Alice in Chains

Jerry Cantrell was living in a rehearsal space called the Music Bank because he had nowhere else to go. He met Layne Staley at a party, and they spent the early days trying to shake off a glam-metal hangover that almost killed the band's credibility before it started. By the time they got into London Bridge Studio with producer Dave Jerden, the hairspray was gone and replaced by a slab of sludge-heavy riffs that sounded more like Black Sabbath than Poison. Jerden pushed Kinney’s drums to the front and let Staley’s haunting harmonies bleed into Cantrell’s, creating that signature dual-vocal drone that defined the Seattle sound as something much darker than just 'punk with better gear.' They were the only band from that scene that the metalheads actually respected. While the rest of the Pacific Northwest was worshipping at the altar of the Melvins or Mudhoney, Alice in Chains was out touring with Slayer and Megadeth on the Clash of the Titans trek. They took the physical abuse of being a 'grunge' band opening for thrash icons and turned it into 'Dirt', an album so suffocatingly honest about addiction and collapse that it makes their peers' records sound like radio jingles. The wheels eventually fell off because the reality of the lyrics caught up to the room, but for a five-year stretch, they were the most unflinching band on the planet.

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