(Credits: Far Out / Daigooliva)
Thu 1 January 2026 21:00, UK
It’s impossible to get around the rock and roll comparisons when it comes to Steven Tyler and Joe Perry.
Both of them may have been looking to play the loudest rock music they could think of, but when listening to their songs, the seeds of everyone from Led Zeppelin to The Rolling Stones are baked into the fabric of every single guitar lick. But for ‘The Toxic Twins’, things went a little bit deeper than being associated with two of the greatest heavy rock and roll bands that ever lived.
Then again, Tyler isn’t exactly running away from the comparisons, either. He would be the first to say that he loved Mick Jagger as a frontman, and the fact that he auditioned to do a project with Jimmy Page showed he at least had a respect for what Robert Plant had done. But if there was one thing that united all three bands, it was the blues, and Aerosmith knew that sense of groove better than anybody.
Whereas The Stones made records that sounded more guttural and Zeppelin went for heaviness on a lot of their greatest tracks, it’s easy to get a certain swing on when listening to Aerosmith records. A song like ‘Walk This Way’ isn’t necessarily built on the same blues vocabulary as the greats, but their rhythmic approach to everything dared to ask the question of what a blues band would sound like if they had James Brown as a frontman.
Tyler and Perry were both fans of the British Invasion, though, and listening to The Yardbirds was what set their worlds on fire. The Stones had shown what could happen when a band sounded dangerous, but with both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck taking over after Eric Clapton left, Perry felt that they had everything that he wanted in a guitar team when he first started working with Brad Whitford.
No one can play like Beck, but Perry could hear where that musical vocabulary could be applied to his music, saying, “I didn’t really know it then, but that was proto-Aerosmith: two guitar players who can pretty much play with that kind of energy and that kind of creativity coming from two different schools. There just weren’t any bands around like that. There were bands with two guitar players, three guitar players, but they never played with that kind of on-the-edge feeling.”
If Perry was more reserved about his Yardbirds love, Tyler was in love when he first heard their music, saying, “They were the shit to us, out of all the British bands in the Sixties. The Yardbirds were a bit of a mystery. They had an eclecticism — the Gregorian chant-ness of the vocals, the melodic diversity, the way they used guitar feedback. I loved that weirdness.” But Tyler’s passion comes a lot from the fact that The Yardbirds get treated more like a springboard for the greatest guitarists of all time whenever you bring them up.
Sure, they had a roster of fantastic musicians among their ranks, but if you listen to them playing ‘Shapes of Things’ and ‘Heart Full of Soul’, you’re hearing the beginning of hard rock. Page would take that sound and run with it when he put Zeppelin together, but if you listen to those early Aerosmith records, they’re practically Yardbirds clones on a few songs, especially on their debut when Tyler twists his voice to sound as close to a standard bluesman as he can.
It didn’t always work out for Aerosmith when they started making their masterpieces, but their music was forever indebted to what The Yardbirds had done. They needed to add a bit more funk to everything, but once they found their identity, they were still going to put their favourite artists front and centre in their songs.
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