It couldn’t be clearer that they mirror his life at that moment, but frankly, it’s good to hear him at all. The lyrics are raw, dark, and honest, trademark Alice in Chains: “We chase misprinted lines / We face the path of time / And yet I fight, yet I fight / This battle all alone / No one to cry to / And no place to call home.” It’s both a bummer and a relief to hear Staley, their writer, deliver them. Sean Kinney’s drums lock in right before Staley begins to sing as if no time has passed and they’ve been doing exactly this for the past three years. Inez joins in with impeccable electro-acoustic basswork. Opening with “Nutshell”, from the 1994 EP Jar of Flies, Cantrell manages to strum the first chords (and all further chords) without throwing up. They blow everyone’s expectations out of the water. Starting with the first song, though, Alice in Chains don’t merely squeak out a show. Studio execs would be forgiven for being more than a little concerned. Mike Inez was trolling the newly shorn members of Metallica, who were sitting right up front, with a message scrawled on the front of his bass: “FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS GET FRIENDS HAIRCUTS…”. Songwriter and guitarist Jerry Cantrell had eaten a bad hot dog and was barely staving off the effects of food poisoning (if you’re watching the show, you can spot a trash can next to him). By all accounts, Staley was high but just high enough so that he wasn’t actively in withdrawal and could function in public. Combining the long break with the band’s numerous personal obstacles during the actual show was a major risk, and the night could’ve easily gone south. MTV had been after Alice in Chains to do an Unplugged taping for some time, and they finally agreed, rehearsing first in Seattle and then New York. (This would be the group’s last studio release to feature Staley in a 2018 interview, Cantrell called it “the sound of a band falling apart”.) They did not tour in support of the album. Due to his heroin addiction, Staley would frequently miss sessions, and the band, who had drifted apart, wrote much of the material in the studio, stretching the recording time to four months. The recording of their previous album- Alice in Chains, released in November 1995-was painful and prolonged. It’s the only one we’ve done in three years.” Staley laughs and says, “Well, it’s still the best.”īefore Unplugged, Alice in Chains had indeed been offstage for about two and a half years. One of Staley’s bandmates, it’s unclear who-responds, “Layne, it’s…the only one. MTV aired the show on 28 May, and the live album version was released by Columbia Records on 30 July, eventually going platinum in the US. Again, it's a case of an Unplugged album that is designed to attract the band's core audience, which makes it a fairly entertaining effort that is essentially just an official bootleg.“I would have to say that this is the best show we’ve done in three years,” Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley announces during the band’s MTV Unplugged performance, recorded on 10 April 1996, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Majestic Theatre in New York. The acoustic arrangements of the harder songs sound like novelties, and the rest sound like rehashes of their previous work, only without much energy.
ALICE IN CHAINS MTV UNPLUGGED FULL ALBUM PROFESSIONAL
During the concert, Alice in Chains drew from their three albums and two EPs, offering new, more reflective arrangements for harder songs like "Would?" and virtually re-creating the original versions of "Got Me Wrong" and "No Excuses." Throughout the album, the group sounds tight and professional - on the basis of this performance, it's hard to believe that they hadn't played together for nearly three years - but it doesn't offer anything that the albums don't already. There's a variety of reasons for their inactivity - primarily it's due to the health of certain members - but the lack of concerts made the Unplugged performance seem special.
Between the end of 1993 and a performance for MTV Unplugged in the spring of 1996, Alice in Chains performed no concerts - they didn't even support the release of their eponymous third album with a minor tour.
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