The Seattle band’s third EP feels as cohesive and deeply intentional as the band’s full-length efforts, stratified by layers of texture-building harmonies and instrumentation. Its intricacies are dazzling—especially considering the brief recording timeline—with each element coloring a mood, staging a story.
It’s April 10th, 1996 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Majestic Theater. The stage is doused in rich indigo, decorated with fuchsia lava lamps and stately white candles, flames lapping at the darkness. It’s set for Alice in Chains’s first live show in two-and-a-half years: a soon-to-be monumental performance.
And it almost didn’t happen. Jerry Cantrell—the band’s principal composer and lead guitarist—was incapacitated by a gnarly case of food poisoning, vomiting uncontrollably right before the show began and as soon as it wrapped. It seems, by way of a miracle, that the spell was lifted for the performance’s duration. The first member onstage, he sat alone, strands of long blonde hair draping over his shoulders, slowly strumming the instantly recognizable minor chord progression to “Nutshell.” Bassist Mike Inez then sauntered in, wearing a slight grin and shaking out his hands before strapping on his instrument. Guest guitarist Scott Olson then settled into place, followed by drummer Sean Kinney.
Suddenly, the steady applause erupted into delighted screams and whistles: Layne Staley—the voice and face of the band, their incomparable frontman—had entered. He hastily shouldered his way to center stage, the pallor of his frail frame stark against his all-black attire, dark shades and faded pink hair dye. He looked like a shell of the 23-year-old powerhouse who’d emerged from Seattle’s alternative underground to national fame less than six years earlier, that yet boyishly handsome dreadhead whose guttural howl had blown through his barnyard cage and out of TV speakers across the nation. Years of heroin abuse had all but broken down his body, but, as soon as he opened his mouth, hardly a second after plopping down on his stool, it became clear that one thing hadn’t changed—he could still bring a crowd to its knees with one word:
It should be tiny, inconsequential—but even at his weakest, every word that fell from Staley’s lips was blown-up with oversized emotion. He sent that “We” across the plodding rhythm like a tsunami, letting it dip and spiral so that it obliterates the barrier between himself and the listener; when he sang that “we chase misprinted lies” and “face the path of time,” it felt like he was singing about you and I as much as himself. His voice then softened into a murmur (“And yet I fight / And yet I fight this battle all alone”) and then a whisper (“No one to cry to / No place to call home”), trailing off into a fragile, dove-like coo. He could roll up the world into one word, and still, this battle was his alone to fight. It’s a challenging listen today, knowing that he would fatally overdose in 2002.
Less than three years had passed since Staley first sang “Nutshell”—which first appeared on the band’s third EP, Jar of Flies, released in early 1994—but the toll those years had taken on Staley was immense; pairing the renditions against each other, one can hear how the hard drug abuse had shaded his restrained roar, which bears a slight lisp on the later cut. With this hindsight, the studio version becomes even more chilling: listening to Staley reckon with a downfall he could have prevented, a paths end foreseen but still taken. He knew he was chasing a lie. Time would catch up, regardless.
The sober, self-reflections of “Nutshell” are the crux of Jar of Flies, which occupies an uncertain in-between: when the obfuscating haze of addiction had cleared (pointedly, Staley’s opening remark is that “innocence is over”), but before the weight of absolute dependence had not yet snuffed every flicker of hope. The liminality of the period Jar of Flies captures is mirrored by the record’s truncated length—emphasized when it’s contextually situated within the band’s discography. The EP’s predecessor, 1992’s Dirt, tracks a dizzying descent into addiction, from the first flush of intoxicated euphoria to the horrific realization that “I can feel the wheel, but I can’t steer,” while its follow-up, 1996’s Alice in Chains—the titular band’s final studio album featuring Staley—resounds as a sludgy resignation to demise (almost clairvoyantly, it ends with a song called “Over Now”). Essentially, Jar of Flies is about turning points, which often manifest physically: One might immediately clock spatially-minded titles like “I Stay Away” and “Don’t Follow”; it takes multiple listens to piece together the record’s central conflict—whether the next step should be a limp towards someplace warmer and brighter, or a trudge forward into the dark unknown—strewn about in fragments across Staley and Cantrell’s lyrics.
