Jerry Cantrell: his harmonies and drop-D tuning gave AIC the distinctive sound they still have today (Image credit: Stephanie Cabral) It’s only later t hat they were right inside it looking out.” I believe that on Facelift, Layne was portraying a dark world from the outside looking in. “I believe that Layne was a sensitive person attracted to darkness,” Dave shrugs, “but I never saw any evidence of drugs in the studio. “Seeing all these 9, 10, 11 year-old kids with beepers dealing drugs equalled ‘We died young’ to me,” he wrote in the liner notes to 1999’s Music Bank box set. Layne claimed that Man In The Box was inspired by mass media censorship, while Jerry claimed We Die Young came about after he spotted a gang of pre-teen drug dealers on the way to rehearsals. Songs such as Man In The Box, We Die Young and Bleed The Freak were shot through with dark imagery, but the band subsequently denied they were about drugs or the attendant lifestyle. “We just want to be able to look each other in the eye and go, ‘This is pretty cool.’ That’s all you need – everybody grooving on the same thing.” “We’re all outcasts,” Jerry later told Spin magazine. “Those guys came from the same sort of crazy backgrounds, and they banded together like a family,” says the producer. Dave remembers there being a real camaraderie between the bandmembers. The darkness that would descend on Alice In Chains was still a way off. “We got the drummer from Pearl Jam to cover him but he couldn’t do it, so Sean played on that record with a broken arm.” “Sean Kinney had broken his arm and couldn’t play,” recalls Dave. Despite Layne’s escalating drug use, the problems were physical rather than pharmaceutical. Work began on Facelift at London Bridge Studios, out in the woods a long drive from the centre of Seattle. Layne and Jerry performing at the Limelight in New York City, Octo(Image credit: Frank White) A short time later they recorded a demo of the songs you hear on Facelift and they had that drop-D tuning on them.” “I said, ‘There’s this thing called drop-D tuning. “Jerry asked me how to play songs like Beyond The Wheel ,” he remembered. He claimed that the band changed their approach when they heard Soundgarden. Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil recalled their early demos “owed a little bit more to Poison”. Not that Alice were entirely accepted by their grunge peers. “I had kind of been aware of this ‘Seattle sound’ that people were talking about, but to be there felt very exciting.” “You could tell that something was in the air,” he says. The band took him out to the local clubs, where he saw grunge pioneers such as Soundgarden and Mother Love Bone. “When I got that six-track demo, and it had Man In The Box and all the great songs from that first album, that’s when I really thought we could be on to something.”ĭave travelled up to Seattle to start working on Alice In Chains’ debut album. One of the songs was Man In The Box, destined to become AIC’s breakthrough hit. A few months later, Dave received a new six- track tape. Nick passed it on to Dave Jerden, who told the band they should go in and record another demo. Their demo, The Treehouse Tapes, ended up in the hands of Nick Terzo, an A&R man with Columbia Records, who signed the band. The line-up was completed by bassist Mike Starr and drummer Sean Kinney. The pair stumbled through various combinations of band names before settling on Alice In Chains, borrowed from a name Layne’s old band had briefly used. I knew I wanted to be in a band with him right off the bat.” He was just such a cool fucking guy and his voice was amazing. “I didn’t have a place to live so he invited me to this place where he lived called Music Bank. “We met at a party,” Jerry told author Mark Yarm in the book Everybody Loves This Town. They bonded over family, drugs and music. Layne had been kicked out of his house by his mom. Jerry’s mother had died of cancer when he was young, and he wasn’t close to his father. Layne and Jerry had chequered musical pasts – the former as the singer of glam metal band Sleze, the latter as guitarist with bouffant-haired rockers Diamond Lie.
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