Jar of Flies

The jar dominates the frame. It is a standard wide-mouth canning jar with a screw-on metal lid, and it catches cold highlights along its ribbed shoulder while the rest of the image burns warm. That single contrast, cool glass against a red-hot room, keeps the eye pinned to the vessel before anything else registers.

Inside, the fluid glows a deep rose, lit from somewhere below or behind so the whole container behaves like a lamp. The light source hidden within the jar is what gives the picture its uncanny warmth; the glow radiates outward and pools on every surface. Floating in that glow are the flies, some drifting mid-liquid, others gathered in a sediment of tiny bodies near the base, so the jar reads at once as light source and as tomb.

The typography is the image's quietest trick. Embossed into the glass, faint and reversed, are the words Alice in Chains, less a logo than a ghost pressed into the surface. Because we read it backwards through the far wall of the jar, it looks like manufacturer's lettering rather than type laid over a photo, dissolving the boundary between design and object. Nothing here announces itself as a sleeve; the branding hides inside the scene.

Behind the jar, the child's head rests almost on the tabletop, cheek nearly to the wood, only half the face visible past the curve of the glass. The red light pools on the skin and hollows the features into something between sleepy and haunted. The cropping is severe: we get one eye and a partial face, which turns a person into another specimen under observation, as trapped by the frame as the flies are by the glass.

The eye finally leads down to the lower left corner, where a small cluster of crayons or colored pencils lies scattered on the grain of the table. That scrap of childhood innocence, set against a jar of dead things, is the whole tension of the image in one detail: a kid's drawing tools beside a container of decay. The composition stages a collision of feeding and neglect, of play and rot, and the warm domestic light makes it more disturbing, not less, because horror here wears the color of a family kitchen.

Read as a whole, the picture works by making the ordinary sinister. A canning jar, a table, a child, crayons: household objects, all of them, arranged so that the child seems less a bystander than the small authority who decides what lives inside the glass. The single red-lit eye becomes the emotional center, curious and complicit at once, and the image holds because it never resolves into either innocence or menace. It keeps both suspended, exactly like the flies.

The imagery is not arbitrary. The title and its jar of flies come straight out of a third-grade science experiment by Jerry Cantrell, in which one jar of flies was overfed and another was starved. That grade-school memory of feeding and neglect, of watching insects live and die under glass, became the governing metaphor for the release, and it recasts the child in the frame as the experimenter, the small hand that decides which jar eats and which does not.

The man who translated that idea into a photograph was Rocky Schenck, and he did it without a studio. Schenck shot the cover in his own dining room, working with a crew of exactly two other people: his assistant and a child model whose name he says he has forgotten. There were no elaborate resources here, only a table, a jar, colored light, and the patience to get real flies into frame.

And the flies were the problem. Schenck used actual flies, not props, and they kept dying during the shoot, which meant they had to be constantly replaced. His assistant made repeated trips to nearby horse stables armed with a butterfly net, scooping up hundreds of them to keep the jar populated. It is an absurd, almost slapstick reality behind such a somber-looking image: a man with a net stalking a stable while a child waited under red light in a dining room. Schenck says he still has the jars from that day.

Mary Maurer handled the art direction and design that framed Schenck's photograph and gave the release its cohesive presentation, turning a homemade shoot into a finished package.

The music underneath the image matched its uneasy warmth. Released on January 25, 1994, through Columbia Records, the EP moved through acoustic rock, grunge, and hard rock, a softer and stranger register than the band's heaviest work, which made the intimate, domestic quality of the cover feel right.

What the release did commercially gave the eerie little picture a permanent place in the story. Jar of Flies became the first EP in music history to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, a fact that turned a short-form release with a homespun cover into a landmark. Revolver magazine has since characterized the cover as "eerie" and "iconic" and the EP as a "watershed" release, reflecting the image's elevated present-day standing among 1990s rock album art.

The packaging drew formal industry recognition too, earning a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Recording Package in 1995.

The fly-and-rot motif of the cover has been carried physically into later pressings. The first CD release placed plastic flies inside its clear spine, and the 20th-anniversary vinyl had actual dead flies pressed into the record. For the EP's 30th anniversary in March 2024, Legacy Recordings issued a multi-format reissue that included an ultra-limited pressing of 100 copies with the carcasses of real dead flies set into the vinyl, extending the cover's imagery straight into the physical product.

The image itself has been revisited and rebuilt for its anniversaries. To mark the 25th anniversary in 2019, Schenck publicly dug up and shared previously unseen outtakes from the shoot and recounted its making, renewing attention to the image. For the 30th anniversary in 2024, design studio Mindreader built the box set's central showpiece as a three-dimensional recreation of the original cover, even digitally rebuilding the unseen half of the boy's face from Schenck's shoot archive to render it as a lenticular print behind the jar.