Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Today we have a guest post from the one, the only, the Tall One. Join him on a journey of self-discovery, ecstatic wonderment, and of course, rock.

1.

I saw Alice in Chains perform live on Labor Day.  It was the best concert of my life.

For those who aren’t big fans of the grunge/metal world, AiC’s name may not be that familiar.  They were part of the matrix of early ‘90s bands to rebel against the glam-rock world of the ‘80s, along with Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and Soundgarden.  While AiC was a mainstream band and received national attention, they were always lumped into the larger category of ‘90s grunge rock, and were always in the shadow of the larger bands at the time.

AiC would get famous mostly on the strength of their lead singer, Layne Staley, whose vocal talents would later be emulated by Staind, Godsmack, Tantric, and even Creed in their early work, and the morbid focus of their lyrics.  In their active period from 1990 to 1996, AiC recorded three EPs and three full-length albums, toured on two big occasions, and shut up shop after their MTV unplugged special in 1996, mostly due to Staley’s heroin addiction.  He would die of it in 2002.  Staley’s death and the band’s limited catalogue and touring exposure gave AiC a sort of cult following for years after they stopped playing.

But I didn’t know any of that.

2.

From the time I was a kid, music formed my strongest connection to raw emotion: it was the artistic filter I used to explore my own feelings and express my identity to the world.  Despite this, I never listened to the radio much, because the stations I got at home in the mid ’90s were lousy, and I didn’t have money of my own to buy albums I hadn’t heard.   My parents, especially my mom, was a huge fan of the rock masters of the ’60s and ’70s, and that translated into some love for newer artists, but the only time I was regularly exposed to a variety of music was through the radio in my mom’s car, or when my older brother, Matt, brought home a new album.

Matt is four years older than me and got into AiC around his twelfth or thirteenth birthday. His first album was Dirt, AiC’s 1992 release, which would eventually go on to become their best selling album (four times platinum).  It’s a good thing my mom was musically permissive–Dirt is a rough album, full of references to murder, death, addiction, depression, and suicide.  It also had intense guitar riffs, a slow, heavy, crunching sound, and sweet minor-note harmonies between Staley and Cantrell.  Matt and I must have listened to Dirt at least a couple hundred times between 1992 and 1995, when the next studio album came out, but I wasn’t old enough to really listen to the songs at the time.  They were a constant background noise while my brother and I played video games, or Necromunda, or went on family vacations.  Even though I heard all of the songs on Dirt so many times that I could sing all of them by the time I was ten or eleven, and had read the lyrics a couple of times just to make sure, I had no clue what the words I sang meant.  I did not live in a family that exposed me to substantial trauma, so lyrics from songs like “Down in Hole”, couldn’t mean anything to me as a ten year-old.

My love for AiC was initially a way for me to emulate my brother.  While Jerry Cantrell’s guitar work was truly boss and Staley’s voice was a great backdrop to Warhammer 40,000, I loved AiC because it was what my older brother liked.  When I was a kid, I wanted to be like him in every way, and so if he liked AiC, well then it was damn certain that I was going to like them, too.  By the time I was in high school, though, I had come to love AiC of my own volition.  We played that poor cassette tape so much, over so many years, that Dirt started to get into my soul.  Mom eventually had to get the CD because the tape got so worn down it wouldn’t play.

The first album I got with my own money was Facelift, AiC’s first album, released in 1990.  I bought it when I was probably twelve or thirteen myself, six years after it first debuted.  Matt was in high school then and had a driver’s license.  I didn’t get to spend as much time hanging out with him because he had shows to do (he’s an actor), friends of his own to hang out with, and ladies to chase.  So, I did what I always did with AiC music–I listened to it when I played my nerd games, and I just picked a new audience with whom to share it.  My friend Will, who spent a lot of time in my house in early high school, got roped into listening to Facelift an awful lot during particularly epic bouts of Necromunda, Gorkamorka, or Warhammer.  All of the activities that I remember shaping the friendships of my past have Layne Staley’s voice wailing through them as a backdrop.

Just as with Dirt, I never really paid too much attention to what Staley was actually singing about in most of the songs on Facelift.  I found specific sections of each song that I really liked–a particular guitar riff here, a bridge there, or a single harmonized set of lyrics that I could belt out when I was at home by myself.  I still feel compelled to sing along with the harmonized breakdown of “Sunshine” (at the 2:50 mark).  But just as they had a few years prior, the deeper purposes of these songs–the reasons they were written in the first place–still eluded me.  I wasn’t old enough to understand them, and I had started to imprint my own experiences onto each song.

