Nutshell
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If you haven’t heard/watched the MTV Unplugged set that Alice in Chains played. Would highly recommend it. They opened with Nutshell.
It opens with Jerry Cantrell sitting by himself in a set lit with candles, much like the Nirvana set design philosophy. The crowd is cheering, and yet you can see him playing, but you can’t hear it.
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7 seconds, and you can only hear hints of the chords.
The Mike Inez walks in. Gives a smile to the audience. Full, toothy.
He hasn’t sat down yet, but you can hear Cantrell now.
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It repeats. Inez and Cantrell meet each other’s eyes. And Inez joins in. The camera is close we hear the bass cleanly. Either the crowd’s audio has been cut, or they’ve shut up. Honestly. Don’t know.
The introduction continues, and my eyes close.
More cheers, Scott Olson and Sean Kinney enter the stage and take their places. Cantrell continues looking over. It’s coming together. For what will be the bands last televised live performance.
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Then the audience’s voices rise, and from the shadows, stage right from our perspective, movement. Pink Hair. Unshaven. Layne Staley.
I was too late for grunge, Duh. Also, in the wrong country for grunge as well. Generation too late. Yet, and perhaps with a hint of irony, my generation seems to have been the one that, at least in the UK, loved grunge the most.
I remember high school parties where everyone was thrashing their hair to Smells Like Teen Spirit, everyone getting a bit weird and emotional to Black Hole Sun because if you didn’t like Chris Cornell, it was a fucking problem. Belting out and everyone deciding that air guitar was the objectively right thing to do to Alive. Now I have complicated opinions about Eddie Vedder, but I Am Mine will haunt me to the day I die.
"I know that I was born and I know that I'll die, the in-between is mine"
How fucking dare you. I don’t even like you.
But Alice in Chains never featured at these awkward teenage house parties. They just weren’t a thing. No one heard of them, never played on Kerrang or Scuzz.
Despite being strongly associated with grunge (likely purely by virtue of being part of the Seattle music scene in the early 90’s), the band themselves never thought of themselves as ‘grunge’
Cantrell himself summed it up in Jake Browns book (2011), Alice in Chains in the Studio.
“When we first came out we were metal. Then we started being called alternative metal. Then grunge came out and then we were hard rock. And now, since we’ve started doing this again I’ve seen us listed as: hard rock, alternative, alternative metal and just straight metal. I walked into an HMV the other day to check out the placement and see what’s on and they’ve got us relegated back into the metal section. Right back where we started!”
While Nirvana captured a generation’s general angst and Pearl Jam fought Ticketmaster, Alice in Chains was writing brutally insular, sludgy metal about the horrors of heroin addiction. It wasn’t anthemic; it was agonising. When his former fiancée, Demri Parrott, passed away in 1996, Staley didn’t just step back from the spotlight; he effectively locked his front door and disappeared. He couldn’t be a symbol for a generation because he was entirely consumed by the battle within his own walls.
Staley sits down, and 3 seconds later.
“We, chase misprinted lies”
Stripped of the normal layered harmony that Staley and Cantrell normally employ. (See Rooster) This performance is raw. Powerful.
Staley is singing at his own funeral.
It’s hard not to read it that way now, knowing that Staley would die just a few years later, in 2002, largely out of the public eye. His body would go undiscovered for two weeks.
“We, face the path of time”
There’s an energy here, despite this being the year that the band stopped touring and actively recording music, you can’t tell, at least from this performance. Without knowing the context about what happened behind the scenes regarding addiction, Cobain’s own passing years prior and the culture of the Seattle movement. It’s just a powerful song.
“And yet I fight, and yet I fight this battle all alone”
Story of my fucking life.
“No one to cry to, no place to call home”
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In Revolver Magazine, December 2013, Inez said.
