They’re delivered by a weakened, brittle Staley who’s almost immobile on his chair, wearing long sleeves and shades to conceal his predicament. Half of the songs interpreted on Unplugged are some of the band’s darkest and a lot of them deal with Layne Staley’s heroin use or the idea of an ending: Down in a Hole, Angry Chair, Got Me Wrong, Heaven Beside You, Would?, Over Now. Unplugged is perhaps Alice in Chains’ gloomiest album. It’s an album * where the song choice and overall interpretation is more important than the songs played. The main appeal of Unplugged is to put them on equal footing, played in the same style and atmosphere. What makes them fascinating is that the line between the two isn’t always clear, for that folk informs a lot of their song structures and artistic choices. So, Alice in Chains has always been the story of two bands, right? The doom-influenced heavy metal outfit and the folk rockers. If there’s any lesson to be learned from Alice in Chains’ Unplugged, it’s that they never were a freakin’ grunge band to begin with. It was de facto a funeral for the grunge era and perhaps the least grunge performance from an artist qualified to be grunge. Alice in Chains did that in 1996, one year after releasing what would be their last album with frontman Layne Staley. Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York is arguably the only relevant cultural artifact from this concept, but there is apparently still people ready and willing to pay to listen to their favorite mainstream artists perform acoustic versions of their songs in an intimate setting.
MTV Unplugged concerts have been a thing for over thirty years, now.
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