ALICE IN CHAINS Don’t Consider Themselves A ‘Grunge’ Band

Alice in Chains’ bassist Mike Inez, in an interview to Metal Wani, put an end in a long controversy about the term grunge and Seatle’s bands. Read it here:

“It’s funny, because I don’t think you would talk to any one of the people in any of the bands like Soundgarden or Pearl Jam or Nirvana, and they’ll never use that word ‘grunge,’ really.

“It was kind of a marketing tag that other people put on it. It was interesting to watch. Eddie [Vedder] is from San Diego, I’m from Los Angeles, Dave Grohl is from Virginia, so we had a strange view to watch it from kind of an outsider’s [perspective], in a way.

“We weren’t playing those clubs early on like the other guys were. The camaraderie with all those bands was really amazing. They would be very supportive. I think the secret was that all those bands had time to be a band and kind of percolate their styles before they got big record deals and all that.

Soundgarden were a band for 10 years before they got a major label deal I think. I never thought Soundgarden sounded like Alice in Chains, sounded like Pearl Jam, sounded like Nirvana.

“I think it was really just kind of this weird confluence of energies up there in the Pacific Northwest just jamming and jamming in the rain, and that’s what came out of it. You couldn’t have planned that sort of global movement. That kind of thing just kind of happens.”