Alice in Chains

by David de Sola

  Carlstrom had two other vivid recollections of recording Layne’s vocals. While working on “Them Bones,” Layne showed an improvisational element when he told Carlstrom, “Oh, I hear a little vocal part I want to stick in the song.” As he was hearing the music played back to him on his headphones, Layne began singing the “Ah!” screams timed to Jerry’s guitar riff. He tracked the screams once or twice. “He just made that up on the spot,” Carlstrom said. Jerry is credited for the music and lyrics to the song, but it’s difficult to imagine without those screams.

  Layne also demonstrated an ability to innovate in using his voice as an instrument. “He sings on the verse on ‘God Smack’ with this effect that literally sounds like there’s a tremolo [effect] or a Leslie [speaker] on his voice, and he is doing that with his voice,” Carlstrom said. No studio wizardry was necessary. Carlstrom had no idea how he was doing it. He couldn’t see Layne singing because of the makeshift wall in the studio.

  Cisneros also noted that Layne could be very sensitive. She recalls one day while on break, they were watching To Kill a Mockingbird on TV, and she noticed he started to tear up during a scene near the end of the movie.

  Cisneros’s calendar shows no entries until the second week of July. Vocals and guitars for “Sickman” and guitars for “Fear the Voices” on July 7. July 9 is marked down as vocals, although the song is not identified. July 10 is marked explicitly as vocals for “Fear the Voices.”

  “Mike talked to me before we did the album. He said he had these songs and he wanted publishing—he wanted to get more money,” Jerden said. “He wanted to know if as producer I would help him out and get these songs, make them really good so they could make it on the record. I worked really hard. I spent more time on those two songs, one in particular, than any of the other songs on the record. They just were not good songs. I tried to make them work for Mike, but I just could not do it. And Jerry and Layne were getting fed up with the whole thing.”

  One of those songs—likely “Fear the Voices”—was referred to as “Mike’s Dead Mouse” by the band and Jerden. “It was like a kid bringing a dead mouse to school and showing it to everybody, and he pets it and it’s all dirty and all that stuff, and it’s like nobody wants to see this dead mouse anymore.”

  There were two memorable and, in retrospect, foreboding incidents during the recording of this song. On a Saturday afternoon, Carlstrom was in the studio with Layne and Mike working on the song, which was already difficult because of technical issues. “That was actually a fairly stressful thing right there, because we’re trying to edit things that they had recorded from Seattle, edit together multitracks of things from Seattle with things that we had recorded here in Los Angeles, which I’d never done before.”

  “Jerry and Sean didn’t like the song,” Carlstrom explained. He speculated that it was because the song “didn’t feel like it fit” on the record, but Mike persisted. “Mike really wanted that song on the record, and at the time Layne was the only one backing the song, so there was stress regarding that situation.”

  At some point during that session, Layne and Mike went to the bathroom together. Layne gave Mike a shot of heroin, and Mike had an extremely adverse reaction. He left the bathroom and threw up all over the carpet in the studio lounge. After the incident, there was a conversation between Layne, Mike, and Carlstrom. Carlstrom recalled hearing from somebody—“ninety-nine percent sure” it was Mike, but acknowledges it could have been Layne—that that had been the first time Mike ever tried heroin. When he was interviewed in October 2011, Carlstrom was the only person still alive of those three, so only his account is available.

  Years later, Mike would offer different accounts of when his heroin use started. Once he denied ever doing heroin while in Alice in Chains. “I never did dope when I was in the band. I didn’t need to. I got high off of playing music,” he said on Celebrity Rehab. He contradicted himself in that same episode. When asked how long he had been using intravenous drugs, Mike answered, “Seventeen years.” The program was filmed in 2009, so he dates the beginning of his heroin use to 1992, while he was still in the band.11

  The second incident, which Carlstrom called “the nail in the coffin” for the song, happened after Layne had recorded his vocals. Mike came in later, high. He listened to the song, was not happy with the vocals, and called Layne. He wanted him to come back to the studio and do it again. Layne lost it. Jerden and Carlstrom’s accounts differ slightly as to what he said. “I remember the end of that conversation was Layne on the phone saying ‘Fuck this song!’ and hanging up on him,” Carlstrom recalled.

