The one live band Joe Perry didn’t want to follow: “We were fretting”
From the minute that Aerosmith started, Joe Perry was always going to leave his best work on the stage.
The band had built up their following the old-fashioned way by touring relentlessly, and even if they didn’t go down the best with every single crowd they played to, no one could deny that they were giving it their all whenever they attacked the stage. They were like rabid dogs being let loose whenever their tunes started, but even for a band with that much bite, Perry saw more than a few people who could give them a run for their money.
When they first debuted, though, no one could picture anything more dangerous than what ‘The Bad Boys from Boston’ were doing. That sounds insane coming from the same band that would eventually make tunes like ‘Jaded’ and ‘Cryin’, but in terms of American rock and roll, there was hardly anyone who could match the kind of swagger that they had when working on tracks like ‘Rats in the Cellar’ or ‘Last Child’ when they first came out.
But the language of rock and roll was already changing around the time that Aerosmith was first starting. The genre had already moved out of the Flower Power era with ease, and while some hung onto their old blues records like a life raft whenever they made their records, there were already those who were willing to push the envelope to get a reaction, whether that was David Bowie reinventing himself or Iggy Pop terrifying audiences whenever he played.
Then again, not every band needed to change the concert experience strictly through their music. Alice Cooper may have sounded like your average avant-garde outfit on some of their first tunes, but when they started to get a little bit more gritty on record, people got introduced to the true macabre master behind all of those tunes onstage. So if Cooper was wowing crowds as only one man, what would happen if there were four of them?
The shock rock genre was still relatively new, but when Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons got the idea of putting together their answer to Cooper with Kiss, every other band needed to re-evaluate their stage setup. Any band could bring as much energy as they wanted to the stage, but when you’re competing with a band that has a bass player that breathes fire, a guitarist that shoots rockets and a drumset that levitates above the ground, you are always going to be competing for second place.
Steven Tyler already had a bit of a bone to pick with the way that Kiss’s crew clashed with theirs, but Perry couldn’t deny that they were in a league of their own, saying, “Kiss took performance art to the next level. I remember seeing them for the first time, and I was just fucking blown away. Those guys were the best. We were fretting about not making a mistake, and they didn’t give a shit, they just put it out there. Those guys were killing it. I saw their show and thought: ‘What the fuck do we have to do?’”
At the same time, no one was coming to a Kiss show looking to get the most thoughtful songs they had ever heard. Aerosmith did have a lot more depth to what they were doing, and while Stanley and Simmons did have a knack for coming up with the best choruses in rock and roll history on a few of their songs, they were never going to match a song like ‘You See Me Crying’ whenever they went into the studio.
There might have been a healthy sense of competition between both bands back in the day, but since they have each earned their stripes as rock and roll legends, there’s no sense in competing anymore. Tyler still wants to put on the best performance that he could, but it’s much better to let Kiss bring rock and roll to the circus while he practised his best rock and roll moves whenever he played live.
