Joe Perry on the best guitar riff Aerosmith made: “That one gets the gold star”
There’s a particular art that comes with making a great guitar riff. Most people have to be in the right place at the right time with their guitar to sculpt a riff out of nothing, but once the drums come in and someone locks into a groove, it doesn’t take that long for the fingers to find the right frets and get the entire house rocking on a bluesy lead line. While Joe Perry is one of the inventors of the perfect guitar lick, he still thinks that nothing can get better than what Aerosmith did on ‘Walk This Way’.
For all of the great licks that the ‘Bad Boys From Boston’ made, though, they never claimed to be the first to try it out. What they were doing went as far back as The Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds, and while they have taken many steps outside of their comfort zone in the past, it doesn’t really get better than when they lock into a bluesy mode.
Even after going through some of the biggest pop makeovers any band has endured, Honkin’ On Bobo may be one of their most underrated projects. Every track is a cover of an old blues standard, and hearing Perry sing some of the tunes like ‘Back Back Train’ brought them back to the roots they had before they had even released their debut album.
For all of those fantastic licks that Perry put together, ‘Walk This Way’ wasn’t initially meant as a bluesy jam. When first hitting on that riff with Steven Tyler behind the drumkit, Perry thought that it should sound a lot closer to what funk acts like The Metres were playing, which makes sense because of how rhythmic it sounds, almost like he was trying to emulate some sort of horn line.
Aerosmith may have been given a lot of trash talk for their artistic liberties with The Stones’ material, but ‘Walk This Way’ is what solidified them as a tour de force in their own right. No matter how many times Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote a tune together, none of them could play something this funky or have lyrics that were as filthy as what came out of Tyler’s mouth.
When talking about the tune years later, Perry thought that ‘Walk This Way’ will forever be known as their most iconic lick, saying, “I think “Walk This Way” is probably the one that comes up the most, and I think it’s not just a straight rock-and-roll song. It shows a lot of influences that Aerosmith has. I think that’s probably the one that gets the gold star as being the riff people know us for.”
And despite having the greatest licks in rock history, that famous break isn’t even the best part of the song. For any guitar player, the verse groove is one of the most satisfying things anyone can play, never letting for a second and chopping up the traditional shuffle rhythm to the point where it sounds like funk meets rockabilly.
And as far as rock’s future goes, ‘Walk This Way’ has its fingerprints on countless pieces of culture, whether that’s providing the blueprint for hair metal or turning into the archetype for rap-rock once the group re-recorded it with Run-DMC in the 1980s. ‘Same Old Song and Dance’ and ‘Dream On’ may be more complex and arguably the better songs, but that one handful of notes in ‘Walk This Way’ is the reason why it will go down in history just like ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
