The dark concept album hidden in Alice in Chains’ ‘Dirt’
Not every album is meant to tell a story. While Pete Townshend may have started the idea of music meaning something more than a collection of songs on albums like Tommy, it’s sometimes easier to bring one’s point across with tracks that feel true to where you are. Even though Alice in Chains had their trademark brand of alternative metal down to a science, Dirt may have been much more cerebral than people realised then.
By the time the band reached 1992, though, they had already become one of the biggest acts in the world. Gaining traction off their debut Facelift, they got to work alongside Van Halen on a promo tour, bringing their signature brand of heavy gloom to fans worldwide. Even though they mellowed out on their first EP SAP, their rise to the top was only matched by their appetite for excess.
Between working on each project, Layne Staley was slowly starting to become a heroin addict, becoming addicted midway through the tour for Facelift. While the band would generally turn a blind eye to everyone’s excesses, Staley thought the best way to come clean about his vices was to do it through song.
Combing through each track on Dirt, the linear story reads like a dark concept album centred around a man slowly withering away to addiction. Starting with a cry of agony from Staley on ‘Them Bones’, the tone is dour from the first handful of riffs, with Cantrell and Staley discussing how both of them will turn to dust pretty soon.
That road to oblivion only continues on follow-up tracks like ‘Rain When I Die’, which features Staley’s most tortured performances on record. While most of the songs feature Staley speaking of an unnamed female character throughout the song, it’s easy to substitute this woman with his heroin habit, being a cruel temptress that keeps sucking him down deeper into the bowels of Hell.
As the album plays on, the music gets progressively heavier, as if he’s sinking deeper and deeper into the underworld with every single song. The clearest indication of that shift comes with the title track, with a riff that sounds like it should be soundtracking Lucifer holding court amongst a hoard of demons.
While every track has that foreboding atmosphere behind it, it’s not like every song was written intentionally with the story in mind. For instance, the album centrepiece ‘Rooster’ was famously written about Cantrell’s father and his experiences in The Vietnam War. If we were to look at it more abstractly, it’s easy to see how this story could apply to an addict finding himself in the middle of a hallucination where he is lost in the jungle and struggling to find a way to survive.
By the time ‘Angry Chair’ begins, the listener has descended to the pit of despair, with Staley saying that he doesn’t mind living in this state even if he knows he made a terrible mistake in his past. Once all hope seems lost, ‘Would?’ comes on as both the commercial centrepiece of the record and the final statement from the user.
Written in response to Andy Wood’s death a few years prior, Staley sings about taking himself back into the flood of emotion, creating a song that admits to his mistake and begging the listener to see life through his eyes. As the final chords ring out, Staley leaves the listener hanging by asking if they would have the empathy to forgive him for his actions, even if he threw his life away.
While the album was made to get the sound out of their system, it would become a foreboding sign of things to come just a few years later. Across Jar of Flies, Staley became more candid about his vices, leading to him hardly speaking with the band on subsequent albums. By the time the group had played one of their final performances on MTV Unplugged, it was made clear that Staley was losing his battle, passing away in 2002 after a fatal overdose.
Even though Dirt paints a grim picture of what Staley’s life was like in the early 1990s, it also serves as a cautionary tale for what the dangers of heroin can do to someone when they lose their way. In recent years, the album was also forward-looking, with acts like A Perfect Circle taking a more nuanced approach to the subject on their album Thirteenth Step. While other bands may have been to speak more eloquently on the subject, no one could cut to the core of the junkie’s mindset quite like Staley.
