When Rock was first coming into bloom, during these vital times of change, it seems as if those bands took their cues primarily from old blues legends and R&B originators who came before, and cut this new path. And the bands who followed took their inspiration from the preceding bands, and though there’s still some incredible music out there, it seems as if a chain-reaction of derivative influence has diluted the core of it, the soul of the song.
That’s when we realized, you keep making music even though all this stuff is going on in pop land. We figured it out, that people will still keep playing our music. There was definitely an audience for it, so we continued on it. But it just seemed to be that as each generation went by, we realized we didn’t have to change what we were doing. Not that we would, we stuck to our guns and carried on, hopefully carried the tradition of taking the blues and adding our touch to it. We could be unaffected by the top ten.
Then, of course, all that changed when MTV came around and Aerosmith got back together again. We had to change the way we did things. It almost became as important to have a good video out as it did to have a good song out. We did not like the idea of videos at first. We felt that it took away from the magic of music. But we saw that it was coming, it was what the fans wanted, so we went out and did it.
You’ve hit some incredible highs in terms of iconic videos and popularity, visual fixtures to songs everyone knows. It’s a strange world when Alicia Silverstone is forever tied to you because of the visuals set to your song. How to you reconcile that artistically at this point? When your creation has become more of a movie than a song to a whole other generation.
I would’ve loved it if it would’ve just been one part of a thing. When you listen to a song and there’s no video to go with it, you imagine the song alongside whatever’s going on in your life. That’s why they say music is the soundtrack to life. Then you attach it to certain things in your life, and lyrics mean different things to different people. But when you put on a video, you interpreting the lyrics for your fans already, there’s no room for imagination.
That was the basic reason why I felt it was infringing on the experience. It’s like you have a painting, and a little video next to it explaining what the painting means. It kind of took some of the magic out of it. But it’s what the people wanted, it was all part of the scene. So rather than fight it, we got the best video directors we could get in terms of the songs, and made the best videos we could make. In some cases they were actual literal representations of the song, and in other cases… say a song like “Pink,” the video really didn’t have anything to do with the lyrics, but it was something fun to watch.
So there were different ways to approach it, and it just became another part of the art form. But we’re also talking about two or three songs off a record. There were a lot of other songs on there, and my thought was that anything that can get people to listen to the rest of the songs is worth it. If you’ve got a video that gets popular, the people are also getting all these other songs that don’t have a video, so it’s a two-way street.
In your book, you discussed the Convair plane that crashed with Lynyrd Skynyrd on board. You were supposed to have flown on that the week prior.
It was a terrible tragedy, and we just considered ourselves incredibly lucky. People were flying on all these different planes, and it was very common to be on a plane Fleetwood Mac had been on the week before. We’ve always felt there was somebody watching over us, and this was another example of that. People were put in our lives that helped bail us out for one reason or another. Fortunately we had someone looking at the plane that we would be taking, and put his foot down. To be that close to it… it was really a blow, up and down the line. From knowing those guys, to the loss of music and beyond.
Playing the safe odds is always good, to have people protecting you that passionately.
We had a couple close calls with planes. There was one experience I thought there was a good chance we were gonna put a big hole in the ground. So it was part of the game back then.
Pick up Rocks: My Life In and Out of Aerosmith at Joe Perry’s official site.
