ALICE IN CHAINS

Formed: 1987, Seattle, Washington

Members: Jerry Cantrell, guitar (born Tacoma, Washington, 18 March 1966); Mike Inez, bass (born California, 14 May 1966); Sean Kinney, drums (born Seattle, Washington, 27 March 1966); Layne Staley, vocals (born Kirkland, Washington, 22 August 1967; died Seattle, Washington, 5 April 2002). Former member: Mike Starr, bass (born Honolulu, Hawaii, 4 April 1966).

Genre: Rock

Best-selling album since 1990: Dirt (1992)

Hit songs since 1990: "Man in the Box," "Would?"

Renowned nearly as much for their inactivity as their musical style, Seattle's Alice in Chains was one of the premier heavy metal bands of the early 1990s. Though hobbled by singer Layne Staley's fatal drug addiction, the group created a body of dark, brooding hard rock and intense visual imagery that set the standard for a new generation of heavy metal bands.

Early Years

The enigmatic, rail-thin Staley formed the group while still in high school in Seattle in the mid-1980s, dubbing it Alice N Chains. Like several other pioneering Seattle bands of the time, Alice N Chains melded the primping, gender-bending posturing of glam rock with catchy, noisy heavy metal. When Staley met Diamond Lie guitarist Jerry Cantrell in 1987, the pair began rehearsing at a warehouse called the Music Bank along with a pair of mutual acquaintances, bassist Mike Starr and drummer Sean Kinney. Though they considered several names at first, including Mothra, they settled on Alice in Chains, a slightly different version of the name of Staley's previous band. Staley said the name evoked an image of a speed metal band that dressed in women's clothing.

A Major-Label Deal

Honing their mix of heavy crunching guitar chords and thick, psychedelic blues, the group set itself apart from many of its Seattle peers by relying almost exclusively on a bleak, menacing sound that owed more to heavy metal than the punk-derived sound of such grunge rock peers as Nirvana. Unlike some of their fellow grunge bands, the group spent no time on an independent label proving themselves; instead they quickly inked a recording deal with a major label, Columbia Records, in 1989 on the strength of recordings they made in 1987 and 1988. We Die Young, a three-song promotional album, was released in July 1990, followed by the group's full-length debut, Facelift, two months later.

The metallic, colorized cover of Facelift, featuring all four members' faces superimposed onto one face, set a precedent for the group's pervasively dark imagery. The album is a tour de force of bleak, forceful hard rock. Mixing the over-the-top guitar excess of the 1980s with thick, grinding tempos, tracks such as "Love, Hate, Love" and "I Can't Remember" marked the emergence of a confident if morbid new voice in rock. Staley's vocals are low and rumbling, ominously expressing sentiments such as the following, from the song "Confusion": "Love, sex, pain, confusion, suffering / You're there crying / I feel not a thing/ Drilling my way deeper in your head / Sinking, draining, drowning, bleeding, dead."

The album also produced a bona fide hit with "Man in the Box," a song that bears the band's soon-to-be hallmark style. Inspired by a story Staley had overheard about how veal came from sheep penned in small spaces, the harrowing song combines Staley's haunted, menacing vocals with Cantrell's distorted, choppy guitar lines and the rhythm section's pounding backing. The inclusion of songs such as "Bleed the Freak," "Sea of Sorrow," and "We Die Young" set the template for what became Staley's signature creative voice, that of a morbidly disaffected, diseased pariah struggling to survive on the outskirts of mainstream society.

The group mounted its first U.S. tour in 1990 and followed it up with a multigroup summer 1991 tour—dubbed "Clash of the Titans"—with fellow heavy metal bands Anthrax, Slayer, and Megadeth. Having established themselves as a premier metal band, they returned in March 1992 with the largely acoustic four-song Sap release, which features guest stars Ann Wilson of Heart and Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell.

Growing Popularity

With the breakout success of Nirvana's smash grunge album Nevermind and the inclusion of their song "Would?" on the soundtrack to the popular mainstream film Singles in the summer of 1992, Alice in Chains was suddenly marketed as both a heavy metal and alternative rock act, broadening their fan base considerably. The group began work on their 1992 album, Dirt, in Los Angeles on the day the Los Angeles riots erupted; they waited out the violence for two weeks in nearby Venice, California. The bleak album is an unabashed look at the tortured lives of the now commercially successful, Grammy-nominated group, with Staley singing several songs about drug addiction and self-destruction ("Junkhead," "God Smack," "Sickman," and "Angry Chair") and Cantrell seeking to heal wounds with his father on the Vietnam-themed song, "Rooster."

While the songs are unabashedly catchy amid the dim themes, there is no hiding Staley's pain. "I want to taste dirty, a stinging pistol / In my mouth, on my tongue / I want you to scrape me from the walls / And go crazy like you've made me," he wails on the album's molasses-thick, sludgy title track. Following the album's release, Starr was replaced by former Ozzy Osbourne bassist Mike Inez. While rumors of Staley's drug addiction dogged the band, they successfully completed a headlining stint on the third multiact Lollapalooza summer tour in 1993, helping the album sell more than 3 million copies. Another short album of mostly acoustic songs, Jar of Flies (1994), features two of the band's most beloved songs, the string-laden power ballad "I Stay Away" and "No Excuses," both of which shone a dim light amidst the usual dark imagery.

Staley mounted a short tour with a Seattle supergroup, the Gacy Bunch, featuring Pearl Jam's Mike McCready, the Screaming Trees's Barrett Martin, and John Saunders. The band, named for the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, later changed their name to Mad Season and released their debut, Above, in 1995. The album is a somber hybrid of Staley's dark vocals and McCready's sometimes meandering guitar lines. Alice in Chains returned later that year with a self-titled album that debuted at number one on the charts. They did not tour to promote the album, again raising rumors of Staley's drug addiction that had surfaced after a similar failure to tour to promote Jar of Flies. A long period of inactivity followed.

Fadeout

For their first concert in three years, the group gave an intense performance on MTV's Unplugged show in 1996. An album of the event was released in July of that year. Though gaunt, Staley sounded fine; however, barring a few dates opening for their heroes in KISS that summer, it would be one of the band's final performances. Cantrell released his solo debut, Boggy Depot (1998), several years later, with contributions from Inez and Kinney, and Staley was replaced by Screaming Trees singer Mark Lanegan on Mad Season's second album.

A four-disc commemorative box set featuring rare and previously released material, Music Bank, was released in 1999, and a live album, Live, followed in 2000. Though rumors of his demise were rampant throughout the late 1990s, Staley's death at thirty-four from a lethal overdose of heroin and cocaine in April 2002 came as a shock to the band's longtime fans, providing confirmation that the band would never return to form.

Though their period of creativity was short-lived, Alice in Chains helped to change the face of heavy metal in the 1990s, bringing a poetic, nihilistic edge to a genre that had fallen into parody only a decade earlier. Along the way, they inspired a new generation of bands such as Creed, Puddle of Mudd, and Godsmack, the last taking its name from one of Alice in Chains's songs.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

We Die Young (Columbia, 1990); Facelift (Columbia, 1990); Sap (Columbia, 1992); Dirt (Columbia, 1992); Jar of Flies (Columbia, 1994); Alice in Chains (Columbia, 1995); MTV Unplugged (Columbia, 1996); Music Bank (1999); Nothing Safe: Best of the Box (Columbia, 1999); Live (Columbia, 2000); Greatest Hits (Columbia, 2001).

gil kaufman