The guitarist that convinced Joe Perry to quit Aerosmith: “Doing stuff that I’d never heard before”
For most of the 1970s, nothing was going to slow Aerosmith down. After spending the first years of their career getting compared to their influences a bit too much, the songwriting of Joe Perry and Steven Tyler would soundtrack the next generation of rock and roll. But while they were tempestuous in their creation, sometimes that would spill over.
Creating anthems like ‘Walk This Way’ and ‘Sweet Emotion’ while building their audience at every single show, Aerosmith quickly became juggernauts that had the old guard looking over their shoulders. But these things tend to happen in cycles, and pretty soon, Perry and the band were also having to look behind them to see who was on the come-up.
While Perry was already one of the biggest superstars in the world, he got the fear of God put into him when he saw one guitar player emerging from California.
Throughout the band’s career, though, Perry was never known to be the flashiest player on the block. Despite having the rock and roll mojo most artists would kill for, Perry’s playing style was often focused on the riff before anything else, occasionally playing great lead lines while fellow guitarist Brad Whitford played more complex lines underneath him.
Regardless of who was playing what, Perry quickly became one of the most sought-after guitar players in the world, coming up with the central riffs for Aerosmith classics like ‘Back in the Saddle’ and ‘Walk This Way’. Even though the band catered to the hard rock audience that favoured Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, they began to hit a wall when working on the album Draw the Line.
Informed by the substances everyone was taking, much of the album was assembled from the only riff ideas the band had left, with Perry being completely out of it for most of the sessions. Aside from living like a junkie, Perry was also starting to get intimidated by another band that was coming up from California, Van Halen.
Although the group had barely made a dent in the rock world during Aerosmith’s prime, Eddie Van Halen became the world’s next guitar hero overnight, thanks to the band’s 1978 debut. For the few seconds that aspiring guitarists heard ‘Eruption’ for the first time, they knew there was another legend in town, featuring solos with him playing with both hands on the fretboard.
Aside from the band’s guitar star, their look was made for prime time, with David Lee Roth becoming one of the biggest frontmen on the scene with his signature rapport with the audience. Even though Aerosmith could still pack arenas of people thanks to their blues-infused swagger, Perry knew that they were in trouble when he saw Van Halen for the first time.
When discussing his contemporaries, Perry said that Eddie would become the catalyst for him walking away from Aerosmith, telling Guitar World, “We were rolling into the ’80s, and I still remember hearing the first Van Halen record and fucking loving it. I mean… what a great fucking record. Eddie’s guitar playing was just so incredible; he turned guitar on its fucking ear and was doing stuff that I’d never heard before. I knew it was time for a break because new ideas were needed”.
A guitarist so good that they inspire you to leave your incredibly successful band is a truly gifted player. It might seem strange, but that is just how dynamic Eddie Van Halen was. He tore up the rulebook, built a fire with it, then pissed out the embers. Every guitarist in the world was shaken by his arrival, and Perry did what any true artist would do: he went back to the drawing board. But he knew he couldn;t do that while working with Tyler.
But, with the decision made in his head, he knew he had to leave Aerosmith. Perry would not go quietly when leaving the band, though, culminating in a massive fight with Tyler at the end of an arena show, resulting in him quitting the band for a few years, working on his solo outfits.
While Aerosmith would later be invited back into the limelight as pioneers of the hair metal movement, Van Halen had already invented their own lane in rock and roll, determined to wipe out any other rock band that stood in their path.
