“Stumble Across”: The album Alice in Chains expected no one to listen to
Any artist will want to reach some audience whenever they release an album. Even if they are meant to be playing backyard gigs for the rest of their lives, all that matters for true musicians is having people sing along to the songs whenever they perform, regardless of the venue size. While Alice in Chains were already ready for the world’s stadiums after their debut, Jerry Cantrell admitted that he never expected any of their fans to come across any press for this album.
Then again, no one in the grunge scene seemed likely to become the next big thing in rock music circa 1989. When Alice in Chains were still cutting their teeth, Guns N’ Roses were still ranked as one of the biggest bands in the world, so it wasn’t like the gothic take on Black Sabbath-style rock and roll didn’t seem like the biggest frontrunner for taking over the world when ‘Man in the Box’ first started.
Out of all the Seattle bands, though, Alice seemed to have the most in common with the hair metal scene. They had worn their fair share of cowboy boots back in the day like Slash did, and outside of Chris Cornell channelling Robert Plant in Soundgarden, Facelift was the closest that the grunge scene ever got to accommodating fans that still loved listening to their Def Leppard records.
Right as the band came off tour for their debut, though, the last thing they wanted to do was make the same record over again. Playing heavy electric rock was bound to grate on them, so when they ventured back into the studio, SAP became one of the biggest anomalies in their catalogue because it hardly had any electric guitar on it.
From the acoustic picking of ‘Brother’ to the aching vocal harmonies of ‘Got Me Wrong’, this was the first time that most people got to hear what the sensitive side of Alice in Chains was like, almost like hearing a bizarro world version of a Simon and Garfunkel record, except this time the songs are even more melancholy. That kind of transition doesn’t always leave the best taste in fans’ mouths, though, so the band didn’t even try promoting it.
When talking to Lars Ulrich, Cantrell remembered the group putting it out without promotion and expecting fans to find it on their own, saying, “We were never thinking about putting it out. We had a meeting at the office, and [drummer] Sean [Kinney], said, ‘Dude, I had a dream last night. We put it out as an acoustic EP, and we called it SAP. We said, ‘Let’s not even advertise this thing. That’s put it in stores for the fans and for people to stumble across.”
Even though the record may have been hard to come by, it’s a crime that some of the songs ended up getting buried for years. Despite some of them seeing a resurgence thanks to their inclusion in Clerks or their iconic MTV Unplugged performance, the fact that there was a glorified supergroup on ‘Right Turn’ featuring every member of Alice, Chris Cornell, and Mark Arm of Mudhoney would have been any industry insider’s dream had they known how huge grunge was going to be.
But that’s not how the world works most of the time. People can try their whole lives to make the best album that anyone has ever heard, but it’s more important to have something that tests the audience a little bit by having them dig a little deeper to find the real gems.