“Layne was very honest with his songwriting. And in “Nutshell,” he really put everything in a nutshell for everybody. That song still gets me choked up whenever I play it. I get a little teary-eyed, and sometimes when we’re doing the arena runs especially, they’ll have some video footage of Layne. And I look and see me and Jerry [Cantrell, vocals and guitar] and Sean [Kinney, drums] looking the wrong way. We’re not looking at the audience, we’re looking back at Layne,”
General interpretation of Nutshell follows the dealing of deep isolation, depression and the feeling of being trapped within oneself. To me, there’s a self-awareness threaded through; time is passing by, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Staley seems to grapple with the distance of wanting connection and warmth, but is unwilling or unable to reach for it.
Cantrell has offered that his own feelings of loss and searching for meaning, it’s likely that between them, Nutshell touches on emotional ground.
I don’t disagree with that reading of the song. I would perhaps add one more thread, one tied to addiction and how misinformation affects those most vulnerable (FANCY THAT). I think Staley had reached a point where, in his own mind, being addicted to Heroin was the easier of two paths, and he was aware of this. Doesn’t stop you from noticing the cage is locked. At the time, the internet was swirling with rumours about whether Staley had AIDS, largely fuelled by the symptoms of his addictions. He, of course, found this out by going on the internet.
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“My gift of self is raped
My privacy is raked”
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Don’t those two lines sound familiar? Isn’t this endemic to what we are all doing on this platform, and by extension, others elsewhere in this Grift culture era?
Staley shared parts of himself, unapologetically harsh, dark parts of himself, for all to see, for his art. But it wasn’t enough. He, by proxy, was used by others; his words and his talent became a commodity for others to profit from. What privacy he fought so hard for was rendered moot as people felt entitled to him and his music, outside of the spaces where he was willing to expose himself. His privacy was not respected (see AIDS rumours)
“And yet I find, and yet I find repeating in my head”
Yeah…
“If I can’t be my own, I’d feel better dead”
Before I continue, I would like to make it clear that that is the last sung line in the performance. Just another minute of the rest of the back going through the motions. Staley is sitting, head tilted down towards the stand in front of him. not really moving. As the song closes, he lifts his head up to look at Cantrell, who was watching him.
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I think that last line is Staley showing his frustration; everyone knows too much. He doesn’t feel like himself anymore.
He doesn’t care about his own life anymore at this point.
Since 2011, Cantrell has dedicated performances of Nutshell to Staley and Starr (the original bassist for Alice in Chains), and in 2018, Pantera’s drummer Vinnie Paul was added to this list.
I don’t think I’ve heard a song like Nutshell in my many years of being plugged in. I think what they do musically is enthralling. Your Decision with William Duvall and Cantrell taking the layered harmonics from a decade earlier and elevating it to new levels shows that Cantrell, at least, is still pushing the boundary.
I’m not a grunge fan. I’m not an Alice in Chains fan. But I am someone who has sat with “No one to cry to, no place to call home” at 2am and felt, stupidly, less alone because of it. That’s what Staley left. Not a generation’s symbol, not a cultural moment. Just a song that finds you wherever you are, wrong country, wrong era, wrong everything, and sits down next to you anyway.
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I'll have to give AiC another listen. I know they are good and know them a bit, your article really made me want to hear nutshell properly. I actually have a solo album by Cantrell which I really liked... It's called Boggy Depot which I don't quite understand. Anyway, anyone who likes Grunge is ok in my book. What other bands did you like, Kayleigh?
i remember in high school when i first really discovered alice in chains (weirdly at the same time i started listening to the beastie boys, so the two are linked in my mind). i'd grown up with grunge and other varieties of 90s rock in the background (my dad has a good music taste), but now i was really listening to them for myself.
i fell in love with jar of flies immediately. every song on there is a complete masterpiece. when my dad found out what i was listening to, we took an afternoon and we watched this unplugged together (he had it on DVD!).
i didn't fully understand the story of the band at the time (and layne's story is one that, once i learned about it, has really stuck with me for so many reasons), but the line about a man singing at his own funeral - i've seen it a few times now - really captures the essence of the performance. and it is, somehow, still an incredible performance. it's almost ethereal, in a way. haunting.
i don't really know what i'm trying to say here. this was an excellent piece, so well written, and it's made me think about my relationship with alice in chains' music, and just what it is about it that makes me love it so much. thank you for sharing this.