Alice In Chains

"1991. The Year Punk Broke" is the title of a 1992 documentary made by independent filmmaker/musician Dave Markey about the European tour of Sonic Youth, Mudhoney, Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr. and Babes in Toyland. At the start of the decade, the alternative rock world conquering the charts is sharply split in two: on one side of the ocean, britpop; on the other, grunge. Two stylistically incompatible worlds that nonetheless share more than one might think: the ability to embody the inner turmoil of Generation X, through two opposite reactions, but also two scenes so varied that each ends up flattened under a convenient label.

Soundgarden, Melvins, Mudhoney, Screaming Trees, Pearl Jam, Nirvana and many others: sticking to the different sounds of these bands, it's genuinely hard to define grunge as a genre based on shared stylistic traits. Yet this non-genre becomes a useful umbrella when we look elsewhere: self-destructive tendencies, blind rage, mutual rejection and, of course, geography. If we wanted to pin down the unifying, distinctive trait of these bands, it would be precisely their socio-cultural milieu, that map of the Pacific Northwest stretching between Aberdeen (Melvins), Olympia (Beat Happening, Unwound) and Ellensburg (Screaming Trees), finding an explosive epicenter in Seattle (Tad, Green River), the city that had given breath and blood to the music of Jimi Hendrix, Ray Charles, Sonics and the Wailers. Straddling the 80s and 90s, Seattle suddenly becomes the symbol of a kind of music never before present in mainstream rock, born less from a metal riff or a punk urge to spit out rejection than from generational malaise. And none of its protagonists is truly prepared for what this (over)exposure entails, especially in the mass media, nor for the almost religious devotion of a crowd of freaks, drop-outs, non-conformists and godless kids who see themselves reflected in grunge, turning the new bands into a cult.

Unaware of the history and geography behind it, the moment you hit play on "Dirt" and land on the legendary opener "Them Bones", you're hit by a torrential riff and a primordial scream oozing with heavy metal, stoner, hard rock and sludge. The following "Dam The River" makes no difference, being even more direct and steeped in sludge violence. The band of Jerry Cantrell and Layne Staley represents, together with early Soundgarden, what we might call the metal wing of the Seattle Sound. But when it comes to meaning, to the despair injected into us every time we play an Alice In Chains song, and "Dirt" in particular, their masterpiece and one of the most emblematic works of grunge, it's clear we're in the presence of something like a tablet of commandments for the genre, and a story of self-destruction as iconic as that of Kurt Cobain.

“Music from down the hole”

Rarely has an album so introspectively focused on pain, addiction and social denial, and at the same time so heavy that it's often regarded to all intents and purposes as a metal record, achieved a commercial performance as devastating as that of Alice In Chains' second album. Needless to say, regardless of the record's intrinsic worth, things would have gone very differently without the grunge fever that "Nevermind" (DGC, 1991 – the year punk broke) had infected the world's youth with. Hitting store shelves on September 29, 1992, "Dirt" landed at number 6 on the Billboard 200 and stayed on the chart for a full 196 weeks. It's estimated that by 2008, "Dirt" had sold three and a half million copies in the US alone.

The high proportion of lyrics dealing with the fight against heroin addiction and the inevitable surrender to it was nothing but a mirror of the real torment and anguish the band members were living through. To record the album at Eldorado Recording Studios in Los Angeles, Staley actually left rehab, living through that period caught between anguish and pain, ghostly states of mind that run through the shades of his metallic voice, which seems to echo from some dark recess of the soul.

Producer Dave Jerden recalls the recording of "Dirt" as a tense, turbulent period during which he repeatedly clashed with Staley, whom he had to keep ordering to stay sober. Both dependent on alcohol and other substances, drummer Sean Kinney and bassist Mike Starr weren't in much better shape either – and Starr would in fact be permanently kicked out of the band during the album's promotional tour.

Feuding, unmanageable moods, blow-ups and sudden fits of rage were compounded by the tense atmosphere of the Los Angeles riots, which erupted during the recording sessions following the acquittal of four local police officers, who had been unmistakably caught on a surveillance video committing horrific acts of violence against African American citizen Rodney King.

The considerable talents of the four musicians — particularly the two songwriters, Cantrell and Staley — along with the compositional and technical growth achieved since the callow debut "Facelift" (Columbia, 1990), allowed them to channel every ounce and every vibration of negative energy into a tracklist that never lets up. Thirteen tracks bend alternative metal, the radio-friendly leanings of Nirvana and Pearl Jam's grunge, Staley's overwhelming and expressive vocals, and all the darkness the band was experiencing inside and out, to their own will.

Down in a hole, feelin' so small

Down in a hole, feelin' so small

I’d like to fly, but my wings have been so denied

These are lines that echo, heavy with the foreboding of the hole Alice In Chains were digging for themselves. Written by Cantrell about his troubled relationship with the love of his life, Courtney Clarke, the lyrics of "Down In A Hole" take on a deeper meaning once filtered through Staley's voice, digging into the very existential condition of the band and resonating in communion with the restless souls of Generation X, forever out of place and doomed to be misunderstood. Perhaps the tenderest moment on the whole record, the song features an acoustic guitar tracing celestial lines with just a hint of metallic edge, while the electric guitars dissolve into a bitter, reverb-drenched stream over which the frontman's voice hovers lightly, unable to gain altitude, almost clinging, surrendered to suffering.