AiC’s last studio recording, Alice in Chains came out in 1995, but since the internet didn’t exist then and I didn’t have a peer group that hung out regularly at record stores, its release didn’t register on my radar.  At some point, my brother bought this album also, but it felt like it made its entrance into my world slowly–like the songs on it percolated through Dirt and into my life.  I know the album was released in 1995 because Wikipedia and Amazon say so, but I couldn’t point to a time when Matt and I eagerly ran down to Tower Records, bought the cassette, and ran back home to listen to it, sitting enraptured in front of mom’s sound system in the living room.  I do remember, though, attaching the arms on a squad of space marines while listening to “Grind” on my little broken boom-box in our basement.  I have hundreds of memories like that one (they don’t all involve Space Marines, though many of them do).

After being exposed to art for long enough, I feel like it becomes mine because I have memories and emotions associated with it.  Sometimes, the original intention of the work and my connection to it is very much in line with one another, like my experience of the movie 12 Angry Men, which I first saw in middle school as I was learning about civics.  Sometimes, my ownership of art has little to do with the original intentions of its makers.  AiC falls in this second category.  I didn’t have a lot of personal experiences to relate to the lyrics in AiC’s songs, but because they were the constant soundtrack to my life, I started associating other memories with their songs in middle and high school.

My family didn’t get cable TV until my brother left for college in 1997 and I was in high school, and by that point Alice in Chains wasn’t on the pop culture map anymore.  I never saw an AiC video until college, when I bought their video collection, and I rarely heard their songs on the radio when I did start to listen more regularly.  I felt like AiC were my secret music to be shared only with my brother, Will, and sometimes my mom.  I never experienced their music as older fans might have, with the filter of the early ’90s grunge scene; the whole of the grunge music movement was over by the time I got my learner’s permit.  My exposure to the music was untouched by outside experiences. I didn’t read reviews of AiC’s albums (because I didn’t know there were any), I didn’t get to see live shows (because AiC wasn’t touring), and I didn’t know which songs were singles (because they didn’t get airplay in 1997 or later).  I didn’t know, until I started doing some basic research on the band for this post, that they were nominated for six grammy awards, sold fifteen million records, or that Layne Staley was ranked the twenty-seventh greatest vocalist by Hit Parader magazine.  I didn’t know and it didn’t matter to me, because I didn’t see AiC as a band. They were a part of my family, a pre-existing force in my life.  The power they had for me was the ability to immediately conjure up the emotions and memories of ages eight through eighteen.  Hearing “Them Bones” will usually transport me back to my parents’ basement, where Will and I pushed little plastic escher and goliath gangers towards each other on flimsy papercard scenery.  Hearing “Man in the Box” will remind me of driving with my dad out to Milford Amusements for what must have been my eleventh birthday with four or five of my friends in the back seat of the car.  This music wasn’t normal music in that it was made by people and recorded on devices.  This was music made by my past, and firmly ensconced there.

3.

I don’t process ambiguity well, and I constantly search for meaning and purpose in life and music as a way to get rid of the uncomfortable feeling of not understanding what’s going on around me. As I got older, I started to intellectually understand AiC a little better, but I still couldn’t get the music fully.  I formed my own relationships with their songs, but I felt like I was missing a big chunk of what AiC was about and how they touched their fans, because I couldn’t personally relate to the explicit messages about addiction, depression, and degradation.  By my early 20s, I had started to feel like an imposter for loving AiC.  I was claiming as my favorite band a group, made famous because their music almost dripped with pain and misery, because they reminded me of happy childhood memories?  Something there just didn’t work in my head.

4.

The best rock concerts don’t just give fans a space to share their enthusiasm for a band, although jumping around, singing, and celebrating with a mass of people is primal good times.  The best shows let the audience into the world of the artist, to empathically live the emotions that are the foundation of all good music, and experience the catharsis that comes from sharing powerful feelings with others.  If I didn’t have personal experiences that mirrored the content of AiC’s songs and couldn’t relate to them directly, maybe I could access the emotions behind them by understanding out of what personal pain their songs had come.  Experiences are unique, but emotions are universal.  Because AiC had effectively stopped touring in 1995 and Staley was dead, I just assumed that I would never have the chance to feel that catharsis with them, and as a result, the secret weight of all of their songs would be locked away from me.

In 2006, unbeknownst to me, AiC decided to do exactly what I had hoped: they reformed, and tapped singer William DuVall for lead vocals (the other bandmates are very careful not to say that he is “replacing” Staley).  In 2009, the band announced (again, unbeknownst to me, since I wasn’t in the habit of checking in on bands that had been inactive for fourteen years) that they would be releasing a new album in September, just a couple of weeks after my 26th birthday.

5.

When I found out that AiC was playing at the Paradise Rock Club on Labor Day this year, I wasn’t sure what to expect.  I had seen some pictures of Jerry Cantrell, so I knew vaguely what he looked like, but William DuVall was a complete unknown to me, as were (to my shame) the other band mates.  Sean Kinney and Mike Inez have both been with the band for over sixteen years, and Kinney was one of the founders along with Cantrell and Staley, but just like it wasn’t important to me as a kid what the lyrics of the songs were actually about, it wasn’t really all that important to know who the band was. Other ten year-olds in my middle and high school didn’t listen to AiC, and wouldn’t have been impressed with my knowledge of them.

