The “best rock song” Aerosmith could ever write
Any rock artist would give their left arm to write the kind of tunes that Aerosmith usually throws away.
As much as their sound has changed over the years, their reputation as being one of the first hard rock juggernauts to come out of the US in the 1970s was what set the benchmark for people like Guns N’ Roses to get off their ass and make the greatest rock tunes they could think of. But even if Joe Perry thought they had a few classics in their arsenal, he knew that there was bound to be a musical ceiling of some sort.
Because as much as the band has been able to do a lot of different things, everything went back to the blues for them at every opportunity. They had walked in the footsteps of people like Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, but when working on their poppier stuff, there was always a certain bite lacking from their records that always came back when they fired up tracks like ‘Mama Kin’ live.
However, blues is far from the only tool in their arsenal. As much as they loved the idea of being an Americanised version of The Yardbirds in some respects, Perry was also a student of soul music, which comes out a lot in his playing. His lead breaks are instantly recognisable, but a lot of what makes them work is that they don’t sound like guitars half the time. If you take the notes and lay them out on a page, they almost resemble the kind of lines you would hear in a big band horn section.
It’s not like using other instruments was out of the question, either. The Rolling Stones had brought in the brass ensemble every now and again and even used choirs on ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, but Perry knew that his band worked best when they had the five of them together onstage playing the most dangerous-sounding riff that they could think of.
And while ‘Back in the Saddle’ is certainly a candidate for their most unsettling riff, no other album epitomises their sense of excess than Draw the Line. The band were already whacked out of their minds half the time they were working on the record, but even when the songs weren’t flowing like they should have, Perry knew that nothing could take the title track away from them.
Even with countless riffs under their belt, Perry put ‘Draw the Line’ as the tune he should measure everything else against, saying, “It certainly is daunting [writing new material] because I feel I’ve already written the best rock song I can write with, say, ‘Draw The Line’. It’s got my favourite tempo, uses the right tuning – it hits on all cylinders. Forget about whether it’s a hit and all that stuff. It’s a great rock song for me. I don’t know what it does for the rest of the world.”
And for a band that was recording under the most drug-addled conditions anyone has ever done, the rest of the band was right alongside Perry the whole time. The riff itself is practically a more badass version of a tune that Keith Richards would write, and once the band gets to the breakdown section with Steven Tyler going for broke with his screaming, it’s practically everything that hard rock was supposed to be at the time.
There are definitely bigger hits in the Aerosmith catalogue and even a few lower lights that show off their musicianship a little bit more, but there’s no questioning the importance of ‘Draw the Line’ in their repertoire. Other tunes might have a more compact structure, but none of them have the sense of swagger behind them like this.
