Hero worship Aerosmith and Eric Clapton dig deep into the blues and rock vaults BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Let’s say you’ve asked two kindergartners to draw pictures of their heroes. One turns in an illustration with well-defined lines, carefully colored in, using the right shades of crayon for a gray suit, brown shoes, and Caucasian skin. The other creates a jumble of circles and planes that resembles a pudgy human form but is awash in a blaze of swirling reds, yellows, and blues similar to the tornado that swirls around the Tasmanian Devil.

And let’s say, improbable as it may be, that the first kid’s hero is George W. Bush. After all, small children don’t know any better, and in this case, a neat, dignified representation is appropriate, since anything else could be interpreted as a violation of the Patriot Act. Now, the second kid’s hero is Sam Kinison. Don’t blame me. It’s the parents’ fault. But if anyone was a walking blur of explosive colors, it was Kinison.

The point is, both portraits of these famous comedians are equally valid interpretations. However, one seems wilder, crazier, more expressive. More fun.

So it is with Aerosmith’s Honkin’ on Bobo (Columbia) and Eric Clapton’s Me and Mr. Johnson (Reprise), which appear in stores this Tuesday, March 30. The Aerosmith disc is a swaggering, raucous, feedback-tagged scramble through the catalogues of some of the band’s early rock and blues heroes. Clapton pays tribute to the Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, whose songs seem to be a key to his own brooding psyche. Yet the British guitar legend does so in a tidy, buttoned-down manner, and that’s odd given that Johnson rode freight cars, wrote lyrics that promised violence (often to women), and died drinking bootleg whiskey poisoned by a jealous husband. Hell, when you listen to Honkin’ on Bobo, it sounds as if Steven Tyler could go that way tomorrow, whereas Johnson lines like "I’m gonna beat my woman until I’m satisfied" seem as incongruous in Clapton’s English-accented diction as does his use of Ebonics.

I’m not out to bury Clapton in some lonely grave at a cotton-patch crossroads. Me and Mr. Johnson is beautifully played, and Clapton himself is among the figures rightly honored in Honkin’ on Bobo. I also think that Aerosmith have recorded plenty of crap over the last decade. Shameful crap for a big-balled rock-and-roll band. It’s just that it’s almost impossible to do anything but pay attention when Honkin’ on Bobo is shakin’ its chassis like a Tallahassee lassie, whereas Me and Mr. Johnson is good company for working on the New York Times crossword puzzle.

Even though I’m pissed at Aerosmith for committing crimes like "Amazing" and "I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing" and stiffing me on an interview I was supposed to do for a big magazine, I love Honkin’ on Bobo. Sure, Tyler opens the album with a motormouth carny-barker routine that’s pure corn, but it’s hard to hold a grudge when a moment later he’s caterwauling through a riff-mad version of "Roadrunner" that’s hornier than Bo Diddley’s original. With its focus on the Chess Records roster, stray blues bloodhounds like Mississippi Fred McDowell and Big Joe Williams, and early rock’s mad genius Little Richard, the album quickly becomes an act of karmic balance for Aerosmith’s ’90s atrocities.

Much of Honkin’ on Bobo — whose title is, I expect, one of those cutesy inside references to wanking off that male bands tend to build into their clubhouse vocabulary — was recorded in Joe Perry’s basement, which seems more a fancy studio in a rock star’s home than the place where the Perrys store the Lawn Food and their mountain bikes. Aerosmith have worked there before, but not as extensively. And since this disc was recorded with the entire group playing live, the cramped conditions and small amplifiers turned up to barking volumes helped provide its garage-band energy and tones. Guitarists Perry and Brad Whitford haven’t sounded this raw and fired on an album in years; they trade solos and licks they way Hell-bound gunfighters swap bullets. Think Johnny Depp at the end of Once upon a Time in Mexico: blind, yes, but still smooth and deadly as a gaboon viper. And though Perry provided the thrust for the project, Tyler seems to have climbed aboard whooping like a big-city cowboy on a mechanical bull. Whether he’s tearing up Big Joe Williams’s "Baby Please Don’t Go" or pouring on the soul to shout back at Aretha Franklin in "Never Loved a Girl," Bobo is his hottest studio performance since 1976’s classic Rocks (Columbia).

Tyler also gets to show how bad-ass he is on harmonica for the first time. Sure, he plays the thing live, and on some of Aerosmith’s chestnuts with zeal, but throughout this album he makes like Sonny Boy Williamson and Junior Wells rolled into one little white-boy meteor — blasting like a firehorn, playing fine and mellow, and on Little Walter’s "Temperature" even singing through his Green Bullet microphone and amp, one of the oldest but coolest tricks in the blues-harp textbook.

Although the group make mad drunken love to the legacies of such first-generation rock godfathers as Chuck Berry (whose pianist Johnny Johnson helps dig into "Shame, Shame, Shame") and Muddy Waters, Perry makes it a point to honor the torchbearers who passed the spark of guitar inspiration to him. There’s shades of Jimmy Page in the hammering riffs of "Baby Please Don’t Go" and the grinding tone of Truth-era (Epic) Jeff Beck in "I’m Ready." Best of all of these six-stringed nods is "Stop Messin’ Round," where Perry and Whitford trade solos until the tune starts to sound like a great lost track by Brit blues maven John Mayall’s Clapton-era band.

Perry delivers a rare lead vocal on "Back Back Train," one of a pair of spirituals drawn from Fred McDowell; he’s accompanied by alterna-pop singer Tracy Bonham, who provides the exhortations over Perry’s deadpan charisma that make the cut churchy. Perry also takes the lead on "Jesus Is on the Main Line," using his acoustic resonator guitar as a baton to direct a chorus including Bonham, drummer Joey Kramer, and bassist Tom Hamilton down the gospel road over the loose-tuned thump of a parade bass drum. The track sounds as Mississippi traditional as these Bad Boys from Boston via New Hampshire ever will.

Oh yeah, there is a new Aerosmith song called "The Grind" that ain’t half bad, with its thumping lock-step cadence and Tyler’s tortured declarations of devotion to a manipulative "hip-shake woman." Next to the American music cornerstones that make up the rest of Honkin’ on Bobo, its blood runs a bit thin, but at least it’s got a circulatory system. Maybe even a soul.