The most difficult song Joe Perry ever wrote: “Nothing but a pain in the ass”
Joe Perry has won plenty of awards for his songwriting, having been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Aerosmith, so you can say he knows the isolated, introspective realm of songwriting very well.
There are a few hit singles he’s written speedily, with barely a thought, such as ‘Love in an Elevator’, whose guitar riff practically came out of thin air, and the other Aerosmith classic, ‘Sweet Emotion’, which was written as an “afterthought” to complete the 1975 album, Toys in the Attic.
On the other hand, Perry has faced several songs that prove a huge challenge, wherein no matter what he tried, or how he held his guitar up to the burgeoning sonic soundscape, he couldn’t quite whittle the right riff from the wind of his thoughts, with one such example is another song from Toys in the Attic, the hit single, ‘No More No More’.
In a recent interview, Perry and bandmate Brad Whitford revealed how exactly they came up with their catchy riffs, noting that it was with great difficulty.
“To me, he had it up here,” Whitford said, gesturing to his head, before adding, “but it wasn’t really working in standard tuning”. Adding to this, Perry said that he uses the Robert Johnson tuning the most (the tuning at the heart of his iconic Delta blues), which “threw off a lot of songs”.
However, he added, the open tuning for ‘No More No More’ is “not one of my favourite tunings, and proved to be nothing but a pain in the ass”, going on dejectedly, “I mean, I probably could have written the same riff in regular tuning, but it wouldn’t sound the same”.
The song begins with the beautiful guitar riff, before the lyrics come in: “Blood stains the ivories of my daddy’s baby grand / I ain’t seen no daylight since we started this band,” Steven Tyler gruffly recites on the classic track. On he goes, with a gritty, confessional, diary-like lyrical outpouring about the reality of the rock and roll lifestyle, and the guitar helps to hold him up as he admits to being sorely disillusioned with the whole thing.
There’s a sort of metatextuality at play here, then; while the song was a pain in the ass for Perry to write, it captures how their lifestyle, his lifestyle, was a pain in the ass to live as well. Gone were the mundanities of domesticity, the beautiful rituals of a quiet family life, as the extravagant parties always had a morning-after, and the work always had to be done, whether or not you felt any inspiration for the music.
Despite having to wrestle with the riff like taming an alligator in the wild, Perry has, somewhat famously, shared his appreciation of the musical grind. “I’ve come to realise that you live on through recordings; they’re like a musical diary, a window into somebody’s soul,” he once shared, and with ‘No More No More’, he became a character with greater resilience, determination, and nuance than before.
