Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

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 bed 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.