Get Born Again

So last night, for the first time in my life, I got to see Alice in Chains play live.  They’d never come to Peoria before, and their touring days were basically done for the then-foreseeable future by the time I got really interested in them.  They’ve remained a favorite band of mine ever since I was sixteen, when I got my first CD player and my first CD. 

I asked for an Alice in Chains CD on… not really a whim, necessarily, but not with any particular motive, either.  I’d heard a number of their songs (“Man in the Box”, “Rooster”, “Over Now,” and “Heaven Beside Me” come immediately to mind) on the radio, and I liked what I’d heard.  And their name stuck with me.

Prior to this, I’d listened pretty exclusively either to my parents’ music, or whatever I could manage to record (on tape – how quaint!) from the radio.  But it was getting harder and harder to find most new artists on cassette, CDs offered less hassle and greater portability, not to mention better sound.

This first CD was the band’s latest at the time, and would turn out to be their last for several years, as they went on hiatus.  I worked my way through their discography basically in reverse, literally.  I bought their CDs as I could, from latest to earliest.  This wasn’t something I planned, or did for any reason other than that it was just how I found them.

I could never put my finger on why I liked their music so much.  But that’s me, in a nutshell, when it comes to things I like.  I can never explain why things have an impact on me, at least not without a lot of thought and the benefit of hindsight.  I just hear a song, and it sinks into my head, pushes all my buttons; this is how I know I like it.

Their music was darker than I had expected, based on what I’d heard on the radio.  That this didn’t scare me off surprised even me, really.  Their sound was so far off-base compared to what I’d grown up on (Phil Collins, Bruce Hornsby, Fleetwood Mac, James Taylor, and Elton John are the names that come immediately to mind) that I’ve spent a good chunk of the interval wondering just how in God’s name I acquired a taste for this sort of thing.  Alice in Chains gets lumped in with the grunge movement, because they’re from the Seattle area, but they aren’t really a grunge band in the strictest sense (compare them to Pearl Jam or Nirvana or Soundgarden, and you’ll see what I mean).  They’ve been called metal, and there are elements of that in their music, but they weren’t really like much of what metal sounded like at the time, either.  They’ve been called alternative, but that term, helpful as it sometimes is, is pretty much also a cop-out.  “Alternative”, especially in the 90s, applied to everything from Incubus to Creed to R.E.M. to Natalie Imbruglia to the Dave Matthews Band to Live to No Doubt to Primus to… well, you get the picture.  Basically, if it wasn’t heavy metal, or pop, or R&B, and was in any way even vaguely rock-ish, it was bound to get the Alternative label slapped on it.

I think, looking back, that a large part of what I liked about their music was that it felt in a weird way relatable.  Now, this takes some explaining, since I was in high school at the time, and the struggles of the average suburban white kid in high school tend to be pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, to the point that “struggles” should probably be written in scare quotes, in all instances.

Hang on, let me go update my AP Style Guide…

Part of what was interesting in their music was the weird dichotomy of it.  On the one hand, you have songs begging forgiveness for past mistakes and crying out to be understood, or at least not to be misunderstood, and lamenting this feeling of isolation and alienation.  On the other, there are all the songs furiously condemning a society that rejects people for their problems, for failing to slot easily into ready-made roles, for failing to properly align with some nebulous idea of normalcy, and punishes them for having the audacity to be dissatisfied with this state of affairs.   

There were also the songs about the sheer soul-devouring hell of heroin addiction, but I never did relate to these, nor do I expect to, for reasons that I hope should be obvious.

Obviously, being in high school was nothing like the grim and soul-wearying struggle Alice in Chains was singing about, but I sense an inkling of that sentiment in my own life.  Their lyrics felt true, or at any rate felt that, for me personally, they soon would be.

There wasn’t a lot of solace to be found in the music, but sometimes, you don’t need solace, and you don’t need answers, because the solace feels false (and the world only feels that much worse when you eventually have to go wading back into it), and the answers never feel adequate.  It’s not that help is unappreciated, but more like it can never be enough.  Sometimes, the only thing that seems to make the world make sense is the knowledge that someone, somewhere, shares your frustration, your anger, your desperation…   Someone shares it, and even if they can’t answer you, can’t help you, or don’t even know that you exist, you know that you are not alone in feeling the way that you do, and just knowing that, all by itself, can make a difference.  And someone, somewhere, is taking that pain and making amazing music out of it.

I’ve heard the theory before that all art comes from pain.  I don’t want to believe that, sometimes.  It seems unbearable, monstrous almost, to think that all the amazing, beautiful works I’ve enjoyed in my life – every movie that I’ve loved, every song that spoke to me, every lined in every book that ever sent shivers down my spine – were created from the suffering of another person.

At the same time, it makes perfect sense.  Happy people, content people, practically by definition, don’t have that gaping void in their lives to fill that inspires – that demands – that one make art, capital-A Art, in whatever capacity possible.

And the thing is, the more I think about it, the more the idea that art comes from a person’s pain and struggles isn’t necessarily such a bleak and hopeless idea after all.  What could be more comforting than knowing that pain and struggle can be turned into something of real beauty, meaning, and worth?

*             *             *

In April of 2002, the long downward arc of Layne Staley’s personal struggle with heroin addiction came to the bad end everyone suspected and no one could really stop.

