Let The Music Do The Talking – The Joe Perry Project

“Rock-a-bye baby if you want to dance, Grab yourself a body and take a chance, They say one time around is all you get, But I’m still dancin’ so you lost your bet”

Joe Perry’s debut solo record (or was it solo? The album is titled Joe Perry Project, he’s no Alan Parsons) may have featured the most boring record sleeve imaginable (magnolia boardrooms are not what you want from the Toxic Twin gone rogue). The music on the other hand… It frikkin’ rocks.

To put the album on cold it starts with a ripper of an instrumental and you think you’re in for a dive bomb and whammy wanging precursor to Steve Vai or Joe Satriani. There’s a real street rough sound to Joe’s version. The lyrics are not those posted above however. Those lyrics? They’re Aerosmith lyrics.

So I spoke yesterday about how hard it would be to choose seven Aerosmith tracks and then day two (ooorrr three if you count the stealthy presence of The Chain Reaction) to choose a side project? Wait! I can explain. Let The Music Do The Talking is a really important song in the bands history.

See between the massive CBS years and the hinter land of solo projects and then signing with Geffen and then a false start and then the (yep, you guessed it) massive Geffen years… Well, Let The Music Do The Talking is the fault line between 70’s Aero and 80’s Smith.

The Joe Perry Project may have shifted a quarter of a million copies of this album but the second one (I’ve Got The Rock ‘N’ Rolls Again) didn’t do so well. And he’s a mighty fine guitarist. Jimmy Page and Slash agree with that.

Aerosmith opened their comeback album with Joe’s solo song. A real ‘you were right and we were wrong’ gesture. Steven did… erm… Steven up the lyrics a bit. But he’s Steven Tyler so… Fair dos.

And we missed him. Steven, Joey and Tom missed him. Jimmy Crespo and Rick Dufay were great but they weren’t Joe Perry and Brad Fucking Whitford.

Recently an old radio recording of a show from this era was released on vinyl. Deke at ThunderBayArenaRock tipped me off about it. I rushed to the internet and bought a copy about six months ago. I’ve played the arse out of it since. A bunch of tracks from Done With Mirrors featuring on the archive concert recording were a pretty rare find for your average Rock And Roll Archeologist.

So I’m posting Joe’s version, the Done With Mirrors version and the live in ‘85 version. Don’t read too much into it. Let the mu… Just listen to this.