Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Plum also recalled Mike rerecording a bass track that Jerry had done. “He told me the main reason he wanted to redo the bass track was because he was afraid his mom was going to hear it and would be able to tell that it wasn’t him playing bass on the record.

“Jerry had recorded this bass track, and Mike wanted to come back and replace it. He said he was happy with the bass track, it sounded fine, he just wanted to play it himself because he was worried his mom would hear it and say, ‘That’s not you!’ I think that was sort of a joke.” A highlight was when Ann and Nancy Wilson came to the studio to record their vocals. “I remember this really clearly because we were all so excited and sorta nervous,” Plum said. At one point, Sean asked Parashar, “Can we get her [Ann] to do the ‘Barracuda’ song?” referring to Heart’s signature song.

“I’m not going to ask her. You can ask if you want.”

Parashar handed Sean the talkback, so Ann could hear him from inside the studio. “Ann, at the end of the song, can you do the ‘Ooooh, barracuda’?”

According to Plum, “Ann took the headphones off, walked in the control room, and sat down next to Sean and whoever else, probably Sean and Jerry.”

“‘Look, in ten years, when you’re fucking sick of playing your song “Man in the Box,” the last thing you’re going to want to do is have someone ask you to sing “Man in the Box” on someone else’s song,’” she told Sean, according to Plum’s account.

“Basically schooled them on … why that wasn’t a good question to ask. The whole room was sort of quiet, like ‘Okay, you’re right; we’re sorry.’”

Chris Cornell and Mark Arm came to the studio to record guest vocals for “Right Turn,” a song that would be credited to Alice Mudgarden—a mash-up of the three bands involved: Alice in Chains, Mudhoney, and Soundgarden.

“It was Jerry Cantrell who called and asked me to sing on Sap. I was surprised, like, ‘Why would you want me to sing?’ I could understand why they’d want Chris Cornell to sing,” Arm told Greg Prato.3

“I remember Mark coming in being very nervous,” Hillis said. “We started talking in the lobby and he had a six-pack of beer with him, and he started drinking a beer because he was nervous. I was like, ‘What’s up, man? Why are you so nervous?’ He was nervous about the fact that Chris Cornell was there, and Layne and Ann. ‘They could all really sing, and I don’t fit in. My voice doesn’t come out as a singer like that.’ I remember kind of giving him confidence, ‘Man, you’ll do great. You’ll be fine.’

“I was also curious of how Rick, the producer, what he was going to think of Mark, because he was quite different, and I know that Rick wasn’t really familiar with that kind of music, with Mudhoney and Mark’s style. I remember as soon as he sang, he looked at me and goes, ‘This sounds great!’”

On the other hand, Parashar had to encourage Cornell to show some restraint during his performance. “When he came in, he kept really wanting to belt it out like he does, and I remember Rick kind of messing with him a lot. ‘Well, let’s try this,’ kind of having fun with him, not letting him belt it out with the classic Cornell high scream and stuff,” Hillis said.

Plum said that he and Parashar spent time together one evening and the following morning setting up microphones and getting sounds right for Sean’s drums. When the band came in, Plum and Parashar were working on overdubs and thought that they were going to play. They had other plans. “They were fucking around all day, and eventually they played a song, but they were each playing different instruments. Layne was playing drums, Sean was singing, and it was ‘Love Song.’ [Jerry and Mike traded places on guitar and bass.] It was stupid. I mean, they were just fucking around, and I was pissed that we spent all this time and effort trying to get these drum[s] [to] sound amazing and they wrote this stupid song. It was a joke. They were bored. I don’t know why they did it—they just did it,” Plum recalled.

Rocky Schenck got a phone call from the band to discuss ideas for cover art. Schenck is “pretty sure” Sean came up with the cover concept. On December 22, 1991, Schenck and his assistant went to Griffith Park and took photographs of several different old wooden buckets and taps attached to trees. “I got some great shots of four buckets hanging from a massive old tree, with each bucket representing a different band member, but they ended up using the photo of a single bucket,” Schenck wrote.

For the back cover, Schenck flew up to Seattle for a band photo shoot that took place on January 3, 1992. He took several different photos, which he thinks were never published. The band’s idea—which ultimately became the EP’s back cover—was a shot of them urinating on photos of themselves previously taken by Schenck. That same night, they all went to see Pearl Jam perform at Rock Candy. He called it “a great night, great show” and says he met Demri for the first time that night, saying “she was very sweet to me.”4

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