Alice in Chains

by David de Sola

  Carlstrom was under the impression that Jerden was making up this production technique on the spot, but Jerden said he had done it before, crediting that experience to his work on Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts album. Carlstrom said those early sessions would have to be cut short to get the band members back to their apartment complex in Marina del Rey to beat city curfew. “It was basically martial law. I think it was after six o’clock at night, you weren’t allowed to drive in Los Angeles. You weren’t supposed to … but there was no police. I don’t know who would have enforced that.”

  According to what Evan Sheeley heard at the time, Mike was clashing with Jerden, and the argument escalated to the point where Mike said, “I’m not going to play on this album unless you get Evan [Sheeley] down here.” The day after the riots started, Kelly Curtis called Sheeley, explained the situation to him, and told him, “I need to have you go to LA tomorrow.” Sheeley didn’t want to be down there, but he went because of his friendship with Curtis. He was flown down at management’s expense and paid for his services. Mike was supposed to pick him up at the airport, but Sheeley waited at the airport for two hours because Mike never showed up. Sheeley eventually got to a phone and got ahold of Mike.

  “Where the hell are you, Mike? You’re supposed to be picking me up.”

  “Oh … I forgot. I got a friend here. Can you get a taxi?”

  “Yeah, but if you haven’t looked lately, the city’s on fire. There are no taxis,” Sheeley said. “I’m pissed off. I’ll see what I can do.”

  When Sheeley arrived at Mike’s apartment, he saw a girl who looked underage leaving. Sheeley was furious and berated Mike. Sheeley laid down the law very clearly from the beginning: if he was going to help Mike, as he had been hired to do, he was going to take it seriously. He told Mike, “You treat me like your big brother here. I’m here to help you, and I will make you sound like a bass god. But I don’t want to see you doing shit in front of me that’s going to jeopardize my life or put me in potential trouble with the law.” Sheeley was referring to drug use—specifically, harder drugs like cocaine or heroin. Mike agreed to Sheeley’s terms and never did anything more than smoke an occasional joint when he was around.

  Mike asked him, “Can you help me with some of these songs? Because I haven’t been able to come up with bass parts.” He handed Sheeley an acoustic bass that Sheeley had once sold him and started playing him a cassette with rough demos of the songs. The first song Sheeley heard on the tape was “Down in a Hole.” “What would you play if you were playing this song?”

  “The way I look at songs is [not] for myself [but] if I was a different person playing the songs.” After listening to the song, he told Mike, “Okay, now I’m going to play it like I was John Paul Jones playing on the first Led Zeppelin album.”

  Sheeley played the bass line for “Ramble On” and handed the guitar to Mike, who tried to match what Sheeley had just played. “I’m more of a technical bass player. Mike was more of a thrasher, which I think made the band, honestly. It was a big part of their sound. So when he took the bass from me, he could not play all the notes I was playing. Out of all the notes I showed him, he took certain ones, and that became the bass line.” They would repeat this process for every song except “Would?” which had already been completed. Sheeley used songs by Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath as a point of reference for Mike to develop his bass lines.

  The sound and tone of the bass on the album can be credited not only to Mike but also to Sheeley or Jerden, depending on whom you ask. Jerden bought an electronic piece of gear for nine hundred dollars—whose name and brand he can’t remember—which, when mixed in with Mike’s amplifier setup, would be the sound of the record. “I remember I made it programmable and got a sound on this thing that was great. It was like a growl. We made a program. I named it ‘Mike Starr.’ I don’t know what the piece of equipment is, but whoever’s got it, it probably has a program on it called ‘Mike Starr’ that was the sound of Dirt, the lower end,” Jerden said.

  Sheeley offered a similar account but claims he was the one who programmed the settings. “I took a particular piece of equipment down there to One on One that I ran with the Ampeg SVT that gave the signature sound of Mike Starr for that album. I programmed my own setting for that album, and that’s what you hear on the album.”

