10 Horrible Hard Rock Songs By Great Artists
6. Iron Gland - Alice in Chains
Out of all the great albums of the grunge era, Alice in Chains' Dirt is one of the more sobering listens that you will ever come across. With every song being about struggling with addiction, each note played on this album feels like the band bearing their soul through their instruments. There may have been artistic blood on the pages, but "Iron Gland" is something that really didn't need to see the light of day.
As the band were recording the album in California, Jerry Cantrell ended up camping out in Joshua Tree for a few days due to the riots in LA after the Rodney King trial. Crashing with Slayer's Tom Araya, Cantrell showed his buddy one riff that he wanted to turn into a song. Though Araya liked it, Cantrell said that it originally pissed off the rest of the band and would bring every rehearsal to a halt.
In a weird compromise, the band eventually let Cantrell include this song as an interlude track with Araya, so long as he never played the riff ever again. Though the song itself serves as a perfect counterpoint to the fractured emotion on the rest of the record, it loses its luster when you realize that it was a bit of a goof.