Sunglasses disguise his blackened eyes, long sleeves cover scars left behind from shooting up and he awkwardly clutches his hands together as if afraid to emerge from the shadows and take centre stage – quite different from the powerful vocalist we'd come to know and love. The original performance is therefore a chilling look at the tragic downfall of one of rock's most charismatic and enigmatic frontmen from glam rock loving metal star to the epitome of grunge – in the most negative sense of the word: a bedraggled junkie with scruffy pink hair awkwardly shuffles from the back of the stage and takes his seat. Staley overdosed following their concert in Kansas City on July 3 and despite the frontman recovering from the incident AIC were put on hiatus, and other than one brief recording two years later, where the band briefly reunited to record the songs Get Born Again and Died for Music Bank, Alice in Chains never played with Staley again. His final ever performance was in the same year, when Alice in Chains replaced Stone Temple Pilots in an opening slot for the newly reunited Kiss. Not sure what was the thinking here.Alice in Chains Unplugged marked the second to last performance from Staley, who was battling a crippling addiction to heroin that was poignantly chronicled through the band's dark and agonising lyrics. Frogs is by far the weakest cut on dog album. ** They’re not very good songs to begin with.
* And it’s true for every Unplugged album. They had folk influences, but they were integrated in their own transcendent sound. They were heavy and dark even without loud volume and distorted guitars. Even if they had more to do with heavy and doom metal than grunge. So, it was the proper conclusion to the first iteration of the band, where they reaffirmed their identity as the heaviest, darkest band in grunge. Layne Staley was already severely drifting into drug abuse then and he would only get deeper into it until his passing in 2002. I wanted to review Alice in Chains’ Unplugged as part of my retrospective because it really was their last recording for thirteen years. What they lack in power, the band makes up in sadness and frailty. Rooster, Heaven Beside You and Over Now (the album’s only single) in particular were haunting and memorable. Even in their weakened state, the band carries an intensity and a sadness that lifts their darkest songs above the rest. Alice in Chains (in its first iteration) is a band that fueled on powerful, often negative emotions. That song is a serene goodbye and the Unplugged performance is anything but serene. Even No Excuses (which I love) feels out of place so early in the set list. Musically, I thought the cuts from Sap and Jar of Flies couldn’t hold a candle the others. Only two songs on the original broadcast didn’t fit this theme: Rooster (which they HAD to do) and Sludge Factory.įrogs and Killer is Me ** weren’t originally aired on the broadcast. Unplugged is half Alice in Chans’ folk songs like Nutshell, Brother and No Excuses and half doomy, demise-driven anthems. They’re delivered by a weakened, brittle Staley who’s almost immobile on his chair, wearing long sleeves and shades to conceal his predicament. Half of the songs interpreted on Unplugged are some of the band’s darkest and a lot of them deal with Layne Staley’s heroin use or the idea of an ending: Down in a Hole, Angry Chair, Got Me Wrong, Heaven Beside You, Would?, Over Now. Unplugged is perhaps Alice in Chains’ gloomiest album. It’s an album * where the song choice and overall interpretation is more important than the songs played. The main appeal of Unplugged is to put them on equal footing, played in the same style and atmosphere. What makes them fascinating is that the line between the two isn’t always clear, for that folk informs a lot of their song structures and artistic choices. So, Alice in Chains has always been the story of two bands, right? The doom-influenced heavy metal outfit and the folk rockers. If there’s any lesson to be learned from Alice in Chains’ Unplugged, it’s that they never were a freakin’ grunge band to begin with.
It was de facto a funeral for the grunge era and perhaps the least grunge performance from an artist qualified to be grunge. Alice in Chains did that in 1996, one year after releasing what would be their last album with frontman Layne Staley.
Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York is arguably the only relevant cultural artifact from this concept, but there is apparently still people ready and willing to pay to listen to their favorite mainstream artists perform acoustic versions of their songs in an intimate setting. MTV Unplugged concerts have been a thing for over thirty years, now.
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