The “god-awful” show that brought Aerosmith together
All good rock bands can usually point to one show where they found out what they could do. Although musical magic works in mysterious ways, the truth is always revealed when people plug into their amplifiers and let the music talk for them half the time. Even though Aerosmith earned their stripes being some of the ultimate road dogs of rock and roll, Steven Tyler admitted that he wasn’t particularly impressed by Joe Perry when he first saw him onstage.
By the time Perry started making the rounds on the club scene, Tyler may as well have been a seasoned pro of the music industry. He had already had a single on the jukebox and had been on a support slot where he carried in the amps for The Yardbirds, so what would he want anything to do with some snot-nosed kid?
Well, if your name is Joe Perry, you get your point across pretty quickly. While Tyler had been workshopping different bands since his main outfit, Chain Reaction, went bust, he started to check out the local scene where Perry’s outfit, The Jam Band, was playing.
They may have had the same influences that Tyler had, but there was no way that they were ready for prime-time, saying in Behind the Music, “It was a god-awful show. It was all really fast and out-of-tune and it was very [makes masturbation motion].” Once the band kicked into the song ‘Rattlesnake Shake’, Tyler knew that he had found what he had been searching for for so long.
Instead of the straight-ahead frantic blues that he had heard all night, this was the kind of sexual backbeat that channelled the deep clues that he was used to hearing, saying, “It wasn’t [shit] anymore. It was all about making it right, you know, now we’re talking”. After breaking up The Jam Band, Tyler and Perry would join forces for Aerosmith, bringing in Tom Hamilton from Perry’s old band as well.
Once they started to write tunes of their own, ‘Rattlesnake Shake’ may as well have been the blueprint for their entire career. The old blues song is about the power of sexuality through a bluesy lens, but just through that descriptor alone, that could either mean a blues classic or a good half of Aerosmith’s back catalogue.
The band would also put the song into regular rotation in their live shows as well, with Tyler usually changing the lyrics to make things even more suggestive. Aerosmith had different facets to them, but that didn’t mean they would ever stop drawing from their record collection.
Even when Tyler wasn’t singing about sex, the great backbeat behind it made everything groove in a much different way than what you were hearing from Led Zeppelin at the time. This was the Americanised version of the British Invasion, and whether they knew it or not, the rest of the hard rock community was going to get a healthy dose of boogie along when songs like ‘Walk This Way’ lit up the charts.
