Admittedly I hadn't listened to Alice in Chains for a long time until today. Well, I had, on the radio and at random while choosing records to play, but I hadn't entered a phase for a while. Earlier I was playing guitar to various songs and I ended up at Alice in Chains eventually, one of those songs being Rotten Apple.
Facelift, Dirt and the self-titled album are all great, but the fact that they were able to make an album like Jar of Flies along with all the heavy stuff is why they're one of my favorite bands. I'd probably have to say that Rotten Apple is my favorite song from Jar of Flies, but the entire album is so consistent and near-perfect, despite how short it is (which kind of helps it in a weird bittersweet way).
I think their greatest asset (and secret weapon) was subtelty. Sure, they ROCK and they're loud and everything but even their heaviest songs usually have something else going on that you don't quite notice, something that adds to the atmosphere. I think this song is incredibly heavy, though I don't necessarily mean loud. It's more like a heavy on your soul or something hippie-ish like that. Doesn't that guitar almost sound like David Gilmour? And not just because of the talkbox, though I do have to point out that Jerry Cantrell is the man for using it in the most non-cheesy way ever, and actually making it sound "beautiful" and whatnot, as opposed to gimmicky.
Also there are only three basslines in the entire seven minute song and they're all amazing. I believe this is one of the first songs the band wrote with Mike Inez, and as BA as Mike Starr was, this is a great first impression for Mike 2.
Everyone likes to believe that every Alice in Chains song is about drugs, whether Layne Staley wrote the words or not. I'm pretty sure he wrote them for this song (he seemed to become the "main" lyricist around this time) but I don't know if it's about drugs or not. He seems to also have several songs about God (God Am, Get Born Again) and I definitely see some obvious Biblical imagery throughout. You know, eat of the apple, uh oh! Now innocence is over, etc. Maybe it's relating it to heroin LULZ! I won't dwell too much on the meaning because too many people desecrate their songs by blindly relating them to drugs. But the lyrics ARE good in this one. Layne Staley had a way of saying a lot by NOT saying a lot, you know?
Innocence is over
Ignorance is spoken
Confidence is broken
Sustenance is stolen
Arrogance is potent
What I see is unreal
I've written my own part
Eat of the apple, so young
I'm crawling back to start
I repent tomorrow
I suspend my sorrow
What I see is unreal
I've written my own part
Eat of the apple, so young
I'm crawling back to start
A romance is fallen
Recommend you borrow
And that's it (besides a bunch of "hey ah nah nah"s), over seven minutes. But that's all it needs. This is one of those songs where the minimalism makes it what it is.
This is a video of the one known time Alice in Chains (with Layne) played Rotten Apple. The words get kind of mixed up and it looks like they were fairly unsure with the song, which may be why they didn't play it much (also they didn't play very many shows post-1994 anyway). When I was waiting in line to see the reformed band in Columbia, we could hear them doing a soundcheck and they jammed on this song for a few minutes. Everyone in line stopped their conversations to listen, it was really cool. They've also played it a couple times this year, and there are videos but the quality isn't that great (the audio I mean, not the performance).
<3
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