From the perspective of guitar bands, Nevermind blew the bolted doors of commercial success off their hinges and, predictably enough, Nirvana’s imitators and aficionados speedily flooded through the newly opened breach and into the charts. Alice in Chains, however, were no Nirvana clones. Yes, it was inevitable that they would be lumped in with the new “scene”, because they were also formed in Seattle and, like Nirvana, they purveyed a dirtier, more shambolic style of rock music than the strutting and exuberant hair metal bands that had dominated the 80s. Perhaps the most striking commonality was the fact that their lead singer, Layne Staley, was, like Kurt Cobain, manifestly a rather damaged individual, a walking testament to late-20th century American deindustrialisation, societal decay, and overall post-Cold War directionlessness. But there were also key differences; whereas Kurt was first moved to pick up a guitar by the cacophonous, but sometimes jovial and light-humoured, alternative rock of the Pixies, the primary influences of Staley and guitarist Jerry Cantrell lay in hostile and confrontational metal like Metallica and Guns ‘N Roses.
Indeed, in a genre of music not exactly known for its breezy cheerfulness, Alice in Chains arguably constitutes the darkest and – in every sense of the word – heaviest band to come out of the Seattle grunge scene, and perhaps out of 90s alternative rock altogether, with the possible exception of Nine Inch Nails (and Trent Reznor only narrowly avoided a similar fate to Staley after overdosing on heroin in a London hotel room in 2000). It is very significant that, of the frontmen of the “big four” 90s grunge acts, only Eddie Vedder remains among the living as of 2024. Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell both committed suicide, while things ended very badly indeed for Staley, who descended into full-blown heroin addiction and disappeared into his Seattle apartment for the last half-decade of his life, before dying in 2002 at the age of 34.
Dirt is perhaps best viewed as a harrowing document of Staley’s decline and a testament to his deep-seated death wish. An alarming number of songs on this album are quite explicitly about death, wanting to die, the grave, funerals, being in a hole in the ground, and other such light-hearted fare. The album explodes with “Them Bones”, a furious, wrenching, agonised, two-and-a-half-minute machine gun diatribe about how Alice in Chains’ frontman is “gonna end up a big old pile of them bones”. The tone signally fails to lighten on “Rain When I Die”, a jagged and twisted ode to a toxic relationship with a soaring, powerfully sung chorus, in which Staley cheerfully contemplates what the weather will be like at the precise moment of his passing. The tender acoustic intro to “Down in a Hole” is redolent of “Nothing Else Matters”, but that’s where the commonalities with Metallica’s drippy ballad end; the song quickly escalates into doomy metal and excruciating lyrics about the experience of entombment (“I’m down in a hole and they’ve put all the stones in place”).
Why was Layne Staley such a miserable bastard? Well, apart from his exceedingly troubled childhood, and growing up in a dilapidated city at the precise point of its most egregious post-industrial decline, the fact that he was taking loads of drugs, particularly heroin, probably didn’t help matters. And, of course, his myriad addictions are a key theme of Dirt. The impish, deviant guitars and lunatic vocals of “God Smack” may have provided the name for a terrible death metal band, but the song also comprises an unsettling channelling of the malevolent inner voice of addiction (“cast aside all those who care / stick your arm for some more fun”). “Junkhead”, meanwhile, could perhaps be considered a personal manifesto: Staley frankly admits to his compulsive nature (“what’s my drug of choice? Well, what have you got?”), and he candidly and unapologetically concedes that his consumptive lifestyle is massively facilitated by rockstar wealth and status (“I don’t go broke and I do it a lot”).
At one point on “Junkhead”, Layne even suggests that the self-destructive disregard for “money and status” renders him, and other drug addicts, somehow superior (“we are an elite race of our own”). This perhaps partly explains why not even an extended stint in rehab proved sufficient to resolve his struggle with the junk; on the menacing “Angry Chair”, he dismisses this experience as akin to incarceration in a “corporate prison”, before expressing disbelieving horror at the sight of his own emaciated visage in the mirror (“saw my reflection and I cried”). Tellingly, however, “Hate to Feel” perhaps gets to the core of the issue, as our highly articulate, three-lunged libertine host resignedly accepts that he uses drugs in order to obviate his own overpowering emotions, and coyly links this to what might charitably be called his “relationship” with a deadbeat, alcoholic father (“all this time I swore I’d never be like my old man / But what the hey, it’s time to face exactly who I am”).
Clearly, then, there was some pretty deep shit going on here; it doesn’t take a professional psychologist to intuit that Layne Staley’s various addictions and his preoccupation with death were very probably rooted in a lacerating sense of self-hatred and, perhaps, a somewhat tenuous grip on reality. There are many moments on Dirt where these – to put it mildly – “mental health issues” come starkly into focus. “Sickman” is a deranged miasma of discombobulated shrieking, in which Staley identifies his own thoughts as his “biggest fear” and denounces himself as a “leper… dirty and diseased”. The plodding doom metal of the album’s title track bleakly declares that “I want you to scrape me from the walls”, fitfully insists that “I’ve tried to hide myself from what is wrong for me”, and mordantly seethes at an unnamed persecutor (“you have the talent to make me feel like dirt”).
But the darkest moment on an album of almost unrelenting misery, hostility, and self-loathing is saved until the very end, the demonic three-and-a-half-minute gut shot of “Would?” This appalling and tormented song starts quietly, menacingly, with the grungiest of basslines, eerie guitars, and haunting vocals about being “broken by my master”. It then launches into a furious chorus and an unexpected plea for empathy (“so I made a big mistake / try to see it once my way”), before concluding with the chilling question “if I would, could you?” – that is, how sure are you, dear listener, that you wouldn’t end up as wretched as me if we swapped places?
All in all, then, a charming listen, a real Sunday morning album, perhaps a contender for Carpool Karaoke. In all seriousness, though, I just described Dirt as an album of almost unrelenting misery because there is, in fact, a single, slender shaft of sunlight which briefly penetrates the gloom. This is “Rooster”, a languid, strutting, deceptively heartfelt tribute by Jerry Cantrell to his father, a veteran of the Vietnam War who somehow made it out the other side, only to be “spit on in my homeland”. It is quite literally the only moment on the album that comes from a place of affection, positivity and, indeed, a celebration of life and survival, rather than being inextricably tied up in the macabre tentacles of Layne Staley’s fixation on the afterlife.
In the end, though, the abiding tone of Dirt is indeed provided by its frontman and our knowledge of his terrible fate. It’s anything but a story with a happy ending, but it’s a hell of an album – coherent and thoughtful lyrics (in contrast to the garbled gibberish served up by Cobain), remarkably powerful vocals, and exceptional songwriting from start to finish, with only one or two tracks that might be considered skippable. To some degree, though, it’s basically a heavy metal album; its essential formula is to take Metallica’s sound, shorten the songs, get rid of the thrash, and replace James Hetfield’s clumsy sixth form lyrics about sea monsters or H.P. Lovecraft characters with introspective screeds on Staley’s unravelling psyche. The end product of this represents, in my opinion, the absolute quintessence of grunge; the buzzsaw-like guitars, the slow, deep, dirty basslines, the explosive choruses, the self-abnegating lyrics and grizzled vocals which convey nothing but extreme bad feeling. This is the essence of what the genre is supposed to be, though it makes for anything but a pleasant listen.
9/10
Highlights: “Them Bones”, “Rooster”, “Would?”