Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

“Mariah’s hair was short at the time, so we put a long wig on her so her hair would flow out artistically into the desert floor. After getting her in place, we sealed her up with more clay, which we dried around her with hair dryers. Poor Mariah was stuck in that position for many, many hours as I tried a variety of different lighting effects and visual approaches.”

As soon as the shoot was finished, O’Brien bolted from the set and ran upstairs to use the bathroom, but her wig remained in the clay. Schenck shot several photos of the wig and the empty hole. The album cover would be the subject of a widespread and erroneous rumor: that Demri was the model. According to her mother, it bothered her. “Demri was really hurt when they chose a model that looked so much like her that people thought it was her … because it put her in a position where people would come up to her and say, ‘Oh, wow, I saw you on the cover of Dirt.’ And she’d have to say, ‘No, no, that’s not me.’”

“Sometimes people believed her, and sometimes they didn’t believe her. She wouldn’t have minded if they got a model that didn’t look just like her, but it put her in a really awkward position and it was really hurtful to her,” Kathleen Austin said. Asked if Demri would have posed for the album cover had the band asked her to, Austin said she doesn’t know because Layne’s fame was overshadowing Demri’s identity. “She was just trying to maintain her own identity, never wanted to be somebody’s girlfriend.”

The band regrouped with Schenck at his studio on July 19 to shoot group photos, in what Schenck called “a crazy, creative night.” Schenck also wrote the concept for “Them Bones,” the first music video, on August 5. It went through several changes before the actual shoot, which took place on August 18. Schenck called it “a complicated shoot, and technically challenging” for everyone involved. “To visually accentuate the aggressiveness of the song, I wanted the camera moves to be extremely accelerated—faster than one could achieve using a normal crane. To achieve this effect, I had the band lip-synch, perform, and play their instruments in slow motion to the song played back in slow motion at twelve frames per second, while having the camera moves executed as fast as possible. We filmed at twelve frames per second and then transferred the film at twenty-four frames per second, doubling the speed of the camera moves and making the band’s performance appear as if it was shot at normal speed,” Schenck wrote. “The band gave a great performance, and Layne was extraordinary.”

After having worked on Dirt and listened to rough mixes for ten hours a day, Bryan Carlstrom was feeling pessimistic about the final product. “I listened to it, and all I could think of was, ‘Oh shit, man, I failed. Every song sounds the same, production-wise. People are gonna hate this record and I’m never going to get a job again after this thing.’”

Dirt was released on September 25, 1992. Carlstrom’s fears were seemingly confirmed by a scathing review in the Los Angeles Times: “Hear them sneer. Hear them moan. Hear them try to sound like Nirvana or Mother Love Bone or something, but come out closer to Kansas … On this album, which doesn’t even have the benefit of the slightly charming naivete of its debut, Alice in Chains is pompous, turgid, no riffs, a bore. And the group doesn’t even rock—this album is about competence, not ideology.”13

Carlstrom’s reaction? “More than anything else, I felt like I failed the band and I failed Dave. It sounds like I made every song sound the same. That was unfortunately my perspective, because of how close I was [to] it.”

Carlstrom would have the last laugh. The album entered the Billboard 200 chart at number 6, and would eventually be certified quadruple platinum by the RIAA. “Now I listen back to it, I’m like, ‘Oh my God…’ I’m just honored I got the opportunity to be the one to record that album. I’m just honored. That record … I listen back to it—it was pretty emotional.”

In retrospect, Jerden said that in comparison to Facelift, Dirt was “a totally different record, and it’s all songs that were written from emotional and personal experiences. That’s the reason that record resonates with so many people. A lot of people love that record because it’s real. They’re not pop songs written for pop consumption. They’re songs that are written almost like a personal diary.”

Chapter 16

I beat death! I’m immortal!

LAYNE STALEY