In December, AIC were booked to play two nights at the famous 4,000 capacity Hollywood Palladium. It would be a measure of how far the band had come in their short time together. Towards the end of 1992, Alice In Chains set up some headline shows for themselves, and some of the venues were the biggest up to that date that the band played as headliners. On most nights Alice In Chains and Blind Melon would fill the support slots, and it was on this tour that AIC connected with Mike Inez, Osbourne’s bassist at the time who would go on to be a full time member of Alice In Chains by the beginning of 1993. At first this wasn’t to be a headline tour, as the legendary Ozzy Osbourne asked for the band to support him. With Alice In Chains almost being non existent on the touring front in 1992 due to their recording Dirt, which took most of the spring and summer of that year to complete, the band in earnest and looking refreshed begun a North American tour in the fall of that year to coincide with Dirt’s release. The upside was that their negative experiences, like many bands before them, had been turned into such an artistic beauty that upon listening to Dirt from beginning to end, you almost felt violated, but there is no denying what a great record Dirt is and remains to this day. Fame had made them darker, with drugs and unlimited crates of drinks now openly available on tour. The downside to Dirt was that evidently the band had changed. But the songs were so good, the music that came from Jerry Cantrell on guitar, Mike Starr on bass, and Sean Kinney on drums, was so infectious that it was hard to believe that this was the same band who had made their debut album Facelift just two years prior to this record. Critics could not believe how open Staley was in his lyrics, which were filled with warnings to stay away from what he was doing to himself. It would be a collection of songs largely drawn from singer Layne Staley’s drug problems, which had begun in a downward spiral 12 months before on the band’s support slot for Van Halen. This wasn’t just any old album that would come and then disappear, this one was being hailed as a masterpiece from the very beginning. On September 29, 1992, Alice In Chains released their 2nd album Dirt.
0 kommentar(er)