  The band wanted Sheeley to stay in Los Angeles as long as a month, Sheeley said, but he stuck around for only about a week. On one occasion, Sheeley accidentally walked in on Layne shooting up while he was writing lyrics at the studio. According to Jerden, Layne was sneaking out after curfew to score drugs downtown while the riots were still happening.8

  Another vivid memory of Sheeley’s is from his first day with the band at One on One. The gear was set up and all four members were supposed to be there, but Sean hadn’t come back the night before. Jerden was not happy, Sheeley said, because they were wasting studio time and eventually decided to call it a day. “So about that time, the door flings open and in comes Sean. His hair was all sticking out, looked like he had stuck his finger in a light socket. He had been out the night before partying in Hollywood.”

  “He’d been up probably twenty-four hours, I’m guessing, because he had probably been out drinking all night long and was still on a drinking high,” Sheeley said. “Sean comes in the studio, and everybody’s kind of pissy from him not showing up. It was told to him, ‘Nah, we’re just going to call it a day. You need to go home, get some sleep, and come back,’ blah, blah, blah. And he said, ‘Let me play my drums. Let me just try one song.’”

  The studio was set up so everyone’s instruments were in the big room, but the amplifiers and PA were each isolated in separate rooms. Microphones were set up inside the big room to capture Sean’s drums. They went inside and ran through a performance of “Rooster,” and Sean nailed it. Sheeley thinks this first take is the cut that appeared on the album. Jerden and Carlstrom did not recall this, but did not dispute Sheeley’s account.

  It was obvious early on that “Rooster”—Jerry’s tribute to his father who served in Vietnam—was special. “The first time I heard it on the demo, it just sent chills up my spine when he starts singing the ‘ooh, ooh, ooh.’ It’s just a great song: the guitars come crashing in. My idea was just to make them gigantic when they came in,” Jerden said. Cameron Crowe was visiting from Seattle, and he was allowed to come into the studio while the band was working on the song.

  Production was eventually shut down for a few days as the band members left town to get away from the riots.9 They regrouped and continued recording.

  Jerden heard “Them Bones” when the song was in its infancy. “That song is what Alice in Chains is all about, and only Jerry Cantrell could come up with something like that. He played that for me over the phone. We keep in contact, and sometimes he’d call me at three o’clock in the morning and [say] he just wrote a song or something.”

  While recording “Junkhead,” Sean—for no particular reason—said the words “junk fuck,” which were picked up by the microphones. While editing the song, Jerden said, “Let’s leave that in there!” Carlstrom put it at the beginning, so it would start the song before Sean’s opening count.

  Once the basic drum, bass, and guitar tracks from One on One were finished, production moved to Jerden’s El Dorado Studio, where they would focus on recording vocals, guitar, and bass overdubs, as well as editing and mixing. Annette Cisneros was Jerden’s assistant engineer at El Dorado. According to her personal calendar from this period, the band came to El Dorado on May 19, 1992. The next several days were spent setting up equipment, editing, and transferring the One on One material to forty-eight-track digital tape. From May 26 to May 28, they did bass overdubs. On May 29, the band flew to Seattle for three days to shoot a music video for “Would?”

  Josh Taft got tapped to direct the video. Cameron Crowe was there to offer feedback and watch the shoot. Taft said of Crowe, “He was such a positive influence and so s
upportive, and he just allowed me to sort of run with my instincts. He was there to kind of get everyone on board. At the end of the day, it was for his movie, and he couldn’t have been more inspiring and helpful in the process of making the video and superinvolved.”

  The shoot took place at a now-defunct venue called Under the Rail. Duncan Sharp, a local film director, had filmed a scene as an extra of him making out with his girlfriend in the front seat of a car. Layne had to go home at one point in the middle of the shoot. The word on the set was he had to feed his cat and get some aspirin. “I think everybody at that point knew that he had to go home to get high,” Duncan Sharp said. “Everybody was just sort of shaking their heads, like, ‘Yeah, right.’”

  Asked to comment, Taft said, “I’m not gonna go any further with what happened in that moment, but we had to stop shooting, and then we started again an hour [or] so later, and you can fill in the blanks.” The excuse about having to feed his cat was a lie. Layne did adopt a kitten, named Sadie, but not until 1994—two years later.

