“Get those guys back”: The guitarist that talked himself out of Aerosmith
It’s always hard for any artist to treat their entire career like a business. The best music comes from the heart rather than designed by a committee, and even if money needs to be exchanged between suits to get an album off the ground, it’s sometimes best for the artist to steer clear of the grabby fingers who only want a piece of their art. Although Aerosmith was the epitome of the badass rock and roll band that no one wanted to mess with, one guitarist saw the writing on the wall to step back from the group.
If anyone saw Aerosmith for more than a few minutes on their first album, most people would assume that they wouldn’t be anything more than a flash in the pan. Most of the rock world had become used to the standard blues rock affairs that everyone else was doing, and when hearing tracks like ‘Mama Kin’ or ‘Somebody’ off the first record, it was clear that the ‘Bad Boys From Boston’ worshipped at the alter of The Yardbirds and The Rolling Stones for most of their lives.
Just like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, though, there was always friction between Steven Tyler and Joe Perry. While most frontmen fall victim to a bad case of Lead Singer Disease, Tyler was much more of a perfectionist who couldn’t handle the number of hangers-on that were around Perry. When one of those supposed “hangers-on” is Perry’s wife, though, it’s not like things were going to be cordial backstage.
Once Perry decided enough was enough and left the group, though, the entire group could hardly function. Perry was their resident Keith Richards, and without him providing the right riffs and fellow guitarist Brad Whitford leaving the group, bringing in Jimmy Crespo and Rick Dufay into the mix was slated to fail before it had even got off the ground.
There would be the odd song that worked like ‘Lightning Strikes’, but most of them felt like happy accidents compared to the natural swagger of ‘Back in the Saddle’ or ‘Walk This Way’. And as crazy as this era could get at the best of times, Dufay was the one who at least knew that things were about to come to a screeching halt if they kept things up for too much longer.
When talking about his eventual return to the band, even Perry remembered that Dufay was the one motioning for him and Crespo to bow out gracefully, saying, “Rick Dufay said, ‘Listen, you’ve gotta get those guys back in the band. This just isn’t working without them.’ Rick is a really smart, standup guy who was just telling it like he saw it. But [my wife] Billie encouraged me to get together with Steven, and we hooked up and talked about Aerosmith.”
Given their state of mind, it was also probably a health hazard to keep Perry away for much longer. Tyler had never taken the breakup that well, and Dufay remembered having to carry the frontman through some dark times, including a few shows where they barely got through a setlist before Tyler collapsed at the lip of the stage and became too ill to continue the rest of the set.
When taken in that context, Dufay was more than a replacement guitarist by the end. He was the band’s guardian angel who gave them the life advice that they didn’t realise they needed to hear.
