I’m letting all my friends at 11W in on a little secret today. When I’m picking the topic for TIMH, I usually review a bunch of rock and roll blogs and publications. There are quite a few, and some maintain lists of birthdays, deaths, album releases and significant events in rock history. From those, I usually, but not always, pick an artist that I’m pretty familiar and on good terms with. It helps to like the music you’re talking about. Most days, a topic just leaps off the screen and practically begs to be chosen. But, more frequently than you’d think, the best you can find is something like Alicia Keys and Andy Cox (English Beat/Fine Young Cannibals) sharing a birthday – like today, in fact. It’s not that either of those anniversaries isn’t worthy of my words and your two minutes of attention, but neither has enough gravitas for me. So, in the adventurous spirit of rock and rollers everywhere, I picked through the record bin and chose the release of an album I didn’t know much about, by a group with which I had only passing familiarity, because the title was too damned cool to pass up. Then, I listened to it. And, listened to it again. Why hadn’t anyone told me about this???!!!
Jar of Flies is a 7-cut EP released by underrated Seattle grunge/metal band Alice in Chains on this date 22 years ago. It’s a mostly acoustic work written and recorded during a single week in September, 1993. Folklore has it that coming off months on the Lollapalooza tour, the band dragged their carcasses home to find they’d been evicted. Having previously booked recording time, they simply moved into the studio. No matter how or when the plan was hatched, the group intended to just jam together on their acoustics and see what happened. Everything was recorded, but they didn’t intend that the public should ever hear the sessions. Nothing more than a little guitar riff by Jerry Cantrell had even been written. Not one song. What the band did have that week was some kind of spiritual, creative mojo. Recording engineer Toby Wright described the process:
“They’d [Jerry Cantrell, Sean Kinney, Mike Inez] go out on the floor and jam, and I’d just hit record,” said Wright, noting that most of the EP was recorded on Digital Audio Tape because a conventional 2-inch tape back then would only hold about 16 minutes. “They’d get a little form together, go out and jam it, and send it upstairs to Layne [Staley] who was anxiously awaiting. He’d write lyrics and melody and come down with a little demo on, I think, a four-track recorder. We’d all listen and go, ‘Hell yeah!’ Then he’d run back upstairs and keep going. It was a very positive attitude from everybody.”
The result was an accidental masterpiece. And, when they heard the demos, the record company agreed. The upshot: certified triple platinum; the first EP to debut at #1 on the Billboard 200; AIC’s first #1 album and first #1 single, a monster hit that emerged from Cantrell’s riff, “No Excuses”.
Jar of Flies is just plain gorgeous. It is by turns folky, dark, poppy, creepy, edgy and lyrical. It is amazing – what rock and roll in the 60s and 70s aspired to spawn. I'm probably preaching to a choir of people who were already singing these hymns. Good thing I'm not too old to "get religion".
