Alice in Chains

by David de Sola

  Within his first two weeks on the job, Plum noticed that a week and a half of studio time had been blocked out on the calendar for Alice in Chains. By his own admission, Plum was “superexcited,” having been a fan since he saw them perform at Bumbershoot in 1990. Layne was friendly and polite with the studio staff. “He seemed very down-to-earth of all those guys, the most down-to-earth, the most humble,” Plum recalled. “He would always show up sort of late because it was always like the Jerry show. Jerry seemed to be doing everything, and Layne would come in later. But Layne was superfriendly to me, and he’d ask about my background, how I got a job there, and how my day was. I always thought that was really cool.”

  Plum added, “Jerry was very focused; he was the creative force of the band from what I could tell, and he’s just very intense. He wasn’t the kind of guy to stop and say, ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ or get to know me at all, so I was sort of in awe of him a little bit. But I also sort of stayed away from him a little because I knew he just wasn’t interested in my existence at all unless he needed coffee or needed me to help set something up or if I happened to run the tape deck, he’d have to deal with me.”

  Though Layne was probably already using heroin by this point, Plum never saw any evidence of drugs during the making of Sap. The only drug anecdote he had direct knowledge of was when he first met Mike, who told him he was high on Ecstasy from the night before.

  Hillis noticed that Layne was different. “He wasn’t like the Layne I knew from the Music Bank days; he wasn’t, like, totally in the mix. Now, in hindsight, he’s probably definitely dealing with drugs. But he wasn’t as involved—he’s more quiet, out of the way. I don’t remember seeing him a lot. I think there [were] some issues of him being in the bathroom way too long. I think Jerry and them were trying to keep it on the down low because they didn’t want Rick to know. Rick totally frowned on anything like that, especially in the studio, and in general. Really, really antidrug, in general.” Multiple sources who worked with Alice in Chains on later releases consistently describe Layne’s habit of locking himself in the bathroom for long periods of time.

  Plum also recalled Mike rerecording a bass track that Jerry had done. “He told me the main reason he wanted to redo the bass track was because he was afraid his mom was going to hear it and would be able to tell that it wasn’t him playing bass on the record.

  “Jerry had recorded this bass track, and Mike wanted to come back and replace it. He said he was happy with the bass track, it sounded fine, he just wanted to play it himself because he was worried his mom would hear it and say, ‘That’s not you!’ I think that was sort of a joke.” A highlight was when Ann and Nancy Wilson came to the studio to record their vocals. “I remember this really clearly because we were all so excited and sorta nervous,” Plum said. At one point, Sean asked Parashar, “Can we get her [Ann] to do the ‘Barracuda’ song?” referring to Heart’s signature song.

  “I’m not going to ask her. You can ask if you want.”

  Parashar handed Sean the talkback, so Ann could hear him from inside the studio. “Ann, at the end of the song, can you do the ‘Ooooh, barracuda’?”

  According to Plum, “Ann took the headphones off, walked in the control room, and sat down next to Sean and whoever else, probably Sean and Jerry.”

  “‘Look, in ten years, when you’re fucking sick of playing your song “Man in the Box,” the last thing you’re going to want to do is have someone ask you to sing “Man in the Box” on someone else’s song,’” she told Sean, according to Plum’s account.

  “Basically schooled them on … why that wasn’t a good question to ask. The whole room was sort of quiet, like ‘Okay, you’re right; we’re sorry.’”

  Chris Cornell and Mark Arm came to the studio to record guest vocals for “Right Turn,” a song that would be credited to Alice Mudgarden—a mash-up of the three bands involved: Alice in Chains, Mudhoney, and Soundgarden.

  “It was Jerry Cantrell who called and asked me to sing on Sap. I was surprised, like, ‘Why would you want me to sing?’ I could understand why they’d want Chris Cornell to sing,” Arm told Greg Prato.3

  “I remember Mark coming in being very nervous,” Hillis said. “We started talking in the lobby and he had a six-pack of beer with him, and he started drinking a beer because he was nervous. I was like, ‘What’s up, man? Why are you so nervous?’ He was nervous about the fact that Chris Cornell was there, and Layne and Ann. ‘They could all really sing, and I don’t fit in. My voice doesn’t come out as a singer like that.’ I remember kind of giving him confidence, ‘Man, you’ll do great. You’ll be fine.’

