Joe Perry’s favourite Fleetwood Mac song: “A real spooky feel”
All great Aerosmith songs are descended down from the blues. Throughout every facet of their career, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry were more interested in following in the footsteps of their heroes like The Yardbirds and Cream than trying to make a hit designed to get on the charts. While Perry did take his cues from artists like Keith Richards and Eric Clapton, he knew that Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac should be given proper reverence for his performance on ‘Rattlesnake Shake’.
When looking through Fleetwood Mac’s history, though, the Green incarnation of the band has as much to do with the future of rock and roll as the Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham version of the rock outfit. Whereas the biggest hits the band ever had came from ‘Dreams’ and ‘Landslide’, hearing ‘Oh Well’ and ‘Albatross’ back in the day was like hearing the more eclectic answer to the blues movement.
Green was still more than happy to sprinkle his own bluesy licks into every song he played, but there was nothing else around that truly sounded like him. Much in the vein of acts like Cream, many of his best moments came from blending different pieces of genres together to create a strange collage, but ‘Rattlesnake Shake’ is about as straight-ahead as he ever got.
The Yardbirds had the ability to pump every one of their tracks up like it was on steroids, but Green might actually one-up them here. The tempo might not be the most intense thing ever, but hearing him go for broke opposite Mick Fleetwood’s drums is one of the best instances of controlled jamming in a rock context.
For Perry, there was no way anyone could equal what Green was doing, telling Guitar World, “This is from Peter Green’s earliest incarnation of the band when they had three guitar players and were a great blues band experimenting with rock. Green had a distinctive sound that was right out of the Chicago blues. He had a really spooky feel for phrasing, putting the blues in a rock format that a white boy like me could understand.”
But Perry can thank Green a bit more than just the inspiration, considering this is one of the tracks that got him to form Aerosmith in the first place. Despite not being all that impressed with what Perry was playing at first, Tyler immediately turned around when hearing him break out into ‘Rattlesnake Shake’.
From there, half of Aerosmith’s catalogue involved putting that bluesy spin on their material, whether that was singing about their lives on ‘Movin’ Out’ or odes to sex like ‘Big Ten Inch Record’. And while it didn’t end up appearing on their blues covers album Honkin’ On Bobo, ‘Rattlesnake Shake’ would routinely come in and out of Aerosmith’s setlist over the years, with Tyler changing the lyrics to suit whatever he was thinking at the moment.
But hold on a minute; a bluesy riff, an emphasis on a classic groove, and lyrics having to do with sex? Yeah, Green pretty much wrote the template for every Aerosmith song ever created with just one jam.