Only "Rooster" matches it for tenderness, at least in its opening section. The song takes its title from the nickname given to Cantrell's father by his fellow soldiers during the Vietnam War, an experience he never spoke of at home. The entire lyric is therefore the product of his son's imagination, built on the marks the war had left on his father's face and eyes. Once again the guitarist confines himself to harmonizing, leaving it to Staley to give shape and force to the tale of the "rooster," while Kinney and Starr's rhythmic explosions, along with Cantrell's iconic riff on the chorus, offset more relaxed passages where the guitars are made to weep and shimmer in the style of George Harrison.

Among the finest songs Alice in Chains ever wrote, "Rooster" and "Down In A Hole" find the band easing off the throttle, revealing a complexity and layering in the arrangements that also stems from the musicians' metal background.

“What’s the difference, I’ll die/ in this sick world of mine”

Staley's heroin addiction, and his awareness of the disastrous path it represented, looms over almost every track on the record, and on some it becomes the outright protagonist. Such is the case with "Sickman," which opens with Kinney's tribal drumming and, pervaded by a sobbing, toxic electric guitar, compresses the meaning and extreme consequences of grunge as a total phenomenon. Layne isn't interested in or frightened by the most fatal consequences: the world around him simply isn't worth it.

Written during the rehab stint he interrupted to record "Dirt," "Junkhead" captures the viewpoint of a heroin addict at the first stage of use. While the epic chorus and the guitar solo, soaring free as a bird in flight, seem to glorify opiate abuse, the sludgy riff in the verses draws out a precipice and foreshadows disaster, a tunnel with no way out.

Hallucinations and omens pile up on the title track, a devastating grunge-stoner song that reshapes the Kyuss blueprint for the purposes of the Seattle sound, and in the cracked, arid, sun-scorched desert of the album cover, which cradles the lifeless body of model Mariah O'Brien in a transfiguration of Staley's girlfriend, Demi Parrott, foreshadowing her death a few years later, in 1996. Although the song never mentions drugs directly, numerous interviews with Staley and Cantrell reference the fact that it was Parrott who introduced the Alice In Chains singer to heroin, an initiation that seeps through the cryptic lyrics of a track as effective as it is painful in portraying a toxic relationship.

Electrified by one of Cantrell's most hypnotic and frenzied riffs — one of the most hypnotic and frenzied of the entire '90s — "Rain When I Die" is another song built on tragic premonitions, foreshadowing the fate of an entire generation of musicians like Staley and Cobain, flowers that need water to survive. Six long minutes of driving rhythms, psychedelic guitars and iconic choruses make it a perfect alternative rock gut-punch, one in which the band brushes up against and masters the radio-ready allure of some of their more moderate grunge peers:

Is she ready to know my frustration?

What she slippin' inside, slow castration

I'm a riddle so strong, you can't break me

Did she come here to try, try to take me?

Did she call my name?

I think it’s gonna rain

When I die

The atmosphere becomes suffocating in the final part of the record, between whips of hysterical stoner with funk tinges (“God Smack”), grotesque regurgitations fueled by the voice of Slayer's Tom Araya (“Untitled”), and sharp hard rock riffs à-la Jimmy Page (“Hate To Feel”). But the most intense experience is contained in the two closing tracks, among the most emblematic of Alice in Chains, “Angry Chair” and “Would?”, written respectively by Staley and Cantrell. In the first, we find ourselves balanced between a handful of notes and semitones, breathing in the domestic claustrophobia of the heroin addict through Staley's words, his voice doubled, tripled, fired off by continuous harmonizations:

Loneliness is not a phase

Field of pain is where I graze

Serenity is far away

Saw my reflection and cried

So little hope that I died, oh

The second, a song written for the soundtrack of Cameron Crowe's “Singles” (1992) and performed in the film by the band live in a Seattle club, puts the seal on the album. There's nothing in “Would?” that isn't memorable: the opening bass phrasing scratched by the drums' cymbals, the psych-black chorus with which Staley introduces the guitar riff, the verse with voices multiplying as in a nightmare only to resurface with grit and desperation in the chorus lines, the declaration of a defeat with no solution:

Into the flood again

Same old trip it was back then

So I made a big mistake

Try to see it once my way

Am I wrong?

Have I run too far to get home?

Have I gone?

Left you here alone

“Dirt” embodies the spirit of the era, visceral and toxic, overflowing and uncontainable. It's the creation of one of the most important rock composers of the '90s and the testament of a unique performer, one who managed to infuse stoner, hard rock, heavy metal and sludge with the desperation and anguish of much traditional African-American music, first and foremost the blues. “Dirt” and Staley's fate, like “Nevermind” and Cobain's, or “Superunknown” (A&M, 1994) and Chris Cornell's, circle back around their own frame only to return exactly to the starting point: the “broken home(s), broken heart(s)” from which the protagonist of Hüsker Dü's “Zen Arcade” (SST, 1984) flees, and from which none of them, instead, ever truly managed to escape.

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25/09/2022