“Still pinching myself”: The two bands Joe Perry was desperate to tour with
Support bands are often dealt a pretty raw deal when it comes to touring. Night after night, these groups are forced to contend with the fact that the majority of the audience has either never heard of them or couldn’t care less about their music. Meanwhile, the rest of the audience is probably still in the pub by the time they emerge onto the stage. In an effort to combat this, groups like Aerosmith always made an effort to attract support bands with as captivating a live act as possible.
Aerosmith always knew the power of a strong support act. After all, prior to forming the hard rock outfit in 1971, frontman Steven Tyler once supported 1960s blues rock pioneers The Yardbirds while in the band Chain Reaction. As far as supporting gigs go, playing alongside a group as original and compelling as the Keith Relf-fronted band clearly left an impression on Tyler. When Aerosmith started to find traction in the American rock mainstream, notably after the success of their 1973 single ‘Dream On’, it was suddenly down to them to find their own support groups.
The standard route for a rock group to follow when booking a support band is to look at the city they are set to play in and ask local promoters for any decent local bands that could play. Job done. However, this practice often results in subpar support bands and disinterested audiences. In contrast, Aerosmith were attempting to create as exciting a live experience as they could, which included seeking out support groups which would appeal to the band’s ever-expanding fanbase.
“Every tour, we get a list of young bands and some bands that are on their way up,” Joe Perry once shared with MusicRadar. “It’s hard to know which bands gonna be good live because we wanna give the audience the best show they can. It’s really a drag to have sit through an opening act that just doesn’t have anything going except for one song.”
Highlighting the differences between Aerosmith’s live shows and other groups in the realm of hard rock and metal, the guitarist continued, “We’re not from the school, the old Van Halen school, that has a shitty band on first [and then] more people spend more time at the t-shirt desk. We just like to have the best band we can.”
As such, Perry developed a wishlist of support bands over the years, collating some of Aeromsith’s favourite groups and dream collaborations. Two names, in particular, rose to the top of that list over the years. “Our manager called up and said, ‘What about ZZ Top?’” Perry recalled, “I said, ‘You didn’t even have to call. Are you kidding?’ From the five bands I would want to tour with, AC/DC being one of them, ZZ Top would be one of them too. I’m still pinching myself”.
In terms of supporting bands, AC/DC and ZZ Top would certainly take some beating. After all, both groups were among the leaders of the hard rock and blues rock sound throughout the 1970s. “One of the things that I like about [ZZ Top] so much is the blues rock thing. They kind of went a different way than we did,” Perry declared. “In a lot of ways, they are kind of the AC/DC of blues rock. Nobody does it better.”
Aerosmith ended up achieving their dreams of performing with both AC/DC and ZZ Top. The Australian hard rock icons joined Perry and the gang on their ‘Aerosmith Express Tour’, which ran from 1977 to 1978, and ZZ Top played alongside the band on their 2009 joint tour.
