The band Joe Perry thought took the best of Aerosmith: “Made it their own”
Rock and roll has always been about evolution. No matter how many times people mine the same blues riff, no band can just keep recycling the classics and hope that the next generation of music lovers will accept them. It’s always about forward motion, and while Aerosmith took the best of the bands in their record collections, Joe Perry felt that Guns N’ Roses were taking the best of them and moving it one step forward.
When Aerosmith first burst onto the scene, though, you would have sworn that they were just the British invasion in a funhouse mirror. Steven Tyler and Perry had the same kind of rapport as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and since half of their songs were based around those bluesy textures, it wasn’t a shocker that the press jumped on them for being a second-rate version of The Rolling Stones.
If you listen to the songs for more than five seconds, though, there’s much more hard-edged material in the group’s catalogue than ‘The Glimmer Twins’ could have hoped for. ‘SOS’ is one of the earliest incarnations of punk ever made, and if The Yardbirds turned ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ into a rock standard, Aerosmith’s take on the tune is like that version of steroids.
For Slash, though, it all centred around the licks before the image. Outside of his iconic look with the top hat, the Guns N’ Roses guitarist worshipped at the altar of Perry, even claiming that the album Rocks changed his life when he first fell in love with music. And considering Aerosmith’s fourth outing is the equivalent of Led Zeppelin, The Stones, and a dash of Black Sabbath, it would be an unintentional archetype for how Appetite for Destruction would sound.
Before they brought out the sweeping piano ballads, Guns N’ Roses were probably the closest thing to a straight-ahead rock act that Los Angeles had at the time. If Aerosmith were the ‘Bad Boys From Boston’, Slash and frontman Axl Rose were the Perry and Tyler of the West Coast, with Slash hardly ever speaking but coming up with the perfect melodic ideas for ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’.
According to Perry, Guns N’ Roses were one of the few bands that were able to build on what they had since the first Van Halen album, telling Spin, “The only other record I ever felt that way about was the first Guns N’ Roses record. They basically took the best of what had gone on for 20 years and made it their own. I mean, goddamn.”
And it wasn’t just in the licks, either. Guns N’ Roses were always reverent of their influences, and when they released a live EP of their material, their version of Aerosmith’s ‘Mama Kin’ might have enough attitude to rival the original, especially with Rose getting a little more of that signature growl going that Tyler could never grasp on Aerosmith’s debut.
But that’s not to say that either Aerosmith or Guns N’ Roses are better than one another. It’s just about how you use the influences in front of you, and by the time the millions of glam rock wannabes were cluttering up the airwaves, having a group that called back to the good old days of Aerosmith never felt more necessary than 1987.
