Alice in Chains

by David de Sola

  At the same time, Second Coming was playing local gigs in the Seattle area as a cover band under the name FTA—an acronym for Funding the Album, in reference to their debut album that was in the works. Layne would occasionally come out to FTA shows, take the stage, and sing “Would?” or “Man in the Box.”18 Bergstrom recalls performing “No Excuses” at one show and Layne telling him afterward that it was his first time playing the song live.

  By the spring of 1995, Bacolas decided to move out. “It was a culmination of everything. To me, it got to a point where it was just too depressing, too much.” Layne would leave handwritten letters to Bacolas on his bed. In one of them, he wrote words to the effect of how there was a black cloud over their house.19 Bacolas spoke to Layne’s mother, who told him, “You know you’re not helping him; you’re enabling him.” Bacolas sat down with Layne in the living room and told him, “I can’t do this anymore.” Bacolas isn’t sure how exactly Layne felt about it but thinks he was okay with his decision and understood it. The day Bacolas moved out was the last time he saw Layne.

  At around the same time all this was going on, Jerry was quietly making moves in an effort to get Alice in Chains to regroup.

  Chapter 20

  That’s funny. You don’t plan on using those, right?

  —TOBY WRIGHT

  ALICE IN CHAINS’S SELF-TITLED third album traces its beginnings to the 1994–95 period when the band was on hiatus and was originally meant to be a Jerry Cantrell solo album. He invited Scott Rockwell, the drummer for Gruntruck, to jam and record material on his sixteen-track home studio. These jams were recorded by Jerry’s guitar tech, Darrell Peters. Rockwell said, “I was playing drums and he was playing guitar, and we’d record, and then he’d—we’d talk about it a little bit, and then he’d pick up the bass and put on down some bass tracks and stuff … So we worked on like three songs. I think two of them made it on the album.”

  After these initial demo recordings, Jerry and Rockwell went into a recording studio. Mike Inez was there, as were Ann and Nancy Wilson, who brought a bagful of wine. “Nancy Wilson steps up, never heard the song before, and just [does] this awesome duet on top of it, on the song. This was preproduction tracks for the [Alice in Chains] album. And I’m just sitting there, just like, ‘This is awesome.’ I’m sitting here playing drums, and there’s Ann and Nancy Wilson over there singing with me.”

  One of the songs Rockwell recorded with Jerry eventually became “Again.” Rockwell ran into Sean about a year later and the subject of the song came up during their conversation.

  “Dude, I got out of the studio recording this fucking song and all fucking Jerry said is, ‘Play it like McCullum [Rockwell’s surname at the time],’” Sean told him. According to Rockwell, the style of drumming on that song is his, not Sean’s.

  Toby Wright got a call asking if he wanted to make another Alice in Chains record. First and foremost, Jerry, Susan, and Wright had to get the other band members on board. Wright went to Jerry’s house to start working on material while Layne was doing Mad Season. The idea was to jolt the other members into making another album once they got word that Wright was in Seattle working with Jerry.1

  “Jerry’s mind-set was if it didn’t come out, if the band didn’t want to get involved as Alice, he wanted to put out a solo record. We had the working title of Jerry’s Kids because most musicians call their songs their kids and treat them like kids, very precious. The record was never going to be called that,” Wright explained. Jerry’s plan ultimately worked.

  “Frogs” is another song from these early sessions. A week’s worth of studio time was booked at Bear Creek Studios in Woodinville. “By the lake there were these really cool, loud fucking frogs, so we put the mic outside and recorded them. It cost us ten thousand dollars for the week. We got nothing out of it other than those frogs,” Jerry recalled.2

  Jerry would later say of these demos, “To be honest, I’m too much of a sentimental fuck; I don’t want to play with another band. I didn’t feel I could put something else out that could top what Alice in Chains could do together.”3

  The band booked time at Bad Animals Studio in Seattle, with the idea of writing the new album—which would be titled Alice in Chains but become colloquially known as Tripod, the Dog Record, or the Dog Album for the three-legged dog on the cover—in the studio.4 The idea behind doing it at Bad Animals was proximity and convenience for Layne.

