Hehe, my jaw dropped all the way to Italy when I saw those pics. Hard to believe what a difference hairstyles and outfits can make. Although I can't tell how much they actually altered their music, I've only known them from Dirt onwards. Wonder what might've happened had they kept their looks.

odds are they would have renamed 'would?' to 'wood'

i remember an interview with layne staley back in the day where he flat out called themselves a hair band. i believe it was on the dirt tour as well. someone asked them about the bands popularity and he summed it up to his hair, and how the current generation of kids liked it. he was half joking and the interviewers took it as such but deep down i think he was being a little more honest than most people realized.

Seriously, I wonder if the outward appearance would've mattered much had some glam/sleaze groups decided to write songs about aspects of life other than girls and getting wasted and more girls, and adjusting the distortion and general production a little.
Like I said, no idea what Alice n' Chains were all about but seeing their photos (esp Diamond Lie era) suggests that they didn't have much more to contribute than 'oh yea baby shake your moneymaker'. Obviously they took a turn somewhere. That could've worked for other acts, too.

I have their demos from back in the day. They generally had much more of a rock n roll feel than you'd find on later albums but some aspects of their sound would find themselves, say, on Facelift, which in turn had elements that would find themselves on Dirt (their next full-length album). A good example to look at would be Confusion from Facelift.

I always thought facelift had a bit of a G 'n' R feel to it.

That would be the influence of The Melvins.

yes and no

i think AiC got lucky that they didn't have much mainstream appeal in their early days. it allowed them to transform into the grunge act we all know relatively smoothly.

i remember reading a 'where are they now' style article in guitar world back in the late 90s and they tracked down a bunch of names from the 80s. one of the guys from winger participated and complained about expanding their craft to be more than just titties and beer. they got double shafted where their original fans didn't like their new post-grunge direction and when stewart from beavis and butthead started wearing their shirt.

i'm no winger fan but i'll cut them some slack for being honest about the situation and trying to expand themselves. everyone else in the article seemed to whine about how the current generation of kids didn't know what was 'cool' anymore.

it's really hard to say how things might have gone had the glam bands been able to expand their subject matter into substance over superficiality. i don't get the impression many mainstream music fans in that day were really interested in the darker aspects of the lives of the band members.

Yeah, the sound you're referring to is present to a greater extent in the earlier demos. Their changes in sound weren't a complete turnaround as distinct from the exercise a lot of bands have actively undertaken (in that period or otherwise). The development of the effects of Layne's addiction, to me at least, played no small part in the changes in AiC's sound too.

Anyone heard the new singer? I understand that the reunion was initiated as part of a tribute to the band and Layne in particular. But I'm not looking forward to anything they'd put out (live or otherwise). I expect most of you would feel the same way.

Well seeing as I gave up on the band as soon as this CD sank in, I certainly am not interested in hearing anything by them without Staley.

Winger's third album ("Pull") was IMO just highly inaccessible. Had the material had more hooks it might've done better. Hard to tell. But that's actually a common phenomenon with Glam acts and their releases during Grunge domination. "Mötley Crüe", "Still Climbing" (Cinderella) or "Native Tongue" (Poison) were all hugely different from what they had issued before, each got rather positive reviews but all sold relatively bad. One of the reasons IMO was their inaccessibility. "Keep the Faith" (Bon Jovi) was also quite different from previous releases, but was very accessible and went on to become one of the best selling albums of the decade and probably the band's most successful album ever.

As far as the supposed discrepancy between substance and superficiality goes, musically many Glam/Sleaze/AOR acts were far superior to most Grunge groups. And lyrically, well, like you said, many listeners didn't really bother to read the lyrics apparently. "Teen Spirit" soon became a party anthem and still is today.