The band traveled to New York City in early April to prepare for the show, which was scheduled for April 10, 1996, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Toby Wright got tapped to produce and sat in during rehearsals at Sony Studios, which, in his words, “went great.”
The show was to take place at what at the time was known as the Majestic Theater, a venue whose appearance reflected the music that would be performed there for the series. An art director had renovated it to intentionally look “kind of decrepit,” Coletti said. “The stagehands told me they shot bullet holes into the upstage walls to create the cracks. But all the flaking paint was beautifully hand-painted and done on purpose. You have this bowl shape, the semicircle amphitheater, and it was perfect for Unplugged. Out of all the bands we’ve done there, it was most perfect for Alice. It had this old-theater feel to it, it had a sense of history, a little sense of gloom to it, just enough moodiness, and it was art-directed beautifully.”
Coletti also got a last-minute request for lava lamps to decorate the stage, which wound up adding a visual element he hadn’t anticipated. “I was getting them so late. Apparently lava lamps need to be heated and turned on for quite a while before they do what they’re meant to do. So if you watch the show, they’re kind of sluggish and not at full potential. So the lava lamps themselves were kind of grungy and just barely moving around. It was kind of fitting, but we didn’t do it on purpose.”
Because Layne had dyed his hair pink, the lighting director tried to match the background to that. As the band was doing sound check and camera rehearsal, the lighting palette was chosen based on each song the lighting director was hearing them play. The fact that the band had a specific set list for that show and provided it to MTV ahead of time helped prepare the lighting.
Coletti would be responsible for producing the televised performance, splitting his time between the production truck outside and the floor, while Wright would be responsible for producing the audio, working from inside the truck and letting the band know what sounded good and what needed to be redone. There was an unforeseen preshow complication: Jerry had eaten a hot dog and gotten food poisoning. A wastebasket was placed next to his stool onstage in case he felt sick during the show. “They were expecting [the performance] to be problematic. Everyone was planning on it being a big clusterfuck,” Biro said. “Because of Layne, because of the shape the band was in, especially when we got there. Jerry was throwing up the whole time. Layne and I were going through withdrawals. It was a really ugly situation.”
Biro had run out of heroin and had someone bring some for him to the show. Layne had brought along his own precooked supply, which he carried in an old glass pill bottle covered by a cork top. According to Biro, “He hadn’t done enough where he was nodding off and drooling, but I was there right before he went on, and he did shoot up some dope before he went on. But he didn’t do a lot and he had enough, and at no point during the show did I see him run down to the bathroom or anything.”
When the band started the show—opening with “Nutshell”—Biro turned around and was in tears. He looked around and saw Susan and Michele Anthony in tears as well.
Layne blew the lyrics during several takes of “Sludge Factory.” Toby Wright speculated he might have been nervous singing that song because Ienner and Anthony—the subjects of part of the song—were sitting in front of him at the time. “I don’t remember exactly how many takes we did, but we did a lot,” Wright said.
Mike played the main riff of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” as the band was about to play “Sludge Factory.” The members of Metallica were in the audience, and one or more of them had recently cut their hair, inspiring Mike to write on his bass, “Friends don’t let friends get friends haircuts.” Later in the show, as the band prepared to perform “Angry Chair,” Jerry played the opening guitar riff of Metallica’s “Battery” and then switched to a cover of the song “Gloom, Despair and Agony on Me,” from the Hee Haw variety show.
Biro said that between songs “there was a lot of clowning around with the audience,” adding, “It was funny. Once the show started, it was regular Alice in Chains, but an intimate thing.” The band members would insult Biro during these interludes, referring to him as “a fucking Frenchman” or “a fucking frog from Montreal,” and Biro was yelling right back at them. Initially, the audience thought these barbs were serious. “Then, they started making jokes with the audience and just had a really good connection with the audience in that show.”
Coletti called Sean “the unsung hero of that Unplugged, because the thing about Unplugged, especially with rock bands, is you live or die by the drummer. If the drummer gets it and tempers his playing, then everyone can kind of play at a lower volume and play acoustically. When the drummer just plays like a rock show, everyone turns up their monitors, and then what’s meant to be this pretty, acoustic thing just sounds like shitty electric guitars.”
MTV sent the band the first cut of the show about two weeks later, since they had final approval. Layne didn’t like it, so Wright was given the task of reviewing the material. “When the video was finally cut together, Layne despised it. He didn’t want it coming out at all. They felt that they edited him into the worst light possible, so he asked me if I would edit it. So I ended up editing it, just picking the shots and redoing it, subsequently sending him copies of that along with the audio and boom! There it is,” Wright explained. The problem was “they would cut to him doing certain things during songs I remember, and he just didn’t like the way they cut it together and he was looking for something to show him in a more positive way, away from the stigma of whatever was going on in his personal life.
“He was always paying attention, but he looked like he was falling asleep at certain points or he’d nod out, and then all of the sudden his part would come up and boom! He’d be there. But they’d show him just sitting there with his eyes closed for several bars of the music and then they wouldn’t show him when it was his time to sing—they’d cut to Jerry or cut to Mike or cut somewhere else, and it just looked like he was sleeping through the whole thing during certain songs.” Wright provided suggested changes in the form of specific notes and time codes of what he wanted fixed, and MTV complied. The show aired on May 28, 1996, and the album was released on July 17, debuting at number 3 on the Billboard chart.2
Ken Deans got a call from Susan asking for help getting the band back together and preparing them for a tour with KISS, which had reunited with the four original members. Jerry and Sean were excited—Sean especially, because he had been in the KISS Army growing up. Layne kept saying he didn’t want to do it, after which the band had pretty much given up on the idea. Layne eventually changed his mind and agreed to do the tour.3
According to Deans, the band rented out the Moore Theatre for three weeks of rehearsals. “It was really challenging,” Deans said. “Mike Inez would show up around three or four o’clock in the afternoon. He and I would hang out. And then Sean would show up, and then Jerry would show up, and then Layne would show up around nine o’clock, maybe they’d go through a couple of songs, and then take off.” Deans estimates he spent as much as eight hours a day waiting around for people to show up. “By this time, it was becoming pretty evident that both Layne and Jerry were having some problems, not Jerry so much at that time, but Layne was definitely starting to. You could see that his years of drug use were starting to affect him.”