“Find some fresh talent”: the singer Joe Perry once wanted to replace Steven Tyler
There’s hardly any Aerosmith if you take out Steven Tyler and Joe Perry.
Although the band have been one of the rare breeds in rock and roll for sticking with their classic lineup throughout most of their career, there’s a good chance that fans would have rioted if ‘The Toxic Twins’ weren’t together in some capacity whenever they performed together. All great rock and roll bands work off of tandems like that, but it’s no secret that Tyler and Perry have had more than their fair share of ups and downs throughout their career.
After all, it’s not like they were exactly simpatico when they first started working on their tunes together. ‘Movin Out’ was the first time where they actually seemed to be moving in the right direction, but when it came time for them to play everything onstage, Tyler didn’t exactly mince words when he talked about his ears bleeding every single time Perry played his guitar a little too loud. Then again, telling a guitar player to turn down is like telling the tide to stop coming in; you can politely ask all you want, but it’s not going to happen.
But when you look back on why they were disagreeing so much back in the day, it’s also kind of juvenile compared to everything else. Most people would have been frustrated enough dealing with interband tension, but the fact that they brought their own significant others into the equation was more than a little bit gross, especially after Perry figured he would take his chances by throwing away his shot in the band after a bit of milk was spilt on the floor.
You could blame that all on the druggy atmosphere that they were surrounded by, but when the band were on good terms for years, things got even more heated when Tyler wanted to work on American Idol. Any other singer would marvel at the chance to get that kind of gig, but since he didn’t bother telling any of the band that information, Perry wasn’t going to sit on his hands for a few years. In fact, the rest of the group were dangerously close to kicking Tyler out of the band at the time, once he started auditioning for bands like Led Zeppelin.
But that invites the question: how the hell do you replace Steven Tyler? The short answer is you don’t, and judging by the fact that Tyler eventually came screaming back to the band to make Music From Another Dimension, it wasn’t like there were any hard feelings, but that didn’t stop Perry from having a few ideas of what the band could sound like with someone new. And while Sammy Hagar had talked about jamming with the band, Chris Cornell did seem like one of the few artists who could have worked in that position.
The Soundgarden frontman was already securing his living legend status in the 2000s after Audioslave, and since he was tending to his solo career, Perry thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to see what he could do, saying, “It would be great to find some fresh talent but in all honesty we need to find someone with a track record or we wouldn’t be able to get decent-sized venues. If we got someone like Chris Cornell, then we could do some of each other’s material, put on a great show and go out for a respectable fee.”
Then again, there’s a good chance that it would have been something other than Aerosmith. Soundgarden’s lyrics didn’t really cater to the sex and drugs angle that Tyler’s did back in the day, and even when Perry talks about it, it feels like any collaboration would have had better legs if they were working in The Hollywood Vampires and jamming for the hell of it alongside Alice Cooper and Johnny Depp.
While we’ll never know what a Cornell/Perry song would have sounded like together, it’s not that far off to see how everything could have worked. Cornell had been a junkie for bands like Led Zeppelin just like Perry was, but his sense of groove was always going to be a bit more eclectic than the funkiness that Perry had.
