Layne and Toby Wright were in the studio at 6:00 A.M. when Don Ienner and Michele Anthony called from New York to congratulate Layne: Above had been certified gold. Then they turned on the pressure: they told Layne he had nine days to finish the record. “At that point, we had taken a lot of time. I don’t remember the amount of time, but we had taken a lot of time,” Wright said. “It might have been feeling like it was excessive, but in the interim there were a lot of things, a lot of drama happened, a lot of stuff stopping us from working every day and so forth.” Layne wrote this incident into the lyrics of “Sludge Factory”: “Call me up congratulations ain’t the real why / There’s no pressure besides brilliance let’s say by day nine / Corporate ignorance lets me control time / By the way, by the way.”
“That song is about them,” Wright said. “He was a little pissed off that they told him that he had nine days to finish this record, so he subsequently wrote about that.”
Layne had finished recording the scratch vocals for “Again” when he called Wright and Hofstedt into the control room. They listened and noticed the song ended with a “Toot, toot!” backing vocal over the final bars.
“That’s funny. You don’t plan on using those, right?” Wright asked, according to Hofstedt’s recollection.
“Yeah, I do. Those are going to be on the record,” Layne responded.
“Toby’s like, ‘Really?’” Hofstedt recalled. “I got the impression he wasn’t terribly thrilled with that idea. But I think Layne just sorta—when he saw his reaction, I got the impression that he decided like, ‘Oh, you don’t like it, huh? Well, guess what? It’s going to be on the record now!’”
Wright confirmed Hofstedt’s account but doesn’t think Layne left the “Toot, toot!” backing vocals in to annoy him. “I don’t know if he was that full of animosity at that point,” he said, laughing. “I was questioning that because I was expecting something completely different. It’s hard to say what his attitude was then, but I do remember, ‘That’s the chorus, dude? Really?’ ‘Yep, that’s it.’ ‘Okay, cool.’ And we went with it and that was the end of the conversation. It stands as it is today.”
For the beginning of “God Am,” Layne recorded himself doing a crack hit from a bong. “He thought it was kind of funny and apropos to the song that he included that in the intro,” Wright said. In all the years they knew each other, this was the only time Wright saw Layne use drugs. Layne was known to be a fan of the band Tool. The studio version of the Tool song “Intolerance” begins with a similar sound, which some have speculated to be a bong hit. Whether Layne meant the opening of “God Am” to be an homage to that, Wright doesn’t know.8
For Sam Hofstedt’s birthday, some of the studio employees went to an erotic bakery and bought him a cake shaped like a naked woman. After eating a few pieces, Hofstedt left the cake out in the lounge for anyone to eat. “I swear to God, it was in there for like a month, and it looked the same as it did a month later. There was a couple of pieces cut out of it after the first day or two, and then it just sat there.”
While this was going on, Layne was working on “Nothin’ Song.” Hofstedt had the impression Layne was tired of writing lyrics and was saying whatever came off the top of his head. One of the lyrics in the song was, “Back inside, Sam, throw away your cake.” Wright agreed with Hofstedt’s assessment. “He was probably pretty tapped out by that point. He was probably just picking stuff out and making it work.”
The sessions were briefly interrupted for a few days so Johnny Cash could record a cover of Willie Nelson’s “Time of the Preacher” for the Twisted Willie tribute album. Cash was backed by a grunge supergroup consisting of Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil, Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, and Sean on drums. Jerry also recorded a cover of “I’ve Seen All This World I Care to See” for the same album.
On April 29, 1995, the band and production staff took the night off to see Layne perform with Mad Season at the Moore Theatre. Duncan Sharp was hired to film the performance at the last minute. Originally, Sharp was told they wanted to shoot only two songs for music videos, but Sharp filmed as much of the show as he could—enough for a forty-five-minute home video. Brett Eliason was present to record the audio.
The people hired to do the remote recording left their post to go across the street for beers, thinking the show was over after the main set. As a result, no one was in place for the start of the encore, and thus the beginning of “X-Ray Mind” is missing from the recording, which Eliason was not happy about. The mistake was covered with a fade-up. Despite technical issues and limited resources, Live at the Moore was released on home video. This was Mad Season’s final performance. According to Joseph H. Saunders, his brother told him there were talks at one point for the band to perform on Saturday Night Live, but it never happened.
Susan would visit the studio to speak with Wright and the band. According to Hofstedt, “Because they were in here for a while, I think at times she was kinda trying to gently prod them to get the record done, without being too obviously prodding.” Despite the band’s decision to shut her out of the production process, Wright spoke very highly of her and her role in their career. “Susan is an amazing person, period. I think that without her, that record would have never been made.” It should also be noted that, two decades later, she still remains their manager.
Susan described the making of Alice in Chains to Greg Prato as “really painful.” She said, “It took eight or nine months—hours and hours of waiting for Layne to come out of the bathroom. Days of waiting for him to show up at the studio. And through all those last years, he and I were really close. I kept telling him, ‘You don’t have to do this. You have enough money to go and have a quiet life if that’s what you want,’ with his longtime girlfriend, Demri. ‘Just go and do what makes you happy—don’t do this if this is what’s perpetuating your addiction.’”
Susan said it was “horrifying” to see Layne in that condition and that while he was sweet and cognizant, he would fall asleep in a meeting. Production on the album was stopped “many times,” in her words, and that it was “tearing everybody to shreds.”9
Wright called her description “pretty accurate.” He further elaborated: “We talked about stopping the sessions several times, yeah. Obviously, we didn’t stop it. Did I go home for a week? I might have gone home for a week at one point. It was an extremely emotional time in everybody involved’s life.”
Toby Wright was called into Susan’s office for a conference call with Don Ienner and Michele Anthony. Wright was given an ultimatum, which he was to deliver to Layne: start showing up for work every day or production will shut down. “I had to have the conversation with Layne. I just remember I had to tell him if he didn’t step up to the plate and come in to the studio every day at a respectable time that I was being forced to go home and that this record wouldn’t see the light of day,” Wright said. Layne became “very emotional” and started crying.
By the time the band finished, they had a dozen songs for Alice in Chains. Hofstedt and Wright don’t remember the exact number of songs that were tracked and recorded, but think it was between twenty and thirty. “They were writing in the studio. The things that Layne would feel, he would write. The tracks that he didn’t feel, he just passed on and went to the next one,” Wright said. He doesn’t know what—if anything—became of the extra songs, which were in instrumental form. “They went to Columbia, and they’re probably sitting in their vaults somewhere.” Wright doesn’t think any of these outtakes resurfaced on Jerry’s solo albums.