“The way I look at songs is [not] for myself [but] if I was a different person playing the songs.” After listening to the song, he told Mike, “Okay, now I’m going to play it like I was John Paul Jones playing on the first Led Zeppelin album.”
Sheeley played the bass line for “Ramble On” and handed the guitar to Mike, who tried to match what Sheeley had just played. “I’m more of a technical bass player. Mike was more of a thrasher, which I think made the band, honestly. It was a big part of their sound. So when he took the bass from me, he could not play all the notes I was playing. Out of all the notes I showed him, he took certain ones, and that became the bass line.” They would repeat this process for every song except “Would?” which had already been completed. Sheeley used songs by Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath as a point of reference for Mike to develop his bass lines.
The sound and tone of the bass on the album can be credited not only to Mike but also to Sheeley or Jerden, depending on whom you ask. Jerden bought an electronic piece of gear for nine hundred dollars—whose name and brand he can’t remember—which, when mixed in with Mike’s amplifier setup, would be the sound of the record. “I remember I made it programmable and got a sound on this thing that was great. It was like a growl. We made a program. I named it ‘Mike Starr.’ I don’t know what the piece of equipment is, but whoever’s got it, it probably has a program on it called ‘Mike Starr’ that was the sound of Dirt, the lower end,” Jerden said.
Sheeley offered a similar account but claims he was the one who programmed the settings. “I took a particular piece of equipment down there to One on One that I ran with the Ampeg SVT that gave the signature sound of Mike Starr for that album. I programmed my own setting for that album, and that’s what you hear on the album.”
The band wanted Sheeley to stay in Los Angeles as long as a month, Sheeley said, but he stuck around for only about a week. On one occasion, Sheeley accidentally walked in on Layne shooting up while he was writing lyrics at the studio. According to Jerden, Layne was sneaking out after curfew to score drugs downtown while the riots were still happening.8
Another vivid memory of Sheeley’s is from his first day with the band at One on One. The gear was set up and all four members were supposed to be there, but Sean hadn’t come back the night before. Jerden was not happy, Sheeley said, because they were wasting studio time and eventually decided to call it a day. “So about that time, the door flings open and in comes Sean. His hair was all sticking out, looked like he had stuck his finger in a light socket. He had been out the night before partying in Hollywood.”
“He’d been up probably twenty-four hours, I’m guessing, because he had probably been out drinking all night long and was still on a drinking high,” Sheeley said. “Sean comes in the studio, and everybody’s kind of pissy from him not showing up. It was told to him, ‘Nah, we’re just going to call it a day. You need to go home, get some sleep, and come back,’ blah, blah, blah. And he said, ‘Let me play my drums. Let me just try one song.’”
The studio was set up so everyone’s instruments were in the big room, but the amplifiers and PA were each isolated in separate rooms. Microphones were set up inside the big room to capture Sean’s drums. They went inside and ran through a performance of “Rooster,” and Sean nailed it. Sheeley thinks this first take is the cut that appeared on the album. Jerden and Carlstrom did not recall this, but did not dispute Sheeley’s account.
It was obvious early on that “Rooster”—Jerry’s tribute to his father who served in Vietnam—was special. “The first time I heard it on the demo, it just sent chills up my spine when he starts singing the ‘ooh, ooh, ooh.’ It’s just a great song: the guitars come crashing in. My idea was just to make them gigantic when they came in,” Jerden said. Cameron Crowe was visiting from Seattle, and he was allowed to come into the studio while the band was working on the song.
Production was eventually shut down for a few days as the band members left town to get away from the riots.9 They regrouped and continued recording.
Jerden heard “Them Bones” when the song was in its infancy. “That song is what Alice in Chains is all about, and only Jerry Cantrell could come up with something like that. He played that for me over the phone. We keep in contact, and sometimes he’d call me at three o’clock in the morning and [say] he just wrote a song or something.”
While recording “Junkhead,” Sean—for no particular reason—said the words “junk fuck,” which were picked up by the microphones. While editing the song, Jerden said, “Let’s leave that in there!” Carlstrom put it at the beginning, so it would start the song before Sean’s opening count.
Once the basic drum, bass, and guitar tracks from One on One were finished, production moved to Jerden’s El Dorado Studio, where they would focus on recording vocals, guitar, and bass overdubs, as well as editing and mixing. Annette Cisneros was Jerden’s assistant engineer at El Dorado. According to her personal calendar from this period, the band came to El Dorado on May 19, 1992. The next several days were spent setting up equipment, editing, and transferring the One on One material to forty-eight-track digital tape. From May 26 to May 28, they did bass overdubs. On May 29, the band flew to Seattle for three days to shoot a music video for “Would?”
Josh Taft got tapped to direct the video. Cameron Crowe was there to offer feedback and watch the shoot. Taft said of Crowe, “He was such a positive influence and so supportive, and he just allowed me to sort of run with my instincts. He was there to kind of get everyone on board. At the end of the day, it was for his movie, and he couldn’t have been more inspiring and helpful in the process of making the video and superinvolved.”
The shoot took place at a now-defunct venue called Under the Rail. Duncan Sharp, a local film director, had filmed a scene as an extra of him making out with his girlfriend in the front seat of a car. Layne had to go home at one point in the middle of the shoot. The word on the set was he had to feed his cat and get some aspirin. “I think everybody at that point knew that he had to go home to get high,” Duncan Sharp said. “Everybody was just sort of shaking their heads, like, ‘Yeah, right.’”
Asked to comment, Taft said, “I’m not gonna go any further with what happened in that moment, but we had to stop shooting, and then we started again an hour [or] so later, and you can fill in the blanks.” The excuse about having to feed his cat was a lie. Layne did adopt a kitten, named Sadie, but not until 1994—two years later.
Evan Sheeley got a call from Kelly Curtis, asking if he had a white Spector bass at his store that Mike could borrow for the shoot. Mike wanted one that looked like the bass he normally used, which was in Los Angeles. Sheeley had another white Spector, although it wasn’t the exact same model as Mike’s, but only a serious bass player would have noticed the difference. The guitar was brand new, and Sheeley warned Curtis that if Mike scratched it, he would have to buy it. He taped a diaper to the back of the guitar so Mike wouldn’t scratch it. On top of that, Sheeley had to duct-tape two straps together for Mike to play the instrument, because he played bass extremely low on his body, almost down to his knees.
In retrospect, Taft said of the “Would?” shoot, “It wasn’t the funnest night of my life. It was hard to get it done, and we got it done, and it was good in the end. But that wasn’t the experience of the first time [Live Facelift] and it was all kind of just—the innocence was starting to unravel and get a little more complicated, and you could see it in that room kind of happening. It was tough to watch. I had a lot of respect for those guys. At the time … I considered [Jerry] my friend, and I could sort of see what he was going through to try to keep it going. So I remember feeling a little sad for him for what was looking like it might continue to go that way.”