Great live performance. Alice in Chains - MTV Unplugged

Concert albums are my passion. In particular, I adore when the band performs with acoustic versions of songs. Not all of them are cool, most teams do not cope with their tasks, but not in this case.

The performance of the Seattle rock band Alice in Chains on the MTV Unplugged TV show is one of those to which you want to return again and again. Maybe it's because of the love for their music or the vocal duet of Jerry Cantrell and Layne Staley, but I consider this record to be one of the best in the MTV series on a par with Nirvana of Kurt Cobain. By the way, the concert tape released later became platinum, which says something.

The concert was held at the Majestic Theater - Brooklyn Music Academy in the distant 1996 year. On it, Alice performed hit songs in acoustic processing, and also presented new songs. During the performance, things were heard from the studio's three studio works: Facelift, Dirt and Alice in Chains. The legendary "Would?" And my adored "Heaven Beside You" were played.

I propose to listen it:

This performance was one of the last for vocalist Layne Staley. The last time he came on the scene in the same 96th during the July tour of glam rockers KISS.

1996 for Layne was quite heavy. He suffered from drug addiction and tried to get rid of this rubbish. But later a quarrel with the bride, her departure, and as a consequence, death broke the musician, and he gave up trying to get rid of drugs.

The video shows a markedly bad state of Staley, but he managed to cope with his party. His voice was weakened, he tried not to perform complicated parts, but at the same time it was pleasant to listen. Layne even could play on a guitar.

In these years Alice in Chains performed little, and to be more precise, there was not a single concert since 1993. They also do not took a tour in support of the eponymous studio album in the 95th. The whole cause was the illness of Layne Staley. His already weak immune system could not cope with the use of heroin and other chemicals, he looked lousy and could not simply to sing. But by the sixth year he had taken himself in hand and briefly continued his musical activity.

The performance is also attended by session musician Scott Olson, who played at that time in the hard rock band Heart. He performed the rhythm part throughout the show and the bass part in "Killer Is Me".

We listen to the lyrical "Down In A Hole":

Together with Pearl Jam, Chris Cornell's Soundgarden and Nirvana Alice in Chains are some of the most significant bands who was develope the musical direction, called the Seattle sound. Simply - grunge. Although about the genres here we can argue, because in the beginning the style of their music was far from this trend. However, the second full-length album "Dirt" of 1992 set the bar and was included in the list of their four main albums for the history of the term "grunge". The other three are from the above-mentioned performers.

"Would?". Here, I like Staley's voice the most of all:

The songs of Alice In Chains are mostly depressing, although they act quite differently to me. The texts that Staley wrote were like walking in an endless circle. He sings that he has lost his way and is trying to find salvation with all his might, and after a few tracks his hands drop and he sends everything goes to hell.

I like to listen to Alice and Layne, when no one interferes. On the one hand, their music may seem straining and, as one person put it, "addict". But looking from another angle - such compositions tell about the experience of a person. Let him being wrong and destructive, but still.

In the end I decided to pour a full acoustic concert MTV Unplugged.