Tickets were long gone even before I’d heard about the show, so I headed over to Paradise on Monday night to see if I could get lucky with scalpers.  I did, and managed to find myself a ticket.  The face value was $37.50, I paid $160, but after hearing what some other people in line had paid for their tickets, I didn’t feel so bad about dropping the cash.  But then again, I’ve been waiting since I was a kid to see this show.  How much should childhood cost?

Fourteen years is a really long time.  It’s twice as long as the band was originally active.  In that time period, the US has switched presidents twice, had two economic downturns, experienced several national tragedies, started two wars.  On a personal level, I graduated from three different levels of school, got my degree, my first job, met, fell in love with, and was dumped by my first girlfriend, switched apartments three times, got fired, found a new job, ran a marathon, and got into graduate school.  The last time AiC released an album, I couldn’t ride Superman at Six Flags.  For that matter, Six Flags wasn’t even Six Flags yet, it was still Riverside New England.  For all that change in life, AiC was the constant music I had to process it.  This wasn’t a show about AiC’s music, this was a show about my music that they just happened to write.  But now I would be coming face to face with the men who did write it.  Would this change the way I looked at my own childhood?

The crowd outside of Paradise was pretty diverse, but there were a lot of guys and girls roughly my age.  I talked to a couple who were near me as we waited to get in, and they hinted at the same sort of feeling I had about AiC: for some reason, the band’s music had become inextricably bound up in their lives for over a decade, and they wanted a chance to experience the catharsis that only comes with celebrating something like that with a mass of people.  They wanted, like I did, to actually see the guys of AiC, and find out who it was that made this art that played such a large part in our worlds.

Paradise is a great dirty-rock venue because it’s small, intimate, dirty, and has cheap beer.  The whole place only holds a couple hundred people at most.  If I had known about the tour earlier, there’s a chance I could’ve found another venue to see AiC, like the Fillmore in New York, but I don’t think I would’ve wanted to.  I wanted to be part of a crowd that was passionate and present, and that’s what I got.

On a purely technical, non-emotional level, the show was great.  The band was crisp and on target.  Jerry Cantrell really can play the guitar as well as it sounds on the recorded albums, and DuVall didn’t miss a note all night, even the really high ones.  I think someone who didn’t have the history with the band still would’ve thought it was a damn good rock concert.  But I don’t think anyone there just showed up out of curiosity.  AiC attracts people around the country like me, who are yearning to reconnect to the music that formed the backdrop of their youth, and do so with the creators they were never able to see when the music first came into their lives.  I wanted to experience this music communally, which I could never do once the band stopped touring when I was twelve.  And connect away I did: I knew that DuVall was singing, but I had to focus hard to hear him over the 400 fans who were drowning him out, including me.

I got what I was looking for in these songs at last; it just took seeing Jerry Cantrell actually singing for me to find it.  A verse from the song “No Excuses” hit me hard in the gut at the show, as I watched Cantrell and DuVall harmonizing:

Yeah, its fine
We’ll walk down the line
Leave our rain, a cold
Trade for warm sunshine
You my friend
I will defend
And if we change, well I
Love you anyway

“No Excuses” is one of my favorite AiC songs, and I’ve been listening to it for fifteen years, and it’s always felt bittersweet to me, though I couldn’t explain why.  After the concert, I went online to do some research about the song to see if I could find out where those emotions came from, and I did: Cantrell wrote this song about his relationship with Staley in 1994, when the band was in a nasty rough patch before releasing the last album.  One of my favorite AiC tunes, one of their big singles, too, and one of the first songs of theirs I tried to replicate on my own guitar, was a paen to a now-dead bandmate and beloved friend.  I saw the emotional weight there, naked as hell, when they actually played.  Even the title, “No Excuses,” is more powerful now that I know it was written to Layne, whose addiction was both killing him and crippling the band.  I am exceptionally lucky that I can’t directly channel the loyalty and grief that Cantrell was sharing, but I can relate to trying to be a good friend to someone who’s going through tough issues.

A recorded song is a beautiful artifact, but it’s not alive.  AiC has been a part of my life since I’ve been old enough to have memories, but their music has always been an artifact to me, albeit an exceptionally important one.  Coming face-to-face with the human creators of this artifact made it human, and made the songs themselves human, too.  Instead of just hearing the wailing guitars and wah-wah pedals on “Rain When I Die,” now that I’ve actually seen Cantrell’s and Inez’s and Kinney’s faces, I can feel the despair also.  Feeling that sudden rush of emotions in a giant crowd that was also feeling them was the closure I was seeking from this music for 14 years.  I left the show buzzing, a little numb, and partially deaf (emotional pain or no, Cantrell plays that business loud).

I’m excited for the new album, and I’ll be one of the first in line to pick it up when it comes out on the 26th, but I don’t expect it to have the type of resonance that the older stuff does.  Maybe I’ll change my mind in another fourteen years.