Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

AFTER THE RELEASE OF DIRT, Alice in Chains finally made the cover of The Rocket after a lack of coverage in previous years, possibly due to the influence of the paper’s managing editor, Grant Alden, who said, “I did my level best not to do anything on them at The Rocket, to squash them.”1 The magazine assigned the story to Jeff Gilbert, who was on the receiving end of Jerry’s verbal wrath. The story’s opening sentence is Jerry saying “Fuck The Rocket, man!” The cover of the October 1992 issue was a photo of the band with a caption reading, “Jeff Gilbert Sucks Up to Alice in Chains.”

“It isn’t that we’re pissed off at The Rocket or anything,” Jerry said. “That’s stupid. Magazines have the right to do what they want. It’s just that there seemed to be a lot of bias with the type of bands that end up in The Rocket.”2

To promote the album, the band tapped Gruntruck to tour with them for most of the final months of 1992. The connection with Alice in Chains happened when Gruntruck was performing a show where Layne happened to be in attendance. The tour would take both bands across North America for an initial run from August 23 through September 5 and then pick up again from November 13 through December 20.3 The initial leg—dubbed the Shitty Cities Tour—was a regional tour consisting of nine dates through the Pacific Northwest. It was a low-key affair, with both bands touring in vans.

Norman Scott Rockwell—the drummer for Gruntruck who went by the stage name Norman Scott and had previously been the drummer for Skin Yard—said, “I remember coming in and the first person I ran into was Sean Kinney and everybody—it was just like any tour. It’s like everybody’s like, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ It was like we’re just kind of sizing each other up a little bit type of thing,” Rockwell said. “We met in Ellensburg and through the night we all got kind of our drink on and sort of started to talk to the crews.

“And through the night we just slowly started to hang out and kind of get used to each other. And then the next day, it seemed like we had known each other forever, best friends, and got into a shitload of trouble. It was just on after that,” he said.

Crank calls were a popular pastime for a while. According to Rockwell, “We’d sit there in the hotel room in the middle of the night, nothing to do, it’s after two, all the bars are closed, whatever. And we’d just sit there and dial out of the phone book. We’d do things like dial a Denny’s, and it would be like, ‘Hey, are you hiring? Is your manager there?’

“I think this was sort of Jerry’s sort of shtick. He would be like, ‘Yeah, well, do you have fluorescent lights?’

“‘Yeah.’

“‘Well, I can’t stand fluorescent lights, and I’ll just bash them out. So you guys got to get rid of those if I’m going to ever work there. Where’s your manager?’

“‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir, he’s not here.’

“‘Well, do you got his phone number?’”

The gag would go on and on, sometimes as long as fifteen to twenty minutes, and people would keep talking. Other times, they would randomly call somebody in the middle of the night. “We did that night after night until that got kind of old.”

At another town, someone thought it would be a good idea to try cow-tipping. “We go find some cows sleeping on their feet and tip them over, and it’s just hilarious,” Rockwell said. “We get into the pasture, and all of a sudden we hear this, like, big ‘moo’—like, it’s a bull, and we all freak the fuck out and hightail it out of there.”

Rockwell and Sean, both being drummers, wound up hanging out together quite a bit. “When Sean got lit he was pretty unstoppable. He was sort of a classic destroyer of hotel rooms.”

Case in point: the two drummers walked out of the room looking for something to do when they noticed the hallway was illuminated by tulip-shaped sconces lining the hallway. Sean, with beer in hand, walked down the corridor and poured a little beer in each sconce before walking to the next one and pouring more beer as he and Rockwell continued down the hall. A few seconds later, each lightbulb would explode. Rockwell thinks the band might have been banned from the hotel where this happened.

Sean had an alter ego he called Steve, which he referred to whenever he was particularly rowdy or destructive. According to Randy Biro, Sean once walked into the restaurant of a nice hotel in Toronto where a brunch had been set up. “He’s standing on a chair, peeing onto the dessert cart in the middle of the dining hall,” Biro said. For some mind-boggling reason, the band was not kicked out of the hotel. When Sean was asked about it later, he allegedly responded, “That wasn’t me. That was Steve.” Multiple sources have said that Sean has given up drinking in recent years.