  At the same time, the band was isolating itself from the record label. “The third album was when Alice in Chains accomplished their goal of boxing me out. I heard very few demos. They picked Toby Wright, who I brought in once to engineer something for them. I would not have picked Toby Wright. I think he was more of an engineer, and they could have used a full-on producer again,” Nick Terzo told Mark Yarm. “I felt Toby was more of an enabler in a way, too. Because he enabled the label to be shut out. As someone who’s being hired by a record label, I think you have to have better diplomatic skills than that. You’re serving two masters in a way.”5

  Asked to comment, Wright said, “That was a very, very political thing. The band even shut out Susan Silver, their manager. I remember being the liaison between Susan and the band. At that point for some reason, the band didn’t want to deal with Nick anymore, and they only wanted to deal with Donnie Ienner and Michele Anthony. That’s who they considered their A&R people. I didn’t create that [dynamic]. That was already created by the band and Nick.”

  “You would think that the manager would just walk in and say, ‘Hey, guys, how are you doing?’ That wasn’t happening. They didn’t want that to happen. They wanted me to tell Susan exactly what was going on in the studio, and then her to take it from there, and them not to be bothered by any management or record label or anything. All of that stuff was created by the band themselves. It was never created by me.”

  In response to Terzo’s comment calling him an enabler, Wright said, “I am an enabler in the fact that I enable creativity in my artists, whatever that takes. I just want them to be as creative as they can all be, at all moments in time when they’re in the studio. That’s what I do. That’s what allowed the Dog Record to come out the way it did, because without that you never would have had a Dog Record.”

  Wright said they did not have a recording budget or a timetable to finish the album. It was an extraordinary degree of artistic and financial freedom, even as their management and record label were almost entirely shut out of the process. Wright went to New York to meet with Don Ienner, who was not optimistic about the project, and said so openly. “I remember sitting in Donnie Ienner’s office in New York before we started the record and him telling me, ‘Good luck,’ because he didn’t think I’d be able to get a record out of them.”

  Sam Hofstedt was a staff engineer at Bad Animals when he was assigned to work as an assistant engineer to Toby Wright. According to him, it was not uncommon for the band and production team to work twelve-hour days and overnight shifts. Wright asked the studio engineer to give Hofstedt a beeper. By this point, Hofstedt said, Layne was “a night owl.”

  “The reason I had a beeper was when it got down to we really needed to get the vocals done, that’s what we were really waiting on,” Hofstedt said. “Layne was in, Toby would ask, ‘What time do you want to show up tomorrow, Layne?’ Layne would give a time; he would come down. We sorta learned early on that he wouldn’t always show up at that time,” he said with a laugh. “So we’d sit around the studio until midnight or one and Toby would be trying to call him—no one would answer or something. He’d say, ‘Whatever. Let’s just go home.’”

  This was where the beeper system came into play. If Wright was able to get ahold of Layne and he was going to come in, Wright used the beeper to let Hofstedt know to get to the studio. “There’s a good period there where I just wore this beeper. I wouldn’t even know if I was going to be working that day or not,” Hofstedt said. One night he was sitting at home watching TV. At about one in the morning, he was getting in b
ed when the beeper went off. It was Wright.

  Making the record took longer than anticipated. Hofstedt estimates the band went through about seventy rolls of two-inch tape, enough that “probably the tape budget alone is about what most album budgets are nowadays.” Jerry described the recording process as “a whole lot of not thinking about it, and a whole lot of just doing it—and making sure the tape is always rolling.”6

  One reason the record took so long was the lyrics, which Layne sometimes wrote in the studio. He also spent time experimenting with different vocal and harmony ideas in privacy before he was ready to record. Layne knew how to operate the tape machine and some of the equipment. Hofstedt would give Layne a handheld microphone, load a track for him, and leave him alone in the control room.

