Alice in Chains recruited its singer by auditioning deliberately terrible replacements in front of him
Jerry Cantrell, Sean Kinney and Mike Starr knew who they wanted on vocals: Layne Staley, who was busy with a funk band. So they held auditions for awful singers right in front of him, hoping he would take the hint. When a male stripper tried out, Staley gave in and joined.
The name came before the band. Staley's earlier glam metal group had been joking about a backstage pass reading Welcome to Wonderland when a friend suggested Alice in Chains. Worried about parents, they spelled it Alice N' Chains, a choice made, one member insists, a year before Guns N' Roses became famous. When Staley later teamed up with Cantrell, he asked his old bandmates for permission to reuse the original spelling.
Cantrell had been thrown out of his family home and was homeless when Staley met him at a Seattle party around August 1987 and let him live at the Music Bank rehearsal studio. Two weeks after forming, the new band was stretching a handful of originals plus Hanoi Rocks and David Bowie covers into a 40-minute set. A promoter offered to pay for demos, but the day before the session police shut the studio in the largest cannabis raid in Washington's history. The eventual demo, The Treehouse Tapes, got them signed to Columbia in 1989.
Their debut album, Facelift, barely moved at first, selling under 40,000 copies in six months. Then MTV put Man in the Box into daytime rotation, and within six weeks it had shifted 400,000. In 1991 it became the first album from Seattle's grunge scene to be certified gold. A drummer's dream about an EP called Sap produced an acoustic record in 1992, featuring Ann Wilson of Heart and Chris Cornell of Soundgarden.
Later that year came Dirt, their darkest and best-selling album, with six of its thirteen songs about addiction. That subject turned out to be tragically real: Staley's substance abuse kept the band largely inactive from 1996 and ended with his death in 2002. The group reunited in 2005, adding William DuVall on guitar and shared vocals the next year, and has since released three more albums.
Source: Alice in Chains
