Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Recording of Layne’s vocals began on June 17. It was during the Dirt sessions that he developed what became his signature sound: heavily layering his vocals in the studio by recording two or three vocal tracks in multiple intervals. The technique, called stacked vocals, “was totally Layne,” Jerden said. Layne hadn’t discussed his ideas in advance with Jerden, who recounted, “What he would say to me when we did that stuff is he had it all worked out, and he would just say, ‘Give me another track.’ ‘I want to double it.’ ‘Now let’s triple it.’ He was just telling me what he wanted to do, and we’d do it … He’s the best I’ve ever worked with doing that. Without a doubt.”

The vocal sessions got off to a rocky start. According to the production staff, Layne’s drug use was affecting his performance, and Jerden asked him about it. “When he started singing, he was singing off-key—he was loaded. So I told him not to come into the studio loaded. I said, ‘You can get loaded wherever you want, but don’t get loaded on my time,’” Jerden said. “It was the first time I’d ever heard him sing bad.”

As Carlstrom recalled, it was Jerden who finally went up to Layne and addressed the elephant in the room. Layne did not take it well. In what Carlstrom described as “a major blowup,” Layne stormed out of the studio, slamming every door on the way out. Cisneros, who was also there, said, “I remember doing vocals and Layne wasn’t singing very well, and Dave said, ‘You’re not singing good because you’re high.’ And then Layne denied it. Whether he was high or not, I don’t know. But I know that there were tensions.”

“It takes a lot of focus the way Layne did the vocals. If he wasn’t up to singing, if his voice was gone or he couldn’t sing in tune or he couldn’t concentrate, then what’s the use of continuing?”

Jerden called Layne that night to apologize. He told Layne he didn’t say that to be mean to him, but because he wanted to “make sure they got a great record.” Layne accepted his apology, Jerden said, and apparently took Jerden’s comments to heart.

“I don’t know what happened, but suddenly after that, the next week after that, they started getting vocal takes,” Carlstrom said. “I don’t know if Layne cut back on his using, or if he was just not going out partying at night, at least resting even though he was using. You can’t just stop using if you’re a heroin addict, but yeah, we started getting vocals, and the vocals are obviously pretty amazing, to say the least.”

Layne asked the production staff to put up a makeshift wall made from soundproof material inside the studio so that he couldn’t be seen from the outside while he was recording his vocals. Inside the wall, Layne created a little shrine that, according to Carlstrom, consisted of “candles and a picture of the Last Supper, and then a dead puppy in a jar.” This is what he was looking at as he was recording his vocals for Dirt. Cisneros confirmed Carlstrom’s account, saying, “It was scary back there. I tried not to go back there.

“If that’s what he needed to see to get him into the mood of the song, if that’s why he had it, I don’t know. I don’t know why he had that thing in a jar sitting there. I didn’t talk to him about it.” Jerden, who said he vaguely remembered the shrine, offered a similar possible explanation for its purpose as Cisneros: “There’s all kinds of fun, nutty, weird stuff that bands do for studio decorations.”

Layne wrote bleak, brutally honest depictions of drug addiction on this album. Lyrics like “What’s my drug of choice? Well, what have you got?” “We are an elite race of our own / The stoners, junkies and freaks,” and “Stick your arm for some real fun” left little room for misinterpretation. Later on, Layne would be disturbed by the idea his music might inspire some of his fans to use drugs. The phenomenon was not new. When former Velvet Underground front man Lou Reed was at an AA meeting in New York City during the early 1980s, one of the other participants said, “How dare you be here—you’re the reason I took heroin!”10

Once recording of Layne’s vocals was under way, Carlstrom began to have some reservations about making a pro-drug or pro-heroin record. He said, “I never talked to them about it, but that was on my mind as soon as we started doing vocals.” He added, “It concerned me so much that at one point I was like, ‘Should I be here doing this?’ I really, really questioned it. Obviously I loved the music, and my gig was being Dave’s engineer. At that point, I was clean. I had my issues and was clean and sober at this point in my life. It was a hard thing for me to deal with, as far as, ‘Is this right for me to do?’