Back before there was a festival for every city, a booking agent for every band, and a service charge for every ticket, live music was a little less… predictable. Remember the good old days?
 
We all know the monster that it became, but Perry Farrell’s Lollapalooza festival was at one point, pretty cool! So influential in fact, that it inspired an entire industry to effectively dismantle it. Or maybe we’re just getting old…
 
One thing is for certain, however, if the Lollapalooza tour had not begun in 1991, then there certainly would have been no Rollercoaster Tour. Spread across eleven dates throughout the United Kingdom in 1992, the tour was the product of a buzz surrounding the newfound Lolla. With FOUR rotating co-headliners playing full, 45-minute sets each night, the Rollercoaster Tour intended to “give the recession-bitten public value for money with four bands for the price of one.” And that’s exactly what they achieved by assembling some of the most celebrated alternative rock bands at the time (and of all time): the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Dinosaur Jr, and Blur.
 

 
Similar to Farrell’s involvement with ‘Palooza, the Rollercoaster Tour was dreamt up by members of the Jesus and Mary Chain. The Scottish noise-pop group was supporting their record Honey’s Dead, but decided it would be better for the fan if they were to split the bill with three other like-minded bands. Dinosaur Jr, the only Americans on the lineup, had been around for a number of years by this point, their classic record Bug had been released in 1987. Shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine were at their peak in 1992 - their seminal distortion record Loveless had come out just a year prior. Also, this would be the last time MBV would play the UK until their 2008 reunion tour. The greatest outlier of them all was the youngest and most energetic of the bunch, Blur. With just a debut record under their belt, the English band was just moments away from taking rest of the world by storm with the colossal explosion of [the dreaded] Britpop. Woo-hoo!
 

Ticket Stub from the Rollercoaster Tour, London
 
Jim Reid, singer of the Jesus and Mary Chain spoke about the Rollercoaster Tour in the April 2013 issue of ‘MOJO’:
 

That year, everyone was talking about [Perry Farrell’s touring alt-rock package fest] Lollapalooza, which to us was pretty crap. We did it, playing at 2pm after Pearl Jam, and it was fairly disastrous. So we thought, Why not do a good version of it? We were just trying to shake things up, to make it not like a bunch of boring blokes standing around with pints of beer. We were sick to death of plodding up and down the UK on our own, playing the same shitholes. The venues we playing on Rollercoaster, like Whitley Bay Ice Rink and Glasgow SECC, we could never have done on our own. Instead of a fucking cold Friday night in Nottingham Rock City, it felt a bit more like being a rock star - more a Bowie/Bolan thing. The idea was to have bands from different corners of the indie scene. It was pre-Britpop, so Blur were there to cover the Manchester/baggy thing, the grunge thing was covered by Dinosaur Jr., and then it was the Valentines doing freak-out noise, and we were doing something similar, but more poppy.

 
More after the jump…

 
It was just a year and a half ago that my colleague Ron Kretsch was lamenting that there appeared to be “no new music in the offing yet” from Jesus and Mary Chain, this while in the throes of a 30th anniversary tour of Psychocandy.

Well, Ron can guardedly commence a process of rejoicing, as this morning the following tweet appeared in the feed of Creation Records:
 

JAMC will drop their new record March 2017. ...............................on Warners of course!

— Creation Records (@creationrecords) November 16, 2016

 
In an interview with CBC Music yesterday, Creation Records’ co-founder Alan McGee confirmed that the Scottish band will be releasing a new album in March 2017. His exact words were: “New album coming. It’s coming out end of next March. It’s kinda enormous!”

Jesus and Mary Chain put out several albums between its legendary debut album Psychocandy in 1985 and Munki in 1998. In 2003 JAMC released Live In Concert on Strange Fruit, and just last year the band put out Barrowlands Live, a document from November 2014 of the 30th anniversary Psychocandy tour. 

More after the jump…

 
A lot of now-classic albums have grown into their reputations over the course of years or decades, but the Jesus and Mary Chain’s debut Psychocandy was one of those whose epochal nature was screamingly obvious right out of the starting gate. Because so many bands in the last 30 years have copped JaMC’s move of burying SoCal pop and surf tropes under layers of reverb, noise, and darkness, it might be hard to convey just how INSANE they sounded when they were upstarts. I’m going to date myself pretty seriously here, but the first time I heard them, I was 15, delivering my paper route (laugh all you want, it was money for records), and listening to college radio on my Walkman. The song “Never Understand” came on, and I don’t know how the hell I didn’t fall off my bike. It seemed amazingly assaultive—full of ugly squealing feedback and guitars that could just as well have been broken vacuum cleaners, propelled at a nervous clip by caveman drumming that somehow sounded like it was stalking you, and yet it was catchy as hell, sporting laid-back, almost drowsy vocals that didn’t belong anywhere near that out-of-control musical mess, but it all clicked perfectly, like there was nothing weird about it at all. These young noise-abusers from Scotland had managed the feat of making themselves the Velvet Underground’s second coming. Even if they’d done nothing else worth hearing (and that’s decidedly not the case, of course, they churned out a lot of very cool stuff), Psychocandy would have cemented their legend.
 
Continues after the jump…

 
It used to be that you could only read about some legendary concert, but sometimes there was a video camera present and actual records, not just memories, of these shows are starting to surface. Witness The Jesus and Mary Chain’s infamous Sept. 9, 1985 performance at Electric Ballroom in Camden Town, London. The group played six songs for twenty minutes and then fucked off, prompting the audience to destroy their equipment and rip down a lighting rig.

I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain both before and after this show. When I saw them in London, they were an uneasy combination of crap and brilliance, whereas by the time I saw them at what I believe was their first American show, at The World discotheque on 2nd Street in NYC, their stage show had become something like… Godzilla destoying a city. For the show at The World, they had the biggest, brightest, whitest flash pods aimed directly at the audience’s retinas and no other lighting source. It was as loud as fuck and they simply destroyed the place. Maybe it was the LSD I’d taken, but they seemed to have improved quite a lot in those months since I’d first seen them perform and I left a convert.

You can watch the full pre-Psychocandy set: “Just Out of Reach,” “Inside Me,” “In a Hole,” “You Trip Me Up,” “The Living End” and “Crack’d” on Slicing Up Eyeballs, but the quality is basically shit. Better to go directly to the sixth clip to see a bit of the crowd rioting at the end.