The tune Joe Perry called “one of my favourite rock songs”
Any guitarist that came up alongside Joe Perry knew that rock and roll wasn’t always about the catchy single.
Chuck Berry showed everyone what could be done, but when you lock into that bluesy groove, there’s no limit to the kind of magic that can come out of the guitar. And while Perry took his lead playing in far different directions than the average blues rocker from his time, he knew that Aerosmith would have never had a solid foundation were it not for the legends of the genre, either.
Because when looking at their track record in the beginning, over half of their greatest tunes owed a huge debt to everyone from Eric Clapton to Keith Richards. There was no one looking at Steven Tyler singing along with Perry that wasn’t thinking that they were a carbon copy of The Rolling Stones, but when they happened to sound even more ramshackle, it’s not like that really mattered.
Over half of the greatest Aerosmith songs do have a Stonesy swagger to them, but the biggest part of their appeal is their sense of boogie. The importance of rhythm was never lost on Tyler, and when listening to the way that he coached Joey Kramer through playing certain drum parts, a lot of their greatest tunes seemed to take the basis of rock and roll and layer some pure funk on top of it all.
If you look at what Perry was doing on the lead side, though, there was a lot more interest in the heavier side of music. His licks are very idiosyncratic to him, but every now and again, a lick will jump out that will feel lifted from anyone from Jeff Beck to Jimmy Page. There are even a few of his breaks that sound like horn lines, but if there were any one inspiration, it all ended up going back to The Yardbirds.
As much as they are known as a breeding ground for Clapton, Beck and Page these days, there’s hardly any tune in their catalogue that Aerosmith didn’t steal from. ‘Somebody’ is the most blatant ripoff of their sound, but Perry felt that listening to the song ‘Stroll On’ was a revelation for him as a guitar player.
He had already been a fan for years, but listening to the interplay between Page and Beck was what ultimately caught his ear, saying, “One of my favorite rock songs ever, which still gives me goosebumps when I hear it, is ‘Stroll On’ by The Yardbirds. It’s one of the few recordings that has Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck on it, and at the beginning, Jimmy and Jeff are both getting feedback… I could listen to that 10 times in a row, and it still sounds like the first time I heard it.”
While it would be easy for Page and Beck to turn a track like this into a guitar duel, it’s clear that they have no real interest in doing that. They wanted to make the best tune they could, and that often meant taking the crux of whatever tune they were working with and adding the perfect sonic touch to everything so that the tune held together properly.
And listening to how Perry interweaves his solos alongside Brad Whitford, ‘Stroll On’ probably has a lot more inspiration behind Aerosmith’s guitar sound than people realise. Any musician would love the idea of turning every one of their tracks into an excuse to play one solo after another, but the real magic comes from musicians who listen to the song and play only what’s appropriate.
