Alice In Chains & Layne Staley's Lost Year

what's going on everyone and welcome to the real stories of rock and roll and we're back with another Alice in Chains story. It seems like you guys love these stories and I love making them, so let's at least talk about what I call Alice in Chains. Chains is a

lost

year

and what I want to refer to as 1994, 1994 really should have been a great

year

for Alice in Chains. The band completed a fairly extensive tour in late '93 to promote their '92 album, Dirt, which was a huge hit and the band. they would meet in Seattle to finish an EP that took about a week to write and record called Jarrah flies and there was basically no rest for the evil Allison Chains were set to tour with Metallic in the summer of 1994, so Allison Chains would release Jar of flies at the end of January and would reach number one on the Billboard charts.

Now the band also started 1994 with a benefit show at the Hollywood Palladium where they played some of the tracks from their latest EP as well as some SAP songs like Well, Now It was believed that around this time when Lane had relapsed and started using heroin again, so the whole show he did at the Fishbone benefit in January '94 is on YouTube. It's a pretty short set, they played about four songs in total. Long story short, my inner brother and there are no excuses now looking at some of the people whose friends who attended the show and even listening to it, the fans who attended the show were a little disappointed because it was a pretty short set and the band didn't.

I didn't really play any of their greatest hits. You know, these Jar of Flys songs had just come out, so they didn't have time to go up the charts and a lot of things were new to them and, according to a poster, they said. I had a friend who went to the show, the show was full of heavy hitters like Primus and porn for Pyro's and the crowd, he said, was expecting a mosh-filled set that included some dirty material, damn, River, bones, etc., in the middle of this they came out and played this at a Jar Fly preview, the crowd wasn't too happy, they said they even threw some ice and glasses at them at the end, apparently Jerry himself at Rock Line said I wasn't a very good show. for them and I was pretty poorly booked and it was one of the final performances of the field lanes in that period between 94 and 96 now you can see some photos of this time, he is wearing those leather gloves covering his hands that he used a lot during 95 and 96, if you've read the Rolling Stone article that was done in the lane, a lot of heroin addicts sometimes shoot up their hands, so maybe some people think he was now wearing gloves to hide any kind of marks from punctures in his hands during this time in 1994, between January and until the time they canceled his tour with Metallica Lane he made some appearances during that time he appeared on stage with Tool at the KISW FM stock rock concert where he performed the song opiate with tool and now according to one.

A person who was at the show said that Lane looks sickly and that he wore a wool balaclava to hide his face during the performance and according to Rolling Stone they also said in July 94 Stalee along with Chris Cornell of Soundgarden and Peter Klat of Candlebox. were chosen for Playgirl magazine's Rock and Roll Hall, but their steely appearance had already begun to deteriorate by that time, so in the summer of '94, the day before the start of Metallica's tour, Alice almost He reached the end of his chain at that moment. Staley was in the middle of his heroin addiction and Sean Kinney was struggling with the bottle, so according to Rolling Stone, they said we'd been going full force, just running at top speed with our eyes closed, Cantrell says looking through half an empty beer glass.

We had been too close for too long and we were suffocating, we were like four plants trying to grow in the same pot and things got worse when Staley, who Kinney said had just returned from drug rehab, came to practice and Kenney shot in response. He put down his drumsticks and vowed never to play with Staley again. Cantrell agreed and the tour was canceled and the band broke up for about six months, unfortunately for those fans who wanted cialis and Shane's open for Metallica, the band would end up being replaced by Candlebox. but Metallica's James Hetfield would actually make fun of Layne Staley and in the 1994 performance because he had to retire due to his drug problems at the time, here's the clip.

You want to hear a new song. This song is one that Jason wrote. it's a decent song so he'll have to sing it ok haha ​​i get it thanks anyway and the notation was written to everyone why did you throw that out? I have a question, why did you throw that at me? Why will I tell you? what's the point, what's the most, he'll walk off stage, you'll get over all this, you want, we're here to play some music, not to look for trash like this man, I know you guys are stripping and stuff, having fun out there. but we play much better when we don't have to look at each other flying, that's fine, but if they want us to play pretty well, aren't they here?

So this is Jason Thawne. I don't do it according to Sean Kinney. He said that no one was being honest with each other back then seconds after exhaling a cloud of marijuana smoke that he gave during the interview, he said that if we kept going there was a good chance that we would have self-destructed along the way and we definitely didn't want to. things that happen in public and it's a little ironic because we look at some limits like Guns and Roses in the '80s, when they were starting out, their manager was encouraged to put them on tour because, even though they had their own problems with the drugs.

He thought that if they were all on the same tour bus together, they would all share the same space, since it would be much easier for a manager to help these guys and stop them from hurting themselves, but in this case Alice in Chains . their management decided, hey, we gotta keep these guys off the road and they gotta get better now, there was even a case that a lot of Alice and Shane fans probably hadn't heard of in 1994 when Lane was in rehab Guns N. "Rose's former drummer, Steven Adler, wrote a book and talked about going to the same rehab as Lane and meeting him, so, according to Rolling Stone, in the months after the band broke up band, the band members, of course, went their separate ways and went through the stages of grief that accompany loss, you know, denial, anger, depression and, finally, acceptance Staley recalled that at first I was stunned, muttering as if someone had been woken up by a late night phone call, he said, I just sat on my couch watching TV and got drunk every day saying that when we first got together as a band we were all brothers, We lived in the same house and we partied together and drank as much as everyone else, but then we started to drift apart and go our separate ways and we felt like we were betraying each other and Layne also commented on all the crazy rumors that were going around in the mid-90s when people were dating each other.

He became more aware of his heroin use and basically, as he said, I found out through the Internet that I have AIDS, Staley says, I found out that he was dead. Where else could I discover these things? I don't see a doctor regularly and she was in San Francisco and Lollapalooza and this girl came up to me and told me to stop like she saw a ghost, she said you're not dead and I said no. You're right Wow, so during their time apart, of course, Staley would go on to record an album with mad season, which was his side project with Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready and Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin.

Now Layne would also take time to work with another. group that you may not be familiar with there was a band called Second Coming and Layne performed with them on stage at the Colorbox in Seattle in 1994. The videos are on YouTube, if you want to see it, there is also the music video with Layne Staley. Also, the song is called that and you guys can go see it too and of course Layne wasn't the only one who did some stuff on the side, we also had the other members join other bands and perform other records as well. and Mike Inez did some diving, took a vacation, and of course worked with Guns & Roses guitarist Slash on his first Snakebit record.

It's 5 o'clock somewhere, but I wouldn't end up on tour with Snake Bent and Sean Kinney basically. He snowboarded and recorded a song with Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, Kim Tall and Johnny Cash for the Willie Nelson tribute album. Willy and Jerry, who write most of the band's music, stayed in their rural home outside Seattle and wrote riffs. Initially it was intended for a solo album, but in January of '95 things seemed to be moving again with Alice in Chains while at camp he was working on some material with Sean Kinney and Mike Inez and four months later they would eventually invite Layne Staley to return to the fold and the band would begin work on their self-titled album Alice in Chains, so that concludes today's video guys, let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.

If you followed Alice in Chains in 1994 and the year was broken down for you? When you find out they opened for Metallica on that summer tour, leave your comments below and let me know what stories you'd like to see explored in future episodes of the true rock'n'roll story tag.