Joe Perry is a gear hound. Always has been, always will be. At any given time – at home, in the studio, or onstage – the Aerosmith legend can be seen playing anything from a ’59 Les Paul to a mongrel Strat he assembled himself.
With that, Perry is open to plugging into any guitar amp. As he puts it: “There are no bad sounds, just sounds for different applications.”
In fact, Perry tells MusicRadar, “For me, the amplifier is even more important than the guitar. And then, the speakers are more important than the amplifier! I came up at a time when I had to distort guitars – and they had foot pedals, too. It was a brand-new instrument.”
But there’s a caveat to that statement.
Perry admits: “Taken out of context, that sounds a little one-sided, you know? But it definitely opens the door to the bigger picture. The electric guitar is a relatively new instrument. Along with seeing The Beatles invent arena rock, we saw the invention of a new musical instrument!”
Perry says he sees the scenario as if “Mozart had a buddy and his name was Kurzweil…” Adding, “Oh, yeah, and they had electricity! It’s amazing to have been born at a time where the electric guitar is this fucking thing that is just this amazing-sounding instrument.”
For those of us who play guitar, the idea that the instrument is “new” is hard to wrap our heads around. After all, we’re living in a world where one can open up Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, and be pelted with any level of guitar-playing ‘creators’.
But Perry, ever the open-minded tinkerer, looks at it from all angles, starting from the beginning.
“The whole point of the electric guitar being invented was to make an acoustic guitar louder,” he states. “It wasn’t something in the ’40s like it is now. Guitars were clean-sounding, and the style was totally different.
“Even the way you bent the notes, and the whole blues thing, that became a style of music that seems like it was made for guitar. And the guitar was made to play the blues. It used to be the piano that was the instrument that everybody had in their house, if you could afford it.”
Perry’s point about clean tones, the blues, and the guitar's supposed intended purpose brings light to his meaning when he says “the speakers are even more important than the amp”, as the speakers are, more or less, the vehicle.
“You can go back centuries,” Perry says. “You got instruments based on keys and the hammers hitting something else to get a note out there. But with the guitar, it’s different. And with the electric guitar, you need the amp, and you need the speaker. The early guitars weren’t electric. They were just rhythm instruments with guys pounding on them in a swing band.”
The game changed when the likes of Hendrix, Ray Davies, Page, Clapton, and Beck started messing about with their amps and speakers in the ’60s. Hell, even before that, James Burton, Bill Haley and Link Wray were doing things a different way in the ’50s.
“The way the first distorted guitar was recorded was there was a handful of legends who had an amp that probably fell off the roof of their car,” Perry laughs. “The instrument became distorted, and the guy would say, ‘Listen, we’ve only got an hour to record this. We don’t have time, and this actually sounds pretty good…’ Next thing you know, you’ve got a song like Rocket 88.”
With regard to distortion specifically, we see another moment where, as far as Perry is concerned, the speaker was king.
“They supposedly had a broken speaker when they did Rocket 88,” he says. “But they liked the way it sounded, and then you had other guys taking razor blades to cut up their speakers a little more, and you get that sound.
“You get a certain sustain when you do that,” he explains. “And after that, the strings started getting lighter, which was important because, originally, Strats, Teles, and Les Pauls were made to play with flat-wound strings.”
Taking into account the full scale of guitar-related technical evolution, could a tatty speaker really be the genesis of the full-on, hyper-charged electrified sound that became famous in the ’60s, and blew up beyond belief in the decades that followed?
You started hearing players doing things with electric guitars that no one ever heard before
If you think like Joe Perry, the answer is yes. “Once all of that happened,” Perry says, “you had players getting bigger bends and vibratos. Guys realised that you can get this electric guitar to sound amazing, you know?
“After that, you started hearing players doing things with electric guitars that no one ever heard before. Unlike almost every other instrument that’s played with bows or keys, electric guitars – because of the speakers – can have distortion and sustain and so on.
“You have somebody like Jimi Hendrix that takes a fucking whammy bar that was originally made to get vibrato, and put some Super Slinky strings on, and you get that sound. No one had ever heard that before from any instrument, let alone a guitar. And then you had Alvin Lee, who was the fastest player on the planet for five minutes. So there’s different guitar heroes who have come along and who push the edge.”
As for Perry, while technically wizardry doesn’t interest him, gear definitely does. In that way, for as long as he’s able, he’ll continue to push himself to his personal limit.
“Everybody is pushing to the edge by listening to what everybody else is doing,” he says. “It’s how some of the sounds that The Beatles were getting with their guitars were fucking amazing. I’ve learned from all those past guys, and I’m always looking out for new sounds, amps, foot pedals, and speakers too.”
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