While you might mostly be familiar with Alien Ant Farm because of their popularity in the early 2000s, these guys are anything but a nostalgia nu metal act. They’ve been touring and releasing music all these years, incorporating some truly groan-worthy ant puns, with a sixth studio album mANTras and an accompanying US tour set to launch later this week. But before all that, we got the full band to sit down with us in the Setlist studio and talk about some of their favorite tour memories. What we got was an incredible variety of stories from ‘90s grunge legends to pensive singer-songwriters and hair metal to the Godfather of Soul. Check it out:
Alice in Chains
Terry: Back in the nineties, we were just kids going to a lot of shows. We used to kind of just practically live at the Hollywood Palladium. Going to those shows made me and my friends want to become like those guys up on stage, and one show in particular I went to there was Alice In Chains, and their videos, you know, everybody got kind of used to seeing Layne Staley with his lovely blonde dreadlocks swinging them to and fro. We're at the show, right? And he comes out, and he's got a hat on and his dreadlocks are hanging out-
Mike: Slayer hat, right?
Terry: I think, yeah, he was wearing a Slayer hat. They get maybe three or four songs in and mid-song, he pulls the hat off and all of his dreads come off with it. And he's totally just buzzed head and he just chucks the hat out into the crowd. And I just remember the crowd just raging, the crowd lost their minds at something so minuscule, but like really profound. And they just blew up. I was just like, wow, the power of the crowd, it got me eventually, you know? It was a cool way to kind of reveal your haircut.
Edie Brickell
Dryden: I saw Edie Brickell probably around 2006 at The Roxy in Los Angeles. I felt bad, but after about 20 minutes, I had to tell the woman behind me to stop singing so loudly because it's not the loudest music. I remember a lot of feeling guilty about that. I've just been in love with her since I heard her, maybe when I was about 10, 11 years-old. We even talked about her singing on our, on our second record, and I feel like I kind of kiboshed it because we were riding on the coattails of Michael Jackson in some weird way, and I didn't want a song to blow up with Edie on it. And I regret it every day now that we didn't do that.
Ozzy and Guns N Roses
Mike: I went to see Ozzy at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre. We went, I was about 14 years-old and my grandmother, she took me, my friend Keith, and my friend Aaron, she dropped us off there. We went and found a ticket scalper, and we got some tickets. Parents don't do that anymore, huh? Just drop their kids off. I mean, 14 years-old is like, we had some, some money that she gave us and then found these tickets, and we went to the lawn. I've never been to a rock concert. I’d just see this stuff on MTV and I was just blown away. So we're watching and they had come out and they’re doing some kind of medley of this and that, and Steven Adler and Slash came out and joined. It’s right at the height of Appetite for Destruction and all that, and Guns N Roses was my favorite band at the time. And I was just blown away, I couldn't believe this was happening in front of my very own eyes. Came back home and the next day, we were sitting there kind of just reliving it all and my friends, one of them swore that he played “Iron Man” twice.
James Brown
Tim: Back in 2002, I was a young lad in Washington, DC, and I went to the HFSMas Nutcracker at MCI Center. I went there to see Queens of the Stone Age and the Vines and Coldplay and Box Car Racer. But about halfway during the show, James Brown came out as a surprise guest. He did “Get On Up” he did “I Feel Good” and he did the whole, the whole cape. Where the person comes out after he falls down, puts the cape on him, he throws it off-
Mike: Bobby Byrd.
Tim: Bobby Byrd? He did the Bobby Byrd. When James Brown came out, he was on fire, he was just doing all the dance moves. Just really inspiring to see the guy at that age doing his thing.
mANTras drops this Friday, April 26, with the tour kicking off April 27 in Albuquerque, NM. You can check out other tour dates, including their set at the upcoming Welcome To Rockville 2024 festival, on their official site.
