The blues guitarist Joe Perry called one of the greatest: “The best”
Joe Perry has been used to Aerosmith going in a couple of different directions on every project.
There has never been a set rulebook on how one of their records was supposed to sound, and even if there were more than a few records that weren’t exactly their best work, Perry has always found a way to shoehorn in a couple of great licks into the mix whenever he could. But despite making some of the poppiest songs of their career and even flirting with artists like Run-DMC here and there, Perry’s first love will always be the blues.
That’s how the band started when he and Tom Hamilton were hashing out their riffs before Steven Tyler got the idea to form a band together, and you can hear a lot of it in their early solos as well. As much as Perry didn’t claim to be the most flashy guitarist in the world, a lot of the songs on their first handful of records reek of early Fleetwood Mac and Rolling Stones records, especially in the way that they play off of Joey Kramer’s bass drum.
In fact, it’s almost inaccurate to call Aerosmith a hard rock band. Considering their love of the blues and more R&B acts like James Brown, a lot of their songs are like swing arrangements that happen to have a bit more punch behind them. And for someone who grew up learning the ways of the true giants in blues, that’s all that Perry ever wanted. Everyone was playing those same three chords all the time, but it just takes one person to present them in a different way that makes them sound fresh.
That’s what Zeppelin was doing before Aerosmith had started, and while Tyler and Perry begat a lot of questionable rock stars once the hair metal boom started, they could at least tell which bands were there to stay. Eddie Van Halen had the same bluesy heart that Perry could appreciate, and Slash was practically cut from the same cloth as he was when Guns N’ Roses made it big, but Perry felt that there was nothing that could compare to what Stevie Ray Vaughan was doing.
Because compared to everyone else, Vaughan had crash-landed straight out of an old Western. His Texas get-up made him look like the ultimate gun-slinger whenever he performed, and besides coming off like one of the single coolest people ever to pick up a guitar, the fact that he managed to get songs on the radio during the 1980s was unheard of. MTV didn’t have time for too many throwbacks, but anyone was going to have time to listen to Vaughan bust out his chops on ‘Pride and Joy’.
Some blues purists may not have been fans all the time, but Perry understood that he was looking at one of the best hook writers in the genre, saying, “It’s tough to work in such a finite space and do something new and interesting. I guess that’s why there aren’t too many fresh new blues songs. But you can’t be afraid to try it. I think Stevie Ray Vaughan was one of the best guitarists to get something new out of that space. He knew his chops, obviously, and he’d paid his dues too. But he also wrote a lot of cool songs that crossed over into rock-land.”
And you can definitely hear that kind of pop-flavoured version of him coming out on his first two records. Couldn’t Stand the Weather might have the same legendary status as Texas Flood, but even if a song like ‘Scuttle Buttin’ wasn’t going to get on the radio outside of guitar circles, ‘Cold Shot’ is a perfect example of a blues artist becoming one of the biggest names in the artist by doing nothing more than looking absolutely cool whenever they play.
Vaughan was ready to do anything he could to preach the good word that everyone from Albert King to Jimi Hendrix had done before, and Perry was only too happy to do his part whenever he came out with a new song. Desmond Child did help steer Aerosmith in a more pop direction, but as long as there were people like Vaughan notching up hits, there was no reason for Perry not to wear his blues influences on his sleeve.
