Feed My Eyes…
The Night Alice in Chains Killed Grunge.
Sept. 18, 1993 — SPOKANE, Wash. Alice in Chains are haggard, road-weary, and heavier than hell as they take the stage at the Spokane Coliseum. In other words, they are perfect.
A Seattle band on the fringes of both grunge and massive popularity, Alice in Chains stand out as the most cavernous, dark, and brutally honest among a distinct cadre of cavernous, dark, and brutally honest rock compatriots. Soundgarden, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains. The big four of grunge. And Alice was the era’s first and only Seattle outfit to successfully capture, en masse, the crossover kids from thrash metal, glam, grunge, classic rock, jam band land, and whatever other guitar-driven genre was peaking or waning in those intoxicating post-Reagan years.
A frazzled, disparate lot, to be sure. But Alice fans, especially the 5,000 or so corralled in Spokane’s concrete barn on this cloudy night in ’93, are not possessive. They don’t care what your t-shirt says. Instead, fans are completely and freely bound together by the Jekyll-Hyde duo of guitarist Jerry Cantrell and wailer Layne Staley.
By September, that duo was running full throttle. They’d seen trouble, and slurped it up. Alice in Chains played about 110 shows in 1993. Thirty-five of these gigs spanned a six-week summer stretch with Lollapalooza, the gnarly step-mother of all music festivals. There’s a reason rock festivals don’t travel anymore. It’s for fear of the legends of Lollapalooza in the early ‘90s.
Alice shared top billing with Primus for the rock-n-roll circus, in its third incarnation, which kicked off in the Pacific Northwest, dropped down to the Bay Area, then hit all points eastward before sweeping back west through the dirty South, and ended in L.A. on a crisp August night.
…now you’ve sewn them shut!
So here, and now, in autumnal eastern Washington of all places, the boys just rolled in from Boise — but had been busting their chops on the road for over four years.
Inside the cramped coliseum, there was no extra air to spare, and between musicians and audience, there was no quarter. This is the night Alice in Chains killed grunge. As in, ended it.
Maybe six weeks on the road with Primus trying to top their set every night squeezed the grunge out of them. Maybe it was the nagging whines of Lollapalooza maestro Perry Farrell, who stepped in to remove Alice in Chains from the festival’s coveted show-closing slot. Or, perhaps it was a rekindling of their first visit the Spokane Coliseum. The Clash of the Titans tour, with Alice opening for Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax? Whoa.
Whatever the impetus, Alice’s arrival in Spokane replaced grunge’s brooding introspection with explosive, therapeutic lightning. Staley’s head shaved nearly bare, his black combat boots massive sledgehammers, looked like a pale, slight teenager from a Tim Burton film.
Looks are deceiving. Staley, the mouthpiece for painful addiction, contrasted magnificently with Cantrell’s blond SoCal curtains, and spidery fingers. After this show, grunge would be no more.
At any moment, it felt as if the amps and monitors might explode, as if they were far too small to accept the amperage emanating from Cantrell’s guitar, Staley’s microphone, and drummer Sean Kinney’s hellacious kit.
