Cantrell told him the band would be returning home to Seattle shortly and was looking to book 10 days at London Bridge Studio, the same facility where AIC had recorded Dirt, Facelift, and its eclectic 1992 EP, Sap. “That’s not to disrespect Andy it’s just that he wasn’t there when they were being created.”Ī few months later, as Alice In Chains was winding down its headlining run on Lollapalooza alongside Rage Against The Machine, Tool, and Primus, Wright received a call from Cantrell, who was in Australia doing promotion. “ always bothered me because they were too ‘tinny’ compared to our other stuff,” wrote Cantrell. I was upset because I knew I could’ve killed it with those songs, but there were no hard feelings with the band.”īut it was a decision that apparently didn’t sit all that well with Cantrell either: Later, he offered Wright the opportunity to remix the songs for 1999’s Music Bank anthology. “Apparently it was the A&R guy’s mistake. “ said Columbia brought him on to finish the tracks,” Wright said. ![]() But as Wright bounded into the studio to begin mixing, he was shocked to find another man ( Nevermind mixer Andy Wallace) sitting at his console, mixing his tracks. ![]() It was originally a dream gig for Wright, which became reality when he met the Seattle four-piece in the studio, immediately bro’d down, and recorded both “A Little Bitter” and “What The Hell Have I?” with relative ease. Combined with his nihilistic, often hopeless lyrical confessions and his well-documented substance abuse struggles, he was a perfect vicarious crash test dummy for suburban kids who had only just learned to love self-loathing. Seething charisma beneath a mangy tussle of bright blond hair, he sang in a sort of hypnotic tribal incantation that would coil up and burst forth in majestic Cornell-like shrieks. While guitarist/mastermind Jerry Cantrell (no angel himself) wrote most of the music and half the lyrics (including those for “Down In A Hole” and the mammoth radio staple “Rooster”), and bassist Mike Starr left the band mid-tour largely due to his own drug struggles, it was Staley who understandably received the Kurt Cobain treatment. Acclaimed by critics for its cocksure swagger and exotic melodies and embraced by fans for Staley’s open-veined lyrics on his love/hate/love relationship with heroin, it was immediately unlike anything else on record store shelves. When Dirt finally did surface in September 1992, it had a built-in audience not only with the Headbangers Ball crowd, but with viewers of the grungier 120 Minutes as well. It wasn’t until Cameron Crowe featured Alice In Chains as the quintessential Seattle club act in 1992’s Singles and included “Would?” from the group’s upcoming full-length on the platinum-selling soundtrack that AIC became wrapped up in the Seattle hype machine. I’m glad we didn’t get lumped together with them, because we’re not those other bands.” “All those bands put out records around the same time, and we hadn’t put one out in two years. ![]() “Once it got really big with Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, there wasn’t much mentioned about us,” Staley told Rolling Stone in 1992. The video featured the world’s first real glimpse at instant icon Staley (appearing downright demonic) and, for a few months in 1991, AIC was the biggest band in Seattle. Pearl Jam’s debut, Ten, was the first to drop in August 1991, followed by Nevermind in late September, and Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger in early October. But by then, Alice In Chains was already an established heavy metal outfit with a slow-burning gold album (1990’s Facelift) and an MTV Video Music Award nomination for the stark and disturbing “Man In The Box” clip. Alice In Chains might have been the most misunderstood and reluctant member of the Mount Rushmore of grunge (see also: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden), and that’s partly because the average fan didn’t really become aware of the band until about a year after learning about the other three.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |