Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Chapter 3

SCOTT HUNT WAS ATTENDING Idaho State University on a football scholarship. NCAA regulations forbid student athletes from holding a taxpaying job, so to get around this, Hunt traveled and performed with his band, Mirrors, in which he was the drummer. “We would travel through the summer and I’d make a butt-load of unreported cash as a musician, which saved my father a great deal of money,” Hunt said.

Around 1983, Mirrors played a show in Twin Falls, Idaho, and stopped by a diner after the gig. The diner had a copy of The Rocket. “That was Seattle’s big music mag—at that point the only one—and to me it was like Rolling Stone.” He tore out the “Musicians Wanted” section and later placed an ad for himself. Hunt got a call from Paul Bostic, manager of a local band called Brat. Despite being in Idaho, Hunt convinced Bostic to mail him the band’s demo so he could try out. Hunt was offered the job and then asked himself the obvious question: “Now what?”

If he accepted the job, he would have to quit his band, drop out of college, and move to Seattle. He spent the summer in the Seattle area, rehearsing with Brat at a warehouse, which had live electrical wires hanging from the ceiling, was infested with rats, and had no heating. Hunt had a ten-piece kit with nine cymbals. Every day he had to unload it from his truck, carry it up two flights of stairs, assemble it, play, and then break it down, carry it back downstairs, and load it on the truck. In that state of frustration, Hunt thought to himself, “This is horseshit. This is a major city. Why are we putting up with this?”

Hunt accepted the Brat offer, got a job in construction, and began looking for warehouse space. He and his boss, a drywaller named Jake Bostic, the brother of Brat’s manager, were working for two Swedish land developers named Bengt Von Haartman and Gabriel Marian. Hunt found a forty-thousand-square-foot warehouse in Ballard and had an idea that he wanted to pitch to Von Haartman and Marian. He saved up money to place an ad announcing Round the Sound Studios, which described “24 Hr. Practice Rooms,” and listed his phone number to book rooms, which ran in the September 1984 edition of The Rocket.

After the ad was published, Hunt would come home and find fifteen to twenty messages on his answering machine every night, to the point that the tape was full. “This town was so hungry for this idea,” Hunt said. He wrote down the names of everyone willing to commit three hundred to five hundred dollars, calculated the numbers, and drafted a business proposal. He estimated that renting the warehouse at twenty-one cents per square foot from a private landowner and then rerenting it at $1.60 would bring in twelve thousand dollars a month in revenues. Hunt offered to split the profits with Von Haartman and Marian fifty-fifty but needed them to sign the property lease and to provide a small team of employees to build and maintain the place. Von Haartman and Marian did their due diligence and ultimately agreed to it.

Hunt had to put in his own money to get the project going. His father passed away in January 1984, leaving his mother a sum of money from his insurance policy. She decided each of their children would receive $20,000 as a down payment for a home or to finish college. Hunt pitched his idea to her, and she lent him the money, which he immediately used to buy the doors, walls, studs, wires, and carpeting. Hunt also made Jake Bostic, Von Haartman, and Marian sign a promissory note agreeing to pay his mother $750 a month to repay the loan.

On September 25, 1984, Von Haartman, Marian, and Marian’s wife signed a five-year lease for the property, which would begin on October 1. Under the terms of the lease, they would pay the Rosen Investment Company $2,700 a month in rent. The premises were to be “used and occupied only for recording and audio visual studios.”1 The name had to be changed from Round the Sound Studios to the Music Bank about a year and a half later after Hunt, Marian, and Von Haartman decided to get rid of Bostic. Because of that, and the fact they had to rewrite the promissory note, they had to change the name of the partnership as well. Hunt suggested the name Music Bank.

Hunt and Jake Bostic, along with a framing crew, an electrician, and a laborer, worked to get Round the Sound Studios up and running—aiming to build a room a day. They came very close to that goal. By Hunt’s calculations, they built fifty-two rooms in sixty days. On opening day, every room was rented out, and Hunt had a waiting list of twenty-five bands wanting to get in.

Besides himself, Hunt credits Bostic as a cofounder of the Music Bank. “This was me and Jake’s baby completely. The other guys were just silent partners that were willing to put their name on a piece of land.”

One day in late 1985, an eighteen-year-old who had long spiky hair with a blue streak and was wearing pink jeans walked into Hunt’s office. “I’m Layne from Sleze and I’m looking for a job.”

“Well, Layne, I’m not hiring,” Hunt responded.

Layne continued, “I was in here the other night and I noticed you had this guy that was mopping the back hallway between rooms thirty-six and forty-two. Can you rent that?”

“That’s our fucking broom closet.”

“I don’t care,” Layne responded. “Could I set up a little drum set in there?”

Hunt thought about Layne’s proposition. The small room was not designed for the purpose Layne had in mind. Hunt described it as “barely big enough to hold a small drum set.” He had been looking for more space and figured that if he relocated the cleaning supplies to the back office and rented out the closet, it would bring an extra $150 a month in revenue.

Johnny Bacolas said of this first room, “It could barely fit four of us. It was me, Nick, James, and Layne. And then that room was just too small. It would just kill us in the summer.”

On their first day in the room, they had left their door slightly open. A member of the punk band The Accüsed stuck his hand inside the doorway and gave them the middle finger. Layne got mad and decided that couldn’t go unanswered. He found a piece of dog poop and placed it in front of the door to The Accüsed’s room while they were practicing. They later found out one of the band members stepped on it.

Sleze practiced in the closet until a better room opened up. Hunt put Layne at the top of the waiting list, so they upgraded as soon as one became available. Layne continued pestering Hunt for a job, but he wouldn’t actually work there until about a year later.

After repaying slightly more than half of Hunt’s twenty-thousand-dollar loan from his mother, Von Haartman and Marian stopped paying it. According to Hunt, the reasons for this were that “It was starting not to be profitable. Our rent had gone up. We had been classified as a commercial zone.”

“We were pulling a lot of power. Our power rates went up. A lot of money stuff changed and they decided, ‘This is a promissory note, punk. Why don’t you start paying your mom back out of your money—out of your share?’” Hunt, Von Haartman, and Marian wound up kicking Bostic out, but, because his was the main name on the paperwork, Von Haartman and Marian tried pinning the responsibility for the Hunt loan on Bostic. Hunt, however, refused to renegotiate the original agreement. Complicating matters was that Von Haartman and Marian were the signers on the lease. “They decided to go to war with me, because they didn’t want to make the payment anymore.”

At that point, Hunt approached David Ballenger to take over the day-to-day operations of the Music Bank. “I said, ‘I’m at war with my partners now, because they don’t want to pay my family money back anymore. So I need you to kind of help me run things. This may turn into an ugly fucking deal here.’”

Ballenger had secretly been living in a room, paying rent with his unemployment benefits. Hunt was fine with him doing that and began giving him hours. Ballenger eventually moved into Hunt’s band’s former room and began running keys.

By that point, things had gotten ugly between the Hunt family and Von Haartman and Marian, with the Hunts filing a lawsuit over the unpaid balance of the loan. “In a day, they came and threw Scott out. Scott thought he would be back in two weeks. It was near violence, the experience. They put him up against the wall, up off of his feet,” Ballenger said. “He thought he’d be back in a few, he was like, ‘Dude, I’ll be back and we’ll own it completely in two weeks.’ It didn’t happen. The lawsuit just went on continuously, and so somebody had to run the place.”

Beyond the loan issue, Hunt said there were other reasons they wanted him out. Hunt wanted to expand the Music Bank into the rest of the Ballard Building, which was being rented out to two other businesses. Hunt alleged his business partners wanted him out so they could set up a massive marijuana-growing operation.

Ultimately, the Music Bank was an incubator for the Seattle music scene, with dozens of bands having passed through its doors during the years it was in operation. During this period, Sleze made plans to go in the recording studio.

Chapter 4

BY LATE 1985 OR EARLY 1986, Sleze felt confident enough to record a demo. According to Tim Branom, James Bergstrom approached him to ask for help. “I was older and a little more experienced at the time, and I was kind of an upcoming producer in the area.” Branom and Sleze began working on preproduction of the material in January 1986.

Branom said they worked on the material for about three months, “until the songs were right.” Of the band’s overall creative process, Bergstrom said, “It varied. On those demo tapes, I wrote all of ‘Lip Lock Rock’—lyrics and music. Nick wrote all of ‘Over the Edge’—lyrics and music. ‘Fat Girls’—I wrote all of the music, and I think Jim Sheppard might have written the lyrics to that. But I’d say all the other songs were a collaboration, where maybe I came up with an original riff and Layne would write a lot of lyrics.”

When they started recording in the spring of 1986, they worked on “Fat Girls” and “Lip Lock Rock,” with Mike Mitchell on bass. The instrumental tracks were recorded at the Music Bank, while Layne’s vocals were recorded at Branom’s house in Richmond Beach.

“I worked with Layne for months on his vocals. I was able to afford to go to maestro David Kyle for lessons, but Layne wasn’t, so he would come a few times a week to my house, and we would go over the cassette tapes of my vocal warm-ups, and I would make sure that he was practicing. I knew the only way he would do it was if I was standing right in front of him.

“I made copies of my vocal-lesson tapes for him so he could practice at home. After [he had done] this for about six months, the notes just flowed out effortlessly.” In addition to developing his vocals, Layne had a financial incentive to practice: “It would save money in the studio.”

Later on, Layne did study under David Kyle, whose impressive roster of former students includes Geoff Tate of Queensrÿche, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, Ann Wilson of Heart, and Ronny Munroe of Metal Church. Robert Lunte, a student and protégé of Kyle who now runs the Vocalist Studio in Seattle, remembers seeing a promo head shot of Layne “in full glam regalia” when he was a student at Kyle’s studio, where Kyle kept head shots of all his students. Kyle, who passed away in 2004, told Lunte that Layne had been one of his students.1

Thad Byrd, who would later direct Sleze for a scene in his movie Father Rock and occasionally hung out with the band, said, “Layne was very proud of the fact his vocal coach was the same one as Geoff Tate’s.

“I have a recollection of being at the Music Bank hanging out with those guys. They had just finished practice, and Layne personally telling me. He was all excited that day, because he had either come from a voice lesson … either that day or the day before.

“He said, ‘You know what? Today, he [David Kyle] put Geoff Tate’s picture right in front of me, and he pointed at it and said, “Layne, someday that’s going to be you.”’ Layne was all excited about that. That’s the thing that kills me about what happened to Layne. I had never seen anyone want anything so bad. But he was always smiling, always happy, always upbeat, and always just really super excited.” Byrd thinks this conversation happened at some point in 1987.

It is not known how Layne got started as a student of David Kyle’s and how he paid for it. Jim Elmer had never heard of Kyle, nor did he pay for Layne’s lessons. All this practice would pay off in the long term. Later on in his career, Layne was consistently described by producers and engineers who worked with him as very efficient during his recording sessions, often nailing his parts in one or two takes.

All four members were well prepared by the time they went into the studio, having spent months working on the songs and performing them live. The demo was recorded at London Bridge Studios, a place Layne would come to know well in the years ahead. During one session, Layne and Nick Pollock were hanging out in the lobby, talking about how dedicated they were to their craft, how they would become big rock stars. At one point, Layne looked Pollock in the eye and said, “You know what? I’m a star. It’s just nobody knows it yet.”

“He was very cocky, and he had that just cocksure rock thing down so well,” Pollock said. “He oozed it out of his pores.” At some point during this period, someone—presumably Layne himself—came up with the moniker “Layne the Legend.” According to Pollock, “He wasn’t too serious about it. It was more of a bravado thing that really caught on with people in and out of the band.”

For all Layne’s cockiness, an incident during one of his earliest studio experiences demonstrates his insecurity. According to Branom, Layne was getting ready to record vocals when he asked for time to “work out the bugs” in his voice. He had been out late drinking and partying the night before. Branom thought they had muted his microphone in the control room, but unfortunately for Layne, that wasn’t the case. “We could hear him working out his bugs in the chorus, and his voice was cracking and everything. We were just dying laughing,” Branom said.

Suspecting something was up, Layne kept asking, “Can you hear me?” which Branom and the others in the control room would deny. “We’re all just crying we’re laughing so hard,” Branom explained, and Layne had no idea why. This went on for about twenty minutes. By the time Layne figured it out, it was too late.

According to Branom, singers have to deal with the fact that the voice “is affected by anything—the food you eat, what kind of emotions are going through you, how healthy you are at that point, how much sleep you did or did not get, how much you drank the night before, what time you got up. So all those factors come into play when you’re sitting there, three hundred dollars an hour, you know—it’s kind of embarrassing.” Producers and engineers who worked with Layne later on described him as being very self-conscious about people being present or watching him as he worked on his vocals. Asked about this, Branom said, “We might have traumatized him from doing that.”

On June 4, 1986, Sleze threw a birthday party for Branom. Layne went to an erotic bakery in the University District neighborhood and bought him a cake in the anatomically correct shape of a woman, with breasts made of orange frosting.

Thad Byrd was a nineteen-year-old writer and director working on his first feature film, Father Rock, in May 1986. Byrd was looking for a band to appear in the movie and approached James Bergstrom, who told Byrd that Sleze was recording two songs for a demo. According to Byrd, Bergstrom’s sales pitch for why his band should appear in the movie was “‘We’re the biggest hair band in Seattle!’ but he’s saying it like, ‘Oh my God, I had to have them in my movie because they were the biggest hair band in Seattle. How could I even think of any other band?’” Byrd wrote Bergstrom a check for three hundred dollars, in exchange for which the band would appear in the movie and allow Byrd to use one of their songs. Byrd’s money went toward financing production of the demo.

In the summer of 1986, Layne and the recently graduated Nick Pollock had jobs at Lanks Industries, a factory based in Kirkland that made radiation-containment devices and equipment. In Pollock’s words, “It was hourly punch-a-clock. It was like a sweatshop type of deal. They had all kinds of people coming from a jail work-release type of deal, and people who just didn’t speak any English,” whom he suspected were illegal immigrants.

Working at Lanks was never meant to be a long-term job for Layne or Pollock. In the fall, Pollock was scheduled to start school at Cornish College of the Arts to double major in classical composition and guitar. Neither Pollock nor Layne took their jobs very seriously. “We would spend our time on lunch breaks going out and pounding down a twelve-pack of beer. We were smoking pot. It wasn’t the most responsible thing.

“If we didn’t get fired from the damn place, we certainly quit.”

Layne had gotten his job through future Sleze bassist Morgen Gallagher. According to Gallagher, Layne took acid on the job every day for about six weeks, until he ran out.

Ken Elmer was approached to be part of a horn section for the song “Lip Lock Rock.” Bergstrom told him, “We’ve got this song. It’s kind of a glam rock song, so we want to do this little trumpet and thing at the end to kind of take the song out, and we want you to do a saxophone thing—something crazy and wild.”

