Joe Perry crowns the best live band ever: “Talent that was unbelievable”
From the minute Aerosmith hit the stage for the first time, life on the road came naturally to Joe Perry.
‘The Bad Boys from Boston’ may have been a band of brothers in many respects, but Perry was always the free agent who was always at home as long as he had a guitar around his neck whenever the stage lights came up. But while he was the spitting image of someone like Keith Richards, Perry did everything within his power to give the audience the kind of show that would make even The Stones blush.
It’s not like he woke up trying to be that kind of person, though. When Steven Tyler first caught wind of Perry’s guitar skills, his first time seeing him onstage left a lot to be desired. A kid that jammed for a few hours in nothing but shaggy hair and ripped up jeans wasn’t going to cut it, and with one gig after the next, Aerosmith was going to turn themselves into the kind of well-oiled machine that was impossible to ignore. But they did have stiff competition at the time as well.
Let’s not forget that this was the era when Led Zeppelin were dominating the conversation, and since a little band called Kiss was bringing rock and roll to the circus half the time they tore through town, Aerosmith were going to blow them away on the strength of the music. They didn’t have the same platform boots or glamorous looks as bands like The New York Dolls or anything, but listening to their records, no one had a greater sense of groove that decade, especially when Perry came up with tunes like ‘Same Old Song and Dance’.
That’s all thanks to the way that Tyler approached every tune. He was a drummer by nature, and since Joey Kramer had spent his time playing with funk bands back in the day, their music was Led Zeppelin by way of James Brown. The riffs were heavy as hell whenever they wanted to be, but they also managed to keep every song low to the ground even when playing in the biggest arenas imaginable.
But those venues were only open because The Beatles made it possible. Rock and roll wasn’t meant to be any more than a fad when the Fab Four started, and yet once they strutted onto the stage on the Ed Sullivan Show, they became far too big for any theatre to contain. They needed to go bigger, and even in those packed stadiums where they couldn’t hear anything, Perry was still transfixed by what they could do.
Despite the band themselves not looking back on that era of their performances fondly, Perry felt that they were still better than any other rock and roll act, saying, “The Beatles stopped touring, because people wouldn’t listen to their music when they played live. They were unquestionably one of the best live bands ever, even today. They were a combination of talent that was unbelievable. But what they did was they brought that guitar, that sound, to the forefront – to everybody.”
If you want to get the full picture, though, you would had to have seen the band in their natural habitat. For the most part, the Fab Four started out as a bar band when they got started, and while they did get cleaned up eventually with their trademark suits and ties, hearing the precious little footage of them playing ‘Some Other Guy’ in the Cavern Club is the briefest of snapshots of a band that was slowly but surely becoming legendary.
They weren’t the first band to play rock and roll, and they definitely weren’t going to be the last, but Perry noticed one thing in The Beatles that no one could fake: chemistry. There are other bands that have tried to make the best records that they can with the best musicians at their disposal, but the magic of The Beatles was getting the four right people in place and watching them have a blast playing off each other.
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