The album Joe Perry called “one of the greatest rock records of all time”
It’s never easy for a guy like Joe Perry to reassemble himself after playing in Aerosmith.
Here was one of the greatest guitar heroes in the world in one of the best hard rock bands the world had ever seen, and yet all it took was one glass of spilt milk to get him to leave the group when he decided to let everything end. The whole thing was almost comical if you look at it on paper, but if he was going to get in everyone’s good graces again, he was going to need the right people to help him get back on his feet.
But when you look at Perry’s attitude, a lot of it comes down to the rock and roll swagger that he has every single time he plays. He was the American incarnation of Keith Richards in many respects, so pairing him with a band like ZZ Top that knew the blues like the back of their hand was all that he could have asked for when he first started working on the Joe Perry Project after he left the group.
They had their own problems to deal with after trying to complete Night in the Ruts, but Perry certainly hadn’t lost his touch. ‘Let The Music Do the Talking’ was the kind of riff that reeked of Aerosmith-style swagger, but even if he could crank out some of the best licks that he could think of, there was always going to be an asterisk next to his name when Steven Tyler wasn’t by his side. Then again, ZZ Top weren’t ones to look for fame and fortune when looking at their openers.
What mattered to them was whether or not the band was firing on all cylinders, and even when they were working on their glossy records, you could still hear the bluesy band from Texas that started everything – Perry was already well-versed in Billy Gibbons’s work, so when working with the band on that first tour, he felt like a fish in water when he started to dig deeper into his arsenal for those bluesy licks.
And while Eliminator was just starting to gain steam around that time, Perry felt confident in calling it a modern masterpiece after the fact, saying, “For many dates we opened for ZZ Top, whose [album] Eliminator, one of the great rock records of all time, was climbing the charts. It was always a lot of fun to play with Billy Gibbons and company. Their backstage was always a happy, mellow party –so different from Aerosmith.”
Even if Perry needed a little less edge whenever he walked backstage, that’s what made Aerosmith work to a certain degree. Tyler didn’t want to mess around and give his audience a half-hearted performance, and his way of interacting with the crowd and the ongoing tension between him and Perry onstage is what made them one of the finest rock and roll groups of their time.
You also have to remember how much of that discipline rubbed off on Perry whenever he started forming his own project. He knew how his music was supposed to sound every single time he played, and even if he was more interested in letting the music evolve naturally, chances are he was taking a few cues from his bandmate when one of his solo band members wasn’t playing the kind of music that he wanted to.
Still, ZZ Top is proof that the kind of band that Perry always wanted to be in could exist out there in the wild. Tyler was more interested in the spectacle of it whenever he performed, but sometimes, if you have the right licks and some of the most luscious beards anyone has ever seen this side of Santa Claus, then you pretty much have the ability to do whatever the hell you want onstage.
