The legendary Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which is really close to Boston, the state capital. By the late 60s, he was already a teenager who loved Rock and Roll music and was lucky enough to have seen many famous groups playing in the city during that era.
Those shows made his love for especially British groups get bigger and influence him even more to pursue his musical career. One of the main groups that appeared in the United Kingdom during those years was Led Zeppelin, which was a crucial group to provoke the evolution of Hard Rock.
The group not only influenced Aerosmith, but also countless other groups over the decades and Joe Perry even compared a band that appeared in the turn of the century with Led Zeppelin.
The 90s band that Joe Perry compared to Led Zeppelin
In the 90s Led Zeppelin had already came to end for more than a decade and Aerosmith was getting much bigger than they were. At the time tehy had a more commercial sound that was being extremely successful on MTV. During the first half of that decade the American Grunge groups were the new sensation of Rock and during the second half of the 90s, the Brit-Pop bands conquered the spotlight.
But in 1997, an American duo called The White Stripes was formed releasing their debut album in 1999. During the following years they put out more praised records like “De Stjil”, “White Blood Cells” and “Elephant”. Those albums made Joe Perry, in an interview with Best Life magazine in 2004, compared them to Led Zeppelin.
During the conversation he listed the best albums of all time, in his opinion and one of his choices was “Elephant” released in 2003. “This album is like listening to a Led Zeppelin record. You just put it on and listen to it and don’t know any of the names of the songs. But you just listen to it over and over.”
“You’re entertained by the stream of consciousness in how they play. They speed up, they slow down, they know their blues roots. They got chops,” Joe Perry said. The record made by Jack and Meg White had many famous tracks like “Seven Nation Army”, “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself”, “Black Math” and “The Hardest Button to Button”.
Perry continued:
Curiously, a few years later Jack White and Jimmy Page spent some time together when they were part of the documentary “It Might Get Loud” in 2009. The movie had the intention to explore the career and styles from Page, White and U2’s The Edge. During the movie the three guitarists told their stories and shared personal playing secrets to each other.
White always loved Led Zeppelin and he called back in 2019 the band an “immovable force in music. I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like them.” He had also created a playlist at the time as reported by Consequence, of some of his favorite Zeppelin tracks.
He included less remembered songs like “The Rover”, “St. Tristan’s Sword” and “Out On The Tiles”.
Perry agreed that The White Stripes were making Blues riffing cool again
In the early 00s, The White Stripes were certainly one of the hottest bands around. So other famous rock stars were frequently asked about them in interviews at the time. Talking with Music Radar back in 2004, Joe Perry was asked about AC/DC being again an influential band. Also if The White Stripes that were making “blues riffing” cool again.
The musician agreed with the statement from the interviewer and said: “It’s fun. That’s what it is, it’s a party. It was when Robert Johnson was on a street corner back in 1933 jamming on a riff with a friend and people were throwing quarters in his cup.”
“The pop trends are always gonna be there, getting bigger and bigger for a short while. But this music won’t ever really go away. A steak always tastes good, right? A good steak’ll be just as in demand in 2010 as it was in 1933,” Joe Perry said.