Rick Dufay was, for one brief period, instantly famous as rhythm guitarist Brad Whitford’s temporary replacement in Aerosmith.
‘Steven [Tyler]’s motorcycle thing happened and everything just stopped,’ Whitford recounts in Walk This Way, the band’s semi-autobiography with Stephen Davis. ‘Nothing was going on and I was bored and very frustrated. We all were. Aerosmith was in chaos, with Steven in and out of drugs and rehab.’
During the Rock In A Hard Place sessions, which began in September 1981, Whitford didn’t gel with Jimmy Crespo, the lead guitarist drafted in to replace Joe Perry. ‘Jimmy was a trained musician, a stickler for getting things precise. I found it hard to work with that attitude. Joe and I, we didn’t have to say two words to each other about the guitar parts. It was a big part of the guitar magic that had sustained Aerosmith for ten years.’ He called the band’s manager and quit the band. ‘Tell the guys, okay? Sorry, man. Goodbye.’
Although Whitford had contributed to the sessions, they erased his parts and the resulting album was performed by Crespo with drummer Joey Kramer and bassist Tom Hamilton. Only a guitar part on Lightning Strikes remains as Whitford’s solitary contribution.
The band needed a new rhythm guitarist, and producer Jack Douglas had just the right guy in mind. He had just produced the first solo album of an emerging rock guitarist. ‘So I brought in Rick Dufay, a true character, a kindred spirit. I thought he would mesh well with the band, so we flew him to Florida and he joined Aerosmith. I think he played on one track on the album, Lightning Strikes.’
Dufay couldn’t have been more of a contrast to the quiet, reserved Brad Whitford. ‘Rick Dufay was a friend of Jack’s, a guitar player, a total asshole, and we loved him,’ Tyler remembers. ‘Rick just so defined what a fuckin’ asshole is. He would come up and spit in my face. He would do something brain-dead and just beg Jack to beat the shit out of him.’
It wasn’t a great combination. By this time, Tyler was strung out on heroin on a daily basis, and Dufay more than anything enabled this kind of behaviour. The lead singer had found a new partner in crime. ‘Rick would try anything. He’d been in a mental institution, broke out of his cell, jumped out of a third-floor window and survived. I used to make him explain this to me over and over. “How high were you? Weren’t you afraid you were gonna kill yourself?” “Yeah,” Dufay replied, “but the birds were calling me.”’
Onstage, things were even worse. ‘Dufay didn’t give a shit,’ Kramer recounts, ‘because for him it was all an image thing. Rick would fix his hair onstage, his guitar just hanging there loose and ringing, while Jimmy’s playing his fuckin’ heart out. It drove Jimmy to drugs.’
When Perry’s manager Tim Collins orchestrated Perry and Whitford’s return to Aerosmith in 1984, the writing was on the wall for Crespo and Dufay. ‘It was obvious what had to happen,’ Hamilton remembers. ‘Rick Dufay was even telling us we had to get back together with Joe. But I still feel kind of bad about Jimmy Crespo. I feel weird that we never sat down with Jimmy and said, “Man, you did so fuckin’ great, but we gotta put the band back together and someday we hope we can make it right for you.” Always meant to call him. Never did.’ [Hamilton’s thoughts on playing with Crespo and Dufay can be found here in this great 1982 interview).
Other than his guitar part on Lightning Strikes – and who knows who played what on that song, between Crespo, Whitford and Dufay – his only other appearance on an official Aerosmith release is in the music video for Lightning Strikes. Here he’s every bit as cocksure and arrogant as his reputation suggests, swaggering through the song looking like his idol Ron Wood. In contrast, Crespo just looks like a reanimated scarecrow. As well as showing the band playing the song in a recording studio, the video is interspersed with cut-scenes in which they stand in a dark alley, hamming it up for the cameras, as a gang of greased-up street punks. It has the charm of early MTV, and bizarrely the guitar solo is accompanied by a montage of exploding cantaloupe melons.
Dufay’s solo album Tender Loving Abuse isn’t the greatest rock record you’ve never heard. It exists purely as a curio for Aerosmith fans. It’s well produced – thanks to Douglas – and is perhaps the most sleaziest, most Aerosmith-sounding solo record by any of the band members. Whitford / St.Holmes is too AOR-sounding, and Perry’s run of ever-decreasing-circles solo albums suffer from a number of mediocre lead vocalists. In fact, if anything it’s the vocals which let Dufay’s record down also. He tackles lead vocals himself but it’s clear that he doesn’t have the range to pull off such a feat and as a result, the blistering guitar work is sidelined by his overstretched vocal delivery.
One can only wonder what an Aerosmith album would have sounded like with Dufay contributing to the sessions. Alongside Perry or Crespo, or even in a combination somehow with Whitford, I imagine it would have sounded awesome.
Hit: Love Is The Only Way
Hidden Gem: Straight Jacket
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