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Alice In Chains - Dirt - Retrospective #2

Music is full of stories of serendipity and pure chance, without these odd moments in time where one path crosses another or one turn of events begets another, think of the music we would never have heard. Jagger and Richards spotting each other’s RnB records on the platform at Dartford train station. Syd Barrett’s craziness opening the door for David Gilmour to move Pink Floyd from the psychedelic to the progressive. Andrew Wood’s untimely passing opening the door for Eddie Vedder. Jerry Cantrell and Layne Staley only agreeing to play together if one would join the others band, as Staley’s funk project broke apart, so Alice In Chains became the focus.

The majors had cottoned on to the fact that in Seattle something was brewing, Soundgarden had finally made their way to A&M Records after stints with Sub Pop and SST, Pearl Jam and Screaming Trees signed for Epic and Nirvana went off to Geffen, and so began the second phase of a golden era for American music, one Alice In Chains were set to help define when in 1992 they released their sophomore album Dirt. Amongst the recurrent themes that populated much early nineties alternative music of self loathing, drug abuse and familial and societal disaffection, there lay a stark beauty to the lyrics, a brutal honesty and cathartic laying bare of the soul, stripping it to just its bones and exposing what was left. The vocal interplay between Staley and Cantrell, married smoothly with the craft and vision of Cantrell’s songwriting, was the album’s highlight, the glue that made it all stick together. Whereas their debut Facelift had clung to the coat tails of the death throes of hair metal, Dirt was a heavier, denser, dirtier record, it was a part of the embodiment of grunge and perhaps the darkest record to grow from what was already a bleak, introspective and heroin blighted scene.

The tone for Dirt was already set before Alice In Chains began to record it. Staley was addicted to heroin and was recently out of rehab. Cantrell was consumed by grief from the loss of his mother, as well as drinking heavily. Mike Starr and Sean Kinney were similarly locked into alcohol related problems. But were it not for this background of substances and struggle, the intensity that pervades Dirt, the outpouring of disaffection, would never have bubbled through into the music and the edge that Dirt had would have been smoothed out and softened, had it existed at all. It is almost with a sense of macabre voyeurism, of wanting to look suffering in the face and know what it is like, that we allow ourselves to be immersed in the music. As is often the case, the music we allow ourselves to become identified by is sadly as a direct result of the suffering and torments of its creators, but it is from this place that their best work comes, and Dirt was no exception.

‘Would?’ was the both the final track on Dirt and alsothe first single to be released from it in 1992. The song had already gained some prominence when featured in the film Singles, along with a brief cameo from the band, and was Cantrell’s tribute to the death of his close friend and Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood. Opening with a rolling bass and guitars allowed to ring over a gentle drum pattern, Cantrell’s softer, mournful vocals across the verse precede Staley’s powerful, insistent chorus. The lyrics are ethereal, crowned with sorrow and darkness: “Know me broken by my master / Teach thee on child of love thereafter”. ‘Would?’ is desperately sad, hauntingly so, an open wound that has never really healed.

As a statement of intent, few albums have such a powerful opening track as ‘Them Bones’. The chugging guitars shifting a semitone at a time, Staley’s primal howl and the abrasive, gloomy lyrics set the tone for what is to come: “I believe them bones are me / Some say we’re born into the grave / I feel so alone / Gonna end up a big ole pile o’ them bones”. The themes of loneliness, of fragile mortality, would surface throughout the record and to some extent even define it. It was also darkly portentous.

Cantrell’s innate ability for constructing heavy, chugging riffs and marrying them with not only melody and harmonies, but with alternative guitar parts arranged to give the songs a greater diversity is prominent on ‘Dam That River’. Whilst the lyrics are empty, bitter and sometimes desperate, sometimes defiant, they are without hope and seethe with anger. Staley’s delivery of the vocals is vitriolic, the words spat out.

