Photo by Krasner/Trebitz /Redferns
Three albums and two EPs with Layne Staley, and fans have never once agreed on a best song. Metal Edge readers took a swing at it.
5. "Down in a Hole"
Jerry Cantrell nearly left it off the record. He'd written "Down in a Hole" for his longtime girlfriend, Courtney Clarke — "it's to my long-time love," he explained later in the Music Bank liner notes — and a tender love song didn't obviously belong on an album otherwise buried in heroin and dread. It made Dirt anyway. Layne Staley sang it with a grief that reached well past heartbreak, giving the song's dreamy acoustic drift an undertow the lyrics alone don't account for. Columbia sent it out as the fifth and final single from the album — a love song shipped to rock radio off a record about heroin.
4. "Rooster"
The song began with Cantrell's father. Jerry Cantrell Sr. was a Vietnam veteran nicknamed "the Rooster," and his son wrote the track to carry the horrors the older man had finally started to describe. Released as the fourth single from Dirt, "Rooster" climbed to No. 7 on the Mainstream Rock chart and became the biggest song on an album stacked with them. Its power sits in the dynamics: the intro melody Cantrell and Staley trade before the song opens up, then the swing from that hushed, harmonized opening into Staley's full-throated defiance.
3. "Man in the Box"
Few at Columbia trusted it as a single. "Man in the Box" was the second track the label pushed from Facelift (the lead was "We Die Young"), and it became the one that broke the band, after MTV put its sepia-toned, stitched-eyes video into heavy rotation nearly a year ahead of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Staley built the lyric out of two ideas at once: a swipe at media censorship and the image of a veal calf penned in a crate, a picture he settled on after Columbia staffers described how the meat is made. Under it ran Cantrell's talkbox, the wah-wah snarl producer Dave Jerden borrowed, of all places, from a Bon Jovi song. Cantrell's solo has become its own landmark, ranked among Guitar World's greatest.
The band never shook the song. At their final concert with Staley, on July 3, 1996, they closed with it.
2. "Nutshell"
"Nutshell" was never a single, and it has outlasted most of the ones that were. Layne Staley wrote the lyric, a plain and unguarded account of fighting alone, over a slow build from bassist Mike Inez, Cantrell, and drummer Sean Kinney, and it sat in the middle of 1994's Jar of Flies. What fixed it was the 1996 MTV Unplugged performance. That taping was the band's first concert in roughly two and a half years, Cantrell played it through food poisoning, and they opened the set with "Nutshell" — a stripped, trembling rendition Columbia later pulled for both the Music Bank box set and The Essential Alice in Chains.
1. "Would?"
Grief made it. Cantrell wrote "Would?" while mourning Andrew Wood, the Mother Love Bone singer and a friend, who had died of a heroin overdose in 1990, and he aimed the song as much at the people who judged Wood's choices as at the loss itself. The structure carries that doubling: Cantrell takes the verses, Staley takes the chorus, one voice handing to the other. It reached listeners before Dirt did, opening Cameron Crowe's Singles soundtrack in the summer of 1992, and it went on to close the album and become one of the most-played songs the band ever recorded.
