Alice in Chains recorded Dirt from April to July 1992 at Eldorado in Burbank, One on One in Los Angeles, and London Bridge in Seattle, and the city outside was literally burning. The 1992 LA riots forced the band out of the studio at least once during the sessions. You can hear something of that siege atmosphere in the finished record, a quality of walls closing in, of the outside world becoming irrelevant because the inside world is already catastrophic enough. The album came out September 29, 1992, on Columbia Records, co-produced by Dave Jerden and the band themselves, and it peaked at number six on the Billboard 200. It has since gone five times platinum. None of those numbers tell you what it actually is, which is a record that works as a single sustained argument from its first bar to its last.
The argument begins with "Them Bones." Jerry Cantrell said he wrote the song about mortality, about the fact that one day we all end up a pile of bones. It arrives in an odd time signature, all lurch and skitter, and it does not ease you in. Sean Kinney's drums and Mike Starr's bass set a foundation that sounds less like rhythm than like something collapsing in slow motion. Then "Dam That River," then "Rain When I Die," and by the time "Sickman" arrives as track five, the album has established its terms clearly: this is a record about the body as a site of damage, about the gap between knowing what is happening to you and being able to stop it. Cantrell has said that "Sickman" came together after Layne Staley asked him to write the sickest, darkest, most heavy thing he could. Cantrell obliged. The result is the sound of a man describing his own dissolution with a clarity that is more unsettling than any amount of screaming would be.
The pivot point of Dirt, and the thing that keeps it from being simply harrowing, is "Rooster." Cantrell wrote the song while staying in a spare room at Chris Cornell's house in Seattle, turning over his estranged relationship with his father, a Vietnam veteran whose childhood nickname was Rooster. The song is written from the father's perspective, tracking the experience of combat and survival. It is the one moment on the album where the subject is not addiction, and its placement at track six, at the center of the record, is not accidental. It gives Dirt a kind of structural breathing room, a reminder that the suffering being documented here has roots deeper than a single bad habit, that it runs through families and through history. "Rooster" spent twenty weeks on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Tracks chart and peaked at number seven. The video, directed by Mark Pellington, intercut combat footage with an interview with Cantrell's actual father, who had never spoken publicly about Vietnam before. Cantrell later described writing the song as the start of the healing process between himself and his father.
The back half of the record tightens the screws again. "Junkhead" and "God Smack" are, in Cantrell's own words, the most openly honest songs about the band's heroin period. Then comes the title track, where Cantrell handed Staley a piece of music and later said he had never given him anything without knowing Staley would make it the most devastating thing he'd heard. Tucked between "Hate to Feel" and "Angry Chair," both written solely by Staley, who also played guitar on them, is the hidden track "Iron Gland," featuring Tom Araya of Slayer doing a brief, absurdist riff on Black Sabbath's "Iron Man." It is forty-three seconds of dark humor in the middle of a record that otherwise has none, and it lands like a pressure valve, a tiny acknowledgment that the band knew exactly how deep they were going. Staley writing two songs by himself was new for Alice in Chains. Cantrell has said he was proud watching Staley grow as a songwriter. Those two tracks are among the most interior things on the album, and they feel that way.
Then "Down in a Hole," then "Would?" The closing track is the one that complicates everything. "Would?" was written by Cantrell about Andrew Wood, the vocalist of Mother Love Bone, who died of a heroin overdose in 1990. It was recorded before the rest of Dirt, initially for Cameron Crowe's film Singles, and it was released as a single in June 1992, months before the album arrived. So the song that closes the record was the first one the public heard, and it was already a eulogy. Placing it last turns the album into a kind of circle. You begin with "Them Bones" and mortality as abstraction, and you end with "Would?" and mortality as a specific person who is already gone, someone Cantrell knew, someone who died the same way the album keeps circling. The question in the title hangs there without an answer, which is the only honest way to leave it. Dirt is not a record that resolves. It is a record that documents, and it trusts you to sit with what it has shown you.
