The 1974 song Joe Perry crowned as Aerosmith’s greatest ballad: “The one I liked best”
The entire genesis of Aerosmith always comes back to Steven Tyler and Joe Perry.
Every member of the band was responsible for them becoming larger than life, but ‘The Toxic Twins’ had the kind of partnership that every good band needs, whether that’s Mick Jagger and Keith Richards or Don Henley and Glenn Frey. Every band needs that kind of push and pull, and Perry did get frustrated more than a few times when he was pulled closer to the softer side of rock and roll every time he played.
Because as much as Aerosmith have changed over the years, Perry always wanted the band to be one of the heaviest groups that you had ever seen. Not necessarily metal per se, but when you listen to a lot of their best songs, they have a lot more to do with the bluesy structure that The Rolling Stones started out with, only put through the filter of what bands like Led Zeppelin were doing around the same time.
That was their recipe for success in lots of ways, but Tyler always had other plans for how to get the band to new heights. Anyone with functional eardrums would have thought that ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ was going to be a hit, but in Perry’s mind, the idea of doing the trademark ballad on every single one of their albums was bound to be frustrating for someone who just wanted to rock.
His heart was rooted in songs like ‘Nobody’s Fault’ and ‘Back in the Saddle’, so having to sit through a song that was all about Tyler trying on his best crooner voice didn’t exactly work. But when you listen to the ballads that they were working on before they brought in Desmond Child, Tyler was trying to make some of the best symphonic rock songs that the world had ever heard on their tunes.
‘You See Me Crying’ is one of the most gripping songs that they had ever made at that point, and even though ‘Dream On’ took its sweet time becoming a hit, it did get there in the end to become one of the band’s finest works. But compared to their other ballads, there’s something not quite right about the way that ‘Seasons of Wither’ works, and Perry loved every single second of it.
The song was definitely softer than everything else on Get Your Wings, but Perry felt that it was the one ballad that he could get behind, saying, “Of all the ballads Aerosmith has ever done, ‘Wither’ was the one I liked best. I never thought Aerosmith should do ballads at all. My philosophy was the only thing a hard rock band should play slow was a slow blues.” But that’s what makes ‘Wither’ such a standout.
There aren’t many songs in the band’s catalogue that have as many twists and turns as this, and considering how dark it sounds, it feels closer to some of the more tortured songs that Zeppelin would have made whenever they went acoustic. And since the band would start experimenting even more a few years later, ‘Wither’ was the blueprint for what they would be doing when making tunes like ‘Kings and Queens’ much later.
It took a long time for Perry to come around on a song like ‘The Girls of Summer’, but in 1974, a lot of their ballads were still being made for all the right reasons. A band can only play slow blues licks for so long, and sometimes it’s best to have a song that breaks up the tension or takes off in a totally different direction before bringing everything back down to Earth.
