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"Smoke Pot and Kill Your Parents Book"
The Kiss-fans didn't really care about the Melvins, there was neither frenetic applause nor ennervated boos: They clapped kindly and waited patiently for the main band. Osborne: "Despite all of that Kiss were the nicest guys. They were a totally cool band to open for. (...) Complete gentlemen to us, not only them but also their crew. (...) The biggest bands we've ever played with like Nine Inch Nails, Kiss, Rush, were the coolest bands. The nicest bands you would ever want to play with, you know. The bands we have the most problem with are these tiny little fuck off bands. Who have the biggest attitudes in the world.
(...)
The Melvins continued - like always when they don't happen to be in a studio for recording - to tour intensively, amongst others with commercially more successful bands like Tool, Nine Inch Nails, Rush, and White Zombie. Tom Hazelmyer, the boss of Amphetamine Reptile Records, say: "The Melvins have always been a band's band and people started offering them all of these stadium tours around that time. I don't think Rob Zombie cared that the Melvins knew Nirvana -he was a fan of the band, period. If you look at all of those tours they did, them getting asked out was due more to a headliner thinking those guys were the shit than a headliner thinking that the Melvins were going to bring the audience. Because they'd usually take the opportunity to fuck with people.
The fans of Tool and Nine Inch Nails were by trend younger than the Kiss-fans and didn't really hold back that they couldn't get what the Melvins were doing and that they wanted them to leave the stage as soon as possible for the main act. Osborne: "When your put yourself in the position of opening for a band when the audience isn't interested in hearing what you're doing, it doesn't take a whole lot of prodding for them to go crazy. I mean, put 20,000 people in a room and how many of them will actually like what we're doing? I wasn't devastated by that at all - it really didn't mean a lot to me
Quite the contrary: It's one of the Melvins' characteristics to offend sensibilities and see how far they can go. Joe Preston: "Buzz really enjoyed playing to a hostile audience, a total stacked deck. I don't think people dislike them as much as they used to, so I get the feeling that now Buzz has to try harder to piss people off.
Deutrom describes another attribute of the Melvins very well, namely doing exactly those things that are NOT expected - and maybe anger a part of the recipients: "Anybody who has seen the Melvins will tell you there's a point where they're going to test your attention span, even to die hard fans. Prick (the album) would be a primer example of that - things you can't really listen to. There's a certain amount of arrogance and pride in that, and of course I took part happily in that type of attitude when I was in the band. Some of the more notorious examples of that are when we played in Dallas with Nine Inch Nails and we opened the set with a 9+ minute long instrumental. Nine Inch Nails fans don't want to hear that stuff, so the audience melted down and ripped up the seats in this minor league hockey arena and threw them at us". Deutrom further. "Of course there's a historical precedent to all of this that goes back to Paganini intentionally breaking three strings on his violin. But with the Melvins, it's all an extension of Buzz's personality and it's derived from a punk rock ethic. The old stand-by was to just let the feedback drone on for 15 minutes. It was a no-brainer. And if you loved the band, then you probably looked forward to moments like that, just to see how everyone around you would react. It's as much of a trademark for the Melvins as Gene Simmons blowing fire is for Kiss".
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