Joe Perry names The Rolling Stones’ “watershed” record
It’s impossible for anyone playing rock and roll not to take a few cues from The Rolling Stones. Even if not everything that they played was as innovative as The Beatles or as heavy as Led Zeppelin, there was always a certain sense of groove whenever Keith Richards and Charlie Watts locked in together before Mick Jagger started spouting off his lyrics. But listening back to his favourite band, Joe Perry knew that some pieces of the band’s catalogue stuck out a lot better than others.
But being a student of The Stones also means being a student of the blues. The whole mentality behind their sound in the old days was copying all of the great blues artists that they heard when they were kids, whether that was coming up with the perfect Muddy Waters-style guitar lick or throwing in the odd reference to someone like Robert Johnson whenever they performed live.
It’s not like they were exactly shy about it, either. Whereas Led Zeppelin would end up copying a riff wholesale and never giving someone credit back in the day, there were many other instances where the band would sit down and play a traditional blues tune right alongside their own tracks, like putting a track like ‘You Gotta Move’ right next to ‘Wild Horses’ on Sticky Fingers.
As the band got more and more seasoned as blues musicians, though, it was all building to something by the time they got to their double album Exile on Main St. While there were still plenty of covers to go around, Jagger and Richards seemed much more lived-in than before, almost as if they knew they were at the peak of their powers and could turn anything into gold, whether that was ‘Shake Your Hips’ or ‘Ventilator Blues’.
Although Aerosmith turned themselves into a much different animal by the 2000s, Perry was still proud to wear those influences on his sleeve. He was the one responsible for the band making their blues covers album Honkin’ on Bobo, and even if it wasn’t going to sell as well as the knockout choruses heard on other Aerosmith albums, he knew it would find an audience because of what The Stones managed to do.
For Perry, Exile on Main St marked a turning point in the group’s career and showed that a band could bring something new to a cover song if done the right way, saying, “On what is possibly their watershed record, Exile On Main St, nearly a third of those songs are covers, and you add all their covers together, and you’d have a couple of albums. So I guess we’re just making up time – we’re due this record! And it was the right time to get back together in a room and just play.”
And listening to the ‘Bad Boys From Boston’ inhabit blues tunes, they feel far more capable now that they had some years under their belt. ‘Milk Cow Blues’ was always going to be a fan favourite when they played live, but hearing their versions of ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ is still a treat, especially with Steven Tyler still screaming the same way he did back in the 1970s.
But it’s hard to forget what The Stones laid the groundwork for when thinking about Aerosmith’s blues side. It may have become a joke that the Boston band were a discount version of The Stones, but listening to how much ground they covered on their own, it’s impossible to think of them having that creative drive to go to new places by not listening to what Jagger and Richards could do.
