Jar of flies12/5/2023 ![]() ![]() “Nutshell” is built more upon the strum of an acoustic guitar (with Layne’s haunting vocal stylings being showcased), while “I Stay Away” makes good use of symphonic strings for added dramatic effect. And the album opener, “Rotten Apple”, sets the tone perfectly, with a repetitive, Tool-like bass line, some nifty talk box-effected guitar work, sparse percussion, and Layne announcing straight away, “Innocence is over.” The tune also proved to be the EP’s longest, stretching to nearly seven minutes in length. Songwriting-wise, Staley handled much of the lyrics, while Cantrell handled much of the music, although Inez is credited with co-penning four of the seven tracks - which much have served as a bit of a “trial by fire” for their newest member.Īn EP assembled in such a rapid manner may have left some wondering if Jar of Flies was a throwaway, but it really is the sound of a band decompressing from all that happened to them in the past year. The group assembled at the same recording studio that they had laid down tracks for Sap, Seattle’s London Bridge, on September 7th, 1993 (exactly one month from their final date on Lollapalooza), and as Cantrell explained, remained there for only a week - wrapping on the 14th, before soon resuming the tour in support of Dirt.īut unlike its acoustic predecessor that was produced by the band and Rick Parashar, Jar of Flies solely listed the band when it came to the production credit. We’re still here and shit’s getting better’.” It was like, ‘Cool, we’re moving forward and we’re moving on. “That was a really big turning point – it made sense, because things were looking pretty bleak. Everything you hear on that record was written, recorded, and produced in a week.”ĭrummer Sean Kinney also recounted fond memories of the EP, and what it did for the group’s morale at the time. I think I might have had ‘Don’t Follow’ from the Dirt tour in Europe, when we were just burned – you can feel that in the lyrics. Everybody gets in, and they’re like, ‘OK, what have you got?’ Walked in with nothing, and walked out seven days later with that record – pretty much from scratch. We booked a week and came in off of vacation. He added, “I went on vacation and didn’t play my guitar at all. Before the vacation, the guys were like, ‘We want it to be more of a band thing - so don’t write a bunch of shit to bring in.’ I’m like, ‘OK, that’s cool, no problem’.” I think it was after we had planned on having a vacation. “Between Dirt to the dog record, we were going to do another EP. (Starr would eventually succumb to an overdose in 2011, at the age of 44.) Meanwhile, singer Layne Staley’s struggle with addiction had already been documented in the lyrics to several tunes on Dirt (“Junkhead,” “God Smack,” etc.).īut as guitarist Jerry Cantrell recalled in the book Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music, the writing of Jar of Flies was not mapped out much ahead of time. But this proved to be a chaotic period for the band, as drug abuse ran rampant, resulting in the ousting of original bassist Mike Starr in the middle of the tour for Dirt, with Ozzy bassist Mike Inez signing on as his replacement. With a brief break near the end of their never-ending tour in support of their dark-rock masterpiece Dirt, the band seemingly “cleansed the pallet” with the much more restrained and mellow Jar of Flies. But there were certainly exceptions, the most obvious being the pair of acoustic EP’s that Alice in Chains issued when grunge’s popularity was at its peak - 1992’s Sap, and especially, 1994’s Jar of Flies. When thinking of classic grunge music, the recipe that most bands seemed to follow was detuned riffs played on battered instruments, and cranked through an amp/fuzz pedal combo.
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