“Well, I don’t know if I can reproduce that”: the times Aerosmith’s Joe Perry played a solo so good, he didn’t know how to do it again
Nailing a complex riff in the studio is one thing – but trying to perform it life, night after night, is another challenge entirely. Aerosmith’s Joe Perry has been humbled by this countless times throughout his career when trying to relearn the intricate solos he’s performed on record.
In an archival interview from 2014, Perry explained to Guitar.com that he has struggled to tackle his own riffs before. “There’s a couple of times I’ve played solos [in the studio] and I go, ‘Well, I don’t know if I can reproduce that,’” he admitted at the time. “I’ll sit there and I’ll spend a couple of minutes, and I’ll get it… but I know that there are some riffs on some of my solo stuff that I’d be hard pressed to remember how I played it.”
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“I’d have to sit down and spend some time relearning it, and figuring it out,” he continued. “Once I figure out where my hands were on the neck then it comes pretty fast… because if there’s an easy way to play it, that’s usually the way I played it.”
As Perry explains, studio sessions can be quite spur of the moment – when inspiration for a cool riff finally appears, you’ll race to get it recorded while the idea is fresh. While it can lead to great tracks, it can lead to artists complacently forgetting they’ll have to perform it eventually on tour.
“You play [a riff] three times, and it gets recorded, and then you move on to the next song, and the next song, and the next song,” Perry told Guitar.com. “It may be six months before you actually are learning the song to play it live, and so you’ve got to go back and listen to it.”
“Once I throw down a riff, or the solo thing, or something you might want to add later, you’ve got to go back and re-visit it to remember what it was,” he said. “Let’s say we go back on the road next year, if we decide to put, I don’t know… Shut Up and Dance in the set list. I’m going to have to go back and re-learn that song from top to bottom, because I probably couldn’t hum it to you right now!”
However, it’s never stopped Perry from unleashing intricate solos on record. In 2022, Perry admitted that he was still having to relearn his old material. Speaking in an interview with Boston radio station WBUR, Perry revealed he was going to be playing a handful of tracks on tour that he’d never performed live before.
“I should know these, but it’s like learning somebody else’s songs, as I’ve never played these riffs before live,” he said. “I have to go back and get my head back in the space for when I wrote those riffs.”
“When somebody tells you ‘By the way, you have to play X minutes of songs you’ve never played live before’ but are so close to your heart it’s like, ‘OK, twist my arm!’”
The post “Well, I don’t know if I can reproduce that”: the times Aerosmith’s Joe Perry played a solo so good, he didn’t know how to do it again appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