  “We’d go back to the lounge so he had privacy so he could experiment without feeling self-conscious, kinda coming up with stuff and ideas. Typically, Layne would work on that, and then once in a while he’d buzz back to the lounge when he needed to lay down another track for these scratch vocals,” Hofstedt said. “I’d run out, arm another track, make sure that the signal was there. ‘There you go, Layne.’ Then back out to the lounge. And then at some point, after he’d done a few takes or tracks, he’d say, ‘All right, you guys—you can come in.’”

  At this point, Wright and the other studio technicians would listen to the tape Layne had recorded. Wright would offer his feedback, and then they would set up so Layne could record his vocals in the booth using a nicer microphone rather than the cuts Layne had recorded himself. But even then, Hofstedt said, once Layne had his ideas worked out, those scratch vocal recordings would have been good enough for the album.

  According to Hofstedt, Layne’s drug use was not affecting his performance in the studio. “When he was ready to sing, he was ready to sing. And he took very little time to get the vocals.” Wright concurs, “When it was game time, he worked. It might have taken him a while to get there, but he got there.” However, it was obvious he had a problem. Hofstedt said, “It seemed apparent to me he was using, because when you go to lock yourself in the bathroom for a while, it’s not because you really like the bathroom.”

  For “Grind,” Wright distorted Layne’s vocals on the master tape by having him sing through a Turner Crystal microphone from 1932 that he bought at a pawnshop for ten dollars. The song was Jerry’s angry response to the rumors of the time. Layne had found out through the Internet that he was dead or had AIDS. There were rumors he had had fingers or limbs amputated because of his drug use. Gillian Gaar, an editor at The Rocket, speculated that some of the rumors got started from people who saw Layne out and about, made assumptions, said something, and the stories spread. “You could see someone saying, ‘God, he was so wasted, he looked like the kinda guy that would have AIDS,’ and so then a person hears that and says, ‘Oh, he has AIDS,’” Gaar said. “So then it might just be a misperception and then a mishearing.”7

  Layne and Toby Wright were in the studio at 6:00 A.M. when Don Ienner and Michele Anthony called from New York to congratulate Layne: Above had been certified gold. Then they turned on the pressure: they told Layne he had nine days to finish the record. “At that point, we had taken a lot of time. I don’t remember the amount of time, but we had taken a lot of time,” Wright said. “It might have been feeling like it was excessive, but in the interim there were a lot of things, a lot of drama happened, a lot of stuff stopping us from working every day and so forth.” Layne wrote this incident into the lyrics of “Sludge Factory”: “Call me up congratulations ain’t the real why / There’s no pressure besides brilliance let’s say by day nine / Corporate ignorance lets me control time / By the way, by the way.”

  “That song is about them,” Wright said. “He was a little pissed off that they told him that he had nine days to finish this record, so he subsequently wrote about that.”

  Layne had finished recording the scratch vocals for “Again” when he called Wright and Hofstedt into the control room. They listened and noticed the song ended with a “Toot, toot!” backing vocal over the final bars.

  “That’s funny. You don’t plan on using those, right?” Wright asked, according to Hofstedt’s recollection.

  “Yeah, I do. Those are going to be on the record,” Layne responded.

  “Toby’s like, ‘Really?’” Hofstedt recalled. “I got the impression he wasn’t terribly thrilled with that idea. But I think Layne just sorta—when he saw his reaction, I got the impression that he decided like, ‘Oh, you don’t like it, huh? Well, guess what? It’s going to be on the record now!’”

  Wright confirmed Hofstedt’s account but doesn’t think Layne left the “Toot, toot!” backing vocals in to annoy him. “I don’t know if he was that full of animosity at that point,” he said, laughing. “I was questioning that because I was expecting something completely different. It’s hard to say what his attitude was then, but I do remember, ‘That’s the chorus, dude? Really?’ ‘Yep, that’s it.’ ‘Okay, cool.’ And we went with it and that was the end of the conversation. It stands as it is today.”

