These days I’m just happy to be playing. Just enjoying myself.
Before they had played their first live gig, nearly two years before the album was conceived, they had tossed around all kinds of names for the band and Perry couldn’t exactly remember how they came up with Emotion Box or who, exactly, had suggested it.
EMOTION BOX BY ELEANOR LERMAN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 133 PREVIEW
Perry was walking along a street in his Queens neighborhood when he saw her. He was on his way home from the supermarket and looked up from trying to fish a couple of crackers out of a box of Triscuits he’d bought along with some frozen dinners, and there she was, just a few feet ahead of him, a pretty girl with straight, shiny brown hair holding a small brown dog on a leash. She was half running, half skipping, and the dog was looking up at her with what seemed like a smile. It was a bright spring morning and a soft breeze was blowing the girl’s hair around her face, blowing the loose raincoat she was wearing back from around her legs, just a happy girl, happily making her way down a sunny city street lined with leafy trees and thus, unknowingly, recreating a photograph that had ended up on the cover of the record album that, long ago, Perry had thought would be the beginning of his own happy life.
He stopped in his tracks and let the girl walk on down the street until she turned a corner and was gone. He could hardly believe what he’d just seen but there was no doubt about it.
Of course this was a different girl, a different dog, because the picture he remembered had been taken nearly 50 years ago when he was a young man, still a boy, really, barely 20 years old.
The picture was taken on Charles Lane, a narrow, cobbled street in Greenwich Village. The photographer worked for the small record label that had signed the band Perry was playing in. The girl was the photographer’s girlfriend (Sherry? Gerri? Amanda?) and the dog belonged to her.
Perry remembered how they had teased her about how she would be famous one day, how she’d be the mystery beauty on the cover of the breakthrough album of a wildly famous band.
The album, with its 10 original songs written collaboratively by Perry and his bandmates, all good friends, was given the same name as the band, Emotion Box.
Before they had played their first live gig, nearly two years before the album was conceived, they had tossed around all kinds of names for the band and Perry couldn’t exactly remember how they came up with Emotion Box or who, exactly, had suggested it.
Everyone had high hopes for the album but it never caught on. Who knows why? Over the years Perry thought of all kinds of reasons. Was it the British invasion which doomed the chances of American bands, the album never got the airplay on radio, or maybe the guys in the band weren’t cute enough or angry-looking enough to make them interesting. Whatever the reason it didn’t sell and that was the end of Emotion Box. The band broke up and the four friends in the band went their separate ways.