The new album by former Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell --
Degradation Trip (Roadrunner) -- opens with what anyone familiar with
his former band's brooding songbook will recognize as your basic grunge-metal
rage-rock tune: "Psychotic Break." As thick walls of overdriven guitars close
in on Cantrell, he "feels the fear take hold." By the time a dense choir of
background vocals have swarmed around the chorus, he's "snapping two-by-fours"
and "punching holes in drywall." This is one of the more potent sounds of
alienated youth in the post-alterna-rock era: no irony, no allusions, just
unadulterated autobiographical brutality cast in the grim light of detuned
guitar chordings, rumbling bass, and muscular pounding drums. But it's not long
before Cantrell steers Degradation Trip down an even darker alley of the
psyche, as he zeroes in on a subject closer to his heart and to the hearts of
the band members he helped lead out of Seattle's hair-metal ghetto and onto the
world stage of grunge more than a decade ago. To any one even remotely familiar
with the behind-the-music saga of Alice in Chains, the second song, "Bargain
Basement Howard Hughes," comes loaded with allusions to the band's late singer,
Layne Staley.
It was a heroin overdose that's said to have taken Staley's life back in April,
but that wasn't much of a surprise either. For the better part of the past
decade, Alice in Chains had been a band in name only, as Staley remained in
self-imposed exile because of a debilitating addiction that ranked as one of
the worst-kept secrets in all of rock. Everyone, it seemed, knew what was up,
in part from having read a candid interview he gave to Rolling Stone
around the time of the release of the band's homonymous 1995 album. In its
wake, the band were able to squeeze out an MTV Unplugged CD as well as a
box set and a greatest-hits CD of sorts. Staley was even coaxed into the studio
to record a couple of new tunes. But as the years passed, it became clear that
Alice in Chains were in real chains: there'd be no touring, no new album,
nothing more to keep the band in the public eye until he cleaned up his act.
So Cantrell, who'd been the main architect of the Alice in Chains sound anyway
(the bottoming-out guitars, thundering beats, and almost gothic harmonies that
gave the band's best material a density that was hard to match, even as he
deployed a crucial hook or two to keep radio interested), embarked on a solo
career with 1998's Boggy Depot (Columbia). It amounted to an Alice in
Chains album without a frontman, though Cantrell's voice was more than up to
the task of holding down the center. It even sold reasonably well. But that
didn't change the fact that at the drop of a hat -- or at least a habit --
Alice in Chains could have set off on the kind of lucrative arena tour that
Cantrell couldn't manage on his own, or recorded an album that would almost
certainly have passed the platinum mark, leaving Boggy Depot in the
dust.
The eeriest aspect of "Bargain Basement Howard Hughes" -- and indeed, much of
Degradation Trip -- is that though the disc was finished months before
Staley's death, many of its lyrics could have been written in the wake of his
death. "Chalking up my dead friends," Cantrell grimaces on "Psychotic Break."
And then in "Bargain Basement Howard Hughes" he lets loose with the most
obvious arrows aimed in Staley's direction. "Stubborn bastard, hard head
knocking/We had our good years too/Though apart, you're still in my heart/I'd
give anything for you." Unfortunately, though Staley may have been in
Cantrell's heart, he apparently wasn't in Cantrell's phone book -- reports have
it that he had been dead for two weeks when his body was discovered. You'd
think that someone -- his dealer even -- would have noticed earlier. But
apparently he'd already declared himself dead to the people closest to him. The
coroner's report was a mere formality.
Heroin addiction and rock and roll have had an ongoing stormy relationship at
least since the '60s, and much farther back if you throw the classic bebop jazz
guys (Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, etc.) into the mix. Hell,
it's said that Mozart, who may have been the first real punk-rocker, had a
nasty laudanum addiction that contributed to his early shuffling off of this
mortal coil. So it's in no way news that there's something about the
rock-and-roll lifestyle, or the rock-and-roll personality, that's particularly
vulnerable to heroin addiction and abuse. Any rocker looking to bolster his
rebel image will naturally seek out what society puts atop its list of taboos,
and for years that's been heroin.
