“Everybody passed on it,” Jerden said of this demo. “This was the time of Guns n’ Roses, and everybody was looking for people with that high voice, like Dio or whatever. But I grew up a product of the late sixties, seventies. I liked deep voices, bluesy voices, and when I heard this tape, I just went, ‘Wow!’” The general reaction to Alice in Chains in Los Angeles at the time was confusion, for lack of any point of reference. “There was a lot of head-scratching going on with that band when they were first doing it, but it was something that both Dave and I had already heard in our heads. It was a no-brainer this band is going to go somewhere, because it was just old-school Black Sabbath with new-kid mentality,” Jerden’s engineer, Ronnie Champagne, said.
A meeting between Jerden and the band was arranged in Los Angeles. The band was performing at a club, where four people were in the audience: Jerden, his manager, producer Rick Rubin, and one guy dancing in the middle of the floor “like he was on acid or something.” Rubin walked out after a few songs, leaving Jerden, Jerden’s manager, and the guy on acid to watch the rest of the show. When they met, Jerden and Jerry hit it off immediately.
“I said, ‘What you’re doing is what Tony Iommi was doing in Black Sabbath.’ And he goes, ‘Yeah!’ And I was in. It was pretty much Jerry’s call who was going to produce the record.” Terzo told Jerden the plan was to have them write more songs. The band returned to Seattle and cut two demos at London Bridge Studios with Rick Parashar. A dozen songs from these demos became the basis for the material on Facelift.
“‘We Die Young’ was on that, ‘Man in the Box,’ like six songs that were fucking amazing,” Jerden said. “They were doing a bit of every style: punk, heavy metal, to try and get a sound. I understand Layne at one point had a Mohawk. The idea was to cut out everything that they weren’t.”
At the time, Jerden and Champagne were working on Social Distortion’s first album and putting finishing touches on Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual de lo Habitual. Studio time was booked at London Bridge. According to Jerden, the production budget for the album was between $150,000 and $250,000. Champagne brought a cassette of the then-unreleased Ritual de lo Habitual, consisting of unfinished mixes. The album made an impression on the band. “That’s all they talked about. That’s all they wanted to know about when we first got there,” Champagne said. Mike made copies of the cassette and gave them to friends. “They devoured that record. So while we were making Facelift, their minds were expanding, because they’re starting to listen to this record that hasn’t been released yet, and Ritual was a big sonicscape record.”
Sean had broken his hand about a month before and couldn’t play drums. According to the Music Bank liner notes, it happened “during an altercation at a party one evening.” Mother Love Bone drummer Greg Gilmore was asked to fill in for Sean, and he wasn’t working out.
“The way Sean played, he had this heavy kick drum going, which was the basis of the sound, the bass and the kick drum, which coupled with the low chords that Jerry was playing … this guy just wasn’t hitting hard. I kept saying, ‘You’ve got to hit the kick drum harder. Please!’ He just could not give me that whack that I needed, that really solid backbeat,” Jerden explained. “And finally, after like three days of this, Sean says, ‘Fuck this!’ and he took off his bandages. He says, ‘I’m going to do this, broken arm or no broken arm.’ They changed then—all of the sudden, they sounded like Alice in Chains.” Champagne said after Sean removed his cast—about three weeks ahead of schedule—he winced every time he hit a snare drum.1
Aside from Sean’s mishap, Jerden said the recording process went very smoothly. “What we did was drums, bass, and basic guitars. I was up there for about a month. I had a great time. Jerry was a fisherman and I loved fishing, so we’d go salmon fishing in the mornings and then we’d go to the studio,” Jerden said. The songs were well developed by the time recording sessions began. “We did not stray from the basic tracks at all. We kept it pretty much the way the basic tracks were. I added some stuff to it, but I didn’t subtract anything.”
According to Jerden, his production process consisted of recording several takes of a song, maybe five to ten at most. He would sit with a pencil and notepad, making notes on every bar, whether he liked it or not. He listened to every take and would composite the song using the best takes based on his notes. “There was no click track,” Jerden said, referring to a signal routed into a musician’s headphones in the recording studio to serve as a metronome to keep time while recording. “So the timing would go up and down, but I’d pick the best overall take and then from other takes that were in the same time, I would edit those in.”
Dave Hillis, an assistant engineer at London Bridge at the time, credits Jerden for one element of the band’s sound. “If you hear the demos, the tempos are always faster. The thing that … Dave Jerden brought out [was to] slow the tempos down. Analyzing that now, it really helped develop the Alice sound, in that it became heavier with the tempo slowed down and more brooding.”
According to Jerden, “The midtempo, slow-tempo stuff just sounded heavier. If I sped it up, like ‘Man in the Box’ sped up, it wouldn’t have sounded right. I don’t remember from the demo what I did [in the recording], how much I slowed it down, but to me even a beat per minute slower or a beat per minute faster can make a big difference.” Champagne agreed, “It can’t be racing at you. It’s got to scare the fuck out of you before you even see it coming. That was the mentality.” According to Champagne, their message to the band as they were recording was “Play it like you mean it. Play it to us. Fuck everybody else. Make us impressed, because we’d seen it all already.”
Jerden was driving to the studio one day while they were working on “Man in the Box,” thinking they needed a hook sound for the song. At that point, Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” started playing on the radio, which features a prominent use of a Voice Box. This gave Jerden the idea of adding a Voice Box to “Man in the Box.”
The lyrics to “Man in the Box” can be traced to a dinner conversation between the band and Nick Terzo. Layne told Rolling Stone, “I started writing about censorship. Around the same time, we went out for dinner with some Columbia Records people who were vegetarians. They told me how veal was made from calves raised in these small boxes, and that image stuck in my head. So I went home and wrote about government censorship and eating meat as seen through the eyes of a doomed calf.”2
During a 1991 interview, Layne and Sean criticized bands for writing about subjects they didn’t know about, specifically “political stuff.” Layne said, “We write about ourselves, and we know about ourselves. I’m not any authority to write on any political nothing.” The interviewer asked, “What’s ‘Man in the Box’ about?” And Layne replied, “Ah, shit. It’s kinda loosely based on media censorship, but only my theory, so it’s not a fact or a statement.”
“It’s about veal,” Sean added.
“Plus I was really stoned when I wrote it,” Layne said. “So it meant something different then.”3
Layne’s “Sexual chocolate, baby!” scream at the end of “Real Thing” can be traced to the period when the band was living together after moving out of the Music Bank. According to Steve Alley, the band had been watching the Eddie Murphy movie Coming to America, in which a Murphy character is the singer of a band called Sexual Chocolate. Alley said it became a recurring joke for Layne, which eventually made its way into the song.