Carlstrom had two other vivid recollections of recording Layne’s vocals. While working on “Them Bones,” Layne showed an improvisational element when he told Carlstrom, “Oh, I hear a little vocal part I want to stick in the song.” As he was hearing the music played back to him on his headphones, Layne began singing the “Ah!” screams timed to Jerry’s guitar riff. He tracked the screams once or twice. “He just made that up on the spot,” Carlstrom said. Jerry is credited for the music and lyrics to the song, but it’s difficult to imagine without those screams.
Layne also demonstrated an ability to innovate in using his voice as an instrument. “He sings on the verse on ‘God Smack’ with this effect that literally sounds like there’s a tremolo [effect] or a Leslie [speaker] on his voice, and he is doing that with his voice,” Carlstrom said. No studio wizardry was necessary. Carlstrom had no idea how he was doing it. He couldn’t see Layne singing because of the makeshift wall in the studio.
Cisneros also noted that Layne could be very sensitive. She recalls one day while on break, they were watching To Kill a Mockingbird on TV, and she noticed he started to tear up during a scene near the end of the movie.
Cisneros’s calendar shows no entries until the second week of July. Vocals and guitars for “Sickman” and guitars for “Fear the Voices” on July 7. July 9 is marked down as vocals, although the song is not identified. July 10 is marked explicitly as vocals for “Fear the Voices.”
“Mike talked to me before we did the album. He said he had these songs and he wanted publishing—he wanted to get more money,” Jerden said. “He wanted to know if as producer I would help him out and get these songs, make them really good so they could make it on the record. I worked really hard. I spent more time on those two songs, one in particular, than any of the other songs on the record. They just were not good songs. I tried to make them work for Mike, but I just could not do it. And Jerry and Layne were getting fed up with the whole thing.”
One of those songs—likely “Fear the Voices”—was referred to as “Mike’s Dead Mouse” by the band and Jerden. “It was like a kid bringing a dead mouse to school and showing it to everybody, and he pets it and it’s all dirty and all that stuff, and it’s like nobody wants to see this dead mouse anymore.”
There were two memorable and, in retrospect, foreboding incidents during the recording of this song. On a Saturday afternoon, Carlstrom was in the studio with Layne and Mike working on the song, which was already difficult because of technical issues. “That was actually a fairly stressful thing right there, because we’re trying to edit things that they had recorded from Seattle, edit together multitracks of things from Seattle with things that we had recorded here in Los Angeles, which I’d never done before.”
“Jerry and Sean didn’t like the song,” Carlstrom explained. He speculated that it was because the song “didn’t feel like it fit” on the record, but Mike persisted. “Mike really wanted that song on the record, and at the time Layne was the only one backing the song, so there was stress regarding that situation.”
At some point during that session, Layne and Mike went to the bathroom together. Layne gave Mike a shot of heroin, and Mike had an extremely adverse reaction. He left the bathroom and threw up all over the carpet in the studio lounge. After the incident, there was a conversation between Layne, Mike, and Carlstrom. Carlstrom recalled hearing from somebody—“ninety-nine percent sure” it was Mike, but acknowledges it could have been Layne—that that had been the first time Mike ever tried heroin. When he was interviewed in October 2011, Carlstrom was the only person still alive of those three, so only his account is available.
Years later, Mike would offer different accounts of when his heroin use started. Once he denied ever doing heroin while in Alice in Chains. “I never did dope when I was in the band. I didn’t need to. I got high off of playing music,” he said on Celebrity Rehab. He contradicted himself in that same episode. When asked how long he had been using intravenous drugs, Mike answered, “Seventeen years.” The program was filmed in 2009, so he dates the beginning of his heroin use to 1992, while he was still in the band.11
The second incident, which Carlstrom called “the nail in the coffin” for the song, happened after Layne had recorded his vocals. Mike came in later, high. He listened to the song, was not happy with the vocals, and called Layne. He wanted him to come back to the studio and do it again. Layne lost it. Jerden and Carlstrom’s accounts differ slightly as to what he said. “I remember the end of that conversation was Layne on the phone saying ‘Fuck this song!’ and hanging up on him,” Carlstrom recalled.
According to Jerden, Layne said, “Fuck you! I’m not singing this again!” Jerden thinks the tensions from the recording of this song were a contributing factor in Mike’s eventual dismissal from the band. The song did not make the final cut of Dirt, but was eventually released seven years later as part of the band’s box set. Mike said, “I wrote a song called ‘Fear the Voices.’ We did record it, but they didn’t let it on the album because Jerry didn’t have nothin’ to do with the writing of the music. But they put it on the box set later, and it got some recognition and got played on the radio.”12
Mixing began on Monday, July 13. At some point, Jerden was mixing “Rooster.” He had previously seen a drug dealer hanging out around the studio and told Layne not to bring him in. On this particular day, Layne walked in with the dealer. Jerden played Layne and the dealer the mix he had been working on over the speakers. Layne said it was great, but the dealer decided to offer his unsolicited advice.
“Well, I think you should…”
He didn’t even get to finish the sentence. “Shut up,” Layne told him.
At that point, Jerden lost it. “Who the fuck are you? Get the fuck out of my studio!” He turned to Layne and said, “Don’t bring your drug dealers around.”
The band-approved final mixes were completed on July 29. Cisneros sequenced the album from August 5 through 7, after which it was sent off to be mastered. The exception from all the songs that appear on the final cut of Dirt was “Would?” The song had been recorded for Singles at London Bridge Studios in Seattle, and Jerden made several mixes, but it’s not Jerden’s mix on the finished album. According to Jonathan Plum, “Jerry was unhappy with the way the song came out. I remember him complaining that there was no cymbals on the record and that he liked the demo song better, so he came back [to London Bridge Studios] and Rick [Parashar] and I remixed ‘Would?’”
Rocky Schenck met with the band on April 27, 1992, to discuss their new album and videos. He went to the studio on May 7, where he got to hear some of the new material for the first time, which he says “completely blew me away.” They looked through his portfolio and started discussing ideas for the album cover.
“Their idea was to have a nude woman half buried in the desert. She could be either dead or alive,” Schenck wrote. They discussed the type of woman the band wanted, and Schenck began casting shortly after. Eventually, Schenck submitted a photo of Mariah O’Brien, a model he had worked with for the cover of Spinal Tap’s “Bitch School” single. The band chose her.