‘Rain When I Die’ opens similarly to ‘Would?’, the bass and lingering guitar parts making for a more sustained intro, cloaked in feedback, which is finally overcome by Cantrell’s wah-wah-ed riff and the softer, harmonised vocals, the Staley / Cantrell interplay rounded off with the soaring chorus: “Did she call my name / I think it’s gonna rain / When I die”.  The song descends in the mid section, slowing down, building again, Staley’s grunted “Yeah!” kickstarting the whole thing over as it fades out and back into a longer outro.

‘Sickman’ grew out of a request from Staley to Cantrell to write the ‘sickest tune’ he could, and the stuttering guitars, dark foreboding of the lyrics and recurrent themes of mortality, morbidity and general disgust make for an uncomfortable if not compelling listen. It’s more than tinged with sadness - sadness pervades ‘Sickman’. “I can see the end is getting near / I won’t rest until my head is clear / Ah, what’s the difference, I’ll die / In this sick world of mine.” There’s almost an acceptance that this is as good as it gets, so why bother striving for anything more.

Cantrell famously wrote perennial set closer ‘Rooster’ for his father, documenting his time serving in the Vietnam war. Unlike most of Dirt, ‘Rooster’ has the sense of the anthemic about it, it tells of survival and immortality, in stark contrast to the remainder of the record. It’s a rare positive note in what is otherwise a forlorn album, but still dwells on the mortality of others, the death of fallen comrades and the hope that a similar fate is not lying in wait. But here was a note of survival, of getting through, of making it: “Here they come to snuff the rooster / Yeah here come the rooster / You know he ain’t gonna die.”

‘Junkhead’ is nothing if not self-explanatory. A self-aware analysis, an honest take on an addiction from its source to its effect, which runs in contrast to the following, title track ‘Dirt’, in which Staley explores his drug problem, how it hurts to be with or without, the vicious circle, the thoughts of suicide and release from pain. There’s a beauty to ‘Dirt’ which isn’t first apparent when simply listening to the words spread over the music, the lyrics are so honest, so real, they stand alone: “I try to hide myself from what is wrong with me.” ‘Godsmack’ completes a trio of songs dwelling entirely on drug use: “What in god’s name have you done? / Stick your arm for some real fun” Staley bellows in the chorus, his voice snarling, bordering on vicious throughout the verses though his vitriol is aimed entirely at himself.

After a brief interlude for ‘Intro (Dream Sequence/Iron Gland)’, featuring a cameo from Slayer’s Tom Araya howling and laughing amongst incongruous guitar stabs, Dirt resumes its course with the slower, sometime staccato-ed ‘Hate To Feel’, the layered vocal parts neatly and cleverly arranged around Cantell’s trademark riffing and dirty notes built upon a song Staley predominantly wrote, charting the blame he attaches to his father for the drug addiction which finally killed Layne in 2002.

The majestic ‘Angry Chair’ then follows, another of Staley’s almost total creations, the plucked guitar intro and ringing, solitary heavy chord provide a foundation for the chorus to arrive fattened up and filled out.  The monotonous drone of the verse vocals echoing the relentless sentiment of craving, of succumbing and then the final, temporary release provided for in the upbeat, finally sated “I don’t mind, yeah, I don’t mind”.

And then we come to the moving, graceful ‘Down In A Hole’, a rare instance of acoustic and clean guitar, with the distortion just lurking, waiting to be unleashed on the chorus, Cantrell’s message to a love lost. Cathartic, threadbare, emotional; it’s a beautiful piece of music, the multitudinous layered vocals and harmonies, the different voices in unison almost take away the personal suffering of the writer, sharing the pain around and consequently diluting it.

In a scene blighted by heroin, Alice In Chains did more than any of their contemporaries to document it and Dirt can stand up as the one record to which all the grunge bands in some respects indirectly contributed to before and after their respective careers had hit their zeniths, often through similar tragedies, and could ultimately relate to. Dirt in some respects is a confession, a mixture of honesty and openness, clarity and turbulence. Viewed from another perspective, it could almost be Staley’s suicide note, as he would later say on Mad Season’s sublime ‘Wake Up’: “Slow suicide is no way to go.” He knew eventually, inevitably that the drugs would consume him to a point from which he couldn’t return.