Our first proper meeting with Layne Staley & Jerry Cantrell was in our dressing room at the Brixton academy in London, which was the venue where the tour started off. They entered the room and it was an absolutely beautiful Beavis & Butthead moment, I mean that in the best possible way. The guys were just two regular dudes, no attitude, no “here come the stars”, nothing, just two sweet metal heads who wanted to introduce themselves and say hi to the support band. They told us that if we ever needed anything or if anything was wrong then we should let them know about it because thay had once supported Van Halen and been treated like shit so they wanted to make sure that the same thing didn´t happen to us. Needless to say that was the best thing we could have heard and from there on we just love them even more. I can only imagine how dumb and star struck we must have looked. Here we were in the same room as the main act, the stars of the show, our hero´s and they actually cared about us! I have nothing but fantastic memories from that tour, we watched every show they did from the beginning to end, partied like there was no tomorrow and we came home wanting more, more of the good stuff.
Clawfinger & Alice in Chains
The Story of an emerging band with their heroes
One of the sillier and most memorable moments was just before a gig in Germany when I was sitting on the toilet taking a classic nervous pre gig dump, all of a sudden I heard our intro playing and realized that I had 40 seconds to litteraterly get my shit together and get up on stage, I had to run through the backstage area past Alice in Chains dressing room while still pulling my trousers up, I made it just in time to start screaming the lyrics to Get it Which was the song we usually opened the show with back in those days. I felt so embarrassed but it was hilarious.
Another great moment was when Layne Staley hid out by the sound engineer at the mixing desk with a microphone in his hand that was connected to our monitors so that he could distract us onstage during our gig by singing un-synchronized versions of our songs for us while we were trying to play them. It was annoying but more than anything it was just an amazing feeling to know that one of the best vocalists ever cared enough to play us a prank.
There was the time when we were partying in their hotel lobby and UB40 were also hanging out there, Layne was telling us how much he loved UB40 and their vocalist Ali Campbell but that he was too shy to go over and say hi to them so Jocke simply walked over, told Ali about the situation and got him to come over to our table and introduce himself to Layne. Classic!
Looking back I can´t believe how lucky we were to have been on tour with them and it´s amazing how welcomed we were by their fans despite playing a totally different style of music. Then again we were becoming hot shit and Alice in Chains fans are obviously the best fans in the entire world so why should I be surprised? I was scared though cos´ I´d heard a lot of stories about support bands being booed off stage, not getting to use the entire PA system and only getting limited use of the light rig, maybe that was the case even with us and I just never noticed it because I had nothing to compare to and I was just so damn happy to even be on the tour with one of the best bands in the world, Alice in Chains we love you and we are forever grateful!
R.I.P. Layne.
Zak Tell-Clawfinger singer
Taken from liner notes of “Deafer Dumber Blinder-20 years anniversary box 1993-2013
All of a sudden we received a call from ICM-Fair Warning, a major booking company who worked with the likes of Metallica, Pantera, Slayer and Kyuss. They wanted to know if were interested in supporting Alice in Chains in their European tour, we didn´t believe it. We thought it was a friend making a prank phone at first and it took a while before it sunk in and we realized it was a serious request, we were actually being offered to support one of our all time favourite bands, ALICE IN CHAINS!
Layne wearing a Clawfinger T-shirt