The 1965 song that Joe Perry said “has stuck with me forever”
Despite fitting in perfectly with the glam metal megastars of the 1980s, Aerosmith were secretly a band out of time. They were titans in the 1970s, their combination of undeniable bangers like ‘Walk This Way’ and ‘Sweet Emotion’ with spandex, big hair and an acrobatic, yowling frontman arguably setting the pace for the oncoming likes of Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard.
This means that all of their influences, all the music that made them such megastars of the decade that taste forgot, ironically came from the most revered of all decades, the 1960s. It’s true, a band that named a record ‘Night in the Ruts’ actually had a modicum of taste, and they worshipped at the ground of the British blues-rock groups of the mid-1960s.
We’re talking Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac, The Yardbirds, and early Led Zeppelin, all bands that found their way into their early sound. I’m sure there was another British blues-rock group of the mid-60s that would have influenced a band whose singer had more lips than face, but for the life of me, I can’t remember them.
However, people are nothing if not full of surprises. In an interview conducted a little while ago, totemic lead guitarist Joe Perry talked about his five favourite songs and revealed a pick that few people would have seen coming. Amongst a list containing the usual subjects of Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple, and the like, Perry named the Bob Dylan classic ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ one of his absolute favourite songs.
Even more than that, he dubs it “a song that has stuck with me forever”. Which is fair enough, really. It’s not like this is some lesser-spotted psychedelic spectacular that no one’s ever heard of. The magazine in which the interview was published has dubbed it the single greatest song of all time on a few occasions.
Released in 1965, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ marked a seismic shift in popular music, and that’s putting it lightly. Dylan stretched the boundaries of what a rock song could be, delivering a six-minute epic packed with surreal imagery and biting social commentary at a time when radio was dominated by far simpler pop structures. The song redefined the expectations placed on rock songwriting at the time, proving that the genre could carry the same emotional and literary weight as folk or poetry.
However, it’s still heartening to see an artist who for over half a century was dubbed one of “the toxic twins” not just appreciate a record of its subtlety and wit, but understand it too, even despite himself. He said of the record, “I don’t know what he’s singing about half the time, but somehow the lyrics were easy to wrap your head around”. Which is absolutely true, six decades on and ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ still hits like a train.
That said, Aerosmith themselves were full of surprises. After spending the 1970s on top of the hard rock world, a few members of the band had burnt out in a haze of addiction and touring, Perry himself included. In the face of a music industry on the cusp of passing them by, the band took a few years off to re-centre, then teamed up with Run-DMC to stage an astonishing comeback.
This comeback, a remake of their classic ‘Walk This Way’, was so groundbreaking that it didn’t just reintroduce Aerosmith back into the mainstream; it also turned hip-hop itself into a mainstream concern. The band themselves admit they had to be cajoled into doing it (something they share with Run-DMC), but in the end, it had a hand in changing the face of pop culture as we know it. Something they share with Bob Dylan himself, so maybe that influence runs deeper than all of us thought.
For a band like Aerosmith, whose reputation was built on swaggering riffs and a bit of (admittedly cring-inducing) blues-rock attitude, Dylan’s influence might not seem obvious at first glance. Yet the band’s best songs often carry the same rebellious spirit that runs through Dylan’s catalogue. Perry’s admiration for ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ suggests that, beneath the leather jackets and arena rock spectacle, Aerosmith were always paying attention to the songwriters who reshaped rock music at its foundations.
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