“Wow, that’s awesome,” Wright said. “So you wrote a lot on the road?”
“Uh … funny thing about the songs—I don’t have any,” was Jerry’s sheepish response. Everyone laughed.
“Okay. What do you want to do for the next ten days?” Wright asked, referring to the fact that they had already booked studio time.
“Is it okay if we just jam for the next ten days?” Jerry asked.
“Yeah. Best band in the world, jamming? What bad could happen? I didn’t have anything better to do,” was Wright’s response.
The writing, recording, and mixing process was quick. According to the liner notes, the album was written and recorded in the studio during a five-day period and mixed from September 17 through 22.2 Sessions for the seven-song EP, titled Jar of Flies, were grueling round-the-clock affairs, as long as fourteen to eighteen hours a day. Wright was coproducing and engineering himself, with help from Jonathan Plum as his assistant engineer. “I remember I would leave and they’d still be up. I would go home, get a few hours of sleep, and come back,” Plum said of those marathon sessions.
Once an idea was fully worked out, the band members were very efficient recording their individual parts. “Some of those, once they got an arrangement down, it was one or two takes and they’re done. That being one of the most prolific and best-feeling bands, we got a great take, and that was the song,” Wright said.
Plum remembers seeing Layne sitting on the couch in the lobby watching TV. One morning, Layne was watching cartoons and eating kids’ cereal out of the box with his hands. On the back of the box was a fill-in-the-blank game, which Layne completed with his own twist. “He filled it out, and it was totally disgusting, talking about putting things in your urethra. He cut it out and put it on the refrigerator,” Plum recalled.
The band brought in a four-piece string section for “I Stay Away.” Wright asked Jerry if he wanted to chart out everything he wanted them to play into sheet music.
“No, I’ll just tell them what to play,” Jerry responded. Dave Hillis, who worked at London Bridge at the time but did not work on Jar of Flies, remembers seeing Jerry go into the big room with a guitar in hand, sit down on a metal folding chair, and walk the other musicians through the song, explaining what he had in mind.
“What I’ve learned from other sessions, you have a conductor and everything is written out musically-speaking on paper for them in notes, and usually there’s a lot of preproduction in that, meaning there’s a score and things written for them,” Hillis said. “I remember Jerry being fearless, as he usually is, very confident, and going out there with a guitar into the main room where the orchestra is sitting and showing them the parts on his guitar, what he was hearing, what he wanted, which is not something you normally do because orchestra musicians usually don’t work that way.”
Sean was messing around playing side-stick drumming, a technique consisting of hitting the rim of the snare drum with the side of the drumstick. Wright, who is not a fan of the technique, heard this and was not having it. “We eventually wound up with some bongos and some smaller drums set up over the high hat that we incorporated into that groove.” This became the opening for “No Excuses.” Jerry sang lead vocals and Layne harmonized on the verses, and then they would switch parts during the chorus.
“Don’t Follow” would provide some of the most memorable moments of these recording sessions. Randy Biro; Jerry’s guitar tech, Darrell Peters; and Mike sang backing vocals for the second part of the song. A harmonica player was brought in. “They sent this guy up—he’s this older dude. He was a good player, but he would grunt when he was playing, these really weird kinda disgusting grunting noises,” Plum recalled.
“I remember Jerry was just like, ‘What’s that noise?’ Toby would say, ‘Hey, that sounded great. Can you do it with less grunting noises?’ And the guy would say, ‘Oh yeah, yeah. Sorry about that.’ He would do it again, and he’d still make the same grunting noises.”
After an hour of this, they realized it wasn’t going to work out. Eventually, David Atkinson was called in to play the part. “I remember the harmonica player was like a friend of Chris Cornell’s who came in, blazed around, had to comp it all together into what that performance is,” Wright said. Plum thinks he nailed it one take. Jerry sang the first half of the song; Layne did the second half. Plum had the impression Layne didn’t like the song for some reason, because, while he was recording his vocal, he added a little something extra that wasn’t part of Jerry’s original lyrics. After the “It hurts to care, I’m going down” lyric before the brief break leading into the second half of the song, Layne deadpanned, “How now, brown cow?”
“It was on the recording for a long time, but when we mixed it, Jerry asked us to take it out,” Plum said, laughing. Wright doesn’t remember this but does not dispute Plum’s account. “It was Jerry’s concept of having him start out the song, Layne come in, and then we finish up [with a] two-sides-to-the-story type of thing, which I thought was a brilliant concept,” Wright said.
Rocky Schenck shot the cover in his dining room on September 8, 1993. “The band had come up with the idea for the title and wanted the cover to be a young boy looking into a jar filled with flies. I remember they asked me to use ‘crazy colors’ in the shot, so [I] utilized lots of different color gels over the lights to achieve the final look,” he wrote. Schenck’s assistant made several trips to a nearby stable to collect hundreds of flies with a butterfly net.
Released on January 14, 1994, Jar of Flies was an immediate success, debuting at the top of the Billboard album chart. It was the first EP ever to reach number 1, a feat that has been matched only once—by Jay-Z and Linkin Park’s Collision Course—in the twenty years since its release as of this writing.
In March 1994, Kurt Cobain was in trouble. Courtney Love had already seen him overdose on heroin a dozen times by the time he tried to kill himself by taking sixty Rohypnol pills in a Rome hotel room with a three-page suicide note clutched in his left hand.3 Despite the history between them, Susan got a panicked phone call from Courtney Love.
“You have to help me—Kurt’s going to kill himself. What should I do?” she asked. Susan put Nirvana’s manager in touch with Dr. Lou Cox, a New York physician who had worked with Aerosmith and was working with Alice in Chains at the time. Susan told Greg Prato that they agreed to do an intervention but chose a different interventionist, and not everybody showed up.4
On April Fools’ Day 1994, Cobain went AWOL from the Exodus Recovery Center in Marina del Rey, California, two days after checking in. A week later, his body was found in the greenhouse in his home. He had killed himself by a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head after shooting up a lethal dose of heroin. He was twenty-seven years old.5
Susan helped organize a private service for Cobain at a church as well as the public memorial at Seattle Center, both scheduled at the same time out of concern that fans or the media might try to go to the private service. After it was over, Susan felt “the same sort of overwhelming compassion” for Courtney Love as she did for Yoko Ono after the murder of John Lennon. Susan walked up to Love to offer her support. When she was about ten feet away, Love saw her approaching, turned her back, and walked away.6