Joe Perry’s 1987 attempt to rip-off AC/DC was his greatest move: “There you go!”
While nobody ever really came close to topping their level of consistency at their peak, it’s still fair to say that the influence of AC/DC within the hard rock community is unparalleled even to this day.
The minute they broke out of their native Australia, it was evident that they were going to become the dominant force in rock music, largely thanks to the fact that whatever they did, they did with a smirk and a sense of nonchalance. Oh, and the fact that they were simply one of the most effortless riff-writing acts to have ever graced the planet; let’s not forget about that.
It’s probably for those reasons that nobody ever came close to matching them, given how others lacked that natural charm and cheekiness that always came through both in the lyrical content and the feel of the music, and how, despite trying so hard, you can’t force out an AC/DC riff.
There’s something so sordid and raunchy about their work, and yet, because they all had Cheshire Cat grins on their faces while doing it and knew how ridiculous it had the potential to be, they ended up going to stratospheric levels with it. This may well seem like I’m putting the music as a secondary part of their output, but in truth, the reason for AC/DC’s success was down to the full package, not just a handful of elements.
The thing is, that didn’t stop people from wanting to copy them, and throughout the 1970s and especially during the ‘80s, there were a number of acts who seemed to take their worship of AC/DC to another level, desperately trying to take their crown as they entered their own period of decline.
Aerosmith had already been around for as long as their Aussie counterparts, and while their early material had some of the same energy to it, it wasn’t until their mid-1980s rejuvenation that it became most apparent, with guitarist Joe Perry arguing that one of their songs was their most blatant attempt to rip off their idols.
“I loved AC/DC,” Perry revealed during a 2024 interview with Guitar World, as if it needed to really be acknowledged. “That band still fucking knocks me out! Their early albums – pick any album – they’re all great.” He then continued, explaining that their 1987 hit, ‘Dude (Looks Like a Lady)’ was intended as a direct rip-off of his favourite band.
“I was thinking about an AC/DC song,” he admitted. “It’s funny, it doesn’t sound like an AC/DC song, but there you go!”
He then continued, describing how the addition of a sampler that frontman Steven Tyler had just acquired gave the song its own sense of character that separated it from the work of AC/DC. “He pressed a button, and you could shorten things, and another button would make it repeat,” he said. “So suddenly you’ve got this cool rhythm thing, and we were fooling around with that. That riff you hear at the start came from Steven fooling with the buttons, and we captured that stuttering riff. We built the song from that.”
It isn’t exactly like AC/DC, but you can still see where Perry was coming from, and ‘Dude (Looks Like A Lady)’ is certainly one of the band’s most fun songs, coming as close as they got to matching their levels of cheek and effortlessly bold rock prowess.
