The band Joe Perry said had the best musicians: “They had a no-bullshit”
When Joe Perry was first learning about rock and roll, it didn’t matter about being the most accomplished musician in the world.
There were certainly guitar heroes like Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck for every would-be guitarist to drool over, but the whole point of every great rock and roll tune was to have a bunch of people hear the real person that was on the other side of that vinyl record whenever it came on. But even by those standards, Perry figured that some bands had all of the talent that any group of people could have asked for.
Then again, you have to keep in mind where Perry was coming from. He grew up in a world before the likes of Eddie Van Halen and Joe Satriani, and while he fit the bill for what a rock and roll star was supposed to be, his definition of a virtuoso looked a lot different from the people you see today. His playing was incredibly riff-heavy and might not have favoured the same kind of extravagant freakouts that you saw from everybody else, but if they happened to serve the song, there was no sense in complaining.
After all, those great Aerosmith tunes all benefited from having the best hooks of any American rock and roll act. Their contemporaries like Kiss may have had a lot more theatricality to what they did, but whenever a song like ‘Back in the Saddle’ came on, that opening lick to ‘Walk This Way’, there wasn’t a soul on this Earth that wasn’t bobbing their head from the moment it hit the airwaves.
Rhythm was incredibly important to Perry, and there wasn’t anything too dissimilar between a lot of what he played on guitar and what you would hear out of James Brown’s backing band. They were still a rock and roll outfit, but their sense of swagger came from playing some of the most infectious grooves anyone had ever played. If you really wanted to play rock and roll, there needed to be some power behind everything.
All of those records Perry and Steven Tyler heard as kids had the feeling of a hurricane hitting your eardrums, but even with all of those Yardbirds records leading the way for them, Led Zeppelin felt like a musical tornado. No one would have been able to capture the same feeling that they did when Jimmy Page put together that first album, but even if they didn’t play everything perfectly, Perry was transfixed by what they could do on record.
They may have been given the tag of Zeppelin imitators more than a few times, but that’s only because Perry considered them the finest in their field, saying, “They had a no-bullshit and no compunctions about using the blues. They were simply the best musicians going. You could put Jimmy Page up against any guitarist in the world. Same goes for Bonzo on the drums, and their unsung hero John Paul Jones. His classical slant gave their music an added dimension and kept them in a class of their own.”
All of it was still rooted in blues, but every now and again, there would be songs like ‘Kashmir’ that seemed to fall out of the sky when they made some of their records. There was no reference point for where these tunes were coming from, but when you’ve studied some of the greatest music in Western culture and beyond, like Page was doing, it was all about trying to find that next riff that would light his world on fire.
And while Aerosmith did get inspired to move outside of their comfort zone when making tunes like ‘Janie’s Got a Gun’, it was more about them following the lead of what Zeppelin did. They already knew that their legacy wasn’t going to be touched, and all they could hope to do was ride their own wave for as far as it would take them.
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