Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

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