When Alice In Chains picked out their five musical heroes
In late August 1990, Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ hadn’t yet been written, Pearl Jam were still going by the name Mookie Blaylock, yet to play a proper gig, and grunge hadn’t entered pop music parlance, but up in Seattle, Alice In Chains were already the boys who made it.
The band’s debut album, Facelift, was getting a lot of attention that summer, backed by their inking a surprising seven-record deal with Columbia on the strength of their demos alone. Fans and critics seemed to recognise a potential changing of the guard in rock; an adaptation of some of the base ingredients of ‘80s hair metal into something edgier, darker, deeper, and more honest. Would Alice in Chains be the band that would lead a new wave in ‘90s rock ‘n’ roll?
“We were never fucking thinking about it,” drummer Sean Kinney told Seattle’s Rocket newspaper in 1990, admitting that earlier iterations of the band were a bit more glammy, peppy, and cosmetic, adding, “We’ve been together two-and-a-half years, and we stumbled onto whatever we’re doing now. It took us a long time. Before, we were playing upbeat rockin’ stuff, but not like Poison or anything. Then, one week, after taking a lot of acid and doing a lot of jamming…“
Alice In Chains certainly shared their fellow Seattle bands’ discomfort with taking themselves too seriously, as every interview from these early days displays a boyish, Ren & Stimpy sort of sense of humour, a reverse-Bono worldview that left little room for talking about messaging or principles.
“ZZ Top are big fans of ours,” guitarist Jerry Cantrell deadpanned in the same Rocket interview when asked if the band had acquired a groupie contingent, “They send those girls to our shows. Those girls are our security guards, and we have a bunch of thick girls right up at the stage to keep people back.”
Facelift didn’t actually race up the charts upon release, as the Seattle scenesters had hoped or expected, but after a few months, the success of the record’s second single, ‘Man in the Box’, finally clued in the rest of the country to this growing phenomenon going on in the Pacific Northwest.
By the summer of ‘91, Facelift became the first such album to enter the Billboard Top 50, right around the time every town was starting to open its own Starbucks, and every Little League baseball player was pretending to be Ken Griffey Jr of the Seattle Mariners.
Alice In Chains were off to conquer the world as one of Seattle’s leading new ambassadors, not yet aware of the full extent of the pitfalls that awaited them, and the addiction that would destroy them. As a bunch of kids in their mid-20s, they weren’t looking to any role models as guiding lights in the traditional sense. Kinney, when asked about his musical heroes, offered up “Zamfir, the pan flute artist, and anything bad and gospel”, “Zeppelin and alcohol” was bassist Mike Starr’s response, while “Elton John, AC/DC, and Kiss,” Cantrell said, boldly making no effort to seem underground and cool like Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder would have.
Singer Layne Staley remained mute on the subject, but did join his bandmates in a stereophonic response as to who the most important person in each of their lives was: “Me!”