  “I was also curious of how Rick, the producer, what he was going to think of Mark, because he was quite different, and I know that Rick wasn’t really familiar with that kind of music, with Mudhoney and Mark’s style. I remember as soon as he sang, he looked at me and goes, ‘This sounds great!’”

  On the other hand, Parashar had to encourage Cornell to show some restraint during his performance. “When he came in, he kept really wanting to belt it out like he does, and I remember Rick kind of messing with him a lot. ‘Well, let’s try this,’ kind of having fun with him, not letting him belt it out with the classic Cornell high scream and stuff,” Hillis said.

  Plum said that he and Parashar spent time together one evening and the following morning setting up microphones and getting sounds right for Sean’s drums. When the band came in, Plum and Parashar were working on overdubs and thought that they were going to play. They had other plans. “They were fucking around all day, and eventually they played a song, but they were each playing different instruments. Layne was playing drums, Sean was singing, and it was ‘Love Song.’ [Jerry and Mike traded places on guitar and bass.] It was stupid. I mean, they were just fucking around, and I was pissed that we spent all this time and effort trying to get these drum[s] [to] sound amazing and they wrote this stupid song. It was a joke. They were bored. I don’t know why they did it—they just did it,” Plum recalled.

  Rocky Schenck got a phone call from the band to discuss ideas for cover art. Schenck is “pretty sure” Sean came up with the cover concept. On December 22, 1991, Schenck and his assistant went to Griffith Park and took photographs of several different old wooden buckets and taps attached to trees. “I got some great shots of four buckets hanging from a massive old tree, with each bucket representing a different band member, but they ended up using the photo of a single bucket,” Schenck wrote.

  For the back cover, Schenck flew up to Seattle for a band photo shoot that took place on January 3, 1992. He took several different photos, which he thinks were never published. The band’s idea—which ultimately became the EP’s back cover—was a shot of them urinating on photos of themselves previously taken by Schenck. That same night, they all went to see Pearl Jam perform at Rock Candy. He called it “a great night, great show” and says he met Demri for the first time that night, saying “she was very sweet to me.”4

  * * *

  The nature and extent of Layne’s drug problem was probably a closely held secret at this point. However, word somehow got around to Layne’s ex-girlfriend, Chrissy Chacos. At one point during the early 1990s, she had tried heroin, and Layne had gotten wind of it. “I was at the Vogue when Layne confronted me—like, ‘I heard you’re smoking heroin. You’re not to do that,’ dah-dah-dah. I’m like, ‘Well, I heard you’re shooting it,’” she said.

  Layne’s friend Ron Holt, who had his own struggles with heroin, said, “There’s something that happens when you’re an addict, where it becomes bad and you want to stop. And you do want to stop, even if you stay realistic about it and you accept it. Before you acquiesce, there are points where you try to stop, and you say, ‘I’m going to stop … my record label wants me to,’ whatever.” Holt added, “You draw a line in the sand, but you break it. And then you do it again, and you do it repeatedly. You do it so many times that at a certain point in your head, you go, ‘I can’t fucking even promise mysel
f. What is the fucking use?’ So you start losing your faith in your ability.

  “And so you hang on, so when you find something that you can do or you can hang on to, you tend to overemphasize it, shut everything else that you fail at out.” As Holt explained, “Pretty soon, what happens is that you’re in this mind-set too long that when you finally get clean, like when I did, I found out, ‘Wow! I’m not Ron Holt the Conqueror or creative guy anymore. I’m this beaten-down, frightened person.’ I think that’s what Layne became. I think that he could have, and probably somewhere desired to, create more than he did.”

  At some point during this period, Layne went to rehab for the first time. Though he’d had issues with drugs during his teen years, Jim Elmer had no idea how serious his drug use was until he got a phone call from management telling him, “We need to have an intervention.”

