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What's going on everybody and welcome to Rock N' Roll True Stories and we're back with another Alice in Chains story
You guys seem to love these stories and I love doing them
So let's talk about at least what I refer to as Alice in Chains' lost year and that I want to refer to as 1994
So 1994 should have really been a huge year for Alice in Chains
The band completed a pretty extensive tour in late '93 to support their ' 92 album Dirt which was a huge hit and the band would assemble in Seattle to finish up an EP that took about a week to write and record called Jar of Flies and basically no rest for the wicked
Alice in Chains were set to tour with Metallica in the summer of '94 as well
So Alice in Chains would release Jar of Flies in late January and it would go to number one on the Billboard charts
Now the band also kicked off 1994 with a benefit show at the Hollywood Palladium where they played some of the tracks off of their latest EP as well as some songs from SAP as well
Now it was believed around this time when Layne had relapsed and he had started using heroin again
So the entire show (cut out) did at the fishbone benefit in January of '94 is up on KZfaq
It's a pretty short set
They played about four songs total
They played Am I Inside Brother Nutshell and No Excuses
Now looking at some of the people whose friends had attended the show and even from listening to it the fans who attended the show were a little disappointed because it was a pretty short set and the band didn't really play any of their big hits
You know these songs off of Jar of Flies had just come out so they didn't have time to really go up the charts and a lot of stuff was new to them and according to one poster they said
I had a friend who went to the show
The show was filled with heavy hitters like Primus and Porno for Pyro's and the crowd he said was expecting a mosh filled set including some of the Dirt material Damn That River Them Bones etc
Instead in the middle of this they came out and played this in preview of Jar of Flies
The crowd wasn't too pleased and he said they even chucked some ice and cups at them at the end
Apparently Jerry himself on Rockline pretty much said that it was not a very good show for them and it was rather badly booked and it was one of course Layne's final performances in that period between '94 and '96
Now you can look at some photos of Layne around this time
He's wearing those leather gloves covering his hands which he wore a lot during '95 and '96
If you guys have read the Rolling Stone piece that was done on Layne a lot of heroin addicts will sometimes inject their hands so that's why maybe some people think he was wearing gloves to hide any kind of puncture marks on his hands
Now during this time in 1994 between January up until the point they cancelled their tour with Metallica Layne did make some appearances during that time
He appeared on stage with Tool at the KISW FM's Rock Stock concert where he performed the song Opiate with Tool and now according to one person who was at the show they said that Layne looked sickly and he wore a wool ski mask to hide his face during the performance and according to Rolling Stone they also said in July of '94 Staley along with Chris Cornell of Soundgarden and Peter Klat of Candlebox were elected to Playgirl Magazine's Rock N' Roll Hall of Hunkdom but Staley's appearance had already begun to deteriorate at that point
So in the summer of '94 the day before the start of the tour of Metallica Alice nearly reached the end of their chain
At that time Staley was in his throes of heroin addiction and Sean Kinney was struggling with the bottle
So according to Rolling Stone they said we've just been going full force just running at top speed with our eyes closed says Cantrell peering through half an empty glass of beer
We had been way too close for too long and we were suffocating
We were like four plants trying to grow in the same pot and things got worse when Staley who according to Kinney had just returned from drug rehab came to practice high and in response Kenney threw down his sticks and vowed to never play again with Staley
Cantrell concurred and the tour was canceled and the band parted ways for about six months
Now sadly for those fans wanting to see Alice in Chains open for Metallica the band would end up being replaced by Candlebox instead but James Hetfield of Metallica would actually go on to mock Layne Staley in a 1994 performance because of him having to withdraw due to his drug issues at the time
Here's the clip
You wanna hear a new song
This song is one that Jason wrote
Been alright
This scares me
It's a Jason song so he's gonna have to sing it
Is that okay
I don't get it