by Mark Saleski
As the era of Classic Rock shrinks into the musical and cultural rear view mirror, it’s been enlightening to see how the stars have dealt with aging.
Led Zeppelin splintered and managed to produce some fairly interesting solo material. The Grateful Dead nearly faded away before their big “Touch Of Gray” resurgence. Then Jerry was gone. The Who made a few comeback attempts, but true fans knew that The Who without Keith Moon made little sense (though I’ve got to say that I saw Pete Townshend play Who music with Zack Starkey on the drums … it was frightening). The Rolling Stones get older and craggier every year, but refuse to give up. Some say that they’ve become caricatures of themselves. I say more power to ’em.
Aerosmith? They were huge at one time (“Dream On” and “Walk This Way” were unavoidable … they still are!). Drugs and other ugliness broke them up for a while. Then came the Permanent Vacation-era second life. It seems like they’ve hardly slowed down since.
In the middle of the Aerosmith ‘strife years,’ guitarist Joe Perry formed the Joe Perry Project. When I brought Let The Music Do The Talking back to my dorm room, the sound my ear parts were expecting was undoubtedly a combination of Toys In The Attic and Rocks. I was not disappointed. Perry’s tense and powerful guitar was all over that record. Maybe the vocals weren’t so hot, but I was there for the full-on guitar blasphemy. It was there.
Many years (and several Aerosmith lives) later, Perry finally came up with a true solo record. Firmly ensconced in his home studio (the “Boneyard”), Joe was back to making “the big noise.” Perry plays all instruments and sings all of the lead vocals. The only exceptions are the drums played by friend and co-producer Paul Caruso and the analog synth played by Chris Noise on “Pray For Me.”
In direct contrast to the last few Aerosmith albums (Honkin’ On Bobo excepted), Joe Perry has a much more stripped-down sound. In fact, the “I’m gonna fill every last one of these here 128 tracks” phenomenon is completely avoided. It’s funny, I was poking around in some of the Amazon reviews and one of them said something about how this record sounded like it was a home-recording kind of thing. Though the reviewer meant this in a not-too-nice way, I took it to mean that Perry had touched a nerve. Yes, it’s raw. Isn’t that what rock and roll should be about?
The idea that aging rock stars should trundle off quietly into retirement is crushed to a pulp by this collection of songs. “Shakin’ My Cage” comes cranking out of the gate with a severe combination of classic-rhythm mayhem, momentum-inducing slide guitar and twisty solo work. Far from being a one-dimensional “guitar player’s” record, Joe Perry shows off Joe’s huge guitar sonics palette: from skidding metallic solos to low-down chunky rhythm guitar to gently-strummed acoustic to chiming artificial harmonics.
The songs themselves are similarly varied with flat-out rockers (“Shakin’ My Cage,” “Lonely”), swaggering blues (“Talk Talkin'”), spacey instrumentals (“Twilight”), country-inflected soul (“Ten Years,” on which Joe’s voice manages to sound like Warren Zevon) and the Indian-influenced “Pray For Me,” driven along by a very cool analog synth part.
The cover of the Doors’ “Crystal Ship”? The bits of backward guitar are nice, as is the spacey guitar solo. As the tune began, I was pretty skeptical. Do we really need a cover of this? Probably not, but Perry’s surprisingly good vocals and that guitar stew were just too good to pass up. On the DVD-side of this disc, Perry admits to oversinging some in the Joe Perry Project. Here he seems much more relaxed.
Even if you’re not sold on “Ship,” you’ll be won over by the surprise of the record: a blistering rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “Vigilante Man.” Perry starts with a huge dose of volcanic slide guitar and proceeds to blow the doors out from there. I don’t know if Woody would have appreciated all of the volume, but I had a good time.
People have been arguing that Aerosmith has been “washed up” for years, if not decades. That’s debatable. But what seems clear is that Joe Perry’s still just getting started.
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