Pantheon Songs

Layne Staley died on April 5, 2002. Actually, that date is just the best guess of the coroner associated with Staley’s suicide. Staley’s body was found on April 19 in his apartment amongst a collection of pipes and other drug paraphernalia such as a bag of cocaine and cans of spray paint. Nobody had seen or heard from him in a few weeks; the primary reason why people went to his apartment to begin with was that his bank account had been stagnant for two weeks. He weighed 86 pounds, had a needle still stuck in his arm, and most likely died due to overdose by way of a speedball (the mixture of heroin and cocaine).

Mike Starr died on March 8 of this year. He is the last person to have seen Staley alive, and he lived with the regret of having not called 911 after seeing Staley until he killed himself 24 days ago.

Death and Rock go hand-in-hand in so many ways, either as an exclamation point to a reckless legacy (Jim Morrison, Keith Moon), as an unalloyed international tragedy (John Lennon), as a metaphor for transcendent depression (Kurt Cobain), as a means of revision (Bradley Nowell), or as an unfair collector and robber of rare talent (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin). Death and Rock make for good roommates because, let’s face it, rock stars tend to enjoy things—drugs, of the hard and recreational kind, and booze—that take a toll on their bodies, and minds. To be a rock star there has to be some part of your essence that allows itself to fall into the traps of an addictive mechanism. To some degree, you always have to be willing to subvert yourself to the power of More—anything ranging from More Shows or More Money (or More Drugs) to More Girls or More Time.

When it came to Layne Staley and Mike Starr, their mechanism of addiction was the one we are most familiar with when it comes to rock stars: drugs. Not that we should have been surprised by this, especially in the case of Staley as he was blunt about his addiction and that the fact that it was probably going to consume him. Dirt, the sophomore album by Alice in Chains, tells you everything you need to know right there on the cover: a naked woman literally buried alive in the middle of nowhere; a prisoner inside of your own body to the point that your body couldn’t actually move—quite the metaphor for heroin addiction. Its message was so blunt that it was lost on me when the album was released during my sophomore year in high school.

It wasn’t so much that Staley’s suicide was a surprise (though the gruesome facts of his weight and that he might have been dead for two whole weeks before discovery was particularly jarring to me) more than it surprised me that the death of Alice in Chains had occurred years before the band broke up and their lead singer and bassist met their demises.

The history of rock is littered with bands and artists for which their fans will decry that the band’s/artist’s lack of mainstream success was thwarted either because A) their sound was “ahead of their time” or B) that they were the victims of any number of cosmic joke-like circumstances that prevented them from being embraced by more casual fans. Alice in Chains didn’t technically fit into either of these molds but they are definitely entangled, from a legacy perspective, inside of a bizarre paradox; bizarre because they were legitimately popular: the aforementioned Dirt sold 4 million copies, and Jar of Flies is the only EP to ever debut at #1 on the Billboard charts.^[1] This paradox becomes even more fleshed out when you factor in these things: that they were a “grunge” band yet lead guitarist Jerry Cantrell seemed to have a metal aesthetic; Staley was from the Northwest yet at times his vocals sounded as though he was either from southern California a la Scott Weiland^[2] or possibly even from Texas; for all of their popularity and ability to make killer singles they lacked the ability to make great start-to-finish albums. This last point seems to harm their legacy the most.

So, if the legacy of Alice in Chains has been tattered a bit over the years (sans the suicides of two of its members) why does their legacy matter? Will Alice in Chains be just another band that is defined by the deaths of its band members in the years to come? The short answer to the latter is: probably, yes. As a fan of their music this realization is hard to digest but the flip side of it is that at the end of the day Alice in Chains will probably evolve into a remembered experience rather than being just a band. For people my age there is a very good possibility that this band will be what Yes is to people who were high schoolers and college-age kids in the late ’70′s and early ’80′s. A band that gained entrance to the spotlight for a spell and then was forgotten afterward for a myriad of reasons. As for whether or not their legacy matters I think it does because the metamorphosis of Alice in Chains from notable band to forgotten one says a lot about the ephemeral nature of the Internet Age.

