Favorite music of growing up: Alice in Chains

The early 90's were a pretty wild time as far as music is concerned. We saw the nearly overnight dismissal of an entire decade's worth of music as glam rock was phased out over the course of just a year. I feel as though Guns n Roses was largely responsible for this with their Appetite for Destruction album that just blew everyone away. But then they saw themselves quickly get eclipsed by the grunge scene.

I remember the first day I was introduced to grunge: I was in the school parking lot and someone was playing "Smells like Teen Spirit" and I thought it was the most amazing thing ever. The guy who had the cassette played that one song over and over again. Just like everyone else I really liked Nirvana but they weren't my favorites. My personal favorite band of that time was a lot more dark. They were called Alice in Chains.

Dirt wasn't their first album and I'm not trying to take anything away from that one. It just wasn't a polished an album as Dirt was. Their actual first album was something that most fans weren't even aware of until long after it was released. In fact, when their first album was released it failed to even sell 40,000 copies. But then MTV started putting the song "Man in the Box" into heavy rotation and it seems like everyone liked that song. Dirt however, was an almost instant success and had many kind of hit songs on it.

Alice in Chains was never going to be as popular as Nirvana because they were a bit "out there" as far as their musical stylings were concerned. Nirvana appealed to a much wider range of people whereas AIC fans tended to be people that were more into metal or at least hard rock.

src

For me the real showpiece of the band's ability came in the form of a song called "Would?" This really exhibited the incredible vocal capabilities of singer Layne Staley. When we dig a bit deeper into the band we find out that guitarist and singer Jerry Cantrell was almost exclusively responsible for music creation. He also does a majority of the vocals. I don't know for sure if it is true but this was reportedly a big problem inside the band because Staley didn't seem to really try to be involved in the creative process and was as you would expect, a really hard core drug user.

This problematic behavior would result in Staley distancing himself from the rest of the band as well as from almost anyone else. When he overdosed in his condominium in Seattle, his body wasn't even discovered for 2 weeks. No one checked on him because apparently it was really common for him to just disappear for large stints of time.

src

Without Layne the band couldn't really be the same and it was shortly thereafter that Sony would cut AIC from their label altogether. I suppose it was for the best because the remaining members had already gone their separate ways and were working on other projects. It appears as though they didn't have any interest in carrying on with Alice in Chains especially without their very unique sounding lead singer.

I didn't even know this until today but AIC actually did get back together later on and made new albums starting in 2008. I haven't even heard of these songs and dug around a few of them but unfortunately they just aren't my style. I guess some people appreciate it but to me the band just isn't the same without Staley.

They try to emulate the style that they had with Staley and I guess they did a pretty good job with it. I dunno, it just doesn't appeal to me but they did manage to sell 500,000 copies of the album "Black Gives Way to Blue." I guess someone out there liked it because this was in 2010 when people weren't really buying CD's anymore.

Maybe I've just outgrown AIC because honestly, the album sounds almost exactly the same as their original styles in the 90's.

Alice in Chains will always hold a special place in my heart because I can recall sitting in my shitty apartments in college jamming the Dirt album over and over again. I offloaded all of my CD's many years ago. I gave them away to Goodwill and Lord only knows where it ended up. They remain one of my favorite bands of all time, even if it was just for a couple of albums in the 90's.