Alice in Chains HATED Touring with this band.
Formed in 1987, in Seattle, Alice in Chains original lineup consisted of frontman Layne Staley, guitarist jerry cantrell, bassist Mike Starr and drummer Sean Kinney.
While a lot of bands sang about partying or chicks, Alice in Chains didn’t, tackling more dark subject matter, despite their goofy offstage persona. Bassit mike star would tell the lansing journal “We write about something to get it off our chests. We take out our aggressions on our music so we don’t have to be negative in person.
Immediately following Alice in Chain’s debut album Facelift coming out in late August of 1990, the band did a few warm up shows in seattle. Soundgarden finished their Louder Than Love tour and Alice in Chains manager Susan Silver, was also married to Chris Cornell so she hired Soundgarden’s crew to work for Alice. The band had a total of six people working for them - 3 tech’s, a merch seller a sound engineering and a tour manager. They also got Soundgarden’s tour bus.
The tour to support Facelift saw Alice open for a variety of acts including Van Halen, Poison, Slayer, Megadeth , Anthrax and today’s topic - Extreme. Let’s just say Alice in Chains weren’t fans of touring with Extreme.
Following those warm up shows in seattle, Alice opened Extreme doing a month long tour with them. Extreme were supporting their record Extreme II: Pornograffiti. They were playing at venues ranging from 500 to 1500 people. Extreme’s crew with the exception of a few people had no real experience touring. It seemed like to the Alice in Chains guys and their crew Extreme simply hired their buddies and they had no humor on tour or camaraderie with the guys from Alice in Chains. At Extreme’s homecoming show in Boston, the band’s production manager arrogantly to a crew member of Alice in Chains “Wow, you ever been in a room this big?” to which the crew member responded “Wow, is this as big as a stadium.” The production manger told him to f off and walked away.
Guitarist Jerry Cantrell would reveal to author greg praato - starting out with a really lame tour for us - opening for extreme for thirty days. Jesus christ a couple of the guys were cool, but there were other guys who had egos. At the end of that thirty days, we had enough. We had been playing to empty rooms too - they didn’t have their more than words hit yet.
We gotten attitude about what we could do , what we couldn’t do onstage. He’d go on to reveal that Alice in Chains members were not allowed to smoke or drink onstage, because Gary Cherone liked to perform barefoot
one of Alice’s road crew people would tell David De Sola in the book Alice in Chains the untold story Extreme fans were generally little seedy guitar-player-wannabe dudes. I think they were starting to hit with that ‘More Than Words’ god-awful ballad; they took that one to the bank,”
Another crew member would add. They were just really, really, really cheesy guys. Their music was exactly like they were.”
According to the same crew guys, the guys from Extreme had an old school rock mentality meaning that they screwed over the opening act, turned down their PA, didn’t give them adequate lighting or soundchecks. At one gig in Atlanta the band played on such a small stage that Extreme’s drum riser took up the whole center, so Layne had to sing to the side of the stage and Extreme’s crew did nothing to move their stuff to make the performance a little more bearable for the opening act.. According to Alice in Chains crew, because of that horrible experience with Extreme they never treated their opening acts like crap.
At the last gig, the members of Alice in Chains had enough of Extreme and their rules and drank on stage, spilled their drinks on purpose and smoked. The band had the attitude that since it was the last gig ot the tour they couldn’t get fired. Mike Starr would according to jerry get nervous on stage and had a few beers in him and ended up puking on the drum kit. There was an incident earlier in the tour when Starr was drunk and jumped on Extreme’s bass cabinets knocking them over, angering the road crew from Extreme. Alice made it through the tour joining up with Iggy Pop playing theaters, a considerably more fun experience.
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