What's more, heroin addiction and abuse have not always been a clear-cut evil
in the realm of rock and roll. Even Alice in Chains benefitted from the
numerous songs Staley wrote about his addiction, or at least from the way he
used his addiction as a metaphor for a psychic suffering and alienation that
struck a chord with the alterna-rock audience. And who's to say what Charlie
Parker, the Rolling Stones, or Kurt Cobain (and the list goes on and on and on
and on) would have accomplished without the insights that they derived from the
pain, the dread, and the sense of powerlessness that come with addiction? I
don't mean that as a defense of drug abuse, only as one of the many reasons why
artists like Staley -- people who obviously know the consequences -- dive
headfirst into a downward spiral that few emerge from unscathed, and many never
return from at all.
Unfortunately, it's becoming clear that when people look back on the
alterna-rock years two or three decades from now, heroin is going to play a big
role in the story. It had a hand in robbing grunge/alterna-rock of its most
promising artist, Kurt Cobain. But it's also ravaged and torn apart dozens of
other '90s bands, from Stone Temple Pilots to Alice in Chains to the Red Hot
Chili Peppers, who lost not one but two guitarists to heroin addiction, and
whose singer, Anthony Kiedis, has acknowledged both in interviews and in his
song lyrics that he too had a major problem with the drug.
The first Chili Pepper to go was founding guitarist Hillel Slovak, in June of
1988, and his death inspired one of the Peppers' best songs to that point: the
anti-heroin "Knock Me Down," from Mother's Milk (EMI). As Kiedis has
pointed out, even losing one of his best childhood friends wasn't enough to get
him to stop using -- chilling testimony to the grip that heroin can have.
Eventually he did get clean, and that inspired what might be the Chili Peppers'
defining song of the '90s, "Under the Bridge," a crossover hit from 1991's
Blood Sugar Sex Magik (Warner Bros.) that turned what had been a novelty
funk-punk act into a real band with at least one real song. But the Peppers'
travails with heroin hadn't ended yet -- John Frusciante, who plays the
beautiful Hendrix-style guitar on "Under the Bridge," was the next to succumb,
and his long bout with heroin was as poorly kept a secret as Staley's.
Fortunately, Frusciante made it through to the other side, and though he admits
in the new Spin that his arms are so scarred from shooting coke that
they look like something you'd see on a burn victim, he's not just back in the
band -- he's almost singlehandedly helped redefine the Chili Peppers' musical
direction on their new By the Way. The folks at Spin say it could
be one of the best rock albums of the year, and they might be right. Instead of
toying with the funk-punk, thumb-slapping bass nonsense that had Kiedis rapping
like the whitest man on the block on past recordings, the new disc is full of
textural guitars, pop hooks, real singing with real melodies, and, of course, a
number of allusions to what remains one of the most important parts of Kiedis's
life. The second song begins with the line "This is the place where all the
junkies go" (I guess it's not an allusion when you just come right out and say
it), and though most of the lyrics are semi-stream-of-conscious in form, every
once in a while you catch a line that would seem to refer to the experience
that Kiedis and Frusciante shared.
In other words, the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.
Rock and roll and heroin have shared a special bond throughout the music's
existence, and it would be denying the obvious to claim that the drug has had
only a destructive effect on the music. For those who make it back from the
precipice that Staley couldn't tear himself away from, addiction has become one
of the more powerful metaphors for the human condition in the postmodern age.
And as long as we as a society continue to vilify heroin by waging so-called
wars on drugs, we'll be ensuring that the next generation of rockers looking
for a stiff fix of rebellion will gravitate to the one drug that's guaranteed
to put you on the list of those who aren't afraid to live dangerously. There
will always be casualties like Layne Staley, as well as bands -- like Godsmack,
Mudvayne, Dope, and Rehab -- who gratuitously latch onto heroin's evil mystique
in an effort to move more units. It's a shame, but it's also just a fact of
rock and roll, and life.
Jerry Cantrell will perform at Lupo's on Monday, August 5.
Issue Date: August 2 - 8, 2002