Elmer, an all-state saxophonist, agreed and brought along three trumpet players to London Bridge Studios to record their parts. When they arrived, Bergstrom pulled Elmer aside.

“It’s really a privilege to be on a rock and roll album,” he said.

“Huh?” Elmer didn’t get what he was hinting at.

“We gotta pay for time.”

Elmer paid Bergstrom eighty dollars out of his own pocket to play on the demo. “I don’t know how he ever talked me into that one,” he said, laughing. “I really should develop a backbone in my life sometime.”

The horn section would reunite for a show at the University of Washington’s Kane Hall, where, for the first and only time, they would perform their parts live with the band. They arrived on campus early to set up. Someone found a driver’s license with a photo that looked like Elmer, so they took it to a store and had Elmer buy beer, since everyone was underage. Elmer didn’t drink, but he said the trumpet players got “a little bit wasted.”

“I remember [one trumpet player] came out in his underwear for the trumpet part, with a beer bottle in his underwear. We came out, and he just did that song, and it was toward the end of the thing. It was really neat, but they were getting some notoriety. They are playing this thousand-seat auditorium and actually sound pretty freaking good.”

In August 1986, Sleze and Branom finished recording tracks for the demo. Not long after this, the living situation and working relationship with bassist Mike Mitchell was beginning to deteriorate. Mitchell, then in his midtwenties and a few years older than his bandmates, lived in an apartment that was part of a triplex-style house in the University District with his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Lisa Ahern Rammell, who went by the nickname Leigh in those days. At some point while Mike and Leigh were broken up, Layne had moved into a closet in Mitchell’s apartment, because when the couple got back together, Layne was living there. The closet was big enough for a single bed and had a chest of drawers and its own window.

Layne’s living arrangement was a source of amusement because of the double entendre involved. “We used to give him so much crap about coming out of the closet in the morning. He’d come out rubbing his eyes, ‘Oh, Layne’s coming out of the closet again,’” Ahern Rammell recalled. Her car at the time was a 1969 Pontiac GTO Judge. When Layne wanted to look cool, he would borrow her car. She rode in Layne’s car many times and saw him squirt people with his windshield wipers the same way James Bergstrom did.

Morgen Gallagher recalls that he moved into Mitchell’s place after Layne had already been living there for a few months. They lived near an expressway off-ramp and had Big Wheel races down the ramp when there was little or no traffic in the early hours of the morning.

“One night they got drunk enough they thought it was a grand idea to go for a walk, and they came back bloodied, skinned-up,” Ahern Rammell recalled. “They’re laughing their asses off and I’ve got them all sat down like little kids putting Band-Aids on their elbows and washing off their boo-boos. They had stolen Big Wheels and taken them up on the express lane off-ramp and ridden them all the way down the off-ramp and down the road until they wiped out. They did that a couple times, and the last wipeout was so bad they decided they were done.”

Subsequently Mitchell was dismissed from the band and Gallagher joined as his replacement. Mitchell’s dismissal forced Layne and Gallagher to move out of his house. Marianne Condiff, who wanted to manage Sleze, let them stay in her studio apartment in West Seattle for several months.

The timing of Mitchell’s departure was especially bad because it happened a day or so before Sleze was scheduled to shoot the scene for Father Rock. Gallagher took Mitchell’s spot in the band for the movie. Over the course of a Friday and Saturday in September 1986, Byrd shot the Father Rock scenes with Sleze at the Richmond Beach Congregational Church. Sleze brought along about fifty extras for the shoot. The actor playing the lead role in the movie had to take off for a few hours because he was working as a stripper and had to jump out of a cake.

Byrd was annoyed when he found out Layne was drinking hard liquor in the church bathroom before the performance. Byrd filmed Sleze in the church, which took about three hours. Layne lip-synched as the band performed two songs: “Fat Girls” and “Over the Edge.” Byrd wrapped up the shoot and had everyone come back the next day.

Layne had a small cameo with spoken lines in the script. According to Byrd, he told the actress to call him Candy, which wasn’t in Byrd’s original script. There was an attractive girl sitting in the front row. Byrd later discovered Layne went home with her that night. There was trouble with the extras: one or more of them vandalized the church’s vending machine and caused ten thousand dollars’ worth of damage to the organ pipes. Byrd’s parents had homeowner’s insurance, which paid for the damages as a goodwill gesture.

Byrd was originally set on using “Fat Girls” but later changed his mind and used “In for Trouble,” a song by Tim Branom’s band Gypsy Rose, which played over the footage of Sleze performing “Over the Edge” in the final cut. The movie, which aired on local cable in Seattle, wasn’t released until 1989. By that point, Sleze had broken up and Layne was in Alice in Chains. The last time Byrd saw Layne was in the mid-1990s, backstage after a Second Coming show—Johnny Bacolas and James Bergstrom’s band that Byrd was working with at the time.

“I hadn’t seen him in years. It was really cool to sit down and talk. I remember he had a firm handshake, and he looked muscular. He’d been working out, and he looked good,” he recalled. One of the first things Layne said to him was, “Hey, I saw Father Rock…”

“Oh my God! Where did you see that?”

“Someone had a copy of it.”

“What’d you think?”

“I liked it but it was corny.”

At some point during this period, Layne and Chrissy Chacos were introduced by Chrissy’s sister and started dating. Both Layne and his mother told Chacos she was his first serious girlfriend. Chacos, a Seattle native who had moved to Minneapolis where she became part of the local music scene while Prince was filming Purple Rain, had moved back to Seattle. While in Minnesota, she was a fan of Apollonia Kotero, the female lead in the movie. Somehow she wound up getting two pairs of Prince’s pants and a purple outfit—pants, jacket, and white ruffled shirt—similar to the one he wore on the album cover and movie poster.

Her initial impression of Layne: “Layne was awesome. Layne was a total comedian. He was always in a good mood.” They would go out to see local bands or hang out at the Music Bank.

After several months of crashing at Marianne Condiff’s place, Layne and Gallagher had worn out their welcome. She got fed up because they did not help pay the rent. According to Gallagher, “We would tell Marianne that we were going out job hunting, and we’d go down to the Rainier Brewery and just sit in that sample room and drink half the day.”

They would take the free tour of the brewery, which ended at the sample room, which had a three-beer limit. Layne and Gallagher would leave and come back and take the tour two or three times a day. How did they get by at this point? “Basically, we were taken care of by people. People wanted us to hang out with them. They paid for everything, pretty much,” Gallagher said. “We were acting like rock stars, and we were being paid to do it, so we just kept on doing it.”

In other words, they had no incentive to get a real job. The two moved into the band’s rehearsal room at the Music Bank. Eventually, Johnny Bacolas rejoined the band as a bassist and replaced Gallagher.

Another personal and professional milestone happened at some point in the second half of 1986 when Layne cowrote “Queen of the Rodeo” with local musician Jet Silver. Tim Branom remembers being there with Layne and Silver as they were writing the song. “They were sitting at the piano, and I was there with them at the Music Bank. It was about two or three o’clock in the morning and they were just completing that song, and it was pretty funny,” he said.

Morgen Gallagher has a slightly different recollection of the writing of the song and how Layne came across it. “It was a gift from Jet Silver and that was for Layne’s birthday. And it was just the first verse and then the chorus. And then me and Layne wrote the second verse. It’s a good song, and then we just took and finished it up.

“Jet had first played it for [Layne] and then gave it to him. It was for a birthday present up at Jet’s house in West Seattle, when we were living with Marianne maybe four or five blocks from him, so we saw him quite often.

