On August 21, 1990, Alice In Chains released the song Man In the Box as a single taken from the album Facelift. It was the first commercial hit of the grunge era, which was to be followed by Pearl Jam’s Alive and Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit a year later.
The band’s drummer Sean Kinney remembers it this way:
“Facelift wasn’t blowing up or anything, it had sold about 40,000 albums. When it came to the next single, they were really pushing one and we were like, ‘No, this is the song.’ They said it was a career-killer. We were like, ‘Well it’s our career, we wanna f**king kill it.’ They weren’t used to that. That song changed everything, it changed MTV and took off and the album sold half a million albums in a month or something. From then on the people doing the business realised that these dudes, crazy as they are, might know something.”
