Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Once the basic drum, bass, and guitar tracks from One on One were finished, production moved to Jerden’s El Dorado Studio, where they would focus on recording vocals, guitar, and bass overdubs, as well as editing and mixing. Annette Cisneros was Jerden’s assistant engineer at El Dorado. According to her personal calendar from this period, the band came to El Dorado on May 19, 1992. The next several days were spent setting up equipment, editing, and transferring the One on One material to forty-eight-track digital tape. From May 26 to May 28, they did bass overdubs. On May 29, the band flew to Seattle for three days to shoot a music video for “Would?”

Josh Taft got tapped to direct the video. Cameron Crowe was there to offer feedback and watch the shoot. Taft said of Crowe, “He was such a positive influence and so supportive, and he just allowed me to sort of run with my instincts. He was there to kind of get everyone on board. At the end of the day, it was for his movie, and he couldn’t have been more inspiring and helpful in the process of making the video and superinvolved.”

The shoot took place at a now-defunct venue called Under the Rail. Duncan Sharp, a local film director, had filmed a scene as an extra of him making out with his girlfriend in the front seat of a car. Layne had to go home at one point in the middle of the shoot. The word on the set was he had to feed his cat and get some aspirin. “I think everybody at that point knew that he had to go home to get high,” Duncan Sharp said. “Everybody was just sort of shaking their heads, like, ‘Yeah, right.’”

Asked to comment, Taft said, “I’m not gonna go any further with what happened in that moment, but we had to stop shooting, and then we started again an hour [or] so later, and you can fill in the blanks.” The excuse about having to feed his cat was a lie. Layne did adopt a kitten, named Sadie, but not until 1994—two years later.

Evan Sheeley got a call from Kelly Curtis, asking if he had a white Spector bass at his store that Mike could borrow for the shoot. Mike wanted one that looked like the bass he normally used, which was in Los Angeles. Sheeley had another white Spector, although it wasn’t the exact same model as Mike’s, but only a serious bass player would have noticed the difference. The guitar was brand new, and Sheeley warned Curtis that if Mike scratched it, he would have to buy it. He taped a diaper to the back of the guitar so Mike wouldn’t scratch it. On top of that, Sheeley had to duct-tape two straps together for Mike to play the instrument, because he played bass extremely low on his body, almost down to his knees.

In retrospect, Taft said of the “Would?” shoot, “It wasn’t the funnest night of my life. It was hard to get it done, and we got it done, and it was good in the end. But that wasn’t the experience of the first time [Live Facelift] and it was all kind of just—the innocence was starting to unravel and get a little more complicated, and you could see it in that room kind of happening. It was tough to watch. I had a lot of respect for those guys. At the time … I considered [Jerry] my friend, and I could sort of see what he was going through to try to keep it going. So I remember feeling a little sad for him for what was looking like it might continue to go that way.”

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While the band was out of town, the production staff back in Los Angeles edited “God Smack” on June 1. Work on guitar overdubs began on June 3 and would continue through June 6. “Down in a Hole” was retracked on June 9. “Fear the Voices”—a song Mike had written—was tracked the following day. More editing and bass overdubs were done on June 12. Upon returning to the studio on June 16, they did more bass and guitar overdubs.

Layne came into the recording sessions with lyrics already written for two songs from his stint in rehab: “Sickman” and “Junkhead.” According to Jerden, “Those songs are coming from a real place. They’re not songs that are written for commercial consumption. They’re songs that are written totally from somebody who’s crawled through two miles of rusty razor blades. And it comes out in those songs—the anxiety, the torture, the physical and mental anguish.”

Layne also brought in two musical compositions that did not have lyrics written yet, which would eventually become “Hate to Feel” and “Angry Chair,” the two songs on the album credited entirely to him. When asked for working titles, Layne named them either “Rock On” and “Rockmanoff,” or “Rockmanoff I” and “Rockmanoff II.”

The problem was, the titles kept getting switched around between the two songs, and no one could tell which one was which. This led to a near disaster when Carlstrom almost erased a bunch of vocals on one of the songs when the band wanted to work on the other song. In those days before ProTools and other digital recording software, everything was on tape. Out of an abundance of caution, Carlstrom checked the tape first, and catastrophe was avoided.