Joe Perry on the most incredible live band ever: “Ruled the roost”
The strength of any good rock and roll band tends to come from their ability to kill onstage. Rock and roll has seen its fair share of immaculately produced records, but there’s no greater measure of how good a group really sounds until they’re put in front of a stadium’s worth of people and seeing how they control their audience. While Aerosmith earned their stripes as one of the biggest road dogs of the 1970s, Joe Perry still thought that they had nothing on what J Geils Band had done.
Then again, Aerosmith were certainly no slouches when it came to their live set. It did take a bit of getting used to those main stages, but when their debut failed to generate any buzz, half of the reason they blew up came from running themselves ragged across the US and building up their reputation one show at a time.
Even when acts like Kiss were making some of the boldest innovations to how the rock and roll stage show was supposed to be, you couldn’t take your eyes off of Steven Tyler for a second. From his scarf-clad microphone stand to his operatic vocal chops, Tyler had the kind of stage presence that felt like taking a mixture of Mick Jagger and Robert Plant and rolling them into one.
If anything, J Geils Band feels like they should be a massive step down from that. Looking at their biggest hits like ‘Freeze Frame’ and ‘Centerfold’, this just felt like a cheesy 1970s act that somehow managed to get a handful of decent hits on the charts. That doesn’t really constitute a great career, right?
In theory, yes, but that’s only part of their story. Whereas most people just look at the pop version of the group, J Geils Band had some serious chops back in the day, with their namesake guitarist having the tastiest blues licks on the scene. They may have had the same kind of fanbase that made people love acts like The Doobie Brothers, but when they started to jam onstage, it was a much different story than what people on the album.
Add that to Peter Wolf’s magnetic stage presence, and Perry ended up feeling a little bit intimidated by what he saw, telling Louder, “The J Geils Band ruled the roost in Boston, and rightly so, and we were the young upstarts. The J Geils Band were the most incredible live band I can think of, and they owned Detroit. When Detroit heard that there was another band from Boston called Aerosmith, they gave us a chance.”
If J Geils Band was about soulful rock and roll, Aerosmith had the energy of a freight train by comparison. Despite having some of the heaviest of the 1970s, Perry still never lost his sense of rhythm, with many of their greatest licks almost sounding as if Jimmy Page was playing a James Brown horn section on guitar.
J Geils Band may have dominated the airwaves in Aerosmith’s native Boston, but the minute that Toys in the Attic came out with singles like ‘Sweet Emotion’, there were new kings in town. There would always be time for soulful rock and roll, but if any singer tried to compete with Steven Tyler, they were bound to lose every single time.
