10 Rock Music Albums No One Understood At First

Everyone flocking to the sounds of Seattle in the early '90s were looking for something a lot more grimy than what was coming out of the Sunset Strip. Around the time that the lower tier glam acts like Warrant were making waves, Alice in Chains were kicking ass and taking names on Facelift, making the best hybrid of metal and alternative music that the world had seen thus far with tracks like Man in the Box and We Die Young. So when those guys suddenly decide to turn all the distortion down, you can understand why people might be upset.

To be fair, Alice never intended to promote SAP all that much, just tucking it into record store shelves and never doing any press for the EP. When they started putting songs like Brother and Got Me Wrong into the set though, they were greeted with boos from the audience, with some fans even throwing things at them until they turned up the guitars again.

Maybe it was just a visceral reaction from one too many years of hair metal ballads, but Alice had something a lot more primal and sad in their acoustic work, where Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell could harmonize a lot better over the sounds of gentle acoustic playing. Most of the hardcore fans got the picture around the time of Jar of Flies, but for those few years, it looked like the band that was responsible for bringing the heaviness back was about to piss it all away again.