  According to Jerden, Layne said, “Fuck you! I’m not singing this again!” Jerden thinks the tensions from the recording of this song were a contributing factor in Mike’s eventual dismissal from the band. The song did not make the final cut of Dirt, but was eventually released seven years later as part of the band’s box set. Mike said, “I wrote a song called ‘Fear the Voices.’ We did record it, but they didn’t let it on the album because Jerry didn’t have nothin’ to do with the writing of the music. But they put it on the box set later, and it got some recognition and got played on the radio.”12

  Mixing began on Monday, July 13. At some point, Jerden was mixing “Rooster.” He had previously seen a drug dealer hanging out around the studio and told Layne not to bring him in. On this particular day, Layne walked in with the dealer. Jerden played Layne and the dealer the mix he had been working on over the speakers. Layne said it was great, but the dealer decided to offer his unsolicited advice.

  “Well, I think you should…”

  He didn’t even get to finish the sentence. “Shut up,” Layne told him.

  At that point, Jerden lost it. “Who the fuck are you? Get the fuck out of my studio!” He turned to Layne and said, “Don’t bring your drug dealers around.”

  The band-approved final mixes were completed on July 29. Cisneros sequenced the album from August 5 through 7, after which it was sent off to be mastered. The exception from all the songs that appear on the final cut of Dirt was “Would?” The song had been recorded for Singles at London Bridge Studios in Seattle, and Jerden made several mixes, but it’s not Jerden’s mix on the finished album. According to Jonathan Plum, “Jerry was unhappy with the way the song came out. I remember him complaining that there was no cymbals on the record and that he liked the demo song better, so he came back [to London Bridge Studios] and Rick [Parashar] and I remixed ‘Would?’”

  Rocky Schenck met with the band on April 27, 1992, to discuss their new album and videos. He went to the studio on May 7, where he got to hear some of the new material for the first time, which he says “completely blew me away.” They looked through his portfolio and started discussing ideas for the album cover.

  “Their idea was to have a nude woman half buried in the desert. She could be either dead or alive,” Schenck wrote. They discussed the type of woman the band wanted, and Schenck began casting shortly after. Eventually, Schenck submitted a photo of Mariah O’Brien, a model he had worked with for the cover of Spinal Tap’s “Bitch School” single. The band chose her.

  The cover shoot took place at Schenck’s Hollywood studio on June 14, 1992, with Sean supervising. “We created the cracked desert floor with clay rolled out on foam core raised up on apple boxes. There was a cutout in the center of the foam core for the model to slip into, so she would appear half buried in the desert floor. I cut the miniature mountains out of more foam core, and we put up a painted sky backdrop behind the mountains,” Schenck wrote.

  “Mariah’s hair was short at the time, so we put a long wig on her so her hair would flow out artistically into the desert floor. After getting her in place, we sealed her up with more clay, which we dried around her with hair dryers. Poor Mariah was stuck in that position for many, many hours as I tried a variety of different lighting effects and visual approaches.”

  As soon as the shoot was finished, O’Brien bolted from the set and ran upstairs to use the bathr
oom, but her wig remained in the clay. Schenck shot several photos of the wig and the empty hole. The album cover would be the subject of a widespread and erroneous rumor: that Demri was the model. According to her mother, it bothered her. “Demri was really hurt when they chose a model that looked so much like her that people thought it was her … because it put her in a position where people would come up to her and say, ‘Oh, wow, I saw you on the cover of Dirt.’ And she’d have to say, ‘No, no, that’s not me.’”

  “Sometimes people believed her, and sometimes they didn’t believe her. She wouldn’t have minded if they got a model that didn’t look just like her, but it put her in a really awkward position and it was really hurtful to her,” Kathleen Austin said. Asked if Demri would have posed for the album cover had the band asked her to, Austin said she doesn’t know because Layne’s fame was overshadowing Demri’s identity. “She was just trying to maintain her own identity, never wanted to be somebody’s girlfriend.”

