It is tough for me to say because I guess I am too old now but i think it is safe to say that no one actually buys albums anymore. There was a time when we had to if you can imagine that. There was no way to get the music otherwise unless you had a cassette player and waited until just the right moment with the radio...
I was alive during a wonderful period of transitional history and if you are younger than me you likely do not know the joys of waiting for an album, buying it, and then indulging on every single track contained on it.
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It doesn't mean that you are worse-off than me if you never experienced this. We are all products of our own time and no one is better than another. We can only play the cards we are dealt in life and if you were in college around the time i was Dirt by Alice in Chains was seriously incredible.
"Dirt" was not the first album by Alice in Chains, but it was the first one that the world really took notice of. In the early 90's this album was likely to be found in pretty much everyone's house that was over the age of 20 and less than 30. My parents could not be expected to like this stuff, and kids couldn't either. In that regard it was perfect and perhaps that is why it was as popular as it was.
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back in the early 90's all the members of the band were still alive as well, which would be a big plus if you were hoping to see them play live one day. Unfortunately one of the major members of the band and arguably the part that made them truly unique was Lane Staley, who unfortunately died in 2002 from (you guessed it!) a drug overdose. It was particularly gruesome because the 6-foot tall Staley weighed a mere 86 pounds ( I am more than twice that weight and the same height) at the time of his death.
He had been so abusive towards everyone in and around his life that his body was not discovered until 2 weeks after he had OD'd.
According to toxicology reports he died on the same day that Kurt Cobain did.
Alice in Chains and Nirvana were kind of one and the same as their music is, at least in my mind, extremely similar.
Who knows what drove Lane to do this to himself, but it was a long time ago. If you were to talk to just about anyone who was in college or high school in the early 90's I can assure you...... they had this album and it was truly a showpiece and perhaps a soundtrack of the time. It's a real shame that Lane is not around for the accolades that he truly deserves.