The band Joe Perry said Aerosmith overshadowed: “I was a little offended”
We don’t deny Aerosmith their place as rock royalty these days, but it took a long time for the band to truly establish themselves.
The beginning of their time as a band was met with persistent controversy, as despite trying to establish themselves as a unique and creative collective, everything they put out was met with barrages of onlookers accusing them of trying to rip off the Rolling Stones. Steven Tyler particularly was met with scrutiny, as he had a similar voice and style to Mick Jagger, which didn’t go down well with a lot of people.
“We’ve always just played our music and haven’t given a shit. Still, the ‘Cheap imitation of the Rolling Stones’ criticism was constant. And it hurt for the first couple of years,” said Tyler. “It was constantly Mick Jagger this and Mick Jagger that – that I copied him, and Janis Joplin too. Mick was the cheapest, easiest shot. ‘Well, he looks like him, so let’s write about that.’”
Later in their career, when the band put out their greatest hit, ‘Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing’, that was also quite a controversial piece of success, not with the wider public, but with the band themselves. They had been releasing good music for a long time before that, but suddenly, they were forced to spend extended periods on the road, all because a new horde of fans had started attending with the sole intention of seeing that one song.
“We were just about to go off the road, and that song came around,” recalled band member Joey Kramer, “We continued to tour off that song for another year. That was welcomed by the band. At that time, that was what we did. We would be on the road for 12 or 18 months, and the only time we came off the road was to make another record.”
The point is that while we now recognise Aerosmith as a pretty great band, it’s not been an easy ride, and they’ve been underappreciated plenty of times. As such, they know when a good group is getting overlooked. Joe Perry has a keen eye for it, and when the press started assigning a certain label to Aerosmith, he couldn’t help but feel a little bit guilty, as he felt it belonged to someone else.
Before the Rolling Stones rip-off label came along, localised press were talking about Aerosmith being the “bad boys from Boston.” Of course, this was a name that the band were happy to take on, but Perry thought it was misplaced, and J Geils was more deserving of the title. He always saw them as one of the greatest rock bands at the time, and couldn’t help but be disappointed by the fact that Aerosmith were somewhat overshadowing them. Another casualty of the critical world of music, if you’re not branded a copycat, chances are, you’re not branded at all.
“J Geils was the rock band at the time we were getting together,” he explained. “They were king of the hill. I was a little upset when people started calling us the ‘Bad Boys from Boston’. I was a little offended by the way the press put that title on us because it really belonged to J Geils. They were starting to fade away. They’d just done that world tour with The Rolling Stones and went around the world for a year with them, and then they broke up after that.”
He concluded, “There was no more J. Geils, so we were right there. But the local press and the DJs looked at us like we were kind of outsiders. Also, we weren’t really a blues band, and we weren’t a folk band; we didn’t really fit into the stereotype of what you’d expect from a Boston band.”