  Evan Sheeley got a call from Kelly Curtis, asking if he had a white Spector bass at his store that Mike could borrow for the shoot. Mike wanted one that looked like the bass he normally used, which was in Los Angeles. Sheeley had another white Spector, although it wasn’t the exact same model as Mike’s, but only a serious bass player would have noticed the difference. The guitar was brand new, and Sheeley warned Curtis that if Mike scratched it, he would have to buy it. He taped a diaper to the back of the guitar so Mike wouldn’t scratch it. On top of that, Sheeley had to duct-tape two straps together for Mike to play the instrument, because he played bass extremely low on his body, almost down to his knees.

  In retrospect, Taft said of the “Would?” shoot, “It wasn’t the funnest night of my life. It was hard to get it done, and we got it done, and it was good in the end. But that wasn’t the experience of the first time [Live Facelift] and it was all kind of just—the innocence was starting to unravel and get a little more complicated, and you could see it in that room kind of happening. It was tough to watch. I had a lot of respect for those guys. At the time … I considered [Jerry] my friend, and I could sort of see what he was going through to try to keep it going. So I remember feeling a little sad for him for what was looking like it might continue to go that way.”

  * * *

  While the band was out of town, the production staff back in Los Angeles edited “God Smack” on June 1. Work on guitar overdubs began on June 3 and would continue through June 6. “Down in a Hole” was retracked on June 9. “Fear the Voices”—a song Mike had written—was tracked the following day. More editing and bass overdubs were done on June 12. Upon returning to the studio on June 16, they did more bass and guitar overdubs.

  Layne came into the recording sessions with lyrics already written for two songs from his stint in rehab: “Sickman” and “Junkhead.” According to Jerden, “Those songs are coming from a real place. They’re not songs that are written for commercial consumption. They’re songs that are written totally from somebody who’s crawled through two miles of rusty razor blades. And it comes out in those songs—the anxiety, the torture, the physical and mental anguish.”

  Layne also brought in two musical compositions that did not have lyrics written yet, which would eventually become “Hate to Feel” and “Angry Chair,” the two songs on the album credited entirely to him. When asked for working titles, Layne named them either “Rock On” and “Rockmanoff,” or “Rockmanoff I” and “Rockmanoff II.”

  The problem was, the titles kept getting switched around between the two songs, and no one could tell which one was which. This led to a near disaster when Carlstrom almost erased a bunch of vocals on one of the songs when the band wanted to work on the other song. In those days before ProTools and other digital recording software, everything was on tape. Out of an abundance of caution, Carlstrom checked the tape first, and catastrophe was avoided.

  Recording of Layne’s vocals began on June 17. It was during the Dirt sessions that he developed what became his signature sound: heavily layering his vocals in the studio by recording two or three vocal tracks in multiple intervals. The technique, called stacked vocals, “was totally Layne,” Jerden said. Layne hadn’t discussed his ideas in advance with Jerden, who recounted, “What he would say to me when we did that stuff is he had it all worked out, and he would just say, ‘Give me another track.’ ‘I want to double it.’ ‘Now let’s triple it.’ He was just telling me what he wanted to do, and we’d do it … He’s the best I’ve ever worked with doing that. Without a doubt.”

  The vocal sessions got off to a rocky start. According to the production staff, Layne’s drug use was affecting his performance, and Jerden asked him about it. “When he started singing, he was singing off-key—he was loaded. So I told him not to come into the studio loaded. I said, ‘You can get loaded wherever you want, but don’t get loaded on my time,’” Jerden said. “It was the first time I’d ever heard him sing bad.”

  As Carlstrom recalled, it was Jerden who finally went up to Layne and addressed the elephant in the room. Layne did not take it well. In what Carlstrom described as “a major blowup,” Layne stormed out of the studio, slamming every door on the way out. Cisneros, who was also there, said, “I remember doing vocals and Layne wasn’t singing very well, and Dave said, ‘You’re not singing good because you’re high.’ And then Layne denied it. Whether he was high or not, I don’t know. But I know that there were tensions.”

  “It takes a lot of focus the way Layne did the vocals. If he wasn’t up to singing, if his voice was gone or he couldn’t sing in tune or he couldn’t concentrate, then what’s the use of continuing?”