In the spring of 2002 I was over at a friend’s house drinking copious amounts of beer and attempting to play a game called washers.^[3] In his garage was some beastly jukebox CD player that randomly chose songs from the 30 or 40 discs inside of it. Most of the music was stuff I didn’t dig at all but as a rule I try to never talk about other people’s music unless they directly ask me about it first.^[4] At some point a song came on and my friend asked me if I heard it before and I said no; he then said that it was his favorite song at that moment. (Honestly, I don’t remember the name of the song that played that night but it was some cock rock song by Nickelback or some variant thereof.) After it was over he asked me what I thought of the song and I tried to skirt the question. He persisted, and I finally said “That lead singer should never make a fucking cent because he’s blatantly ripping off Layne Staley.” Only seven years had passed since the release of Alice in Chain’s final studio album and this drunken Spring night and yet my friend—who is only a year younger than me—not only didn’t recognize Staley’s name but couldn’t recall Alice in Chains, or any of their songs. Within seven years, Layne Staley went from being as popular and well-known as Cobain, Vedder, and Corgan to outright forgotten. Welcome to the Internet Age, where the dotted lines connecting influences and events disappear with ease.

I fully realize this post reads like it’s from a petulant ass who’s going around pissing on other people’s gardens because they aren’t growing the flowers that I like but, to me, within the confines of my own head, it seems ridiculous that Alice in Chains has fallen by the wayside buried in the desert of the rock landscape. It bothers me because this is the band that produced “Would?” This is the band that, were it not for Nirvana, would easily claim the top spot for best Unplugged performance by a rock band. This was a band that was quite smart:

“I was thinking a lot about Andrew Wood [lead singer of Mother Love Bone who died of a heroin overdose in 1990] at the time. We always had a great time when we did hang out [...] There was never really a serious moment or conversation, it was all fun. Andy was a hilarious guy, full of life and it was really sad to lose him. But I always hate people who judge the decisions others make. So it was also directed towards people who pass judgments.” — liner notes written by Jerry Cantrell about “Would?”

Alice in Chains fucking mattered to me. They produced some of the best songs of the early ’90′s. Layne Staley’s voice sounded like a welcome relief, a good mixture of raw, cool, angry, and snarly. And now all that’s left in the garden is the imitators; the bands whose members won’t die of an overdose, the bands who produce shit like “Photograph.” To me that garden and those bands is bullshit, and I will not apologize for pissing on them. In fact, I will listen to “Would?” while I do it.

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[1] If you are reading this and are too young to know what an EP is: EP stands for Extended Play. EP’s refer to records that played at a speed other than 78 rpm (which is the standard speed that LPs—regular albums—play on). In the cassette tape and CD era EP essentially meant the musical equivalent of a short story or novella—an album that typically had no more than 6 or 7 songs on it. (Or if it did have more than 6 or 7 songs on it, it probably included remixes or included songs that were going to be released on the follow-up LP/album. An example of this would be the Root Down EP by Beastie Boys.) The Jar of Flies EP had 7 songs on it, all of them original tracks.

[2] I never understood the conventional wisdom of the mid-’90′s that stated that Stone Temple Pilots was trying to rip off Pearl Jam, or that Weiland was trying to rip off Eddie Vedder. If there was any band that Weiland and Stone Temple Pilots were trying to emulate it seemed like it was Alice in Chains more so than any other band.

[3] If you’ve never played it or heard of washers before it’s horseshoes but with steel washers substituting the horseshoe and a PVC pipe replacing the stake. You have to toss the washers into the PVC pipe to get the most amount of points, though you do get a point if the washer lands against the pipe too. The enjoyment of this game rises when combined with an increasing rate of alcohol consumption (just like with bowling).

[4] There are exceptions, of course. If I hear Green Day or Santana or Elvis Costello or Britney Spears at your house I will have no choice but to tell you that these artists are shit and let the chips fall where they may.