If this sounds like a record made by a band in limbo, that’s because it is. Dirt—Alice in Chains’ first LP released after Nirvana’s Nevermind, catapulted them to a similar level of unprecedented critical and commercial heights, especially after the breakout success of their 1990 debut, Facelift. They were on top of the world—at least, they should have been. As the band’s fame and wealth ascended, Staley and founding bassist Mike Starr slipped further into their drug addictions (Cantrell and Kinney also struggled with substance abuse, albeit to lesser extents), and the consequences were becoming impossible to push through.
In January 1993, during the Dirt world tour, Starr nearly died of a heroin overdose on the night of his last show with the band—he was promptly fired for his increasingly erratic behavior and quickly replaced by Mike Inez, Ozzy Osbourne’s bassist, whom the band had befriended while opening for the Prince of Darkness the previous autumn. Upon returning to Seattle after a Lollapalooza tour in the summer of 1993, Alice and Chains found themselves evicted from their home, having failed to pay rent. As the grunge lore goes, they crashed at London Bridge Studio in Seattle, where they’d record Jar of Flies in the interim with engineer and mixer Toby Wright. Burnt-out from touring and ongoing personal trials, the band went into sessions on September 7th, 1993 without any songs written, nor plans to create anything worthy of release. Within a week, they assembled what became, arguably, the finest collection of music from their entire career.
Initially, the Jar of Flies sessions were conceived to test the band’s writing and recording chemistry with Inez. On the surface, he filled Starr’s absence to almost comic levels of perfection, sharing a name and resemblance with his predecessor’s dark, curly tresses (“We didn’t think anyone would notice [the change],” Kinney joked). More importantly though, his musical synergy with the remaining members of Alice in Chains was intense and immediately apparent. In fact, the first thing you hear on “Rotten Apple” is his bass, dotting the notes to a low, lugubrious rhythm that sucks you into the song like a glistening pool of black tar. Staley doesn’t start singing until around the minute-mark, but the instruments hold a transcribable dialogue on their own: Cantrell’s dueling guitars yowl and whimper unspeakable temptations, while the overlapping melodies’ ebbs and suggest a consciousness split between resistance and surrender.
From the first note of its smoldering prologue, “Rotten Apple” is the heaviest song on Jar of Flies, a predominantly acoustic record in the same vein as their 1992 EP Sap, which was released between Facelift and Dirt. Sap was an intriguing and not-unsuccessful experiment, providing the first sign that the band’s songwriting could more than hold up when they simmered down the overblown rage and anguish, but it’s their weakest Staley-era release—the songs occasionally sound rough-hewn to their own detriment (“Brother,” in particular, sounds weirdly underwater and is sorely lacking without Staley’s harmonies, which make the Unplugged version the definitive take).
Contrarily, Jar of Flies feels as cohesive and deeply intentional as the band’s full-length efforts, stratified by layers of texture-building harmonies and instrumentation. Its intricacies are dazzling—especially considering the brief recording timeline—with each element coloring a mood, staging a story. For example, Cantrell and Kinney’s ominously hypnotic riffs latticework into a viscous spider web, providing a fittingly seductive backdrop to Staley’s biblically epic entanglements about an addict’s external temptation and personal responsibility. While wordless, the instrumental interlude “Whale and Wasp” aligns with the content of Staley and Cantrell’s lyrics, in that Cantrell’s antagonistic guitar parts—a lithe, flitting acoustic melody and a smoggy electric drone—seem stuck in a struggle for control.
