‘The payoff”: The album Joe Perry called the peak of Aerosmith
There’s a good chance that no band can ever tell when they have hit their peak in popularity. Whenever a band is starting, there’s no place to go but up, and when they have hit the ceiling, it’s normally the moment where everything starts crashing down before they start fading back into irrelevance. Although Joe Perry managed to see quite a few peaks and valleys when working with Aerosmith, even he had his personal favourite moments where everything was going right.
Because as much as the ‘Bad Boys from Boston’ loved working with different sounds during their lifetime, not all of them were necessarily worth it. It took them forever to even sound like themselves when Steven Tyler traded his signature voice for a bluesy growl on their first album, and even when working on their later material, they seemed to stray much too far from the bluesy rock act that everyone knew them to be.
That being said, not every generation is kind to that sort of music, either. Despite being one of their most freewheeling works, the reason why Done With Mirrors never struck a nerve was because of how much people had forgotten that kind of sound in favour of Bon Jovi and Poison, so bringing them into the 1980s with tunes like ‘Rag Doll’ and ‘Angel’ was their way of playing the game with MTV a lot of the time.
But that was never what Perry was comfortable with, either. He could still write all of the Zeppelin and Stones-y riffs he wanted to, but while a track like ‘Love in an Elevator’ had that kind of guitar swagger behind it, it was never going to hit the same way it did when they started working in the 1970s.
When looking back on their 1970s run, the more the comparisons to The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin don’t hold any water. Every other band was trying to emulate both of those British titans, but Aerosmith brought a sense of groove that no one else had thought of before. Toys in the Attic may have been the more commercial record, but it simply didn’t get better than them finding their swagger on Rocks.
For Perry, their fourth outing was the moment where everything finally came together for them, saying, “Rocks, we were at our peak creatively; we were just warming up to Rocks when we did Toys in the Attic, and Rocks was just kind of the payoff.” And when listening to the record again, this was probably the closest thing to hard rock that the band had ever made up until that point.
The punk movement hadn’t yet started to pick up steam, but hearing the growl of Perry playing a six-string bass in ‘Back in the Saddle’ set the tone for the record a lot better. Even the album cuts on the record are a major improvement from their previous outing, from the hard rock doom of ‘Nobody’s Fault’ to ‘Rats in the Cellar’ practically being the title track from Toys in the Attic on steroids.
Although Perry might have some favourites from every record, Rocks is almost too good, to the point where most average rock fans would question whether the same band was responsible for certain aspects of their career. Because once this record is under your belt, why would anyone want to go back and revisit something like Just Push Play?