  “That’s when it really sunk in that this is real serious,” he said. He spoke with Susan, who wanted a family member present to show support. Elmer thinks Layne’s mother—whom he divorced a few years earlier—was living in Alaska at the time. He agreed to take part in the intervention, which was to be held at Susan’s office, with Susan, the other band members, and at least one person from the band’s record label. In terms of Layne’s reaction, Elmer said, “He was real surprised, because they’re supposed to be a surprise.”

  “He didn’t try to run out. He was respectful to the process. Everybody went through their dialogue on their thoughts and concerns and what he meant to the people in the room there. Once we got through that, he consented to go.” He checked himself in that same day.

  Based on multiple interviews and reviewing the band’s recording and touring schedule at the time, it would have happened at some point in the second half of 1991 or the beginning of 1992. He went to Valley General Hospital in Monroe, Washington—the same clinic Andrew Wood had checked in to in 1989. The other patients noticed they had a celebrity in their midst.

  According to Kathleen Austin, “I go to visit him on a Sunday afternoon. I think Jerry and Sean had been there and left when I got there. I think I saw them. Layne was sitting outside on this picnic table talking, and all of the sudden you hear Alice in Chains music.” Austin says he wasn’t incognito going into the program but that he wanted to keep a low profile.

  Someone—presumably another patient—had brought in a copy of the Live Facelift video, and people were watching it in the treatment center during visiting hours, knowing who Layne was and that he was a patient there. “Layne was devastated. He started to cry. Because from that point on, he wasn’t [a] guy with [an] addiction problem going to treatment, he was Alice in Chains,” Austin said. Layne’s mother and stepfather estimated he went to rehab approximately twelve or thirteen times over the years.5

  But even with Sap finished and scheduled for release in May, and Layne’s first attempt at rehab, the band was getting ready to write and record the proper follow-up to Facelift. In doing so, they would make their masterpiece.

  Chapter 15

  The fucking town went up in flames.

  —JERRY CANTRELL

  BY LATE 1991 OR EARLY 1992, Alice in Chains returned to London Bridge Studios to begin working on a demo for their second album. Rick Parashar would be producing, and Dave Hillis would be engineering. “I think at the time I thought we were actually making a record with them. Like I said, it was always … You never really knew—everything was kind of vague,” Hillis said. The recording sessions for the demo took two to three weeks and were fairly uneventful. According to Hillis, the songs were fairly developed at the time. They may have had working titles, but he doesn’t recall what they were.

  Layne had expanded his musical horizons somewhat, possibly as a result of the band’s experience touring in support of Facelift. “With Dirt, I remember Layne getting into Slayer. I don’t know how much that influenced them, but I remember that because Layne would talk to me about that kind of stuff because he knew my background from the earlier metal days and that my band [Mace] had opened for Slayer.”

  John Starr was hanging out at the studio while the band was working on the demo. Hillis recalls hearing that there was “kind of an issue” with him being around too much and that maybe the two Starrs were “partying together.” At one point, Mike asked for a rough copy of the material that had been recorded. Parashar told Hillis to make him some mixes. Hillis was excited, because he got to play around with and mix the songs himself. He made a rough mix for Mike, without making a copy for himself—a decision he would regret later on. He ran into Mike years later, who told him, “Man, my favorite version of Dirt is that one I have that you made me!”

  Jerry, Nick Terzo, and Dave Jerden were looking at different studios to record the album. They considered San Francisco as a possible halfway point between Seattle and Los Angeles. They had an appointment to look at one studio without telling them who the band was, when the studio manager came in and told them, “Oh, no, you can’t come in today. We have a really important band in.” They passed on the studio, even though it was their first choice. Jerden doesn’t even remember the other band but said they amounted to nothing.

  They also considered Skywalker Sound, located on George Lucas’s four-thousand-acre ranch about forty minutes north of San Francisco, but it was too expensive.1 Ultimately, they decided to record it in Los Angeles. Jerden thinks the only reason for this was because he wanted to do it at One on One Recording Studios, which is most known for being where Metallica recorded … And Justice for All and the Black Album.