  For the beginning of “God Am,” Layne recorded himself doing a crack hit from a bong. “He thought it was kind of funny and apropos to the song that he included that in the intro,” Wright said. In all the years they knew each other, this was the only time Wright saw Layne use drugs. Layne was known to be a fan of the band Tool. The studio version of the Tool song “Intolerance” begins with a similar sound, which some have speculated to be a bong hit. Whether Layne meant the opening of “God Am” to be an homage to that, Wright doesn’t know.8

  For Sam Hofstedt’s birthday, some of the studio employees went to an erotic bakery and bought him a cake shaped like a naked woman. After eating a few pieces, Hofstedt left the cake out in the lounge for anyone to eat. “I swear to God, it was in there for like a month, and it looked the same as it did a month later. There was a couple of pieces cut out of it after the first day or two, and then it just sat there.”

  While this was going on, Layne was working on “Nothin’ Song.” Hofstedt had the impression Layne was tired of writing lyrics and was saying whatever came off the top of his head. One of the lyrics in the song was, “Back inside, Sam, throw away your cake.” Wright agreed with Hofstedt’s assessment. “He was probably pretty tapped out by that point. He was probably just picking stuff out and making it work.”

  The sessions were briefly interrupted for a few days so Johnny Cash could record a cover of Willie Nelson’s “Time of the Preacher” for the Twisted Willie tribute album. Cash was backed by a grunge supergroup consisting of Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil, Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, and Sean on drums. Jerry also recorded a cover of “I’ve Seen All This World I Care to See” for the same album.

  On April 29, 1995, the band and production staff took the night off to see Layne perform with Mad Season at the Moore Theatre. Duncan Sharp was hired to film the performance at the last minute. Originally, Sharp was told they wanted to shoot only two songs for music videos, but Sharp filmed as much of the show as he could—enough for a forty-five-minute home video. Brett Eliason was present to record the audio.

  The people hired to do the remote recording left their post to go across the street for beers, thinking the show was over after the main set. As a result, no one was in place for the start of the encore, and thus the beginning of “X-Ray Mind” is missing from the recording, which Eliason was not happy about. The mistake was covered with a fade-up. Despite technical issues and limited resources, Live at the Moore was released on home video. This was Mad Season’s final performance. According to Joseph H. Saunders, his brother told him there were talks at one point for the band to perform on Saturday Night Live, but it never happened.

  Susan would visit the studio to speak with Wright and the band. According to Hofstedt, “Because they were in here for a while, I think at times she was kinda trying to gently prod them to get the record done, without being too obviously prodding.” Despite the ba
nd’s decision to shut her out of the production process, Wright spoke very highly of her and her role in their career. “Susan is an amazing person, period. I think that without her, that record would have never been made.” It should also be noted that, two decades later, she still remains their manager.

  Susan described the making of Alice in Chains to Greg Prato as “really painful.” She said, “It took eight or nine months—hours and hours of waiting for Layne to come out of the bathroom. Days of waiting for him to show up at the studio. And through all those last years, he and I were really close. I kept telling him, ‘You don’t have to do this. You have enough money to go and have a quiet life if that’s what you want,’ with his longtime girlfriend, Demri. ‘Just go and do what makes you happy—don’t do this if this is what’s perpetuating your addiction.’”

  Susan said it was “horrifying” to see Layne in that condition and that while he was sweet and cognizant, he would fall asleep in a meeting. Production on the album was stopped “many times,” in her words, and that it was “tearing everybody to shreds.”9

  Wright called her description “pretty accurate.” He further elaborated: “We talked about stopping the sessions several times, yeah. Obviously, we didn’t stop it. Did I go home for a week? I might have gone home for a week at one point. It was an extremely emotional time in everybody involved’s life.”