How Miles Davis changed the way Joe Perry recorded music: “Butterflies”
Given the length of his career, both as a member of Aerosmith and later the supergroup Hollywood Vampires, there’s a high likelihood that the approach of guitarist Joe Perry has changed multiple times since he first picked up his instrument.
While he may have noted in the past that he’s also something of a traditionalist, that doesn’t stop him from occasionally picking up new techniques to add to his repertoire, and there have frequently been moments where he’s been exposed to something he hadn’t previously considered making a routine habit of his play style.
However, one of the things that changed his perception the most was only a more recent skill that he had become enlightened by, and it was thanks to an engineer who demanded that he work in a certain way that was reminiscent of how musicians of an older generation used to operate.
While recording with Hollywood Vampires in 2019 alongside bandmates Alice Cooper, Johnny Depp and Tommy Henriksen, the group were attempting to lay down a cover of David Bowie’s infamous 1977 hit, ‘Heroes’, a song which had long been a part of the band’s live set, but that they’d never tried to rearrange in order to feature it on a studio recording.
In an interview with MusicRadar, he claimed that this off-the-cuff decision to try and record the track came naturally, and that the setup in the studio couldn’t have been more suited to his personal preferences. “The whole band could set up and play,” he recalled. “We got plenty of isolation, everyone could see each other, and we could play like a real band.”
He would then explain how the studio engineer requested to know how the band wished to work, and while some of the rest of the band were daunted by the prospect of following his lead, Perry was immediately in favour of following his suggestion. “We’d been playing ‘Heroes’ live, so it sounded pretty good,” he continued. “And the engineer said, ‘How would you guys like to record? Directly to the cutting machine?’ We looked at each other, and we knew what the engineer meant, and we said, ‘Holy shit! That means that we’ve gotta play it perfect because there’s no overdubbing here.’”
Because of his own prior experience of having recorded in this fashion on Aerosmith’s earlier albums, which is something he referred to as “red light blues” in reference to the light that shines in a studio when the engineer is recording, Perry was thrilled to be presented with this challenge.
“That’s how people used to do it,” he concluded. “Miles Davis and all those guys, they’d just record right to the vinyl. And I was fascinated by that. So I got that feeling in my stomach – butterflies for a few minutes. It was a little bit of a shocker, but we had some good takes already, so we went in and cut it directly to the acetate. It sounded about as good as anything can in Analog Land.”
While Hollywood Undead’s take on ‘Heroes’ is nowhere near as good as Bowie’s original, or indeed close to replicating the effortless flair and intuitive musicianship displayed on Davis’ records, it’s interesting to note how Perry was able to return to the techniques he had used early in his career as a result of the simplest suggestion, and how he immediately thought of his heroes when returning to this method.
