Paying Homage | Dirty Honey
- Henry Menigoz
- Feb 12, 2021
- 2 min read
Dirty. Honey.
If these guys aren’t on your Friday night rockin’ out playlist yet, they will be soon. Last Friday the four piece from Santa Monica announced via instagram that their cover of Aerosmith’s “Last Child” was available on all streaming platforms. The single had been recorded a year prior exclusively for Amazon Music—a live-tracked, minimal overdub, raw take on a seventies classic, now available to be enjoyed everywhere.
Very few bands have the strutting audacity to take on a cover of the untouchable Aerosmith. Perpetually swathed in endless scarves and innumerable rings, the ‘bad boys of Boston’ practically wrote the book on being a swaggering-blues-funk-rock n roll band in the mid seventies. Take “Last Child” for example, and Steven Tyler’s rhyming of “south Tallahassee” with “sweet sassafrassy”—I mean who does that!
If ever there was a band to pull off such an insurmountable feat however, it's Dirty Honey.
Ever since they hit the scene in late 2019, this band has been nothing but swagger. With the grooving riffs of guitarist John Notto and the lustful wails of singer Marc LaBelle, Dirty Honey is everything that has been missing from mainstream rock for decades. The band became the first unsigned artist to top the Billboard charts in October of 2019, when their debut single “When I’m Gone” climbed all the way to No. 1. They’ve been conquering the road with their own headlining tour ever since, including some gigs opening for the likes of Guns n Roses, Slash, and The Who.
And now, as the still unsigned band finalizes work on their upcoming album, Dirty Honey offers us a far from subtle reminder of their exciting future in the form of this single. The track stays fairly true to Aerosmith’s original recording, though Dirty Honey opts for a more minimalist, live-performance feel. The song’s funky groove was practically made for this band, and Labelle’s vocal performance is enough to give even Tyler a run for his money (and by the 3:02 mark, it’s fair to say he’s taken the upperhand). John Notto adds an extra guitar breakdown where Aersomith’s version would fade out, before Labelle showcases one more shivering wail to close the song. Listen below as LaBelle explains the influence Aerosmith had on the band, as well as the impact of working with producer Dave Cobb and RCA studios in Nashville:
Emphasising the creative freedoms allotted in having no commitment to a record label, John Notto has promised that the band’s upcoming 2021 album will be “all killer and no filler”, referencing the conventional formatting of contractual albums. However, with no release date on our radar and no current tour videos to scour, we have only to take what morsels we can scrape together from the band and savor every last bit. Until then, keep rockin’ out to these ‘windows-down volume-up’ songs off the debut EP:
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