ALICE IN CHAINS

BAND DISCOVERED
Around 1991, one afternoon after school, a classmate introduced me to Facelift by Alice In Chains. The songs Man in the Box and It Ain’t Like That immediately stuck in my mind. As the band began appearing more and more in rotation on MTV and was featured in 1992 with the song Would? on the Singles soundtrack, Layne Staley, Jerry Cantrell, Mike Starr, Sean Kinney, and later Mike Inez became impossible to ignore. The Pacific Northwest rock explosion had completely drawn me in. The Big Four from Seattle went on to define every mixtape through 1996.

The self-titled third album (also known as Tripod) was the last studio album with Layne Staley. At the time, I wasn’t really aware of how heavy and dark the record was—it was more a matter of just going with the flow. For a long time, the vinyl was out of print and only available as overpriced black-market copies. This January, the band officially re-released the album, presented in a remarkably elegant package.