Day 16: "Dirt" - Alice In Chains (1992)

There are albums which make me think of stretches of time in my life, or people I've known, or just make me feel a certain way.  Then there are albums like this, so indelibly linked in my mind with a single activity, one single place and time that as soon as I hear it, I am transported instantly back to that place.

listen to me here

I consider myself lucky that during my teenage years, I managed to make so many likeminded friends.  Until 1990, we were a nomadic family, moving from place to place as dictated by my Dad's work for the Royal Air Force.  When we had returned from our overseas posting, we relocated to Chesterfield, which was where all my Mum's family were, while my Dad shipped off to Saudi Arabia to take part in the first Gulf War.  We'd visited the town only sporadically in the past, for summer holidays and visits with relatives, but now we were moving here permanently.

Through what I can only assume was a strange combination of great luck and persistence, on one of those summer vacations some time in the mid 1980's, I met Jamie, who lived in a house behind my aunt's house and was 3 weeks older than me.  I ended up hanging out with him every time we came back to Chesterfield for vacation, so when I moved back, I was incredibly lucky to already have a friend.  Through Jamie I met Tim and Rob, also burgeoning proto-nerds with an interest in Fighting Fantasy books and 80's action movies and Star Trek.  Through Tim and Rob, I met Kingsley, who had board game nights at his house;  through those nights, I met D, Hado, Lee and Kev, as our spiderweb nerd network branched out and made more and more connections.

All of us, as well as being an expanded cast of Stranger Things:  The Teenage Years, were all music fans.  We'd all start with a baseline understanding of each other tastes, or at least the mutual musical base we were all working from, but then each of us had our niche, the band or musical style that they would champion to the group.  Gradually we would all infect everyone else we knew with, if not a love for, then at least a grudging respect for musical groups and styles they might not have found on our own.  Even now, looking at The Pile, I can see instantly dozens of CDs that I own because I first heard it played at Hado's house one night while playing Tekken 2, or that my old housemate Dave loved and played incessantly until it became stuck in my head.

A large part of this cross-pollination of our musical tastes was expressed in the form of bootleg cassettes.  Back in the day, as long as you had a CD/tape system, or just two independent tape players, making bootleg copies of albums for your friends was simplicity itself.  Long before I owned this CD, I had a Red TDK-90 with this album on.

One afternoon, one summer holiday, I was at D's house.  Me, him, his brother Garyth and our mutual friend Lee were there, in D's bedroom, studiously ignoring the sun outside because we had bigger, more important issues to face than simply keeping up our Vitamin D levels and going outside.

Hell yes we did.

You see, D had a Commodore Amiga, a gaming computer to make my poor, Spectrum owning teenage self green with envy.  And when an Amiga version of Space Crusade, a board game we had played and enjoyed, became available with the option for four people to play at once, our fate was sealed.  I can't tell you how many afternoons we spent, the four of us cooped up in D's room, taking turns to sit at the one computer chair and ordering our Tactical Marine squads around.

One of those afternoons, I had obviously brought my bootleg copy of "Dirt" with me.  Mid-Crusading, we changed the cassette, slotting in my copy of the album and Lee, who was closest to the Hi-fi, was instructed to hit play.  

After 20 seconds of silence from the speakers, during which we continued to take our turns, Lee says "Oh shit" and realises he's hit record rather than play.  The tape is stopped, and play hit, and the music appears from the speakers.  When the time comes to flip the tape over, he manages to do the same thing again.

I owned that tape for years after, probably until I bought this CD, with a copy of this album where the intro to "Them Bones" is 20 seconds of us playing Space Crusade and Lee saying "Oh shit", and the intro to "Rooster" has a 10 second clip of Garyth laughing and me cursing at Lee.  I can still hear those clips, clear as day, when I listen to this album, even though the original audio is now long gone.

  

From a musical point of view, I've always loved this album.  Listening to it again, it's amazing to me that despite being associated with the Seattle grunge movement of the 90's, Alice in Chains have such a distinct style is almost impossible to classify them alongside Nirvana or Pearl Jam.  Layne Stayley had an amazing voice, and it's strange to listen back now, with a more discerning ear, and appreciate the intricate harmonies between Stayley and Jerry Cantrell on guitar on songs like "Down in a Hole" and "Rooster".  "Would?" remains one of my all time favourite songs from that era, one which I still occasionally work to master the guitar part to, despite a fairly high probability that no-one apart from the walls of my office and my long suffering partner will ever hear me play it.

Strangely, this is the only Alice In Chains album I ever owned.  Despite knowing that "Sap" and "Jar of Flies" existed, I never sought them out, and I am fairly sure I've never listened to either album all the way through, despite how much I enjoyed "Dirt".

Maybe they just wouldn't be the same without Lee taping over the intros.