“Whenever we were over at his house we just played some stuff, and Layne heard it and just fell in love with it and kept on raving about it. So Jet says, ‘Fine, it’s yours then.’”

Nick Pollock said of the song, “We played that one in the old Alice ’N Chains a lot. It was a big crowd-pleaser because it was such a ridiculous song.

“I would say we’re playing it by, I don’t know, early ’87. It seems to be a big part of that band any way you look at it. I think it may have correlated with when we did the name change. I can’t remember. But it was such a big show hit, I just remember playing it at every show.”

One of the more curious elements of the Alice in Chains history is that none of the members of the first or second version of the band came up with the name. Credit for the name goes to Russ Klatt, front man for the band Slaughter Haus 5.

In the fall or winter of 1986, Johnny Bacolas was at a party and ran into Klatt. The two started a conversation about changing Sleze’s name. Layne and Bacolas had designed backstage passes. One pass said something to the effect of “Sleze: Welcome to Wonderland Tour.”2 The conversation shifted to Alice in Wonderland and evolved into Alice in Bondage. Eventually, Klatt said three fateful words: Alice in Chains.

“From what I remember, I got to basically give [credit for the name] to Russ, because I remember him saying the name, and I went, ‘Wow, that’s got a nice ring to it!’” Bacolas said. But there was a problem, or more specifically four problems: the band members’ mothers.

“I had a sense of humor about the name Sleze. But when he came home and said they were changing the name to [Alice in Chains], I was not happy,” Layne’s mother told Greg Prato years later. Nancy and Layne butted heads about it, each with strong views. They didn’t talk much for the next two weeks. Nancy explains: “I was concerned, and also offended. How could my child possibly choose a name like ‘[Alice in Chains]’?”3

Bacolas’s and Bergstrom’s mothers didn’t like the name, either. “If they thought there was any connotation to bondage or a woman in chains, we would have had issues,” Bacolas said, pointing out their parents paid for their rehearsal space and studio costs. “Instead of taking the car away, they’d take the practice room away, or they’d take the studio-recording money away.”

The compromise solution was making the band’s name “Alice ’N Chains,” which made it sound more like “Alice and Chains.” Even though Guns n’ Roses released Appetite for Destruction on July 21, 1987, the decision to use the apostrophe-N combination in their name had nothing to do with the up-and-coming Los Angeles quintet. The name change happened well before Guns n’ Roses became a household name. “I don’t think that [Guns n’ Roses] was in our thought process. I think we were just being slick,” Bacolas said.

However, this possibility cannot be entirely ruled out. There was a poor-quality recording of Guns n’ Roses circulating at the Music Bank at some point before Appetite for Destruction was released. “We were like, ‘Who the hell are these guys?’” said Hit and Run drummer Dean Noble. “We were trying to figure out how they could even be considered a great band, because it sounded like shit.” But once Appetite for Destruction was out, Layne was a fan, David Ballenger recalled.

The name change happened at some point in late 1986 and was briefly mentioned in the Metal Rap section of the June 1987 edition of The Rocket. It reads, “Glam popsters SLEZE have changed their name to ALICE N’ CHAINS.”4 This is possibly the first reference in any publication to the new band name, or to any version of the Alice in Chains name.

Johnny Bacolas and Nick Pollock didn’t know their name change had been mentioned in The Rocket until they were interviewed for this book twenty-four years later, and both of them say they didn’t contact the paper. It’s possible that Layne might have done it. However, James Bergstrom says he may have been responsible. “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know if I want to change the name.’ But we thought it was a cool-sounding name. I remember actually calling The Rocket and asking them for their opinion,” he recalls.

The response from the girl at The Rocket who took his phone call?

“Hate it. Don’t like it.”

Chapter 5

THE FINAL MIXES OF the Sleze demo were done at Triad Studios in January 1987. Although band members have said that the demo cost approximately $1,600, Branom said the real costs were higher, noting that both he and Thad Byrd had put money into the project. The demo was released that same month. Only about a hundred cassette copies were made, which band members gave mostly to friends and family. Tim Branom gave Jeff Gilbert a copy, which was played on KCMU. Branom didn’t get a copy for himself at the time—he wound up having to buy one on eBay several years later.

Gilbert had a very positive impression of the band from the demo and seeing them live, calling them “unusually talented, for being a brand-new band. They had polish, where other people were still [not] ripe,” he recalled. “What struck me is just how good they were even just as a brand-new band. Like, where did these guys get these skills? It wasn’t just that the musicianship was just freakin’ solid, but it was their skill in arranging and actually writing a song.”

Mace guitarist Dave Hillis saw the band perform at Ballard High School. “There was probably like a hundred people, maybe more, maybe a little less. I just remember they definitely had girls, like seventy-five percent of it was girls, all glammed up,” he said. “What attracted me to hanging out with them is that’s where the girls were—even in their rehearsal studios, there would be girls. I met one of my girlfriends going to an Alice ’N Chains rehearsal.”

“They were kinda taking a lead off of Poison, before Poison made it, but we had all heard in LA, the Sunset Strip, how Poison was really doing everything they could, from flyering excessively to having gimmicks onstage, confetti. It was a very good-time party atmosphere. They were going in that direction, Sunset Strip kinda thing—plastic confetti, lights, I think maybe a water gun shooting people, any kind of little gimmick they could to make it like this big party atmosphere. The complete opposite of what they ended up being—later Alice, where they’re more brooding. I can tell you a lot of bands back then … nobody had an identity yet. Everybody was searching.”

During their shows, they would walk out to the theme from the movie The Stripper while tossing out roses to the girls in the audience. The onstage gimmicks were often their interpretations or parodies of things they had seen elsewhere. In between songs after a designated cue, a friend would come out onstage and hold up a mirror where any of the band members could primp. This was a parody of a scene in Purple Rain, where Morris Day had a member of his entourage do the same thing. Sometimes Layne would go offstage and come back on riding a Big Wheel, which had a paper sign taped to the front that read THE LAYNEMOBILE—a spoof of Judas Priest front man Rob Halford, who rode a motorcycle onstage. Lisa Ahern Rammell remembers seeing Layne do it and laughing herself “sick,” because of her memory of the Big Wheel race. The Laynemobile wound up in Tim Branom’s grandmother’s garage and was later donated to Goodwill.

Layne’s wardrobe often consisted of items borrowed from Lisa Ahern Rammell, who also provided fashion tips. “They would wear my pink and black spandex pants. I had a huge collection of belts and lace gloves and tank tops and necklaces and scarves. And I was a hairdresser, so I did their hair, taught them how to do their makeup. And they looked like Poison out there, a bunch of beautiful boys with hair out to here, and that slowly morphed into the grunge thing,” she recalled. To get a sense of how thin he was, during the period when Layne was wearing her pants, she had a twenty-four-inch waist. Chrissy Chacos lent Layne the purple outfit belonging to Prince that she had acquired in Minnesota. According to her, he wore it onstage during his last show with Sleze, but she never got it back.

According to James Bergstrom, they would have band meetings at the Denny’s in Ballard, where over breakfast they would plan their stage moves. Johnny Bacolas compared their planning to a Las Vegas production.1

Jeff Gilbert’s day job at the time was working at a silk-screen shop called Silver Screen Graphics, where he got a design for an Alice ’N Chains T-shirt, consisting of the band’s logo and a photo of the four members. “It looked like Poison’s first album cover—four guys with pouffed-up hair. They had kind of a badass logo that they just kind of wrapped around.” Gilbert made the T-shirts, which would come back to haunt Layne a few years later.

