The band Brian May called “everything a rock group” should be
There should never be any parameters behind proper rock and roll. Despite many gatekeepers of the genre who like to deny anything that isn’t 100% guitar riffs and wailing as inauthentic to their values, the best rock and roll is usually the kind of music that defies convention, switching up the formula and even revelling in the fact that they are the outsiders of the industry in many ways. Then again, it’s hard to really consider Brian May as being an outsider when in one of the biggest rock and roll bands of all time.
Although many rock bands had to fight to get the attention of the masses, Queen were almost universally loved right out of the gate. Granted, there were a handful of critics who wouldn’t know good taste if it hit them in the cochlea who didn’t get it, but listening to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, it was clear that they were pointing the way forward for music and had a bit of tongue-in-cheek humour in their delivery as well.
Even though there was one universal Queen sound, there was no telling where one song was going to be going once it started playing. There were many moving parts to all of their tunes, but it wasn’t out of the question for them to make a song that took on prog-rock tendencies, paved the way for metal, or even indulged Freddie Mercury’s love of show tunes like on ‘Bring Back That Leroy Brown’.
For any guitarist who was born around the time May was playing, though, it all came back to one’s ability to play the blues. Eric Clapton was being looked at as one of the greatest rock and roll guitarists of all time, and to get anywhere near what he was doing, most people had to take cues from what artists like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters had been playing in the years before rock and roll existed.
And while Queen could make a bluesy tune when they wanted to, Aerosmith were masters of their craft in terms of getting the exact right balance between blues and rock. Despite people wanting to put them in a box as Rolling Stones ripoffs, May knew he was listening to something original when he heard them play, especially when they put some old-school swing back into their tunes like ‘Sweet Emotion’ and ‘Walk This Way’.
A lot of their music may have been played out for some people, but May knew that all of the hallmarks of the genre could be found in any of their tunes, saying, “Aerosmith are everything that a rock group could possibly be. Joe Perry plays from the heart, he plays with technique, he plays with anger, he puts his pain. He plays with danger, and that has never changed over the years.”
Like May, though, Perry’s technique has always been more unorthodox than what the standard rock and roll scales should be. There are hints of people like Peter Green and Brian Jones in his sound every now and again, but in the same way that May brings symphonies to life whenever he plays, Perry takes the kind of musical lines that would have made great horn lines and transposes them onto guitar.
Even though the band’s reputation was dented in the eyes of most rock purists the minute they hit on ‘I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing’, that shouldn’t discount the mark they have left on rock culture. When looking at the greatest archetypes for what a rock and roll band should be, the chemistry between Perry and Steven Tyler deserves to be placed on the same level as that of Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.
