Jar of Flies
1994 EP by Alice in Chains
Jar of Flies is the third studio EP by American rock band Alice in Chains. It was released on January 25, 1994, by Columbia Records. Jar of Flies was the band's second acoustic EP, after 1992's Sap, and it was the first EP in music history to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, with the first week sales exceeding 141,000 copies in the United States. The self-produced record was written and recorded over the course of just one week at the London Bridge Studio in Seattle. The tracks "No Excuses", "I Stay Away" and "Don't Follow" were released as radio singles to promote the EP. Jar of Flies was nominated for two Grammy Awards in 1995: Best Recording Package and Best Hard Rock Performance for "I Stay Away".
The EP was well received by critics and has been certified quadruple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), making Jar of Flies one of the band's most successful releases. In Canada, Jar of Flies was certified double platinum for sales of 200,000 copies. In the United Kingdom, the EP was certified silver after selling 60,000 copies there.
Background and recording
Following Alice in Chains' extensive 1993 world tour for Dirt, bassist Mike Starr getting fired during the tour for his drug use, and Ozzy Osbourne bassist Mike Inez joining the band, the members returned home to Seattle after the end of their Lollapalooza tour and found themselves evicted from their residence after failing to pay the rent.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jar of Flies” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.