According to David Ballenger, it was at some point in early 1987 that he began taking over the day-to-day operations of running the Music Bank from Scott Hunt. Nick Pollock had a job there, running the keys and letting people in and out of the building, but Ballenger decided to fire him after seeing him drinking on the job. Pollock said he never really had a job there, only that he helped out occasionally. Layne eventually convinced Ballenger to give him Pollock’s job, which, according to Tim Branom, paid four dollars an hour in credit toward room rent. “No money ever changed hands,” Ballenger said.

Ballenger and Layne became friends. At one point, during conversations about his biological father, Layne said to him, “I wish you were my dad.” “We had long talks about his dad, not that he didn’t care for his dad, but he thought his dad was never around for him,” Ballenger said. Layne invited him to his parents’ home, where he met the family.

“Is Layne being a good boy?” his mother asked Ballenger.

“Oh, yeah. Layne’s being a real good boy.”

After she was out of earshot, he said to Layne, “You owe me for that.”

Darrell Vernon arrived at the Music Bank at some point in 1986 as the guitarist in a band called De Oppresso Liber—later named Triathlon. Though he wasn’t supposed to, he had been living in his room at the Music Bank and eventually got a job there running keys. Vernon said of Layne, “He was definitely a big presence there.” He said that under the previous management, there was “a lot of snobbiness and sort of meanness at first,” and that even Layne could come off that way.

Their friendship began while both were living at the Music Bank. Vernon got to know him because he lived there and had a few necessary supplies—hair spray and a hair dryer—that Layne would borrow on occasion. He and Layne spent many late nights sitting around the office. There was a TV and VCR, and if nothing was going on, they would watch videos of The Terminator or Purple Rain.

“One of my main [memories] of Layne is, every time when I would come into the rehearsal space in the Music Bank, he’d be in the office with his feet up on the desk watching Purple Rain, like a million times,” Dave Hillis recalled. “It could be a week later: I’d come in, and he’s still watching Purple Rain.”

According to Vernon, “They had this really old, like, bootleg copy of The Terminator. It was just kind of a joke. ‘We’ve got nothing else better to do. Put The Terminator in again.’ And it got so worn out it was almost unwatchable, but we still put it in.”

Layne would also practice. He’d put on Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” on the PA and sing along until he had gotten it perfect—to the point where he nailed every note in the wail near the end of the song. One time Layne was in the office when he started singing a song by the band Mistrust, whose singer, Jeff L’Heureux, had somewhat of an operatic voice, which Layne mimicked perfectly. At that point, the people in the office saw L’Heureux himself walking up, having heard Layne. He watched Layne through the office’s window, remarking, “What the hell is going on?” According to David Ballenger, “Everyone [was] just laughing like crazy.”

Pranks and practical jokes were part of life at the Music Bank, although sometimes they could push the envelope. Layne put a dead rat inside the bass drum of the band Sex. As payback, someone from Sex set up a large cup filled with flour, mounted it on top of a door, and tied it to the doorknob. According to James Bergstrom, Layne had a big date that night, which he had taken time to prepare for. He stepped through the booby-trapped door and was covered with flour. Bergstrom isn’t sure, but he thinks the members of Sex may have followed up the flour immediately by dousing him with water. Layne was furious and suspected Bergstrom was behind it because he was there at the time, a charge Bergstrom denied.

Another time, Tim Branom was on duty with the keys one night when Layne brought a girl back to his room for a tryst. Branom and a group of about a dozen people were standing outside. They barged in and pulled the two of them apart. “I remember the condom flying in the air and us all laughing, but Layne never got back at me or anything. That was all part of being friends. The girl was screaming, of course, but she wasn’t screaming that bad. It was almost like you just knew that was going to happen.”

One night at the Music Bank, Layne; Dehumanizers drummer Infra Ed; Barry Oswald, who worked at the Music Bank; and graphic artist Steve Alley were watching This Is Spinal Tap—“in an altered state of being,” according to Alley—after which everyone decided they could do it better. They formed a band called Penis NV—pronounced “penis envy”—which Alley designed a logo for. They booked a show at a club under the Aurora Bridge, which sold out. Before the show, Layne and Ed drank a fifth of Jack Daniel’s by themselves. When they took the stage, Ed tripped and kicked his drum set into the crowd. After this, Layne went to the microphone, said “Thank you,” and walked offstage. The performance lasted about two minutes, and they didn’t play a single song. “We had a bunch of pissed-off people who spent five bucks to get in the door,” Alley said. “But they got what they got.” They hurried out of there as fast as they could.

Drug use was also part of life at the Music Bank, usually marijuana, cocaine, and acid. Multiple sources consistently say heroin was not part of the scene. “I didn’t know anybody that did heroin back then, but pretty much everybody did coke. It was just standard,” Tim Branom said. “It was the eighties—everybody did it. It wasn’t considered that bad, because people weren’t doing it out of control. It was just like somebody would drink a beer, they would do a few lines.”

“I don’t even know when the whole heroin thing happened for them. I know there was a little bit of blow going around at one point and we were all doing it like nobody gave a shit,” Music Bank cofounder Scott Hunt said. “[Heroin] just hadn’t hit Seattle yet. If … it was going to hit anywhere, [you think] it would have hit us. We never saw it.”

Music Bank manager David Ballenger offered a similar recollection, with a slight caveat. “There was a problem with cocaine around, but I’m not saying there wasn’t heroin around. Cocaine was a real scourge around the Music Bank. I’ve got some hellacious stories about that, involving psychotic people with guns.”

There is some evidence of heroin use at the Music Bank. Layne and Hit and Run drummer Dean Noble went to the room occupied by the band Broken Toyz, who had a larger room and whose singer, Rob Brustad, was always down for getting stoned. “We were smoking some weed, and Rob broke out some heroin and offered it to us. I looked at Layne and he looked at me and we’re like, ‘No thanks. You go ahead—we’ll just stick with weed. We’re cool.’ That was pretty much it. It wasn’t like a hard sell or anything like that. At that time, Layne wasn’t interested in that.” Duane Lance Bodenheimer, singer of the band the Derelicts, who had his own struggles with heroin, agreed with Noble’s assessment. “A heroin junkie doesn’t turn down heroin.”

Darrell Vernon offered a surprising account of Layne’s views at the time. “Back then, he was very against heroin. They were doing just about everything else. There was lots of cocaine, like, and LSD and stuff like that, and everybody is smoking pot and that sort of thing, but it was ironic that he became a heroin addict, because he was so against heroin at that point in time.

“There was like sort of a line where junkies weren’t cool,” he added. “Generally, there was this sort of peer-pressure thing that the heroin was definitely not okay. Junkies were bad, but all other sort of drugs were okay, but that wasn’t.” Brustad would later die of an apparent drug overdose in 1996. He was thirty-one years old.2

Regardless of his opposition to heroin, Layne was developing a growing appetite and tolerance for drug use, enough that his bandmates were becoming alarmed. During one night out in Seattle, Layne and Pollock—“fueled by mushrooms”—were walking around, and there was talk about the movie A Clockwork Orange. “We went out being decadent, breaking shit, that kind of thing. We ran—Layne got caught,” Pollock said. Layne decided to give the police officer, a woman, some attitude. According to the account he heard from Layne later, “He was a smart-ass to her, and she sicced the dog on him and it chewed up his legs. We came by him a little bit later in the evening. The cops had him in the back of a car at 7-Eleven. We just saw him kind of like look up and nod at us. I believe his hands were still handcuffed behind his back.” Someone eventually got Layne out of jail.

