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SUSAN SILVER With Alice, it was just balls-to-the-wall enthusiasm. I had to bring it down a little bit because Alice didn’t have straight jobs and didn’t have a sense of budget, and Dave came along and said, “Just go buy what you need,” which is like telling a kid in a candy store that there’s no limit. So I said, “Look, Dave, we’ve got X amount of dollars to spend on this record. We don’t need to blow it on a bunch of equipment that they’re going to use once to get the sound that you want. Let’s capture the sound that they have and get only what we need.”

Three of the guys understood that really well, and Mike Starr, he understood ultimately, it just took a little more conversation with him, because in his mind he was already a huge rock star.

DAVE JERDEN Jerry and I just saw eye to eye about everything. He was in control of the band. I just spent all my time with Jerry up there. We’d go to the Vogue every night, and after the Vogue, the party would usually end up at my place and then we’d stay up all night and then go fishing for salmon in Puget Sound and then go to the studio.

NICK TERZO I was vegetarian at the time, and I had this long discussion with the band at dinner once about how veal is actually produced, how these calves are put in the boxes. That was kind of the genesis for the song “Man in the Box.”

Dave Jerden was my number-one pick to produce. I just thought the Jane’s Addiction record he did sounded amazing. I wanted it to sound like that. He had very good chemistry with the band. Dave’s a tough guy—he’s a bit of a taskmaster—but he’s got a very good sense of humor.

DAVE JERDEN Then we went to Los Angeles, and they got an apartment at the Oakwood Apartments. They wanted to know where the local strip bar was. So they went to the Tropicana, and all the strippers ended up hanging out at their apartment. They had a calendar with all the Tropicana strippers on it, and they put X’s on the ones that they fucked. They had ’em all X’d out.

ERIC JOHNSON Mookie Blaylock’s first tour was with Alice in Chains, down the West Coast. There was the Alice in Chains minivan and the Mookie Blaylock minivan, and my best friend Keith was driving the Alice in Chains minivan and being an all-around roadie/tech/lighting guy. I was in the van with Mookie Blaylock, and we would have food fights between the minivans at 80 miles an hour on I-5.

Mookie Blaylock and Alice in Chains were different on every level. Why they would fit together I didn’t know, but they almost seemed like one big band then.

DAVE KRUSEN One night on that tour, we went to see Ozzy, because Alice in Chains were playing his Children of the Night benefit show in Long Beach. They sent a limo for me and Mike to go to the show. We got all excited, and I brought my bong. The limo was fully stocked with booze, so we were pretty torn up by the time we got there.

MIKE INEZ (Ozzy Osbourne band bassist; later Alice in Chains bassist) The first time I saw Alice in Chains play was when I was in the Ozzy band and we did a benefit concert at Long Beach Arena. Alice was the first band on, and as I’m walking in, they were playing to basically an empty arena. But I’m like, Wow, this band is really cool. I went and stood on the side of the stage and watched them play. I gotta tell ya, Layne was, and still to this day is, one of the most compelling front men I’ve ever seen. He was so cool and creepy and just a badass dude.

DAVE KRUSEN By the time we left the show, everybody was in the limo with us, including Alice in Chains. We were sitting in the limo, and some girl came up and she said, “Who’s in the car?” and Sean Kinney goes, “It’s Ozzy,” and points to me. She’s looking right at me, and I looked like a little kid. She was like, “Oh, my God! Ozzy!” So Sean goes, “Let him sign your tits.” Someone gave me a Sharpie, and I wrote OZZY really big.

At one point on that ride back, McCready was taking a leak out the window as we were going down the freeway and Kelly Curtis was holding him by his belt. That was entertaining.