Jar of Flies is, frankly, the band’s easiest record to listen to, which is to say that it’s their most ambient project—the crisp acoustics, gothic strings and smokey drum rolls conjure the dark romanticism of a wind-bitten autumn night, and there’s a drinkable warmth to it that’s generally absent from their longer material. Toning down the distortion-drenched hard rock without sacrificing their equally distinctive emotional potency and musical complexity scored the band their most accessible and, at that point, immediately successful work: Jar of Flies wasn’t just their first chart-topping release, but it was the first EP to ever top the Billboard 200. Lead singles “No Excuses” and “I Stay Away” remain two of the band’s most well-recognized works: The former was the band’s first song to top the Album Rock Tracks chart, while the latter received a Grammy nomination for Best Hard Rock Performance—not too bad for a record that was written and recorded without any intentions of being heard or released.
A jangly, uptempo strummer with a just-blistering-enough central guitar solo, “No Excuses” is the band’s most inevitable widespread triumph. Oddly, what makes it so brilliant is that it’s simultaneously the most and least “Alice in Chains” song in their catalog. With their typical swampy swaths of reverb absent, their core melodic sensibility shines, while their intricate musicianship remains at play—Kinney is arguably the MVP here, driving the song with a deceptively breezy, wickedly complex groove. But what cements its place among the band’s best songs is that it’s the brightest synthesis of Cantrell and Staley’s unmatched vocal chemistry. They sing the verses through together, neither voice dominating the other: Cantrell’s mild tone and Staley’s scorched vibrato strike a precise balance; they aren’t duetting as much as they are merging their voices into one. The effect is especially poignant on the Unplugged take, particularly when their voices tightly intertwine on the promise their verses on a fracturing friendship lead to: “You, my friend / I will defend / And if we change, well, I’ll love you anyway.” They had changed, but that once-in-a-generation synergy—and that love—was palpable as ever, crackling in their vocal exchanges like sparks flying from a hearth as they renewed that oath.
Jar of Flies is a palatable and adventurous record—a major accomplishment for a half-an-hour’s worth of spur-of-the-moment jams. Notably, it’s debatable, at best, whether closing tracks “Don’t Follow” and “Swing on This” fall under the notoriously vast “grunge” umbrella. The former—a twangy, harmonica-laced ditty performed as a duet between Cantrell and Staley—seems more directly descended from the lineage of the parabolic country vignettes Cantrell grew up on, full of lone ranger-like musings of “You’re living life full-throttle,” “Forgot my woman, lost my friends” and “Pass me down that bottle,” while the latter—as advertised—is a bluesy number strung along Inez’s slinky bassline.
“Swing on This” is true to its name in more ways than one, though—in spite of its sultry swing, it plays as a spookily bleak epilogue to “Don’t Follow,” violently swerving from its predecessor’s goosebump-inducing, gospel climax (“Yeahhh, take me home!” Staley cries out, after telling us of his toils on the open road, packing that “yeah” with so much power that it audibly distorts the mic). The mise en scène: Staley’s mother, father, sister and friends are begging him to come home. But he doubles back on the cathartic surrender of “Don’t Follow”: “Let me be,” he replies with a sneering, sinister drawl, proceeding to assure that, despite looking a “little skinny,” he’s really “alright,” “just fine,” “okay”—it’s like he’s trying on the words for size to see what’s most convincing. Still, he can’t fool himself—he’s more frightfully aware than ever that he “can shift / cannot steer,” and when presented with one last opportunity to make a change, he slaps himself across the face. Thus, the record is bookended by abuses of free will, beginning with the decision to “eat of the apple” and ending with this literal show of self-flagellation—if you were to play it on loop, you’d be hearing the endless, apparently inescapable cycle of addiction.
In retrospect, Jar of Flies’s anticlimactic ending seems like a foreshadowing of the slippery slope Staley would descend soon after its release—it was just over a year later that he’d be wailing to God, “Why’s it have to be this way?,” unbearable pain tearing up each helpless repetition. Sometimes, it feels like the agony he expresses here is what he’s best remembered for. To be fair, he was the person to admit that his addiction was inextricable from his music, life and legacy. “Drugs will have a huge effect on my work for the rest of my life, whether I’m using or not,” he explained to Pandemonium in April 1995. “There are lasting consequences for using drugs. It doesn’t matter whether I am taking drugs or not, I’ll still be paying for my prior use.”
