — and he’s barely taken a break since. “I still feel like there’s ways to make music that I haven’t done yet, and I just keep looking,” he says. Perry’s latest project is another all-star affair, Sweetzerland Manifesto, a blues-rock album featuring vocals by Cheap Trick’s Robin Zander, the New York Dolls’ David Johansen, the Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson, and legendary rock belter Terry Reid, and executive-produced by Johnny Depp at Depp’s home studio. (The album title is a nod to Los Angeles’s Sweetzer Ave., where Depp resides.)

“I can name my own hours,” Perry quips, when asked what he gets out of such side projects. “Aerosmith’s an amazing machine, but the same five guys have been moving it along for close to 50 years; once it’s moving in one direction, it’s kind of hard to steer it. I’d have to say, we’ve missed a lot of rocks, just probably through good fortune and maybe a few good decisions, but getting that machine going can be really hard, getting that up to speed. With these side projects, I like it because I can just pick up and do it.”

But Aerosmith will be back on the road in the fall, and Perry says he’d “really like to put some music together” with his main band, whose last studio album was Music from Another Dimension! in 2012. “Steven and I have talked about it in general, because we both have things going on [Tyler released a country solo album in 2016], but I think there’s some time we’ll carve in there to get together. Even if it’s a couple of songs, it would be good to get something new out, so we’ll see.”

Related: Joe Perry talks the end of a rock ’n’ roll era

As for Perry’s partnership with Tyler, it may not be as solid as his marriage to Billie, but the two rockers have learned how to coexist despite their issues. “We have had our ups and downs, there’s no doubt about it. I guess over the years we just learned how to direct it in a more positive way and have it work for us, as opposed to constantly going at it,” says Perry. “We probably get along better now than we ever have — but I only see him once every three months, so we get along great!”

Perry reveals that Aerosmith have “used every tool available to man to figure out how to get along” and stay together, including the same sort of group counseling that Metallica attended in their rockumentary, Some Kind of Monster. “That Metallica thing that they did, it was pretty cool that they filmed it and all that, but that was like old news for us at that point,” he chuckles. “Over the years, we’ve had to seek professional help. We grew up together. We were kids, had this idea to do this, and living in an apartment together. You grow up, you know. You have relationships, marriages, kids, so everybody’s interests started to spread out, but the vision of doing the band, we still feel that. But sometimes it’s really hard to reconcile people’s differences, so sometimes you’re going to talk to somebody.

“We haven’t needed that for a while. We should probably be writing books on it now! But I think that’s another thing we’ve outgrown.”

Watch Joe Perry’s full Yahoo Entertainment interview below, in which he discusses Aerosmith’s history and music videography; his relationship with his wife and children, Tyler, and Depp; the future of rock; and the making of Sweetzerland Manifesto.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.