On April 10, 1996, Layne Staley, Jerry Cantrell, Mike Inez, and Sean Kinney (with Scotty Olson in support) reunited Alice In Chains for the first time in two and a half years for a live acoustic performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Majestic Theater. The music recorded that evening has been in heavy rotation in my personal catalog for almost 28 years and remains as fresh as the first time I heard it, perhaps even more so if that’s possible. The album opens with a slow burn intro of the song Nutshell, as each band member takes the stage and picks up their instrument adding layers to it. The song ends and after a brief pause, the unique chords that open the song Brother can be heard, and after several minutes of the most beautifully hypnotic sounds I’ve ever heard, Layne breaks the spell that the audience is under with a very simple “thanks.” 6 years later, Layne Staley would die alone in his apartment, and his body not be discovered for days. His bank would trigger the discovery when his account had been inactive for two weeks. It’s one thing to die alone. It’s another level of alone when your accountant is the first to notice your absence. What’s so hard to accept is this is the way he “wanted” it. And for this reason, to this day, I cannot listen to Alice In Chains without feeling profound sadness. But I love the way their music sounds way too much to not listen. Listening to tracks like Them Bones, Man In the Box, and Would? Instantly transports me back to my dorm during my freshman year of college to the point that I can remember the way that building smelled. Seattle grunge music was blowing up in 1992, but each of the bands that were a part of this revolution had very unique sounds. Unique from other rock bands, and unique from each other as well. Of the four main pillars, the other three being Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden; the band with the most unmistakably distinctive sound was Alice In Chains. Their voices and heavy reliance on tritone harmony was instantly recognizable, yet nearly impossible to categorize even from song to song. It’s equally present when you listen to the sweet pain in the acoustic performance of Brother that I linked to above as it is in the raw contempt for drug abuse in the song Junkhead. Staley isn’t advocating for drug use in this song at all, though it would be easy to make that mistake. He’s mimicking the arrogance of those who are in the early stages of addiction, thinking they are in complete control and feeling superior to the squares who look down on them. And the thing that amazes me to this day is the specific way they employ three part tritonal harmony in the chorus; making a song about something so ugly sound like the most beautiful music in the world to me. What I didn’t know back then was that the lyrics Staley delivered in those incredibly gorgeous and equally tense sounding tritones were the contents of a note he could have written to be found with his already decomposing body in his apartment. He didn’t write most of the lyrics for Alice In Chains songs, that was Jerry Cantrell. But he wrote plenty of them and the ones he didn’t write he sang as though he were living them. The tragedy of Layne Staley is that he knew he was self destructing and was unable to stop it.
Two years prior to Alice In Chains appearance on Unplugged, I was in my sophomore year of college. Grunge music still dominated my imagination. Then in April, Kurt Cobain died, and Nirvana released its final album which was their iteration of Unplugged. Nirvana’s swan song is that album and the video of that performance. Nirvana didn’t get together to play their greatest hits that night. They played a set that paid tribute to what inspired them to be musicians, with a few songs of their own sprinkled in.
The musical pioneers of our generation were already leaving us, but doing so with the kind of farewell that ensured they would live forever.
That summer I went to a movie theater to see Wyatt Earp. While many were gushing over Tombstone, I hadn’t seen it yet, and I was introduced to the story of the Earps and Doc Holliday via Kevin Costner and Dennis Quaid instead of Kurt Russel and Val Kilmer. I don’t know when I was introduced to the concept of nihilism, but this movie laid it out plain for me. You know how sometimes folks say “explain it to me like I’m in 3rd grade.”
Costner’s Earp is a teetotaler; having exorcised demons that came to him in the aftermath of his first wife’s sudden passing. His “breaking the fast” moment here is brought on by his guilt over his inability to love his 2nd wife the way she needs to be, and it’s driving her to destroy herself. Despair is the door the devil uses to whisper poisonous thoughts into our consciousness. If they take root, you get to become a helpless witness to your own self destruction. Wyatt flirted with such a fate in the first act of the movie, and now even considering that he is driving Maddie to the same place has him contemplating a return to the abyss for himself. Doc’s version of consoling someone in such a place is to assure him that little of it matters or has any meaning and he shouldn’t be burdened by it.
