“Beatles-esque”: Joe Perry’s favourite grunge band
The term “Beatles-esque” is frequently used, often in unexpected contexts. In one interview, Aerosmith’s Joe Perry even applied it to describe a grunge band, a genre seemingly far removed from the sound and legacy of The Beatles. To truly grasp Perry’s admiration for the band, it’s worth exploring what “Beatles-esque” actually means and why it might be the perfect descriptor in this instance. It speaks not only to musical style but also to the innovation, creativity, and transformative influence The Beatles had—qualities that can transcend genre boundaries.
The trickiness of “Beatles-esque” is that the Beatles were an ever-evolving beast. There is no one Beatles sound. In the early 1960s, they were a pack of early rock and rolls with a sound that now feels more twee or doo-wop inspired than any classic rock music. Only years later, after Bob Dylan passed them their first spliff, they mixed in strains of folk for a sound that wandered into countercultural waters. By the time they got to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or The White Album, they defied all genre descriptors as they made records that were a multi-textured merge of seemingly anything and everything they fancied.
In that way, the term “Beatles-esque” emerged because no other term would do. The Fab Four could only be contextualised within their own world because their world was so hard to pin down or capture by any outside labels or standards. But when the term is now pinned to other acts, it’s hard to know what it actually means in terms of sound, energy or presence in culture.
“I don’t think there’s anything anybody’s doing that the Beatles didn’t at least try at some point,” Perry said of the band. He sees them as the golden standard, with every band since essentially existing as their students. As the Liverpool lot covered so much ground, he thinks bands from all genres are still sitting in their lineage.
That’s how he justifies the connection he makes between The Beatles and Stone Temple Pilots, a 1990s grunge band formed in San Diago. The troupe came up in the early grunge wave that included bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, which, weirdly, were regularly referenced in connection to the Fab Four, as Kurt Cobain was once dubbed “the John Lennon of the swinging northwest”.
There are plenty of reasons why that could be. It could be argued that after the long era of classic rock, the grunge scene was the birth of something new. It was a new phenomenon, much like how rock and roll was back in the 1950s and ‘60s when The Beatles were revolutionary long before they were experimental.
But according to Joe Perry, the actual reason, and his own definition of what “Beatles-esque” means, is that these bands, especially Stone Temple Pilots, refused to be confined by genre. Even though they were part of a clear musical movement, the band wouldn’t be boxed in by that as they took influence from bossanova, psychedelic rock and beyond.
“I like them all as people as well as admire, and this isn’t meant to sound trite, their sheer musicality,” Perry said of the group, adding in reference to their broad sound, “Their influences are kind of Beatles-esque in a way.”
He continued, “Having done some songwriting with Robert, I picture him in another life playing jazz guitar someplace in Harlem in the Forties,” capturing that evolving and experimental spirit by being able to see Robert DeLeo, the band’s bassist in so many different contexts and timeframes. He said, “Musically, his head is on another planet,” much like Lennon’s was as he wandered into a world of experimentation.
