“The music connected so strongly”: the story of Alice in Chains’ controversial comeback
When Layne Staley passed on April 5th, 2002, at just 34 years old, the silence that followed his absence was vast, a resounding tragedy that continues to be felt.
Years of addiction and suffering had plagued the members of Alice In Chains, and the loss of Staley was a definitive mark on the band’s legacy. They went their separate ways, pursuing solo projects and various endeavours while trying to persist through grief.
In 2005, drummer Sean Kinney rounded up the surviving members of Alice In Chains – vocalist/guitarist Jerry Cantrell and bassist Mike Inez – for a benefit concert in support of the victims of the tsunami disaster in South Asia the year prior, and performing for the first time in nine years, they were joined by Damageplan vocalist Pat Lachman, with special guests including Maynard James Keenan, Wes Scantlin (Puddle of Mudd) and Ann Wilson (Heart).
Spurred by the enthusiasm that coincided with the reunion show, the band called their former manager, Susan Silver, and Cantrell’s manager, Bill Siddons, deciding that they wanted to tour as Alice In Chains once again. Then, in 2006, while performing at the Decades Rock Live! concert (in tribute to Ann and Nancy Wilson), they performed ‘Rooster’ with Ann and William DuVall, frontman of the Atlanta-based rock band Comes with the Fall.
Cantrell and DuVall had known each other since 2000, forming a friendship and later, touring together (Comes with the Fall served as both Cantrell’s opener and his backing band on tour), where DuVall sang Staley’s parts during Cantrell’s set. “There’s a long story to get to this point,” DuVall explained. “I’ve known these guys almost ten years. As step by step as this has gone, as manic as it has been over the last three years, seven years prior to that lives converged and now here we are. We were friends when Layne was living, he passed while we were on the road.”
During his sole audition for Alice In Chains, DuVall sang ‘Love, Hate, Love,’ and his place in the band was, to the other members, a no-brainer.
An 86-show, sold-out world tour ensued, but plans to conceptualise new music had yet to fully take shape. “We started writing in November 2007,” Cantrell explained to Metal Hammer. “We went on a couple of tours first before that, but was more a celebration of the music, and we felt right about doing it.”
Recording a drum beat here, a casual riff there, Alice In Chains held on to what could eventually build into something more for about two years, and by the following March, they began to discuss compiling an album into a fully-formed project.
“There was no master plan, despite what people think,” Cantrell clarified. “This felt right, so we did the next thing, and then the next thing… It’s more than just making music and it always has been. We’ve been friends a long time. We’re not doing this to please anybody.”
Still, there was no set decision to release a proper album, but the news of Alice In Chains entering Studio 606 in Los Angeles was met with an immediate mixed reaction. To many fans, their reformation showed disloyalty to Staley’s memory, and many could not fathom the decision to continue in his absence.
“It’s harder for us,” Inez said. “Layne is irreplaceable; he’s gone, and that takes a lot of adjustment. We did a whole world tour just to be sitting here talking to you about a record. This is hard for us. We had to bury our brother.”
Their subsequent 2009 album, Black Gives Way To Blue, then became not just a “comeback” album, nor an album dominated by grief, but a reclamation of what made Alice In Chains so impactful in the first place. More, it meant a return to self for each of the members, channelling their ache in the best way they knew how.
“The music connected so strongly with some people. It’s amazing that they have such a connection but they seem to act like it happened to them,” Kinney reasoned. “But this happened to us and Layne’s family, not them. This is actually our lives, so we appreciate that but it’s irrelevant. If we can be OK with it, why can’t you?”
Persisting in spite of tragedy became something of a necessity for Alice In Chains, a calling to choose to live rather than sink into the pain that they felt. “You listened to our records and now you’re bummed out? Imagine how it is for us!,” Kinney continued.
Concluding, “If we’re proving that we can move on and fucking continue to live and set some example, then people should too… It was always a survival thing. This record is us moving on, and hurting. That to me is a victory.”