  Jerden called Layne that night to apologize. He told Layne he didn’t say that to be mean to him, but because he wanted to “make sure they got a great record.” Layne accepted his apology, Jerden said, and apparently took Jerden’s comments to heart.

  “I don’t know what happened, but suddenly after that, the next week after that, they started getting vocal takes,” Carlstrom said. “I don’t know if Layne cut back on his using, or if he was just not going out partying at night, at least resting even though he was using. You can’t just stop using if you’re a heroin addict, but yeah, we started getting vocals, and the vocals are obviously pretty amazing, to say the least.”

  Layne asked the production staff to put up a makeshift wall made from soundproof material inside the studio so that he couldn’t be seen from the outside while he was recording his vocals. Inside the wall, Layne created a little shrine that, according to Carlstrom, consisted of “candles and a picture of the Last Supper, and then a dead puppy in a jar.” This is what he was looking at as he was recording his vocals for Dirt. Cisneros confirmed Carlstrom’s account, saying, “It was scary back there. I tried not to go back there.

  “If that’s what he needed to see to get him into the mood of the song, if that’s why he had it, I don’t know. I don’t know why he had that thing in a jar sitting there. I didn’t talk to him about it.” Jerden, who said he vaguely remembered the shrine, offered a similar possible explanation for its purpose as Cisneros: “There’s all kinds of fun, nutty, weird stuff that bands do for studio decorations.”

  Layne wrote bleak, brutally honest depictions of drug addiction on this album. Lyrics like “What’s my drug of choice? Well, what have you got?” “We are an elite race of our own / The stoners, junkies and freaks,” and “Stick your arm for some real fun” left little room for misinterpretation. Later on, Layne would be disturbed by the idea his music might inspire some of his fans to use drugs. The phenomenon was not new. When former Velvet Underground front man Lou Reed was at an AA meeting in New York City during the early 1980s, one of the other participants said, “How dare you be here—you’re the reason I took heroin!”10

  Once recording of Layne’s vocals was under way, Carlstrom began to have some reservations about making a pro-drug or pro-heroin record. He said, “I never talked to the
m about it, but that was on my mind as soon as we started doing vocals.” He added, “It concerned me so much that at one point I was like, ‘Should I be here doing this?’ I really, really questioned it. Obviously I loved the music, and my gig was being Dave’s engineer. At that point, I was clean. I had my issues and was clean and sober at this point in my life. It was a hard thing for me to deal with, as far as, ‘Is this right for me to do?’

  “The weird thing about that story is that ten years later, as I started to encounter kids who grew up with that album, and even today, I’ve never bumped into one kid that said they used drugs because of the album,” Carlstrom noted. “In fact, it’s been the contrary every single time, not just like half and half, but every single kid is like, ‘Wow, I didn’t do drugs because of that album. Just listening to Layne’s lyrics was like this big sign that said, ‘Don’t come this way.’ That was a big shocker for me,” he admits. “I’m sure that people out there did drugs because of that album. It’s hard for me to imagine that that didn’t take place, but I haven’t met any of them.”

  Vocals and guitar overdubs for “Down in a Hole” and “Rooster” were recorded on June 23. The next day, they did vocals and guitars for “Rain When I Die,” Jerry’s guitar solo for “God Smack,” the vocals for “Angry Chair,” and the backing vocals for “Rooster.” On June 26, vocals and guitars for “Dirt” and “Angry Chair” were recorded.

  Layne’s vocals on “Angry Chair” are massive, unusually so compared to anything else on the album or in the Alice in Chains catalog. The reason for this? “On the part where he’s singing, ‘Sitting on an angry chair…’ there’s sixteen tracks of vocals going there,” Carlstrom said. “All different harmonies, and multiple layers of harmonies. Maybe there’s a harmony part and it’s tripled, and another harmony part and it’s tripled, and the lead part. It was crazy. And then I had to find space to record all those delays, because all the delays you hear on the vocals I actually printed … on tape along with the vocals.” The delay Carlstrom refers to is an echolike effect Layne used when recording his vocals.