Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

At some point during that session, Layne and Mike went to the bathroom together. Layne gave Mike a shot of heroin, and Mike had an extremely adverse reaction. He left the bathroom and threw up all over the carpet in the studio lounge. After the incident, there was a conversation between Layne, Mike, and Carlstrom. Carlstrom recalled hearing from somebody—“ninety-nine percent sure” it was Mike, but acknowledges it could have been Layne—that that had been the first time Mike ever tried heroin. When he was interviewed in October 2011, Carlstrom was the only person still alive of those three, so only his account is available.

Years later, Mike would offer different accounts of when his heroin use started. Once he denied ever doing heroin while in Alice in Chains. “I never did dope when I was in the band. I didn’t need to. I got high off of playing music,” he said on Celebrity Rehab. He contradicted himself in that same episode. When asked how long he had been using intravenous drugs, Mike answered, “Seventeen years.” The program was filmed in 2009, so he dates the beginning of his heroin use to 1992, while he was still in the band.11

The second incident, which Carlstrom called “the nail in the coffin” for the song, happened after Layne had recorded his vocals. Mike came in later, high. He listened to the song, was not happy with the vocals, and called Layne. He wanted him to come back to the studio and do it again. Layne lost it. Jerden and Carlstrom’s accounts differ slightly as to what he said. “I remember the end of that conversation was Layne on the phone saying ‘Fuck this song!’ and hanging up on him,” Carlstrom recalled.

According to Jerden, Layne said, “Fuck you! I’m not singing this again!” Jerden thinks the tensions from the recording of this song were a contributing factor in Mike’s eventual dismissal from the band. The song did not make the final cut of Dirt, but was eventually released seven years later as part of the band’s box set. Mike said, “I wrote a song called ‘Fear the Voices.’ We did record it, but they didn’t let it on the album because Jerry didn’t have nothin’ to do with the writing of the music. But they put it on the box set later, and it got some recognition and got played on the radio.”12

Mixing began on Monday, July 13. At some point, Jerden was mixing “Rooster.” He had previously seen a drug dealer hanging out around the studio and told Layne not to bring him in. On this particular day, Layne walked in with the dealer. Jerden played Layne and the dealer the mix he had been working on over the speakers. Layne said it was great, but the dealer decided to offer his unsolicited advice.

“Well, I think you should…”

He didn’t even get to finish the sentence. “Shut up,” Layne told him.

At that point, Jerden lost it. “Who the fuck are you? Get the fuck out of my studio!” He turned to Layne and said, “Don’t bring your drug dealers around.”

The band-approved final mixes were completed on July 29. Cisneros sequenced the album from August 5 through 7, after which it was sent off to be mastered. The exception from all the songs that appear on the final cut of Dirt was “Would?” The song had been recorded for Singles at London Bridge Studios in Seattle, and Jerden made several mixes, but it’s not Jerden’s mix on the finished album. According to Jonathan Plum, “Jerry was unhappy with the way the song came out. I remember him complaining that there was no cymbals on the record and that he liked the demo song better, so he came back [to London Bridge Studios] and Rick [Parashar] and I remixed ‘Would?’”

Rocky Schenck met with the band on April 27, 1992, to discuss their new album and videos. He went to the studio on May 7, where he got to hear some of the new material for the first time, which he says “completely blew me away.” They looked through his portfolio and started discussing ideas for the album cover.

“Their idea was to have a nude woman half buried in the desert. She could be either dead or alive,” Schenck wrote. They discussed the type of woman the band wanted, and Schenck began casting shortly after. Eventually, Schenck submitted a photo of Mariah O’Brien, a model he had worked with for the cover of Spinal Tap’s “Bitch School” single. The band chose her.

The cover shoot took place at Schenck’s Hollywood studio on June 14, 1992, with Sean supervising. “We created the cracked desert floor with clay rolled out on foam core raised up on apple boxes. There was a cutout in the center of the foam core for the model to slip into, so she would appear half buried in the desert floor. I cut the miniature mountains out of more foam core, and we put up a painted sky backdrop behind the mountains,” Schenck wrote.