Rocky Schenck got a phone call from the band to discuss ideas for cover art. Schenck is “pretty sure” Sean came up with the cover concept. On December 22, 1991, Schenck and his assistant went to Griffith Park and took photographs of several different old wooden buckets and taps attached to trees. “I got some great shots of four buckets hanging from a massive old tree, with each bucket representing a different band member, but they ended up using the photo of a single bucket,” Schenck wrote.
For the back cover, Schenck flew up to Seattle for a band photo shoot that took place on January 3, 1992. He took several different photos, which he thinks were never published. The band’s idea—which ultimately became the EP’s back cover—was a shot of them urinating on photos of themselves previously taken by Schenck. That same night, they all went to see Pearl Jam perform at Rock Candy. He called it “a great night, great show” and says he met Demri for the first time that night, saying “she was very sweet to me.”4
The nature and extent of Layne’s drug problem was probably a closely held secret at this point. However, word somehow got around to Layne’s ex-girlfriend, Chrissy Chacos. At one point during the early 1990s, she had tried heroin, and Layne had gotten wind of it. “I was at the Vogue when Layne confronted me—like, ‘I heard you’re smoking heroin. You’re not to do that,’ dah-dah-dah. I’m like, ‘Well, I heard you’re shooting it,’” she said.
Layne’s friend Ron Holt, who had his own struggles with heroin, said, “There’s something that happens when you’re an addict, where it becomes bad and you want to stop. And you do want to stop, even if you stay realistic about it and you accept it. Before you acquiesce, there are points where you try to stop, and you say, ‘I’m going to stop … my record label wants me to,’ whatever.” Holt added, “You draw a line in the sand, but you break it. And then you do it again, and you do it repeatedly. You do it so many times that at a certain point in your head, you go, ‘I can’t fucking even promise myself. What is the fucking use?’ So you start losing your faith in your ability.
“And so you hang on, so when you find something that you can do or you can hang on to, you tend to overemphasize it, shut everything else that you fail at out.” As Holt explained, “Pretty soon, what happens is that you’re in this mind-set too long that when you finally get clean, like when I did, I found out, ‘Wow! I’m not Ron Holt the Conqueror or creative guy anymore. I’m this beaten-down, frightened person.’ I think that’s what Layne became. I think that he could have, and probably somewhere desired to, create more than he did.”
At some point during this period, Layne went to rehab for the first time. Though he’d had issues with drugs during his teen years, Jim Elmer had no idea how serious his drug use was until he got a phone call from management telling him, “We need to have an intervention.”
“That’s when it really sunk in that this is real serious,” he said. He spoke with Susan, who wanted a family member present to show support. Elmer thinks Layne’s mother—whom he divorced a few years earlier—was living in Alaska at the time. He agreed to take part in the intervention, which was to be held at Susan’s office, with Susan, the other band members, and at least one person from the band’s record label. In terms of Layne’s reaction, Elmer said, “He was real surprised, because they’re supposed to be a surprise.”
“He didn’t try to run out. He was respectful to the process. Everybody went through their dialogue on their thoughts and concerns and what he meant to the people in the room there. Once we got through that, he consented to go.” He checked himself in that same day.
Based on multiple interviews and reviewing the band’s recording and touring schedule at the time, it would have happened at some point in the second half of 1991 or the beginning of 1992. He went to Valley General Hospital in Monroe, Washington—the same clinic Andrew Wood had checked in to in 1989. The other patients noticed they had a celebrity in their midst.
According to Kathleen Austin, “I go to visit him on a Sunday afternoon. I think Jerry and Sean had been there and left when I got there. I think I saw them. Layne was sitting outside on this picnic table talking, and all of the sudden you hear Alice in Chains music.” Austin says he wasn’t incognito going into the program but that he wanted to keep a low profile.
Someone—presumably another patient—had brought in a copy of the Live Facelift video, and people were watching it in the treatment center during visiting hours, knowing who Layne was and that he was a patient there. “Layne was devastated. He started to cry. Because from that point on, he wasn’t [a] guy with [an] addiction problem going to treatment, he was Alice in Chains,” Austin said. Layne’s mother and stepfather estimated he went to rehab approximately twelve or thirteen times over the years.5
But even with Sap finished and scheduled for release in May, and Layne’s first attempt at rehab, the band was getting ready to write and record the proper follow-up to Facelift. In doing so, they would make their masterpiece.
Chapter 15
The fucking town went up in flames.
BY LATE 1991 OR EARLY 1992, Alice in Chains returned to London Bridge Studios to begin working on a demo for their second album. Rick Parashar would be producing, and Dave Hillis would be engineering. “I think at the time I thought we were actually making a record with them. Like I said, it was always … You never really knew—everything was kind of vague,” Hillis said. The recording sessions for the demo took two to three weeks and were fairly uneventful. According to Hillis, the songs were fairly developed at the time. They may have had working titles, but he doesn’t recall what they were.
Layne had expanded his musical horizons somewhat, possibly as a result of the band’s experience touring in support of Facelift. “With Dirt, I remember Layne getting into Slayer. I don’t know how much that influenced them, but I remember that because Layne would talk to me about that kind of stuff because he knew my background from the earlier metal days and that my band [Mace] had opened for Slayer.”
John Starr was hanging out at the studio while the band was working on the demo. Hillis recalls hearing that there was “kind of an issue” with him being around too much and that maybe the two Starrs were “partying together.” At one point, Mike asked for a rough copy of the material that had been recorded. Parashar told Hillis to make him some mixes. Hillis was excited, because he got to play around with and mix the songs himself. He made a rough mix for Mike, without making a copy for himself—a decision he would regret later on. He ran into Mike years later, who told him, “Man, my favorite version of Dirt is that one I have that you made me!”
Jerry, Nick Terzo, and Dave Jerden were looking at different studios to record the album. They considered San Francisco as a possible halfway point between Seattle and Los Angeles. They had an appointment to look at one studio without telling them who the band was, when the studio manager came in and told them, “Oh, no, you can’t come in today. We have a really important band in.” They passed on the studio, even though it was their first choice. Jerden doesn’t even remember the other band but said they amounted to nothing.