Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Before the tour came to Seattle on May 30, Jeff Gilbert was interviewing Megadeth front man Dave Mustaine for an article for Guitar World magazine. Gilbert mentioned he was friends with Alice in Chains. Mustaine asked what he knew about them. Gilbert praised Alice in Chains but noted, “They used to be a full-on Poison-style glam band.”

Mustaine looked at him and said, “Are you kidding me?”

“No. In fact, I still have pictures of them from back in the day.” He was referring to the Alice ’N Chains design he had pressed onto T-shirts a few years earlier. He sent it to Mustaine, who had the tour manager make posters out of it and place them all over Mercer Arena. “By the time Alice in Chains showed up, you couldn’t walk anywhere. Those poor guys would walk in and see this glam band Alice ’N Chains, and it was so flippin’ funny. Just everywhere, before the doors even opened. So that way, when these guys rolled in backstage, it was the funniest thing,” Gilbert said, chuckling pretty hard.

Gilbert was walking down the hallway backstage when he saw Layne.

“Hey, Layne.”

“Hey, man.”

And then Layne put two and two together.

“HEY!”

“Layne knew exactly when he saw me. He goes, ‘God dang it, man!’ He liked the joke, though—he thought it was pretty funny,” Gilbert said. “I asked [the other members of Alice in Chains] later, and Jerry and I were talking. He said, ‘Oh, man. We did some shows with those guys and they just ripped us into the ground. They were busting our chops left and right.’ I’m like, ‘Well, you deserved it. Look how goofy you guys used to look.’”

The most important thing to happen during this tour wasn’t even the tour itself. “Man in the Box” was about to jump-start the band’s career.

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At some point in the late spring of 1991, there was a meeting at MTV to decide which of two videos—“Man in the Box” or either Blue Murder’s “Valley of the Kings” or “Jelly Roll”—would get the network’s coveted “Buzz Bin” seal of approval. In that pre-YouTube, pre–realityshow era when music videos formed a large part of MTV’s daily programming, getting a video in regular airplay on the network could have an enormous impact on a band’s career. According to Rick Krim, at the time MTV’s vice president of music and programming and a participant in that meeting, “Buzz Bin” meant a video would get heavy rotation: “That clip got X number of plays for that week and then it probably goes into some other kind of rotation after that.”

Krim said the discussion centered on “whether we pick this big, glossy hair band, sort of late-in-the-game hair-band video by this band [Blue Murder] or this dark, sepia-toned, sort of weird band, Alice in Chains. I don’t remember the deciding factor, but we decided it was time to change the landscape a little bit, try something different, and we went with Alice in Chains.”

As far as the decision-making process, Krim said they would have votes or try to reach a consensus. For “Man in the Box,” he said, “I think we talked both sides through, and I do think the consensus ultimately was, ‘Let’s just try something different,’ which it certainly was.” This was how a group of fewer than ten people broke Alice in Chains nationally.

“That video in the MTV ‘Buzz’ clip helped us out a lot, and I know it helped a lot of other bands as well,” Jerry said during an interview with MTV. “It can blow you up really fast.” The impact was immediate. One week after MTV put “Man in the Box” in the “Buzz Bin” in early May 1991, Facelift jumped from number 166 on the Billboard chart to 108. A month and a half later, the album peaked at number 42.17

“I think MTV had a lot to do with it. I think MTV at that time in particular was really leading the drive on record sales. It was kinda the peak of MTV. Everybody was watching. When MTV put it in ‘Buzz Bin,’ everything changed for that band, everything,” Paul Rachman said. He also thinks it was MTV that drove the song’s airplay on rock radio.

According to Jerry, Facelift had sold only about forty thousand copies after eight months of touring by the time the “Man in the Box” video hit.18 Another indicator of the song’s success happened when the band and crew walked into a bar on a night off from the tour and heard the bar band performing a cover of “Man in the Box.”

“We couldn’t believe it. We were blown away,” Biro said of the band and crew’s reaction. “They didn’t know we had come in through a back door. Nobody knew we were there.”

“[The ‘Man in the Box’ cover] sounded atrocious, but they knew who it was,” Biro said, referring to the band’s recognition of their song. “And then [the bar band] got all weirded out when they realized the band was there.”