The metal band Joe Perry said everyone got wrong: “Their stuff is just very tasty”
Most bands that started heavy metal never saw themselves in those terms. Even if Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath deserve musical medals of honour for making music become heavier at the dawn of the 1970s, none of them exactly wanted to be associated with the same genre of music that birthed bands like Slipknot and Korn years later. However, even with the heavy riffs in Aerosmith’s catalogue, Joe Perry felt that people were still getting the genre wrong even up into the 1980s.
Then again, Aerosmith has never been known as metal in the fullest sense of the word. They still had their heavy moments, like on Rocks, but since their biggest influences were acts like The Rolling Stones and early Fleetwood Mac in their prime, it was more likely for them to bust out a bluesy jam than try to write something that could give Tony Iommi or Eddie Van Halen a run for their money.
And as much as metal relies on virtuosity, Perry was never that kind of guitarist either. He had his shining moments where people thought of him as a genuine guitar hero, but there were also a handful of moments where he thought outside the box or constructed a guitar line not all that different from a horn break in a funk song or adding in the odd riff in the middle of a song while Steven Tyler blew away on his harmonica.
Once the band fell out, though, the era of hair metal may have been their one saving grace going into the next decade. Done With Mirrors had done mediocre numbers, but the minute they got glammed up in the same kind of attire that was in Whitesnake’s best videos, songs like ‘Rag Doll’ and ‘Love In An Elevator’ suddenly didn’t look all that out of place next to whatever Poison video was coming on.
But that music had started to expire before the 1980s was even over, and it took Guns N’ Roses to separate the quality from the bullshit. Since Aerosmith was one of their primary influences, it wasn’t hard to see them continuing on what ‘The Bad Boys From Boston’ started in the 1970s with a more punk-rock ethos, especially when Axl Rose seemed to come onstage frothing at the mouth during the Appetite for Destruction era.
Despite everyone calling them the last of the greatest hair metal bands, though, Perry never thought in those terms, saying, “They were called metal at the time, but they weren’t: Metal isn’t sexy, but rock is. To put it another way: You can have the rock, but you need the roll. Songs like ‘Paradise City’ and ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ were just simple enough; the chorus lines came right when you wanted them. Guns n’ Roses’ music wasn’t full of the overblown gymnastics that a lot of guys were doing then — their stuff is just very tasty.”
And it’s not like the band was proud of their metal credentials, either. Slash never identified with that music aside from saying that he enjoyed Black Sabbath’s records, and compared to every other guitar virtuoso at the time trying to play at a thousand miles an hour, the guitarist always took the lyrical approach and made the kind of guitar lines that anyone could sing within their first listen.
So when people are talking about the death of hair metal, Guns N’ Roses weren’t the genre’s final authentic band as everyone thinks. They may have come from the same place, but whereas most other acts were purely hair metal, they were the epitome of what a hard rock and roll band were supposed to be.
