{"id":600702,"date":"2026-05-24T01:18:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T01:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/600702\/"},"modified":"2026-05-24T01:18:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T01:18:09","slug":"how-joe-perry-ripped-off-ac-dc-for-a-1987-aerosmith-hit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/600702\/","title":{"rendered":"How Joe Perry ripped off AC\/DC for a 1987 Aerosmith hit"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Joe<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still<\/p>\n

Sat 23 May 2026 22:15, UK <\/p>\n

While nobody ever really came close to topping their level of consistency at their peak, it\u2019s still fair to say that the influence of AC\/DC<\/a> within the hard rock community is unparalleled even to this day.<\/p>\n

The minute they broke out of their native Australia, it was evident that they were going to become the dominant force in rock music, largely thanks to the fact that whatever they did, they did with a smirk and a sense of nonchalance. Oh, and the fact that they were simply one of the most effortless riff-writing acts to have ever graced the planet; let\u2019s not forget about that.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s probably for those reasons that nobody ever came close to matching them, given how others lacked that natural charm and cheekiness that always came through both in the lyrical content and the feel of the music, and how, despite trying so hard, you can\u2019t force out an AC\/DC riff<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something so sordid and raunchy about their work, and yet, because they all had Cheshire Cat grins on their faces while doing it and knew how ridiculous it had the potential to be, they ended up going to stratospheric levels with it. This may well seem like I\u2019m putting the music as a secondary part of their output, but in truth, the reason for AC\/DC\u2019s success was down to the full package, not just a handful of elements.<\/p>\n

The thing is, that didn\u2019t stop people from wanting to copy them, and throughout the 1970s and especially during the \u201880s, there were a number of acts who seemed to take their worship of AC\/DC to another level, desperately trying to take their crown as they entered their own period of decline.<\/p>\n

Aerosmith had already been around for as long<\/a> as their Aussie counterparts, and while their early material had some of the same energy to it, it wasn\u2019t until their mid-1980s rejuvenation that it became most apparent, with guitarist Joe Perry arguing that one of their songs was their most blatant attempt to rip off their idols.<\/p>\n

\u201cI loved AC\/DC,\u201d Perry revealed during a 2024 interview with Guitar World, as if it needed to really be acknowledged. \u201cThat band still fucking knocks me out! Their early albums \u2013 pick any album \u2013 they\u2019re all great.\u201d He then continued, explaining that their 1987 hit, \u2018Dude (Looks Like a Lady)\u2019 was intended as a direct rip-off of his favourite band. <\/p>\n

Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n

\u201cI was thinking about an AC\/DC song,\u201d he admitted. \u201cIt\u2019s funny, it doesn\u2019t sound like an AC\/DC song, but there you go!\u201d<\/p>\n

He then continued, describing how the addition of a sampler that frontman Steven Tyler had just acquired gave the song its own sense of character that separated it from the work of AC\/DC. \u201cHe pressed a button, and you could shorten things, and another button would make it repeat,\u201d he said. \u201cSo suddenly you\u2019ve got this cool rhythm thing, and we were fooling around with that. That riff you hear at the start came from Steven fooling with the buttons, and we captured that stuttering riff. We built the song from that.\u201d<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t exactly like AC\/DC, but you can still see where Perry was coming from, and \u2018Dude (Looks Like A Lady)\u2019 is certainly one of the band\u2019s most fun songs, coming as close as they got to matching their levels of cheek and effortlessly bold rock prowess.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still Sat 23 May 2026 22:15, UK While nobody ever really came close…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":600703,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[205067,27575,31111,96,31106,128,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-600702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-205067","tag-ac-dc","tag-aerosmith","tag-entertainment","tag-joe-perry","tag-music","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600702\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/600703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}