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In the late 80s, Alice In Chains guitarist and vocalist Jerry Cantrell accompanied Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil to a show in Seattle by Canadian punk-rockers D.O.A. and took the opportunity to quiz his fellow six-stringer about a few of his distinctive riffs. Cantrell had two specific tracks in mind. How, he wondered, had Thayil achieved the thunderous low-end riffs that powered early Soundgarden tracks Nothing To Say and Beyond The Wheel? “There’s this thing called drop D tuning,” Thayil told him, revealing the secret that gave his guitar parts their menacing growl. It was information that would change the course of Alice In Chains’ career.
“A short time later, they recorded a demo that contained many of the songs you hear on Facelift and they had a drop D tuning on them,” Thayil recounted in Mark Yarm’s excellent grunge oral history Everybody Loves Our Town. Before they were Alice In Chains, they were a more poppier, hair-metal-y entity who went under the name Alice N’ Chains, but now they had a sound to match the slight tweak in their moniker. “Their first demo owed a little more to Poison than the huge monster they became,” Thayil said. “That really changed when they heard us.”
But like all the greatest bands, Alice In Chains took inspiration from elsewhere and turned it into something entirely their own. Facelift, released 35 years ago this month, is one of the all-time grunge debut albums, a record that helped to reshape the sound of rock as the 80s turned into the 90s. Its meld of fiendish riffs, grinding, Sabbath-y grooves, soaring melodic hooks and powerhouse vocals made Cantrell, frontman Layne Staley, bassist Mike Starr and drummer Sean Kinney huge.
Producer Dave Jerden was a big part of the album’s success, encouraging the band to slow down their tempos to make Cantrell’s imposing riffs hit even harder. It became part of the album’s signature sound. Jerden, who also helmed Jane’s Addiction’s first two records (Ritual De Lo Habitual was released the same month as Facelift), immediately hit it off with Alice In Chains leader Cantrell.
“Jerry and I just saw eye to eye about everything,” he said. “He was in control of the band. I just spent all my time with Jerry up there.” The pair would go partying at Seattle hotspot the Vogue every night, go fishing in Puget Sound in the morning and then head to the studio.
But, for an album where the rhythmical precision was such a core ingredient, there were significant hurdles to overcome. Drummer Kinney had broken his hand in the run-up to recording and the band had drafted in Mother Love Bone’s Greg Gilmore as a replacement. “I was sitting there playing with one hand, guiding him through it,” Kinney remembered. But Jerden was against it, opining that an essential part of the band’s sound had been ripped out and it wasn’t the same. “Luckily, we took a tiny bit of time off. I had the cast on for a while and was like, ‘I can’t miss this’,” Kinney said. “I cut my cast off in the studio and kept a bucket of ice by the drum set and kept my hand iced down and played with a broken hand.”
It was worth it. Released on 28 August, 1990, Facelift became the first mega-selling grunge record, propelled to success by its signature tune Man In The Box, released as a single in January, 1991.
“Alice In Chains were the first band to have radio success in that movement,” declared label A&R Nick Terzo. “Man In The Box broke down tons of doors.” In the liner notes to the 1999 Music Bank box set, Cantrell said the song was pivotal in the evolution of the band’s sound. “It’s when we started to find ourselves,” he wrote. “”It helped Alice become what it was.”
It wasn’t just on radio, either – MTV got behind the video and the floodgates were open for a new wave of darker rock bands. A year later, Nirvana would take full advantage.
By that point, Alice In Chains had turned their sights towards their masterpiece second album Dirt, a record that had its origins in the tour to support Facelift. “We’d had a really successful tour and campaign for Facelift,” Cantrell told Billboard. “It was probably a good 18 months of touring and during that time, I was always collecting ideas. Back then, it was a little handheld tape recorder or a little Tascam four-track you’d dump your ideas into. There were also jams during rehearsals and in dressing rooms and soundchecks.”
By the time Dirt came out in 1992, grunge was a worldwide phenomenon. But Facelift was a major part of it, the record that helped shine a light on the Seattle disruptors who changed the face of 90s music.