On another occasion, Nick Pollock drove to Layne’s parents’ home to pick him up for band practice. He was driving across the 520 bridge when he noticed Layne’s eyes were extremely dilated. “His eyes were just totally crazy, but he had this really calm look on his face.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Pollock asked.

“I took some acid.”

“How much?”

“A sheet.”

“The man had a constitution for drugs,” Pollock would later recall. “He could ingest so much stuff, and it just didn’t mess him up. We went out one night with a bottle of tequila somehow he got a hold of. I remember imbibing enough of it to get me pretty wasted. But he drank all the rest of it.” Pollock estimated Layne drank more than half of the bottle by himself. “I always remember that the guy just could do a lot. He could drink a lot, he could do a lot of drugs, and it didn’t seem to slow him down too much.”

On another occasion, Layne brought Pollock into a room at the Music Bank. His motives for doing so were unknown to Pollock until they actually did it: they freebased cocaine.

Pollock was shaken because he enjoyed it so much that it scared him. “I walked away from that and said, ‘I will never, ever do that again,’ because it felt way too good,” Pollock said. “I remember feeling like I was standing at the opening of an abyss, and then I turned around and walked away.” Layne and Pollock talked about it after, and both agreed they would never do it again. Pollock doesn’t know if Layne did it again.

Layne’s drug use got to the point where Pollock, Bergstrom, and Bacolas organized a band meeting at the Music Bank to confront him at some point in 1987, not long before their band broke up. “I think he [was] doing more and more and more of it, and then we started to notice, band-wise, like, ‘This is freaking us out,’ because we’re worried for our friend. We had something of an intervention with him. There were tears involved,” Pollock said.

“I’ll take care of it. It’ll get better. I’ll stop doing it,” Layne told them.

Bergstrom had a similar recollection. “I remember at one point during the Music Bank days, he did, I think, start doing a little bit of cocaine. I remember us having a band meeting about it because we didn’t know and he wasn’t singing as well, and then we found out. I remember us scheduling a band meeting and sitting down with him and all of us talking about it. I remember Layne crying and saying, ‘I’m not going to do that anymore.’”

Asked if he agreed with Pollock’s description of this meeting as an intervention, Bergstrom said, “In its own innocent way, it was. Absolutely.”

“We’re probably seventeen- or eighteen-year-old kids at that time. It was like, ‘Dude, we love you, man. We don’t want to see you get involved with that and ruin your life, affecting your great talent.’ I remember it hitting home with Layne.” Their intervention consisted of a private band meeting between the four of them—there were no family members or counselors involved. That wouldn’t happen until a few years later.

On May 1, 1987, Alice ’N Chains was the opening act on a three-band bill at the Tacoma Little Theatre.3 “This next song is a little creepy,” Layne said while introducing “Glamorous Girls.” “There’s actually a little story. We used to be kinda tacky, me and Johnny here especially—we used to be kind of tacky. We had this fetish of, like, being with girls and taking their clothes, you know? And keeping them, and wearing them. Just like some strange obsession, you know? We wrote this song, ‘Glamorous Girls,’ and this is what it’s about.”

Before the band started the song, someone in the audience could clearly be heard yelling, “Fuck you, Layne!”

“You know who that was? That’s the guy whose face looks like the moon,” Layne responded, to roars of laughter from the audience. “You should really, seriously think about investing in Stridex, you know, not just buying some for yourself.”

The most important thing about that show had nothing to do with anything the band said or did during the performance. Rather, the unforeseen and ultimately life-altering consequence of that show was one of the people in the audience watching: a twenty-one-year-old guitarist from Spanaway named Jerry Cantrell, who immediately knew he wanted to be in a band with Layne.4

Jerry’s father, Jerry Cantrell, Sr., was a soldier who served three years in Vietnam; his mother, Gloria Jean Krumpos, raised Jerry and his two siblings by herself for several years.5

“One of the first memories I have was my dad coming back from Vietnam in his uniform when I was three years old,” Jerry told Rolling Stone. “And my mom telling me he was my dad.”6 After the war, Jerry’s father was assigned to various U.S. military bases. His parents divorced when he was seven. Jerry moved around, having lived in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Washington. Jerry developed an interest in music at an early age. Shortly after learning to write, he was given a copy of Dr. Seuss’s My Book About Me. He filled in the sentence “When I grow up I want to be a…” with two words: “rock star.”7

Around 1980, the fourteen-year-old Jerry was inspired to learn guitar by listening to Elton John’s Caribou and Captain Fantastic albums. Jerry and his friends would play along to Def Leppard, though they didn’t have any instruments. “We played on milk cans and buckets and stuff, and I had this guitar that played through a stereo,” Jerry told Rockline. “We didn’t have instruments, so we made our own, and we’re trying to play like On Through the Night.”8

Jerry eventually moved back with his mother, who was living in Spanaway, a few miles outside Tacoma. The family lived through difficult times, during which they were on welfare and food stamps. Jerry was jamming with friends and acting in high school plays. He also engaged in typical adolescent antics—egging cars and smashing mailboxes with baseball bats. When he was seventeen, he was arrested by police officers for trying to get oral sex in a park. What worried him most was that his grandmother might find out from her police scanner, which she would listen to every day, telling him every time one of his friends got busted. Fortunately for him, the scanner malfunctioned that night, so she never heard anything.9

While Jerry was a student at Spanaway High School in 1982, a teacher named Joanne Becker asked him and his friends to try out for choir. Jerry spoke highly of his experience with Becker. “She was one of the few teachers I actually had fun being around,” he told The Seattle Times in 1991. “We did everything from modern pop to some really great classical stuff. It was really happening.” Becker is credited with alleviating Jerry’s fear of performing onstage—a crucial skill for his future profession. She eventually had him performing fifteenth-century a cappella music.

“You didn’t feel intimidated,” Jerry said. “That’s something that really stands out in my mind. I was really into rock and roll at the time, and I was getting into bands and jamming, and that was my only musical outlet. I’d seen teachers in other schools that had music programs, but I was never impressed with their attitude. And that’s something I look for now when I’m working with anybody, is somebody who doesn’t talk down to you.”10

In his senior year, Jerry was president of the choir, which had a quartet that sang the national anthem at basketball games and won competitions, getting ones from the judges—the highest possible mark. Years later, Jerry said his choir and drama teachers really pushed him early on in his quest for a music career. After Facelift was certified gold for sales in excess of 500,000 copies, he sent both of his former teachers gold records.11

Jerry graduated from high school in 1984. A year later, he moved to the Dallas area to join a band with a couple of friends and worked at the Arnold and Morgan Music Company.12 At some point in 1985 or early 1986, Jerry moved back to the Tacoma area. Bobby Nesbitt and Scott Nutter were the singer and drummer in a local band named Phoenix, which had their practice space at a storage facility, along with several other local bands. Nesbitt and Nutter were checking out the other bands when they walked into the unit where Raze—Jerry’s band at the time—had their rehearsal space. Raze didn’t have a singer—at the time the band was a trio with Jerry on guitar, future Pretty Boy Floyd bassist Vinnie Chas (real name: Vincent Charles Pusateri), and a drummer. They recognized Jerry’s talent immediately.13

“Our guitar player was going to be fired, but we heard of another band in the facility. It was Jerry,” Nutter recalled. Nesbitt added, “Basically we ended up kind of stealing Jerry from that band because we saw him and we were like, ‘Wow, this is the guy, totally,’ and it fit.”

Shortly after Jerry joined the band, they changed their name to Diamond Lie. “He didn’t like the name [Phoenix] right away, and he came up with the name Diamond Lie. I want to say he said it was some lyrics from a song that he had heard on the radio,” Nesbitt said, but could not recall the name of the band or song.

