Macumber Macblog

Last night Justin and I went to go see Alice In Chains at the Louisville Palace Theater. I bought their latest album, “Black Gives Way to Blue” back in December and was overwhelmed by it. I spent the better part of Christmas vacation learning “Your Decision” and trying to get the lead down on “Check My Brain”. I was in that mode where I was listening to the album over and over and was telling a buddy how I thought it was my “record of the year”, when he informed me that they were coming to Louisville. I never listen to the radio anymore so I don’t catch the concert announcements. By the time I went to buy tickets they were sold-out. I noticed that they were playing at the Louisville Palace Theater and had never seen a show there before. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss opened their world tour at the Palace Theater and I had known it was a fairly small, renovated space that had previously been used for plays and small musical productions. When I found out that it only seats 2700 people I was pretty sure I needed to pull out all the stops to get some tickets. As luck would have it, I found a pair of front-row seats on StubHub and just couldn’t pass them up.

It wasn’t hard finding a home for that second ticket.

Justin said he would kill me if I sold it to anyone else and he came down from Cleveland for a couple of days and we caught the show together.

I remember clearly when their second album (Dirt) came out and that sort of visceral connection I felt with it musically and thematically. Many of the songs were about addiction and depression but in a lot of ways it was just a blues record to me and I loved wailing to it. I was in college and was starting to get interested in playing guitar again and before long, with Garth’s help, I would be playing a lot of AIC songs (badly). I had already been listening to AIC’s first album “Facelift”, and grunge was a movement in full force. Heroin was making its comeback and claiming more than its fair share of young artists, particularly those in the Seattle scene. Then came Kurt Cobain’s suicide, Layne Staley’s struggles and how he shared them in his lyrics and how the music media gossiped about his heroin problem. By the time Layne died, the grunge era was well on its way out. In the aftermath of Kurt and Layne, as if their passing wasn’t bruising enough, it also struck me as tragic what it did to their friends and band-mates. It seems Dave Grohl used the losses as a life lesson, as if it were a call to kick life in the ass before it kicked his. Dave went on a creative tear like a man living on borrowed time. He started a family and became a positive force in the world of music. But guys like Kris Novoselic and Jerry Cantrell seemed to sort of step back and lick their wounds (I don’t know, this is just my impression). In Jerry’s case it was particularly hard for me to take because he was always such an original composer and his playing always had that bluesy feel even though he was characterized as a grunge player. Jerry had also picked up more and more vocal duties for AIC over the years and I thought that there was no reason that Alice In Chains couldn’t move on without Layne and keep making music. Jerry’s solo records after Layne’s death were interesting but they didn’t get picked up much by the public or by radio. I don’t know if it is was grunge backlash or that people wanted him back where he belonged, fronting Alice in Chains.

Anyway, last night was cathartic for me. It was good to see them together again, drinking water, hitting every note, playing tight. William DuVall has his own voice and style but he can belt out all the Layne Staley vocals on the old stuff. Not some caricature of “sex, drugs and rock n’ roll”, but as a group of friends doing what God meant for them to do. I fist bumped Jerry Cantrell and I managed to get one of his guitar picks as a momento. I shook Mike Inez’s hand. I thanked them for coming to Louisville and for playing the best show I have ever had the privilege of seeing.

Click here to see all of the photos Justin and I took with our camera-phones.

written by mark