Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Mike played the main riff of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” as the band was about to play “Sludge Factory.” The members of Metallica were in the audience, and one or more of them had recently cut their hair, inspiring Mike to write on his bass, “Friends don’t let friends get friends haircuts.” Later in the show, as the band prepared to perform “Angry Chair,” Jerry played the opening guitar riff of Metallica’s “Battery” and then switched to a cover of the song “Gloom, Despair and Agony on Me,” from the Hee Haw variety show.

Biro said that between songs “there was a lot of clowning around with the audience,” adding, “It was funny. Once the show started, it was regular Alice in Chains, but an intimate thing.” The band members would insult Biro during these interludes, referring to him as “a fucking Frenchman” or “a fucking frog from Montreal,” and Biro was yelling right back at them. Initially, the audience thought these barbs were serious. “Then, they started making jokes with the audience and just had a really good connection with the audience in that show.”

Coletti called Sean “the unsung hero of that Unplugged, because the thing about Unplugged, especially with rock bands, is you live or die by the drummer. If the drummer gets it and tempers his playing, then everyone can kind of play at a lower volume and play acoustically. When the drummer just plays like a rock show, everyone turns up their monitors, and then what’s meant to be this pretty, acoustic thing just sounds like shitty electric guitars.”

MTV sent the band the first cut of the show about two weeks later, since they had final approval. Layne didn’t like it, so Wright was given the task of reviewing the material. “When the video was finally cut together, Layne despised it. He didn’t want it coming out at all. They felt that they edited him into the worst light possible, so he asked me if I would edit it. So I ended up editing it, just picking the shots and redoing it, subsequently sending him copies of that along with the audio and boom! There it is,” Wright explained. The problem was “they would cut to him doing certain things during songs I remember, and he just didn’t like the way they cut it together and he was looking for something to show him in a more positive way, away from the stigma of whatever was going on in his personal life.

“He was always paying attention, but he looked like he was falling asleep at certain points or he’d nod out, and then all of the sudden his part would come up and boom! He’d be there. But they’d show him just sitting there with his eyes closed for several bars of the music and then they wouldn’t show him when it was his time to sing—they’d cut to Jerry or cut to Mike or cut somewhere else, and it just looked like he was sleeping through the whole thing during certain songs.” Wright provided suggested changes in the form of specific notes and time codes of what he wanted fixed, and MTV complied. The show aired on May 28, 1996, and the album was released on July 17, debuting at number 3 on the Billboard chart.2

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Ken Deans got a call from Susan asking for help getting the band back together and preparing them for a tour with KISS, which had reunited with the four original members. Jerry and Sean were excited—Sean especially, because he had been in the KISS Army growing up. Layne kept saying he didn’t want to do it, after which the band had pretty much given up on the idea. Layne eventually changed his mind and agreed to do the tour.3

According to Deans, the band rented out the Moore Theatre for three weeks of rehearsals. “It was really challenging,” Deans said. “Mike Inez would show up around three or four o’clock in the afternoon. He and I would hang out. And then Sean would show up, and then Jerry would show up, and then Layne would show up around nine o’clock, maybe they’d go through a couple of songs, and then take off.” Deans estimates he spent as much as eight hours a day waiting around for people to show up. “By this time, it was becoming pretty evident that both Layne and Jerry were having some problems, not Jerry so much at that time, but Layne was definitely starting to. You could see that his years of drug use were starting to affect him.”

“I hadn’t seen [Layne] for a while until I saw him at the rehearsals. There was a part of him that was gone at that point.”

Susan was coping with the situation “as good as she could,” Deans recalled. “I remember thinking this tour wasn’t going to last that long or go that far. It was really kind of gut-wrenching for me to come back and work with the guys.”

During a backstage interview with MTV News, Sean was asked about his fondest memories of KISS as a kid, showing off his memorabilia from the 1970s.

“How old were you, where were you when you got that?”