‘Rocks’: The moment Aerosmith finally matched The Rolling Stones
Anyone who’s ever picked up a guitar and started playing will lean on their influences. Even if it’s hard to put together more than two chords when you’re starting out, it’s all about throwing on your favourite records and slowly working until what’s coming out of the guitar sounds like what’s coming out of the speaker. For an artist, though, it’s hard to fall back on your heroes and not be called a copycat, but Aerosmith took all The Rolling Stones comparisons to task when working on Rocks.
Because the minute Steven Tyler and Joe Perry hit the rock and roll scene, critics were already prepared to slap them down as imitators. It’s not hard to see why, either. Tyler and Perry’s rapport was almost identical to that of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and since both of them relied heavily on the blues, it was never that hard to put the pieces together with one listen of ‘Train Kept A-Rollin”.
But Aerosmith was about doing everything The Stones did to the nth degree. Jagger might have played the rock and roll frontman every time he opened his mouth, but Tyler wanted to become Jagger, and Robert Plant meshed into one. And while Toys in the Attic showed them slowly finding their sound, they had a long way to go before dodging the Stones comparisons.
In the first few minutes of Rocks, though, you can tell that the band are going for a completely different sound altogether. After spending years on the road, this is the ultimate road dog album and one of the defining records in hard rock, with ‘Back in the Saddle’ being the moment where everything came together. Whereas The Stones had a fascination with all forms of American music, hearing Tyler play the role of a gun-toting cowboy was all original.
And while The Stones had gone beyond fashionable rock and roll to elongated jams on Exile on Main St., Tyler was interested in making things even more aggressive. While the fastest thing that The Stones had done up to that point was ‘Rip This Joint’, ‘Rats in the Cellar’ is borderline punk in its delivery, especially when Perry hits those lead lines and starts sounding like the musical brother of Johnny Thunders.
There are still all the trappings of what a Stones album is supposed to be, but most of the songs are actually far better than what The Glimmer Twins could have hoped to come up with. ‘Home Tonight’ is the ultimate song about coming home to your other half after life on the road, ‘Last Child’ is the kind of brooding groove that The Stones used on their covers of old blues tunes, and ‘Nobody’s Fault’ is the equivalent of taking ‘Gimme Shelter’ and making it even more menacing.
Then again, making an album this showstopping should have been a sign that things were about to hit a brick wall. Even though Rocks is far and away their best record, hearing Draw the Line afterwards can’t help but feel like a comedown by comparison, especially considering that everyone was off the rails on drugs when recording each of the songs.
The makings of good ideas were on early Aerosmith albums, but Rocks was the kind of gutter-rat album that Jagger and Richards could have never made by the time they hit the Black and Blue era. They had grown world-weary since their days in exile, and now it was time for The Toxic Twins to give the world their fair share of thrills.
