The guitarists Joe Perry said would never exist again: “Turned the world upside down”
When Joe Perry first started woodshedding guitar riffs, rock and roll felt almost omnipresent in everyone’s life.
Even if parents were still convinced that it was the devil’s music and would corrupt the youth, there was never a lack of guitarists that had something different up their sleeve whenever they performed. It was only a matter of how they used their instrument, and Perry was an absolute natural when it came to making the most unusual guitar parts heard in a rock song.
Then again, it’s not like Aerosmith is some off-the-wall rock and roll band that tried to make everything sound strange. They were a typical blues-rock outfit from that time, and it’s easy to see the Zeppelin and Stones influence absolutely bleeding out of every single riff they wrote. But whenever Perry took a solo, there’s no real connective tissue back to the guitar greats of old.
Despite his fixation with guitarists like Peter Green or Eric Clapton, there was a certain energy in his solos that went all the way back to the days of swing bands. If you were to take the raw sheet music of Perry’s solos and had given it to a horn section rather than a guitar player, there’s a good chance that a lot of his lead lines would sound closer to what James Brown had been doing years before proper rock and roll began.
But the joy that never failed to excite Perry was seeing what other people could do with the guitar. There had been idols that he looked up to like Jimmy Page from back in the day, but there was hardly anything that Jimi Hendrix felt like it was of this Earth. He was the closest the guitar world had to an actual alien, and when he let his instrument sing on his records, there were countless times where his soul seemed to go through the sound barrier half the time.
And whether any guitarist wants to admit it, Eddie Van Halen was doing the same thing that Hendrix did years earlier. No one had thought about the instrument the same way that he did, and while it was astonishing listening to those tapping licks all across Van Halen’s debut record, Perry couldn’t help but look at all of those idols without a sense of bittersweet nostalgia for days gone by.
Because as much as he liked to play those records, he knew that no one was going to match what his heroes did, saying, “I think there’s a lot that’s still going to happen. I kind of doubt that there’s going to be another Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page or Eddie Van Halen; that was a time and an era. Those were standout guys who turned the world upside down and changed the way people heard guitar in our little world. But it’s not going to be like that any more.”
As much as Perry is right about it being a time and place, that doesn’t mean the guitar hero is completely gone. All of those guitarists at least had blues to go back to, and now there are guitar heroes that are influencing people in more subtle ways, whether that’s Kurt Cobain inspiring people with his punk rock approach, John Mayer putting together songwriting techniques with flashy playing, or Tim Henson getting as technical on the instrument as anyone dared.
Yes, it’s different, but that doesn’t mean that the age of the guitar heroes like Page, Hendrix, and Van Halen are gone for good. The music world has to evolve to stay in fashion, and while that might be a brutal truth for a lot of people to hear, it’s also encouraging knowing that the next biggest thing in music could be right around the corner.