He’s not in Hell, but he can see it from here.
~2000 years ago in Capernaum, a troubled Jewish woman named Lil told her bartender that she was in Hell. At least this is how it is portrayed in the first episode of The Chosen which I started watching last year. Earlier in the episode, Lil shows a palpable fear of Roman soldiers, strongly implying she’s been assaulted, possibly sexually. Her behavior is at times normal, and at other times unpredictable….sometimes violent toward others, sometimes more self destructive. She’s caused such a disturbance that religious leaders are implored to perform an exorcism that fails. Lil’s demons speak directly to the exorcist telling him there is nothing he can do for her. She wants to die just to put a stop to her suffering and views any attempt to help her as misguided. To Lil, those who intend to help would only prolong her suffering. Then she meets someone who changes it all.
Superman was born in comic books as a pop culture surrogate for Jesus. Superman has a problem that is often talked about for all superheroes, but never really solved. There’s too much disaster going on in the world for any Superhero to save everyone. Follow that through to its logical conclusion and what you end up with is a world divided between those who love the hero for being there and those who hate the hero for not making it on time. What if Superman could save everyone? Follow that through to its logical conclusion and you have a world that sees no need to be good because Superman will take care of everything. It’s easy to envision humanity questioning its own worth when they need Superman just to get through the day. This is fertile soil for the devil’s poisonous seeds to take root in the hearts and minds of humanity.
This, I suspect is at the root of why so many might struggle with what Jesus is shown doing for Lil when he calls her by her real name, Mary Magdalene and redeems her from the grip of demonic thoughts.
It’s fitting that Superman, the crusader for truth, justice and the American Way is a complete misinterpretation of the Gospel. But such errors are as American as the Kent’s from Smallville, Kansas are the “American Gothic” image personified.
We struggle with what it means for Jesus to be our savior. He’s not Superman. He won’t swoop in to save Lois Lane from a helicopter falling off the roof of the Daily Planet building. It might look like he’s doing a variation of that for Lil/Mary. But for her that is only the beginning. She’s been redeemed so that she can become an apostle, someone capable of doing for others what Jesus was able to do for her.
Just a few months after Alice In Chains Unplugged performance, Layne Staley lost his girlfriend to a heroin overdose. Staley had already been deep in the throes of his own struggles with addiction, but the part of him that wanted to overcome it still inhabited enough of his psyche to keep him engaged with the world. Until this happened. Staley’s heart and mind died that day, and what followed was six years of him waiting alone in his apartment for his body to catch up.
Former Alice In Chains bass player Mike Starr was the last to see him alive, the night before he died. Starr begged him to let him call 911. His dying friend became angry and threatening. They fought and Starr left. Superman wasn’t coming to save the day, and the dying musician would have told him to fuck off if he did.
Despair is the door the devil uses to dump poisonous thoughts into our brains. Waiting for Superman gives him the time and space to do such work. What I see in The Chosen is not to wait for Jesus as a surrogate for Superman either. It’s that Jesus is waiting for me. The tragedy of Layne Staley is submitting to the belief that nobody could have done anything for him. Maybe that is true, but that doesn’t mean we are freed from the obligation to try. It doesn’t mean that Mike Starr’s attempts to save Layne from himself were in vain. What was in vain was that Starr didn’t learn how to save himself either as he suffered a similar fate several years later.
All of this leads people to draw conclusions about those in a place like Staley. Just as silly as seeing Superman as a cool Jesus in tights, it is equally off base to see Layne Staley as the sum of his mistakes, robbing his legacy of the humanity that made music that was never imagined before and will never be done again. There is so much we can learn about ourselves from trying to see that humanity in everyone suffering such a fate, whether they have already passed on or are still here.