Diamond Lie’s original bassist quit sometime later. Shortly after this, Matt Muasau’s sister met Jerry and told him, “My brother is a really good bass player. Why don’t you talk to him?” A meeting was arranged, the two hit it off and began writing music, and Muasau got the job, for which he used the stage name Matt Mustapha.

The band relocated to a new rehearsal space in a rented basement in somebody’s house in Spanaway. The owner of the house, who Muasau said they called Big Mike, was the band’s unofficial manager and handled their bookings. Nutter described the band’s image and sound as “any of the glam bands that were big at the time. Poison. Not really Mötley Crüe—we were more pop, chick rock, that kind of thing.” Their set included covers of Sweet’s “Fox on the Run” and KISS’s “Rock and Roll All Nite.” Jerry was already writing songs at the time. According to Nutter, “I would say [Jerry] would write half of it or more, and then bring it to the band. They would work it out, and then I would add vocals to the top.”

Nesbitt said Jerry became the band’s leader fairly soon after joining. “I really liked Jerry a lot. I was not used to Jerry’s brashness. He definitely was the leader, and he let you know how he felt, but he wasn’t an asshole. He wasn’t a yelling kind of guy. But he was in his own way kind of intimidating because he was so confident.

“Jerry knew exactly what he wanted to do,” he said. “He basically wrote all the material. He took over the whole songwriting process. It wasn’t a bad thing or anything, because he was such an excellent songwriter. He could crank out a song. Every practice, he came back with new songs.

“Being in Diamond Lie was like being in the army. We worked our asses off. It was regimented; we had a goal. We worked our butts off to be the best. I’d say Jerry was kind of the general. He knew exactly what it took to get to that point,” Nesbitt said. Jerry set up large mirrors in their practice space so they could see for themselves how they looked performing live and make improvements as necessary. “I was horrified at the faces I was making while I was playing drums that I never even knew about,” Nesbitt said.

According to Muasau, “Jerry was always professional, and he wanted to make sure the show was professional. So when we hit the stage, it wasn’t just a band getting up there and jamming. It was a band getting up there and putting on a show. We were entertainers as much as we were musicians and songwriters.” Jerry also had the band working on stage choreography. He and Muasau worked out a move where they would toss their guitar picks at each other while standing about ten feet apart in the middle of a song, catch it, and keep playing.

Things didn’t always go according to plan. During one performance, Muasau and Jerry were doing the KISS move where everyone is swaying back and forth in synch with one another. Jerry and Muasau got out of rhythm, and eventually each wound up doing the opposite of the other while about two feet apart. Muasau felt the headstock of his bass hit something solid, a feeling he compared to hitting a baseball.

It was Jerry’s head he’d hit, giving him a cut right above his eyebrow, which began to bleed. According to Muasau, “The crowd was like, ‘Yeah, go on, man, kill yourself for us!’” Someone put a bandage on the cut and stopped the bleeding, and Jerry was able to finish the set.

At another gig, the band was told there would be pyro. Before the set, they were told to pay attention to the markers placed on the stage, noting that Nutter, Muasau, and Jerry had to be standing on those markers at specific times in the show. During the start of the performance, the pyro went off, but Muasau wasn’t on his marker.

“The crowd was just … their eyes got really big, and I went, ‘Wow, what did I do?’ Then all of a sudden, all these sparks started falling all around me like snow. I had enough hair spray in my hair, and I had enough hair back then to where I would have exploded,” Muasau said. He, however, avoided disaster, where others—Michael Jackson and Metallica’s James Hetfield—suffered severe burns and had to be hospitalized.

Diamond Lie would typically practice five nights a week, with rehearsals lasting as long as three hours. They started playing shows in Tacoma and Seattle with the ultimate goal of getting a record deal. They got to the point where they were playing weekly gigs. At some time during this period, they became friends with a guy named Steve Frost, who would regularly come to their rehearsals. Frost had recently received money from an inheritance, and he gave Diamond Lie two thousand dollars to record a demo.

The band went into London Bridge Studios and recorded a four-song demo. “It came out really great. I was excited by it. We had the guitar player from a band called Perennial, Schuyler Duryee came out, and he kind of produced it for us, along with Rick and Raj Parashar,” Nesbitt recalled. “Perennial was a big deal. They had a song on [Seattle radio station KISW] that was in the [station’s] top ten. That was really probably my very first experience at being in a recording studio.”

Jerry was already thinking of public relations. “When I was hanging out with him, he was a charismatic person, and people are pretty naturally attracted to talk with him and hang out with him, and he knows what he’s doing,” Nesbitt recalled. “I never thought in a million years I would walk through Tacoma Mall wearing spandex with holes cut in my ass passing out cassette tapes and flyers and not getting my ass beat in. That’s exactly what we ended up doing. We walked through there. He just said, ‘Be confident; do what I do,’ and I did. I’m talking with full makeup and hair stacked three miles high.”

Muasau recalls a show where he was wearing a black leather outfit and Jerry was wearing a very tight white leather outfit. “Golly, man, aren’t you uncomfortable in that? It’s hot,” he asked. “Yeah, but I look good in this,” was Jerry’s response. That was when he knew Jerry was going to make it and be successful as a musician.

Nesbitt and Nutter both described Jerry as extremely close to his mother, and they recall her being very encouraging of him. “Just a cool mom. Really supportive of what Jerry wanted to do,” Nutter said.

“I remember his mom, and I know that he wanted to show his mom that he could do this. He was really adamant. I remember him one day telling her, ‘I’m going to become the best songwriter, and the best this and that, and you’re going to see it happen,’” Nesbitt recalled. “She was a really nice person, and she seemed to kind of light up around him.”

By the time he turned twenty-one, Jerry had been hit by two family tragedies within six months of each other. First, his grandmother, Dorothy Krumpos, a retired secretary and lifelong resident of the Tacoma and Eatonville area, died of cancer on October 9, 1986. Not long after her death, his mother said she had six months to live after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. “She and my grandmother both spent most of their time in the house in the medical bed doped up on morphine and wasting away daily,” Jerry said of this painful period. He coped with the situation by playing guitar ten to twelve hours a night.14

According to Nesbitt, Jerry kept his personal family turmoil to himself. “I found out she was sick right before she passed away.” This description is consistent with what Matt Muasau recalls. Jerry started coming over to his house regularly, where they would hang out and write music. Eventually, Muasau asked him, “Hey, man, don’t you got to go home?”

“Nah, this is my home now,” Jerry responded. Muasau started picking him up at his house and helping him move some of his things out. As Jerry was spending more time at Muasau’s house, his sister, Cheri, would pick him up so he could see their mother. Jerry told Rolling Stone that after tensions had been brewing between him and his relatives as his mother’s health was deteriorating, he was kicked out of the house. Jerry moved out at some point before his mother’s death.15

“Me and my mom said our good-byes a while ago,” he told Muasau.

“Well, don’t you want to be there for her?”

“No, me and my mom said our good-byes already.”

On April 11, 1987, Gloria Jean Cantrell died of complications from pancreatic cancer. She was forty-three years old. According to her obituary in the Tacoma News Tribune, she was an administrative assistant for the Clover Park School District and “was active in many sports … she loved music and was a beautiful seamstress.”16 Jerry’s bandmates went to the memorial service to support him. “I felt really bad for him. I know it hit him really hard. I felt really honored that he invited us to be there as his friends, because I know it meant a lot to him and it meant a lot to us to be there and put our hands on him, let him know it was going to be okay. It was a pretty deep moment for all of us,” Nesbitt said.