I was in the Army at the time, stationed at Fort Lewis, in Washington.  This was about an hour or so from Seattle.  I was a journalist, working on the Northwest Guardian, which was the post paper.  My friend Joe was a photographer, and when it came to the work of taking photos, his bad days were better than my best days were ever going to be.  I say this without jealousy or envy, but to state a simple fact.  I cared much more about writing stories, and I didn’t really “get” photography beyond the absolute basics.  The basics, in this case, being “make sure the picture is in focus and for God’s sake try not to let your hands jitter too badly”.  He was one of the civilians on staff at the paper, and he’d lived in the area for most (if not all) of his life.

I call him my friend in the hope that the feeling was mutual.  It was a strange and awkward time of my life (the obvious joke here being “when has that ever not been true”), and in hindsight, I have to admit that I could be kind of an insufferable shit at times.  I don’t know why.  Sometimes, everything just felt wrong, and I felt wrong right along with it.  I told you Alice in Chains struck a chord with me.

So I was on my way past Joe’s desk for something or other, and he pulled me aside.  This is the conversation as best I can remember it”

“Hey, you listen to Alice in Chains, right?” he asked me.  I told him I did, and wondered where this was going.  “Well, you’re not going to want to hear this, but you should probably know that they found Layne Staley’s body in his apartment yesterday.”

“Oh…  Shit.”  I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“You know who he is, right?” Joe asked.  He looked a little concerned.  “He was the lead singer of—”

“Alice in Chains, yeah.  Um…”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah, I’m just going to go… sit down, I think.”

Which I then did.  It was a strange feeling for me.  I couldn’t claim that I was personally moved by the death.  I had never known the man as anything other than assorted photos in the liner notes of CD inserts, and a tremendously talented voice from the stereo.  But that voice…

In many ways, he is one of the most talented singers I’ve ever heard.  He could go from a grainy, anguished belting-out, to a scream of fury and pain, to a sonorous drone all within the space of one song.  He shared songwriting duties with Jerry Cantrell, the lead guitarist of Alice in Chains and one of the better guitarists currently active, period.  With a few notable exceptions, he wrote most of the lyrics for the band’s last album.  It might help to explain most of that album’s dark, introspective tone.  You can tell from the lyrics that this is the work of a person who has problems with the world.

I couldn’t mourn the man personally, because it didn’t hit me the way deaths in my family have done, striking in the place below and before thinking and understanding, the place where there is only feeling and reaction.  But at the same time, I did feel upset.  Someone who had been important to me had been taken out of the world.

By all accounts, or at least, judging from his interviews, Staley was not a man who enjoyed his addiction.  Maybe he had, once, at the distant beginning.  But he had reached a point where he did heroin for the same reason most people breathe: because some part of his brain told him it was necessary.  He admitted on at least one occasion that he was fairly sure it was going to kill him, and he felt like there was nothing he could do about it.

Like I said: the bad end everybody knew was coming and nobody knew how to stop.

It was hard to listen to Alice in Chains for a while.  Suddenly, the band’s whole body of work sounded to me like one long, pre-emptive obituary for Layne Staley.

I didn’t listen to them for a long while after that.  It just felt strange and uncomfortable, knowing that the owner of the voice coming through the speakers was no longer alive.

*             *             *

Some years and a few jobs after I came home from the Army, one of my supervisors asked me if I’d heard the latest Alice in Chains album.  This was in 2008, and Black Gives Way to Blue had just come out.  I hadn’t been paying attention.  Alice in Chains had gone on hiatus in 1996, when Staley’s heroin problem had become enough of an obstacle that he could no longer perform live or even really record in the studio.  While there had been a couple of new songs released in this interval for a “Best Of” album (itself culled from a boxed collection), titled “Get Born Again” and “Died”, even this had been a struggle to arrange and execute.  The group had disbanded following Staley’s death, and I figured, well, that was it.

“I didn’t realize they had a new album out,” I said to my supervisor, whose name was Brandon.

“Yeah, it just came out like a few weeks ago.  There are a couple songs on the radio.  I think you’d like it.”

I was oddly offended.  “How can they even have an album without Layne Staley?” I asked.  “I mean, he wasn’t just some singer.  He wrote a lot of the lyrics.  He wasn’t exactly the whole band by himself, but still…”

“I know, man, but the new guy they got sounds pretty good.  A lot like Staley, actually.  Just...  Look, just give it a listen.”

For a while, I couldn’t shake the weird feeling of betrayal.  It felt like moving on with the same name was in some way trampling on everything the band had been.  Layne Staley had been an integral part of it.  I mean, if he’d been fired, that would have been one thing.  But this was completely different.  

Eventually, though, I broke down.  I bought Black Gives Way to Blue.  And if I didn’t love it the way I’d loved the self-titled final album before Staley’s death, or Jar of Flies or Dirt before it, it was still good.  The new singer, William DuVall, does sound a bit like Layne Staley, and a little different at the same time.  What’s more important, though, is that Alice in Chains still sounds like Alice in Chains.

That’s the thing I kept thinking as I was at the concert, with the music roaring and my skull shaking, singing along with the lyrics of pretty every song (save for the ones on The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here, which I need to go out and buy soon) and knowing my voice was lost in the crowd, completely inaudible even to my own battered ears, and caring not even one single bit.  The important thing, the best thing, was that Alice in Chains still sounds like Alice in Chains.

And they sounded incredible.