’80s metal survivors Extreme make rare Hartford appearance with Living Colour at The Webster

Extreme has been living up to its name for over a quarter century. The band has often been at odds with the prevailing pop trends of the time, but the indelible partnership of its founding members — vocalist Gary Cherone, guitarist Nuno Bettencourt and bassist Pat Badger (with Kevin Figueiredo as their drummer for the past 15 years) — has endured.

Extreme plays The Webster in Hartford on Friday with another noteworthy rock act that formed in the 1980s, Living Colour, with its classic lineup of Vernon Reid, Corey Glover, Will Calhoun and Doug Wimbish.

Extreme hasn’t played Connecticut in years, most recently at the Milford Oyster Festival in 2019. The Webster gig has a lot to do with the new management at the venue. The previous Webster management also runs the Palladium in Worcester, and that’s where the band was booked in 2017. Over the years, Extreme has played at Mohegan Sun, Foxwoods, Toad’s Place, the Stafford Palace, Lake Compounce and the now-defunct The Sting in New Britain but has visited Massachusetts far more often than Connecticut.

Extreme was founded in Boston in the mid-1980s at a time when the local scene in that college-heavy state was mainly defined by punk and new wave acts.

“There were all these bands like The Atlantics and The Stompers, and then here’s Extreme,” Cherone recalled. “We were not the golden child of Boston. (The leading FM radio station) WBCN ruled, but they catered more to new wave bands. We had a couple of places to play, like Narcissus or Celebrations in Kenmore Square, where we opened for Poison once. The punk clubs were just down the street. When 1 o’clock hit, all the different clubs would close and there’d be fighting in the streets. But we survived.”

Extreme grew out of a band called The Dream — the new name was a homophone of “Ex-Dream” — that had more of a power pop sound and might have fit the local scene at the time better. But Extreme was inspired by a longstanding wave of rock and metal bands that came out of the state.

“We were typical suburban kids who grew up worshipping at the altar of Aerosmith,” Cherone said. “I remember seeing (the band) Boston live.”

Cherone also had high praise for some of the quirkier rock acts in the city at the time, like Rick Berlin bands Orchestra Luna and Berlin Airlift or the high school punks-plus-saxophone act Boy’s Life, who wore their Boy Scout uniforms onstage.

Extreme forged their own path, and their chosen genre of guitar-driven hard rock turned out to be ideal for a new national phenomenon of the late 1980s: MTV. The cable music channel put Extreme’s engrossingly laid-back video for “More Than Words” in high rotation. “That was incredible,” Cherone remembered, “but the biggest hurdle was fighting the misconception that we were a ballad band. People thought it was just a duet. It was a blessing and a curse.”

Luckily, playing live “was our wheelhouse,” the singer said. “We’d had years in the clubs. We just performed. We sold out big theaters and clubs. We were lucky because the music scene would change again in 1990, ‘91, when MTV turned to grunge. We fought that as well.”

That era of rock was just captured in a recent documentary series on the Paramount+ channel, “I Wanna Rock: The ‘80s Metal Dream,” which mentions Extreme in passing. Many of the big rock bands of that era crashed and burned, but Extreme has had remarkable staying power.

One interesting side project for Cherone was diving back into the local Boston music scene in 1996 to sing the title role in “Jesus Christ Superstar” for the Boston Rock Opera theater company (with Letters to Cleo’s Kay Hanley as Mary Magdalene) and later playing the role again in a summer theater in the midwest. There are other roles he’d love to sing but “I’m a rock singer,” he said. “Those (theater) people rehearse all day. I can’t sing until 8 at night. I’m a different animal.”

Cherone remains highly admired as both a vocalist and a songwriter, while Bettencourt is one as one of the finest rock guitarists of his generation, having made guest appearances on albums by artists as varied as Nickleback, Joe Jonas, Dweezil Zappa, Toni Braxton, Robert Palmer and Rihanna.

In recent years, Cherone says of the ever-touring Extreme, “The audiences have gotten older, but with the internet coming in and digital music and video games that licensed our songs, a lot of our music has gotten back out there. A younger audience has found us on their own, and our original fans are bringing their kids to shows. It’s fun to see a lot of kids standing in front.”

There’ve been two big multi-year hiatuses for the band — in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when Cherone replaced Sammy Hagar as the vocalist for Van Halen and Bettencourt began a solo career, then in the early 2010s when Bettencourt toured as the guitarist for Rihanna — but Extreme’s strength as a live act has kept them going for decades. They’ve also continued to record. The new Extreme album, “Six,” was released in June, and the band is likely to do a song or two from it at The Webster, though Cherone insists “we still take our cues from bands we grew up with, playing the hits and not too many new songs.”

Extreme and Living Colour play Friday at 7 p.m. at The Webster, 31 Webster St., Hartford. $42. thewebsterct.com.