The 1973 album Joe Perry never wanted to hear again: “I wish my guitar sounded better”
Everything that Joe Perry ever played had to be almost second nature to him before it hit the stage.
A lot of the best Aerosmith songs are based around feel to a certain degree, and while everyone likes to lump them in with the other hard rock bands of the world, like The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, they had a lot more emphasis on groove whenever they kicked off tunes like ‘Walk This Way’. That was the style that they pioneered for themselves, but it took Perry a while before he hit on the same kind of discipline that Steven Tyler had during their early days.
Because as much as Perry liked the idea of pumping out great riffs, Tyler was the one cracking the whip whenever they were making their songs. The frontman had spent years trying to find the band that he wanted, and even when he seemed to have it, he wasn’t going to let the band lounge around all day and wait for inspiration to strike. Everything needed to sound perfect, but sometimes the best performances fall out of the sky as well.
I mean, ‘Movin’ Out’ is the perfect example of why that mentality works so well. Perry came up with the song’s central riff when he and Tyler were sitting on a waterbed, and even if the song itself was rough around the edges, it didn’t matter. This was the first authentic Aerosmith song, and given how happy Tyler was when he finished it, it felt like they had given birth to their first musical child.
Which can’t really be said for the rest of their debut album. Even though it’s the home of several future Aerosmith hits like ‘Mama Kin’ and ‘Dream On’, the whole album feels a bit more rushed compared to what they would be doing later. Tyler was the driving force behind writing most of the songs, and while he does have a unique style, Perry was more upset at hearing what his guitar sounded like when he got the final pressing of the album.
Everything sounded tight enough, but considering what Toys in the Attic and Rocks would go on to sound like, Perry didn’t really feel like the album represented all that the band could do, saying, “I don’t think any of us liked it at the time. We thought that we had an idea in our heads about how we thought it was gonna sound, but we were all pretty naive about everything, including working in the studio. So when I listened to that record for years, it was like, ‘God, I wish my guitar sounded better. I wish we had played this differently’. But as the band got better, and we recorded the second record and the third record, things changed for us.”
But the biggest problem with the album and even with the band’s performances is Tyler’s voice. Don’t get me wrong: Steven Tyler is one of the greatest frontmen who ever lived and could have easily put on a clinic in how to scream like a banshee, but when you listen to him on this record, he’s virtually unrecognisable. He was going too far into bluesy territory, and he ended up sounding like what Kermit the Frog would sound like if he were a little grittier.
So when the public got to hear this for the first time, it’s no big shock that the band’s label ended up putting all their faith into Bruce Springsteen instead. ‘The Boss’ was someone who sang with conviction every single time he made a record, and you could tell that ‘The Bad Boys From Boston’ were still a little wet behind the ears and didn’t exactly realise what they were doing on their first go-around.
Their work was cut out for them once they hit the road for their record, but that helped give them a bit more depth as entertainers. They couldn’t always make it work on their records, but if they kept honing their skills live one night at a time, their ‘Blue Army’ was bound to come to them in no time.
