‘Milk Cow Blues’: The Aerosmith song that ripped off the Kinks
If you look at the music of any and every successful rock band of the past five decades, their lineage can usually be traced back to the trailblazing sounds of the swinging sixties. The period marked the point at which the rock gauntlet was passed down to an angry new generation, who expressed their emotions through fashion and pop music. Countless now iconic bands populated the airwaves of the 1960s, and many left a mark on the music industry that remains to this day – as in the case of The Kinks.
From their initial formation in 1963, The Kinks pioneered an aggressive, adrenaline-fueled new era for rock and roll, awash with guitar distortion and short, sharp compositions. Songs like ‘You Really Got Me’ or ‘All Day and All of the Night’ inspired countless future artists to adopt the same effective yet simplistic song structures, and their use of guitar distortion – created by slashing their amps with razor blades – changed the sound of alternative rock indefinitely.
Whichever way you spin it, without The Kinks there is no punk, no grunge, no alternative rock. However, the Ray Davies-fronted group were incredibly diverse in their output, capable of writing both adolescent angst, in the form of ‘You Really Got Me’ and timeless romanticism through songs like ‘Waterloo Sunset.’ As a result, their influence over future rock movements was similarly varied, touching everybody from the Sex Pistols to the bubblegum arena rock of groups like Aerosmith.
Having formed in 1970, The Kinks were still active during the early years of Aerosmith. Of course, Boston, Massachusetts, is a world away from the mini-skirts of Carnaby Street, and so The Kinks had to be introduced to band member Joe Perry from a third party. “When we were young,” Perry recalled to Guitar World, “Tom and I had a garage band back in New Hampshire. And the bass player in that band had a brother who went to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and he would come home with a bunch of great records.”
Within those records that Perry had introduced to him, there was The Kinks. The London band seemed to have a distinct effect on young Joe Perry, who was captivated by Davies’ ability to create both new musical movements and reimagine old songs. “He also had this really hard-to-find live record by the Kinks,” he remembered, “I remember they did a version of ‘Milk Cow Blues’, where I kinda ripped off the Aerosmith version from.”
‘Milk Cow Blues’ was originally recorded during the 1930s by blues pioneer Kokomo Arnold and has since been covered numerous times by various different artists. The Kinks’ version is a definite highlight, thanks largely to the innovative fashion in which the band reimagined the blues number. “The way they did it was totally different from anywhere else,” Perry attested, “and that’s where I took inspiration from when we were doing Draw the Line.”
Aerosmith did their own version of the blues classic for the closing track of their 1977 record Draw the Line, which lifted heavily from The Kinks’ arrangement of it. “The guitar was played with a heavy wrist and just sounded so cool,” Perry said of The Kinks’ version. “We played it early in the clubs, and so we’d kinda had our version down by the time we did Draw the Line.”
Whether or not the Aerosmith version lived up to The Kinks is up for debate. However, it does provide an interesting look at the enduring and all-encompassing influence of the swinging sixties premier outfit, The Kinks.