But for it to overshadow his personhood and art—not to mention, Alice in Chains as a band—is grossly reductive. In the interview for the band’s Rolling Stone cover story in February 1996, Staley expressed his frustration with how the media would flatten his image: “Every article I see is ‘dope this,’ ‘junkie that,’ ‘whiskey this,’—that ain’t my title,” he stressed. “My bad habits aren’t my title. My strengths and my talent are my title.” The publication then proceeded, quite literally, to turn his worst habit into his title: The magazine cover is a close-up photo of Staley’s face, looking close to tears, paired with the provocative, Neil Young-indebted headline “The Needle & The Damage Done: Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley.”
The idea of Staley’s fate having been predetermined, and the damage already being irreversible, makes for an easy bit to chomp on. But, he—like anyone else—was never doomed, nor a train wreck just waiting to happen. As Cantrell once told Hit Parader, “Layne could have been anything he wanted to be. Unfortunately, at times in his life, what he wanted to be wasn’t very good for him.” Instead of wallowing in the tragedy of the second sentence, let the first one really sink in: “Layne could have been anything he wanted to be.” That is how I choose to remember him, and nowhere is his limitless potential more apparent than on Jar of Flies, nor that of Alice in Chains as a collective. By sonically stripping back, they not only yielded the space to take a breath and survey all their sorrows suspended in the air before they came crashing down upon them, but also the space to sound like—to be—whatever they wanted.
And on the record’s centerpiece, “I Stay Away,” Alice in Chains sound hopeful—for the first and last time in their discography. From the anticipation built by Cantrell’s sun-kissed 12-string melody and the giddy quiver of strings to the rhapsodic grand finale, every movement of the symphonic suite/window-down anthem is designed to serve Staley. When Kinney’s rollicking drumbeat and Inez’s thumping bassline kick in, they propel him straight forward from the impenetrable depths of “Rotten Apple” and “Nutshell” onto a south-bound highway; rather than manifesting anger or despair, the slow-burn, metal-inflected interludes undergird his all-power (“I am enlightened,” Staley sneers at one point, the zig-zag of Cantrell’s lightning-bolt riff hammering in the point); and, as the titular phrase explodes off his tongue, the orchestra crescendos in response, the highest notes exclamation marks at the end of each sentence. Listening, one can’t help but believe that he will stay away from his vices—you can hear him start to believe in himself as he draws out the resolution, almost blown away by the force of his own conviction.
How lucky we are that this ephemeral surge of hope and self-faith was crystallized into Jar of Flies. After the EP, Staley re-entered rehab as the band planned to tour in support of the music over the summer. After Staley showed up to rehearsal high, they cancelled at the last minute and broke up for six months. It wasn’t until Unplugged that they’d resurface as a live act, and by the end of the year—just five shows later—they’d be on indefinite hiatus, officially disbanding upon Staley’s death less than six years later.
After almost a decade of inactivity as a band (barring two new songs released in 1998), Cantrell, Kinney and Inez decided to regroup, adding singer and guitarist William DuVall to the lineup. By all intents and purposes, the band is alive, and apparently more “well” than ever: Alice 2.0 has dropped three well-received albums, and the current members regularly perform as bandmates and in support of various solo and side projects.
As for Staley—to use a cliché—we can only reach him through the music he left behind. Though concise, Jar of Flies might boast the highest concentration of moments where it almost feels like he could stroll out of the speakers and walk right beside you: To highlight a couple, there’s his bar-nothing soliloquy on “Nutshell,” or when he brings down the roof of the very church he takes us to on “Don’t Follow.” There’s also the laughter—if you listen closely as the record fades out, you can hear him giggling with his bandmates, equally surprised and thrilled at the tightness of the jam they’ve conjured out of thin air. While faint and fleeting, those last few seconds are humanizing, bittersweet and haunting—a quiet, final reminder that it didn’t have to be this way.
