Liam Gallagher’s issues with touring America: “A chip on my shoulder”
Many bands tend to see America as the holy grail when it comes to making it as a musician. While the catchphrase behind a city like New York City was that “if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere”, bands knew they had fully arrived when every seat at Madison Square Garden was sold out, and they were treated like gods among men whenever they walked onto the street. Although Liam Gallagher would always talk Oasis up as one of the greatest bands in the world, they were never going to cower to what everyone expected out of them from across the Atlantic.
Granted, some of the misunderstandings in America tended to come from the outlook on their music. A lot of people were still kneedeep in grunge and wanted every single song to be about the depressive side of life and how everything was terrible, so hearing a band that was convinced that they were God’s gift to rock and roll was not going to fly with someone proudly wearing their Nirvana T-shirts and blasting Alice in Chains.
But Oasis were about much more than positive attitude. In a way, they had helped England get over themselves and reminded everyone why rock and roll was the greatest musical force in the entire world, and while they were certainly willing to talk themselves up, they were about as self-destructive behind the scenes as they were electrifying onstage.
So when the band started selling by the boatloads when Definitely Maybe roared up the charts, they weren’t exactly ready to go back to the drawing board when they began touring America. They had spent years on the dole and had started to be treated like the rock gods they believed themselves to be, so why would they want to concern themselves with doing cheap radio promos or trying their best to schmooze some hotshot record executive who couldn’t care less about them?
It’s not like Liam was exactly shy about how he felt in The States, either. Aside from the excessive lifestyle the band were living 24/7, the frontman was absolutely ruthless when it came to the pageantry of everything, including the infamous stunt he pulled at the MTV Awards when he spat onstage in the middle of ‘Champagne Supernova’.
Even though everyone found it obnoxious at the time, Liam knew that it was all in good fun trying to get America to see them for who they really were, saying, “I went over there with a chip on my shoulder, but a good chip. I was like, ‘We’re going to fucking have you, and we’re going to do it our way. You won’t be moulding us to be one of your own.’ I wasn’t bothered whether we made it in the States. We would give it a good crack, but it would have to be on our terms. My main thing was to make an album and be great where I lived. In America, it was, ‘if it happens, it happens.’”
However, their lack of success in America may have been a case of them seemingly having the worst luck in the world when they got over there. They would already deal with one of their biggest fallouts when playing a gig at the Whisky A-Go-Go, but when ‘Wonderwall’ was blowing up the charts, they still had to deal with bassist Guigsy leaving the fold for a few months and his replacement, Scott Macleod, wanting to leave halfway through the tour.
No matter how much people may have gravitated towards other acts like Foo Fighters or Green Day in America, that didn’t seem to bother Liam or Noel, nor should it have. Their pedigree as one of the biggest rock bands in the world was set in stone, and if the rest of America didn’t understand what they were all about, quite frankly, that was their problem.
