Joe Perry: The Jeff Beck of American rock and roll
Any guitarist just hopes to find their voice on their instrument half the time. While the massive influx of blues musicians in the late 1960s led to many artists developing a knack for playing the same licks over and over again, there was no doubt that someone could recognise a Jeff Beck solo the minute that he started playing. The former Yardbirds guitarist stood alone in terms of precision and raw beauty whenever he played, but Joe Perry was the closest thing that America had to that kind of guitar gunslinger.
Then again, is it really a shock that Perry developed based on his love for The Yardbirds? By the time hard rock started to become a mainstream genre, The Yardbirds were the only group to have the star power of Beck, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton all under one roof at one time or another, but Beck was the stand-out above the rest.
Looking at the way that he played on later albums like Blow By Blow, he seemed to be speaking every time he played his guitar, almost like he didn’t even need Rod Stewart out front pumping out the melodies. While Perry was more than happy to follow in his footsteps, what he did with Aerosmith carried on what Beck had set out to do in the first place.
Granted, it’s not fair to limit Perry to just one guitar player ripoff or anything. Combing through Aerosmith’s finest work, there are hints of everyone from Keith Richards to Jimmy Page to even a little bit of Billy Gibbons in the way that he uses his vibrato, but it’s not about the raw precision that makes him Beck’s equal. It’s about the way he phrases his parts.
Because looking back on the way that Perry played guitar, he wasn’t into melting your face off the same way that most guitarists would. He was a riff master first and foremost, and with the help of Brad Whitford, songs like ‘Back in the Saddle’ and ‘Walk This Way’ transformed into feats of brilliance whenever he turned up for a solo.
But let’s analyse ‘Walk This Way’ for a quick second. Looking at the final minutes of the song, where there’s that push and pull between the group as Perry solos, it’s almost impossible to replicate what he’s doing on the guitar, like when he goes for bends seemingly out of nowhere and makes his guitar cry during the outro.
It’s not nearly as flashy, but you can’t say that isn’t at least comparable to what Beck had been doing. From day one, both guitarists had tried to make their guitars talk a little bit, and by taking his time a little more, Perry constructed musical conversations whenever he took a lead, pairing nicely against what Whitford was doing despite sticking to rhythm guitar on tracks like ‘Last Child’.
Even when Steven Tyler decided to make the switch over to more mainstream material, Perry wasn’t going to show up without his guitar in tow. As much as a track like ‘Jaded’ seems incredibly pop-rock for a group that wrote songs like ‘Mama Kin’, Perry still put his signature flash on the opening riff, trading in the pure blues for the jangly sound that could have come off of a Byrds record.
But that’s really the key to why Beck and Perry seem like mirror images of each other. Both of them started off with the blues as their musical anchor, but once they figured out what else was out there to explore, they channelled everything they could into their music and made the guitar emote in ways that it never had before.
