Who is on the cover of Alice in Chain album ‘Dirt’?
Even by the standards set by the grunge explosion of the early 1990s, Alice In Chains were the scene’s dark-hearted outsiders. If Nirvana were the artsy punk band of the scene, and Pearl Jam the hard rock heroes, Jerry Cantrell and Layne Staley’s band gave the scene an intense shot of metal edge.
This checks out since the band was made up of casualties from the glam metal scene of the mid-1980s. It’s not for nothing that after the band’s breakout album, 1990’s Facelift, the group opened for the Clash of the Titans tour featuring the non-Metallica ‘Big Four of Thrash’. However, they did get booed offstage basically every night.
However, Facelift, along with its singles ‘Man In The Box’ and ‘Sea Of Sorrow’, did resonate with audiences even before Nevermind made grunge a mainstream concern. They were a sign the winds of change were blowing, and a year later, after Kurt Cobain’s band became the biggest in the world overnight, Columbia looked to Alice In Chains’ second effort to replicate it.
Putting that level of pressure on any band is never a great idea. Considering that Alice In Chains were already hanging together by a thread after bringing a single album and EP into their existence, it was an even worse strategy. The band were ravaged by drug addiction, in particular, the heroin addiction that would claim Staley’s life in 1996. Away from the band’s personal lives, the recording of the album started the day the LA riots protesting the murder of Rodney King began, which the band found themselves in the middle of.
Despite that, Dirt would become the band’s magnum opus, selling five million copies in the US alone and also creating one of the defining images of the early 1990s with its atmospheric cover. A shot of a blood-red, bone-dry desert with the ghostly image of a woman half buried in the sand looking mournfully up at the sky. It is an eerie image that captures the foreboding, intense music within, conceived by the band and then realised by the album’s art director, Mary Maurer and photographer, Rocky Schenk.
So, who is the girl on the Alice In Chains Dirt album cover?
Schenk told Revolver in 2011, “I wanted this cover to have a rather ‘Hellish’ atmosphere.”
Since the band wanted it to be unclear whether the woman depicted was dead or alive, that atmosphere was well and truly achieved. For years, the rumour was that the cover’s model was Staley’s then-girlfriend, Demri Parrott, but the article reveals that the model was actually Mariah O’Brien. It’s just as well too, because the cover was inspired by a bout of romantic anguish Staley was going through. Having that conversation with your current squeeze would be profoundly awkward.
In 1992, Staley told the Canadian rock magazine MEAT that he likes to refer to the album cover as revenge: “The song ‘Dirt’ was written to a certain person who basically buried my ass. So, the woman on the album cover is… that person being sucked down into the dirt instead of me. The picture is the spitting image of her, and that wasn’t even planned. Actually, I was pretty angry about it when I first saw it – she’s not happy about it either. It was real eerie.”
It was a dark album for a dark period of time, both for the band personally and politically. It’s no wonder that the record’s cover is just as iconic as the music within.
