Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

SPIN chose Alice in Chains as one of the bands to watch in 1991. According to The Seattle Times write-up of the issue, “Writer Daina Darzin says ‘the band’s clearly being groomed as Columbia Records’ next big thing,’ and notes that the last two bands that got that treatment were Faith No More and Living Colour. The piece also has guitarist Jerry Cantrell confessing ‘we were all on coke, high as hell’ the first time big labels came to town to check out the band. But Darzin adds, ‘Alice in Chains cleaned up its act a while back.’ Drummer Sean Kinney says his father, a policeman, is a big fan of the band—‘He’s a really cool guy’—and Cantrell explains why so many of the group’s tunes deal with doom and depression: ‘We’re all outcasts.’”6

For New Year’s Eve, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Mookie Blaylock went to “an old-fashioned hootenanny at the Seattle-area ranch of writer-director Cameron Crowe and his wife, Heart’s Nancy Wilson.” According to Nancy Wilson, they sat around with acoustic instruments playing covers or making up new songs. She had a mechanical elephant windup toy, a gift from Chris Cornell. The next afternoon, she found a note from Jerry that read, “Look at the elephant.” In Wilson’s words, “Apparently Jerry had been fixating on it overnight, and in the morning he was feeding champagne to the horses.”7

Alice in Chains closed out the year having accomplished many professional goals—finishing and releasing their first album, shooting their first two music videos, and going on their first national tours. But the album and the band still had not taken off. That was about to change. The fuse for the Seattle music scene had been lit. It was only a matter of time before the rest of the world was in on the Emerald City’s little secret.

Chapter 12

Let’s just try something different.

RICK KRIM

PAUL RACHMAN HANDED in his first cut of the “Man in the Box” video to the band for approval at the beginning of 1991. “They loved it,” he said. “We made a couple of adjustments, like we added a couple of close-ups of Layne and made sure the whole band was evenly represented, and that was it. There were no creative differences of any sort.” The final cut was released at some point in January 1991.

On February 7, 1991, Alice in Chains began a brief West Coast tour, with Mookie Blaylock along as the opening act. Jerry said, “Things had happened for us, and we were on our way. These guys were starting again. We just wanted to give them as much support as they’d given us in the early days of our band.” One highlight: the two bands, each in their respective van, having food fights while driving eighty miles an hour on the I-5 freeway.1

During that tour, Alice in Chains had landed an opening slot at Ozzy Osbourne’s Children of the Night benefit in Long Beach, California, on February 8. The show was memorable for two reasons. At the end of the night, members of several bands got up onstage to jam a Rolling Stones cover. Mike was one of them, but had no idea how to play the song. “I was stage right, and I was teaching him how to play ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ by giving him these sign languages on how to play it—like, which way to go,” Randy Biro recalled.2

The second and ultimately more consequential reason for the significance of that show was that it was the first time then–Ozzy Osbourne bassist Mike Inez saw Alice in Chains, and he was impressed by what he saw and heard.3

Biro said crew members from both bands put together a band called Sexecutioner. “It was a joke band, because there was nobody at the shows. Mookie would play, and Sexecutioner would play, and Alice would play. And we’d take turns out in the audience to applaud the other band, ’cause there was nobody there. You talk to people now, and there were ten thousand people in these clubs.”

As Operation Desert Storm was winding down, Alice in Chains, along with Ann and Nancy Wilson, were the headliners of a daylong “concert for peace” at the Paramount Theatre on February 23. The show closed with a group-encore cover of Cat Stevens’s “Peace Train.”4

Alice in Chains was nominated for nine Northwest Area Music Association (NAMA) Northwest Music Awards that year during a ceremony on March 3 at the Moore Theatre. They won only one—Rock Recording, for Facelift. There were problems backstage that had nothing to do with the band but did affect them. The show started at approximately 7 P.M. according to The Seattle Times. It ran for a marathon five hours, with about 90 percent of the audience gone by the time the last award was presented at around midnight.