  The band rented a house in the mountains near Malibu, where they lived and rehearsed for about five days before they went into the studio. Jerry had high expectations. “We were coming up with all this stuff that was just aggro. Superpowerful, very heavy lyrical content. It was a serious step up from Facelift—I equate it, as far as artistically, [to] … Nirvana from [Bleach] to Nevermind. To many people, it’s a record unto itself,” Jerry told Greg Prato.2

  One factor that affected the making of the album was Layne’s relapse. Alice in Chains had been working with the addiction specialist Bob Timmins. In a 1994 Seattle Times interview, Timmins said that since the Seattle grunge scene took off in 1991, he had been called up to Seattle to work with six musicians in three prominent bands. “Interestingly, it’s all been for heroin.”3

  According to Jerden, Timmins was Layne’s sponsor. Layne got word that Timmins had been bragging at a party about how he’s “got” the lead singer from Alice in Chains. Layne was furious and started using drugs again. Jerden was critical of Timmins’s modus operandi, saying, “He was notorious for doing interventions on bands where he would just show up at a gig where the band’s playing, where someone’s got a problem in the band, and he’d charge forty thousand dollars for one intervention. AA is supposed to be for free, and this guy was charging money for what Layne could have got for free.” Timmins died in 2008.4

  By the time they went into the studio to start recording, Jerden said the songs were well developed and that the demo made at London Bridge was great. Work on the album began on or around April 27, 1992. Bryan Carlstrom spent the first two days getting sounds before outside events brought the studio and the city to a screeching halt. On April 29, a grand jury acquitted four Los Angeles police officers of beating Rodney King. Angry mobs took to the streets for hours of mayhem and destruction. Stores were looted, motorists were beaten, and more than 150 fires were ignited. By the next morning, four people were dead and at least 106 were hospitalized. Over a period of six days, more than three thousand structures or businesses were destroyed, resulting in $1 billion in property damage and fifty-four deaths.5

  Jerry was in the middle of it when the riots began. “I was actually in a store buying some beer when some guys came in and started looting the place. I also got stuck in traffic and saw people pulling other people out of their cars and beating the crap out of them. That was some pretty scary shit to have to go through, and it definitely affected the overall feel of the
album.”6

  In a separate interview, he said, “We came down to LA, started tracking the record, and that Rodney King verdict came down. The fucking town went up in flames.”7

  At the studio, there was a TV screen about the size of a huge wall. According to Carlstrom, it was showing images of Los Angeles burning, which the band members could see while they were tracking their parts. “At the time it didn’t seem that significant. Now, after hearing the vibe of the album, it’s just so symbolic of Layne’s life—literally, a city on fire—and the things that he was singing about. It was the perfect backdrop to what that album would be about.”

  Jerden offered a similar account. “They were all set up, and then the LA riots started and we had to shut down for a week. We were watching it on television right from the beginning.”

  They had started recording “Sickman,” which would be the most technically difficult song to record from the album. Sean didn’t play to a click, so the timing on his drum parts varied. Jerden found a bar and a half of drumming that was steady and would become the centerpiece of the song. He wanted the song to speed up gradually, so he had Carlstrom do the tedious copying and editing work. “I had to make copies of bars from one tape machine to another tape machine and slowly change the speed on one tape machine as I made copies of the bars. Make a copy of the bar at one speed, and then I’d have to do it again slightly faster. ‘Well, just gradually make that song speed up,’ which at the time I was thinking, ‘How the hell is this going to work? I’ve never heard [of] anybody doing this before,’” he said.

  “Throughout the whole song, it’s the same bar and a half over and over and over again,” Jerden explained. “We had to make copies and copies and copies onto two-inch tape of that drum part and then edit that bar and a half over and over again, just loop it back in with a razor blade. And it took him like two days to do that. I think he was doing that in the studio when the LA riots were going on, but Bryan Carlstrom is like a wizard engineer.”