“Envision this: thirty to fifty rock guys, band and crew, standing outside the door of the bar waiting for it to open, and there’s this poor little girl thinking she’s going to be at the hotel bar and have a nice, easy day bartending because nobody’s going to be at the hotel for Thanksgiving, [and she] has got Prong, Pantera, Mind over Four, Alice in Chains, and Iggy Pop’s band and crew ready to watch football!” Shoaf said, laughing. “Within thirty minutes, she gave up and just put bottles up on the counter, with the money flowing.”
“We started drinking at one in the afternoon, and you can imagine as it went on into the night. We tore that hotel apart. They were like, ‘Please, leave. Everybody leave.’”
Around Halloween, the tour hit New York City, and Alice in Chains booked a headlining show at the Cat Club. In the audience that night was Paul Rachman, a music-video director who had worked with punk and hardcore bands during the 1980s. “I just fell in love with the band and the music,” Rachman said. The next day he called the woman in charge of commissioning music videos at Columbia Records and told her he wanted to work with them.
At that point, Rocky Schenck’s “We Die Young” video had been airing on MTV’s Headbangers Ball and 120 Minutes but hadn’t really caught on. The label was getting ready to release “Man in the Box” as the second single and offered Rachman the chance to do the video. Since it was Layne’s song, the label put him in touch with Layne, so the two of them could talk. Layne briefly touched base with Rachman by phone while on tour. They talked about not making it a typical live-performance video. Rachman told him to write down any specific ideas he had and send them via fax, in that era before cell phones and e-mail. Shortly after, Layne sent Rachman a fax consisting of a scribbled handwritten note, which read:
Rainy drippy barn.
Farm animals.
Baby with eyes sewn shut.
Rachman spent a few days listening to the song. “I came up with the idea of placing the band in this barn and creating this kind of dark mood, making it a sepia tone [with] some farm animals around them, [building] up towards the end where there’s this kind of rebirth character.”
In December 1990, the band traveled to Los Angeles to shoot the video for “Man in the Box.” With a budget of less than fifty thousand dollars, Rachman and the band met on a farm at Malibu State Park for the one-day shoot. Susan was there, and according to Rachman, she was excited.
Rachman said the band members were a bit tired because they had been touring, but overall they were nice and were having a great time. “The thing about working with young bands in terms of, like, it’s their first or second video is, if they like your idea, they trust you. And I really felt trusted and supported, and she really just wanted the band to look great and for this concept to work,” he recalled. They used only two cameras, one of which was a handheld filmed by Rachman himself. “I was watching [Layne’s] close-up take, and I was like, ‘Wow.’ I knew that was a winner. There was something about the shot where you could tell his eyes and the emotion in which he was singing the song just connected.”
Layne’s fax had specifically called for a baby with its eyes sewn shut, which Rachman said would have been impossible. He proposed an alternative. “I had this idea of this kind of rebirth. I thought that there was a dark mood around this barn and there were animals there. I just felt that … all of a sudden, towards the end, that this reaper—this guy in this cape—is kind of walking by, and could look pretty cool. And that could be the person with the eyes sewn shut. He’s kind of taking care of the animals, but he’s blind.”
In the role of the caretaker, Rachman chose the parking-lot attendant of a bar owned by a friend of his. “This guy ran the parking lot. Just had this kind of Jesus Christ look, and I cast him in actually two or three things I’ve done in the past.” The shoot went off without a hitch. Rachman spent the next two or three weeks producing and editing the video.
The Iggy Pop tour ended in Tijuana, Mexico, at a club called Iguana’s, a thousand-capacity venue fifteen minutes from San Diego described by the Los Angeles Times as “the set of ‘Jailhouse Rock’ as designed by Dante.”4 By the end of the night, Biro and Iggy Pop’s production manager had their hands “swollen from beating the shit out of people left and right.
“Anyone that was getting onstage—at first we were stopping people. Then it reached the point where we were just cracking people in the face. Like, someone would get onstage, you’d punch ’em in the face. Someone else, punch ’em in the face.”
According to Biro and Shoaf, everyone went shopping in Tijuana. “We went down Revolutionary Boulevard, bought switchblades and lots of drugs. And then we had it all stuffed in our pants,” Biro said. Iguana’s was a few blocks from the border, so they walked back across.
Josh Taft, a filmmaker, had been around the Seattle music scene, having grown up with Stone Gossard. It was through Gossard that he met Alice in Chains. On December 22, 1990, Alice in Chains was set to play a homecoming show at the Moore Theatre. In an event as memorable and arguably more significant than the headliners, the then-unknown Mookie Blaylock would be the opening act. At the end of their set, Chris Cornell took the stage and joined the band to perform songs from the Temple of the Dog album.5
Taft was there with a camera crew filming the Alice in Chains performance for a home-video release. He had a budget of fourteen to sixteen thousand dollars, which he described as “extraordinarily low for six cameras live.” Put into perspective, it was nearly a third of the budget for the “Man in the Box” video. Taft suggested shooting in black-and-white film. “Of all the bands that were coming out of here, I think it made the most sense visually to [do] something super stripped-down and kind of tough-looking and simple,” he explained. “I think it really kind of shifted perspective, and especially that night because it was one of those shows that kind of, I think, stands alone unto itself in people’s memory. It’s sort of a time when it all was about to turn.”
Jerry’s guitar that he used for the show—which he referred to as his baby—featured a picture of a topless woman that he had laminated onto the body of the instrument. Producer Lisanne Dutton told Thad Byrd later on that the single biggest expense in making that video was blurring out the image on Jerry’s guitar. Taft said, “Back then that was actually pretty high tech to blur a handheld shot. It took a lot of technology.”
SPIN chose Alice in Chains as one of the bands to watch in 1991. According to The Seattle Times write-up of the issue, “Writer Daina Darzin says ‘the band’s clearly being groomed as Columbia Records’ next big thing,’ and notes that the last two bands that got that treatment were Faith No More and Living Colour. The piece also has guitarist Jerry Cantrell confessing ‘we were all on coke, high as hell’ the first time big labels came to town to check out the band. But Darzin adds, ‘Alice in Chains cleaned up its act a while back.’ Drummer Sean Kinney says his father, a policeman, is a big fan of the band—‘He’s a really cool guy’—and Cantrell explains why so many of the group’s tunes deal with doom and depression: ‘We’re all outcasts.’”6
For New Year’s Eve, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Mookie Blaylock went to “an old-fashioned hootenanny at the Seattle-area ranch of writer-director Cameron Crowe and his wife, Heart’s Nancy Wilson.” According to Nancy Wilson, they sat around with acoustic instruments playing covers or making up new songs. She had a mechanical elephant windup toy, a gift from Chris Cornell. The next afternoon, she found a note from Jerry that read, “Look at the elephant.” In Wilson’s words, “Apparently Jerry had been fixating on it overnight, and in the morning he was feeding champagne to the horses.”7