  The band regrouped with Schenck at his studio on July 19 to shoot group photos, in what Schenck called “a crazy, creative night.” Schenck also wrote the concept for “Them Bones,” the first music video, on August 5. It went through several changes before the actual shoot, which took place on August 18. Schenck called it “a complicated shoot, and technically challenging” for everyone involved. “To visually accentuate the aggressiveness of the song, I wanted the camera moves to be extremely accelerated—faster than one could achieve using a normal crane. To achieve this effect, I had the band lip-synch, perform, and play their instruments in slow motion to the song played back in slow motion at twelve frames per second, while having the camera moves executed as fast as possible. We filmed at twelve frames per second and then transferred the film at twenty-four frames per second, doubling the speed of the camera moves and making the band’s performance appear as if it was shot at normal speed,” Schenck wrote. “The band gave a great performance, and Layne was extraordinary.”

  After having worked on Dirt and listened to rough mixes for ten hours a day, Bryan Carlstrom was feeling pessimistic about the final product. “I listened to it, and all I could think of was, ‘Oh shit, man, I failed. Every song sounds the same, production-wise. People are gonna hate this record and I’m never going to get a job again after this thing.’”

  Dirt was released on September 25, 1992. Carlstrom’s fears were seemingly confirmed by a scathing review in the Los Angeles Times: “Hear them sneer. Hear them moan. Hear them try to sound like Nirvana or Mother Love Bone or something, but come out closer to Kansas … On this album, which doesn’t even have the benefit of the slightly charming naivete of its debut, Alice in Chains is pompous, turgid, no riffs, a bore. And the group doesn’t even rock—this album is about competence, not ideology.”13

  Carlstrom’s reaction? “More than anything else, I felt like I failed the band and I failed Dave. It sounds like I made every song sound the same. That was unfortunately my perspective, because of how close I was [to] it.”

  Carlstrom would have the last laugh. The album entered the Billboard 200 chart at number 6, and would eventually be certified quadruple platinum by the RIAA. “Now I listen back to it, I’m like, ‘Oh my God…’ I’m just honored I got the opportunity to be the one to record that album. I’m just honored. That record … I listen back to it—it was pretty emotional.”

  In retrospect, Jerden said that in comparison to Facelift, Dirt was “a totally different record, and it’s all songs that were written from emotional and personal experiences. That’s the reason that record resonates with so many people. A lot of people love that record because it’s real. They’re not pop songs written for pop consumption. They’re songs that are written almost like a personal diary.”

  Chapter 16

  I beat death! I’m immortal!

  —LAYNE STALEY

  AFTER THE RELEASE OF DIRT, Alice in Chains finally made the cover of The Rocket after a lack of coverage in previous years, possibly due to the influence of the paper’s managing editor, Grant Alden, who said, “I did my level best not to do anything on them at The Rocket, to squash them.”1 The magazine assigned the story to Jeff Gilbert, who was on the receiving end of Jerry’s verbal wrath. The story’s opening sentence is Jerry saying “Fuck The Rocket, man!” The cover of the October 1992 issue was a photo of the band with a caption reading, “Jeff Gilbert Sucks Up to Alice in Chains.”

  “It isn’t that we’re pissed off at The Rocket or anything,” Jerry said. “That’s stupid. Magazines have the right to do what they want. It’s just that there seemed to be a lot of bias with the type of bands that end up in The Rocket.”2

  To promote the album, the band tapped Gruntruck to tour with them for most of the final months of 1992. The connection with Alice in Chains happened when Gruntruck was performing a show where Layne happened to be in attendance. The tour would take both bands across North America for an initial run from August 23 through September 5 and then pick up again from November 13 through December 20.3 The initial leg—dubbed the Shitty Cities Tour—was a regional tour consisting of nine dates through the Pacific Northwest. It was a low-key affair, with both bands touring in vans.

