Alice in Chains
The Seattle band whose "Man in the Box" broke through on MTV with a talk-box guitar and a wordless howl. Rooted in heavy metal and built on Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell's eerie harmonies, they were one of the darkest bands of the grunge boom. In 1994 their Jar of Flies became the first EP ever to debut at No. 1.
Alice in Chains formed in Seattle in 1987: singer Layne Staley, guitarist and co-vocalist Jerry Cantrell, bassist Mike Starr and drummer Sean Kinney. They took the name from Staley's previous band, Alice N' Chains. Their debut album, Facelift, came out on August 21, 1990, and sold fewer than 40,000 copies in six months. Then MTV put "Man in the Box" into regular daytime rotation, and the album sold 400,000 copies in six weeks. The song's talk-box guitar was producer Dave Jerden's idea, which came to him when Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" played on his car radio on the way to the studio. Staley told Rolling Stone the lyric began as a song about censorship. Then some vegetarian Columbia Records staff told him over dinner how veal calves are raised in small boxes, and he ended up writing about "government censorship and eating meat as seen through the eyes of a doomed calf." Facelift went gold in September 1991.
After the acoustic EP Sap in February 1992 and a bar-band cameo in Cameron Crowe's Singles, Dirt came out on September 29, 1992, reached No. 6, and is their biggest seller, certified 5× platinum. Six of its 13 songs deal with addiction. Starr left after Dirt and former Ozzy Osbourne bassist Mike Inez replaced him. Lollapalooza in the summer of 1993 was the band's last major tour with Staley.
Jar of Flies, another acoustic EP, was written and recorded in a week. Staley said the band "just wanted to go into the studio for a few days with our acoustic guitars and see what happened." Released on January 25, 1994, it sold 141,000 copies in its first week and became the first EP to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Staley relapsed that year, and the band pulled out of a summer tour with Metallica and out of Woodstock '94, citing "health problems within the band." Their self-titled album debuted at No. 1 in November 1995, but they didn't tour behind it. After an MTV Unplugged taping in April 1996, Staley played his last concert that July, opening for the reunited Kiss.
Staley withdrew from public life and was found dead in his Seattle home in April 2002. The band reunited in 2005, with William DuVall joining in 2006. Their US sales now top 30 million RIAA-certified records, and in 2019 Nielsen counted "Man in the Box" as the second most-played song of the 2010s on mainstream rock radio, decades after it first aired on MTV.
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