If you were a kid of the Greater New York area in the 1980s, Action Park was marketed to you as the most awesome place on the planet. The Vernon, New Jersey, haven promised thrills that no other waterpark would dare offer: a slide (called the Cannonball Loop) with an actual 360-degree loop at the end of it! Another slide that dropped you seven storeys at 60mph! There was even a high-speed twist on that boring lazy river ride your parents drag you onto!
However, there was a reason no other waterpark promoted such excitement. Because it was fucking dangerous.
Between its opening in 1978 and 1987, rides at Action Park claimed six lives. The first, in July 1980, was a 19-year-old who got thrown from one brutally paced attraction and smashed his head on a rock. There were also three drownings, a reported heart attack and an electrocution. The deaths entered local legend, the constant legal battles inspiring the nickname “Class Action Park”, and were recently the subject of an HBO documentary.
The news of Action Park’s deadliness apparently eluded MTV, though. In 1993, the network took Alice In Chains there for an episode of Headbangers Ball, fresh off the grunge icons’ seminal Dirt and a stint with that summer’s Lollapalooza tour.
“I’m from Hollywood, so I’d never heard of Action Park,” Headbangers Ball host Riki Rachtman explained to Variety in 2020. “I never heard any of the bad things, or about anybody dying at the park. I just remember being on this chairlift and looking at the [Cannonball] Loop, and I was like, ‘What the hell is that?’ And they said, ‘Actually, it’s closed down. Somebody broke their nose on it.’”
Nonetheless – with this being the early ’90s, when rock ’n’ roll’s proclivity for sheer recklessness was still very much a thing – neither the host nor the Alice In Chains boys were deterred once they got there. The ostensibly angsty alt-metal bunch were always game for any kind of feature with MTV, after all. Riki later reflected, “There was never a band that was more fun to do anything with than Alice In Chains.”
That fact instantly becomes apparent in the half-hour programme. Riki introduces a four-piece who are dressed to impress: singer Layne Staley’s rocking his best pink-beanie-and-fishing-rod combo, bassist Mike Inez is prepared with arm bands, drummer Sean Kinney’s donning a poncho in the summer sun and guitarist Jerry Cantrell is in the smallest speedos we’ve ever seen. “I feel great!” he declares, distorted by the snorkel he’s screaming through.
The band’s spirits aren’t dampened (ahem) after they enter the park, either. Riki interviews Jerry in front of the infamous Speed Slide: the aforementioned 60mph-running, seven-storey-dropping and apparently pant-destroying attraction. Jerry faces what many would regard as certain doom with gusto. “Any preparation?” Riki asks. The guitarist answers, “Yeah, Preparation H,” acknowledging the slide’s apparent ability to push water into uncomfortable places.
Footage of Jerry and Layne sliding down the near-vertical ride scores incredibly highly on our fuck-that-shit-o’meter. Yet, mercifully, the pair emerged unscathed.
“I’m feeling kinda juicy right now,” Jerry tells RIki right after the fact.
“I’d say my fig is puckered,” Layne adds, treating us to some even more graphic imagery.
As the day continues, Alice In Chains enjoy the not-so-lazy river ride, before capping things off with bouts of sumo wrestling in massive blow-up suits. Despite Action Park’s morbid reputation, the band escape with all four of their members intact – although probably not without a couple of cuts and bruises.
Action Park would close down just three years after this Headbangers Ball episode, though, with owner Great American Recreation filing for bankruptcy. The waterpark remains a complicated fixture of New Jersey culture to this day, with locals having publicly voiced either admiration for its no-rules spirit or condemnation of its lack of safety precautions.
Similarly, this Alice In Chains segment remains one of Headbangers Ball’s most famous moments. As Riki himself said in that Variety interview, “That episode is the most asked-about episode ever” – and we’re thankful he and the band made it out in good enough condition to answer everybody’s questions.