  Norman Scott Rockwell—the drummer for Gruntruck who went by the stage name Norman Scott and had previously been the drummer for Skin Yard—said, “I remember coming in and the first person I ran into was Sean Kinney and everybody—it was just like any tour. It’s like everybody’s like, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ It was like we’re just kind of sizing each other up a little bit type of thing,” Rockwell said. “We met in Ellensburg and through the night we all got kind of our drink on and sort of started to talk to the crews.

  “And through the night we just slowly started to hang out and kind of get used to each other. And then the next day, it seemed like we had known each other forever, best friends, and got into a shitload of trouble. It was just on after that,” he said.

  Crank calls were a popular pastime for a while. According to Rockwell, “We’d sit there in the hotel room in the middle of the night, nothing to do, it’s after two, all the bars are closed, whatever. And we’d just sit there and dial out of the phone book. We’d do things like dial a Denny’s, and it would be like, ‘Hey, are you hiring? Is your manager there?’

  “I think this was sort of Jerry’s sort of shtick. He would be like, ‘Yeah, well, do you have fluorescent lights?’

  “‘Yeah.’

  “‘Well, I can’t stand fluorescent lights, and I’ll just bash them out. So you guys got to get rid of those if I’m going to ever work there. Where’s your manager?’

  “‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir, he’s not here.’

  “‘Well, do you got his phone number?’”

  The gag would go on and on, sometimes as long as fifteen to twenty minutes, and people would keep talking. Other times, they would randomly call somebody in the middle of the night. “We did that night after night until that got kind of old.”

  At another town, someone thought it would be a good idea to try cow-tipping. “We go find some cows sleeping on their feet and tip them over, and it’s just hilarious,” Rockwell said. “We get into the pasture, and all of a sudden we hear this, like, big ‘moo’—like, it’s a bull, and we all freak the fuck out and hightail it out of there.”

  Rockwell and Sean, both being drummers, wound up hanging out together quite a bit. “When Sean got lit he was pretty unstoppable. He was sort of a classic destroyer of hotel rooms.”

  Case in point: the two drummers walked out of the room looking for something to do when they noticed the hallway was illuminated by tulip-shaped sconces lining the hallway. Sean, with beer in hand, walked down the corridor and poured a little beer in each sconce before walking to the next one and pouring more beer as he and Rockwell continued down the hall. A few seconds later, each lightbulb would explode. Rockwell thinks the band might have been banned from the hotel where this happened.

  Sean had an alter ego he called Steve, which he referred to whenever
he was particularly rowdy or destructive. According to Randy Biro, Sean once walked into the restaurant of a nice hotel in Toronto where a brunch had been set up. “He’s standing on a chair, peeing onto the dessert cart in the middle of the dining hall,” Biro said. For some mind-boggling reason, the band was not kicked out of the hotel. When Sean was asked about it later, he allegedly responded, “That wasn’t me. That was Steve.” Multiple sources have said that Sean has given up drinking in recent years.

  Rockwell’s memories of Sean during the Shitty Cities Tour aren’t all mayhem and destruction. After the first show, because they had similar drum kits, Sean suggested they share his kit for the tour to avoid changing drum kits between sets. As the tour progressed, Sean used his contacts in the drumming industry and got Rockwell endorsements with DW, Vic Firth, and Sabian. By the second leg of the tour, several boxes of brand-new drums and drumming equipment had been delivered for Rockwell.

  Mike was known to like younger girls, and this became the subject of a prank. “We knew he had this girl down in his hotel room. We were all upstairs drinking, bored out of our skulls—needed something to do,” Rockwell said. “So we all decide to run down to his room, and we knew she was in the room, knock on the door, and, like, ‘This is the hotel manager. We know you’ve got a young girl in there.’” Jerry told them Mike had gotten in trouble for this on a previous tour.

  “We’re knocking on the door, and he won’t answer the door, just will not, and we’re all snickering.” The gag changed from being the manager to the girl’s father. “Finally, he cracks open the door and realizes it’s us. We bust into the room, and the sliding glass door in the back of the room is open, and she’s, like, out—like, gone.” When she heard everyone laughing and realized it was a joke, she came back, but Mike was furious. Rockwell said for the most part, Mike kept to himself on that tour, as did Layne.