About three weeks later, Jerry went to see Alice ’N Chains perform at the Tacoma Little Theatre, at what Nick Pollock thinks would have been one of the band’s final shows. After the show, Pollock went out to talk to people and to try and pick up girls by inviting them to an after party. Pollock would play the crucial role of introducing Layne and Jerry to each other later that summer.

“I met Jerry in the back. He came up and introduced himself to me. We traded numbers. He was really polite and kind and complimentary,” Pollock recalled. He described Jerry as “a very mannered, polite fella with very whitish-blond hair, all pouffed up because that’s the way we all wore our hair and stuff, glamlike. Nice guy, wearing cowboy boots, tight jeans, a long trench coat that was kind of a military type, T-shirt—dressing like everybody dressed, I think, at the time. And he was a cool guy.”

According to Nutter, the death of Jerry’s mother was the beginning of the end of Diamond Lie, because of the profound impact it had on his personality and his music.

“His grandmother died and then his mom died, and he basically went into, as anybody would, a sort of depression. He just changed [into] a completely different person after that,” Nutter explained. “What he did was, he wrote the songs, and he handed them to us on a tape, and, ‘These are the songs; learn them.’” Nutter empathized with him. “I would think if something like that happened, you’d want to be able to control something in your life.”

Jerry also had a strong sense of foresight in terms of the musical landscape. “He said what he thought the next thing would be. That’s his genius, I would say,” Nutter explained. “When he came to us, he says, ‘You know what’s going on is this band called Poison coming up, blah, blah, blah.’ That’s right before they hit it big, so we started doing that. And then right when his mother died, he said, ‘Hey, there’s this band called Guns n’ Roses. They’re coming up.’ Nobody knew of them yet, but he knew of them. He said people were wearing streetwear, like jeans and T-shirts or whatever as opposed to the glam leg-wear. We were like, ‘That’s crazy. That’s just too out there. We’re supposed to have a show, wear costumes like KISS or whatever.’

“I think it was the look. He said, ‘The singer from Guns n’ Roses sounds like a male Janis Joplin.’ And he said that he was more into the way they looked as opposed to the way they sounded, though the sound was appealing to him, too.”

Nesbitt said there was also a change in Jerry’s music. “I think when his mom died, it completely changed his songwriting. His songwriting completely went in a whole different direction. It wasn’t ‘Let’s party, have some drinks, screw girls.’ It was more reality, I guess you could say. It changed. And that’s when his whole look and everything changed.”

Diamond Lie did at least one show with Jerry after his mother’s death, shortly before his move to Seattle. According to a Ticketmaster ad in the June 1987 edition of The Rocket, Diamond Lie was on the bill for the Capital Rock-Off set to take place at St. Martin’s Pavilion in Lacey on the Fourth of July, with proceeds benefiting the Crisis Clinic of Thurston and Mason Counties. Also on the bill were Heir Apparent, Hammerhead, and Slaughter Haus 5. This would be another chance encounter that would foreshadow Jerry’s future, because his band would be competing against Russ Klatt’s, who had coined the name Alice in Chains a few months earlier.

Diamond Lie’s short biography in the ad, which misspells Jerry’s name, reads: “Diamond Lie is an exciting rock and roll dynamo with fiery licks and catchy melodies. On stage they generate a tight show that is topped off by lead vocalist Scott Damon’s power vocals and fluid presentation. Terry Contrell (guitar), Matt Mustapha (bass), and Randy Nesbitt (drum) complete the band. The group’s four song EP has generated strong interest from Atlantic and CBS. ‘Chain Love,’ a blistering example of their song writing, is reminiscent of early Dokken, and ‘Get It Straight’ is a grinding tune that’s sure to get bodies moving. Watch out for these guys … they’re out for a good time and nothing’s going to stop them.”17

According to Nesbitt, Slaughter Haus 5 were the favorites to win. He didn’t think that was Diamond Lie’s best performance, noting he had made a few mistakes. Diamond Lie pulled off the upset and won it. They received a cash prize and a few hours of free recording time at a local studio, but it was a moot point because the band was falling apart. On top of the issues with Jerry, right before they took the stage, Muasau told them a band he was friends with was moving to the area and they wanted to hire him for studio work. Nesbitt and Nutter weren’t happy about it, but they didn’t get upset. This wound up being Diamond Lie’s final performance. They broke up a few days later. At some point after moving to Seattle, Jerry tried to get Diamond Lie back together for a show. According to Nutter, “We just said no. We were kind of done with it, because at that time we wanted to have a little more involvement with the songs. We wanted to be part of the writing process, instead of just, ‘Here’s the next song; here’s the next song.’ So he said, ‘Okay.’ Bam, hit Alice in Chains and made it superhuge, and we never did. So it’s kind of like that fork in the road where he took a right and we took a left.”

Jerry offered the following account of the events leading to the formation of Alice in Chains:

I met Layne when he played the Tacoma Little Theatre in Tacoma. So I met him first, but I actually played with Mike Starr first in a really crappy band called Gypsy Rose in Burien. My mother had just passed away, and I didn’t really have anyplace to stay, and I kind of was done with Tacoma anyway, so I met this guy Tim Branom. He invited me to come up and hang with him, and I stayed in his basement for about a week, and Mike Starr came over and we were jamming, and then we both got kicked out after a week.18

Jerry and Mike’s tenure in Gypsy Rose is a bit more nuanced than this account. In the summer of 1987, Gypsy Rose singer Tim Branom and drummer Mike Gersema were looking for a bass player, and Mike Starr happened to be nearby and available. Their guitarist, Brock Graue, knew Mike from high school and had been in a band with him.

Michael Christopher Starr was born April 4, 1966, in Honolulu, Hawaii—the first child of John and Gayle Starr—and his sister, Melinda, was born three years to the day later. After his parents split up, Mike lived with his father before moving to the Seattle area when he was around nine years old. His father bought him his first bass guitar. He formed his first band with his best friend Paul Parkinson and named it Cyprus. Jim Hacker, another childhood friend with whom he would listen to Jimi Hendrix and Van Halen, would later recall Mike telling him, “‘When I grow up, I’m going to be a rock star just like them!’ It was never a pilot, astronaut, doctor. Mike knew what he wanted to be. There was never a doubt in his mind.”19

“All I wanted to do twenty-four hours a day was play music,” Mike told Mark Yarm.20 According to Mike’s friend Aaron Woodruff, Van Halen was probably a big inspiration in Mike’s decision to become a musician. Woodruff, who met Mike when they both attended Highline High School, described him as “bigger than life.” Mike was a sophomore or junior, but he was something of a celebrity on campus because he was the bass player in SATO. Even in this early stage of his career, Mike already had a reputation for being a ladies’ man. His drug use at the time was limited to marijuana and alcohol, Woodruff said, although some time later, Mike took some pills and then walked into Woodruff’s house and took his guitar. After he sobered up and realized what happened, he returned the guitar to Woodruff.

According to Ken Kramer, SATO’s guitarist, “We were jamming in Danny and Dave [Jensen’s] mom’s garage, a couple of blocks away from where Gayle lived, and this kid would constantly come down the road and hang out and sit outside: ‘I play bass. I can play. I’m gonna be a rock star someday.’ After two or three months of that, I actually bought into it.”

In 1982, Mike, Kramer, and guitarist Terry Hildebrand formed SATO—named after the Ozzy Osbourne song—and the band began performing in the Seattle area. One of the band’s flyers featured the catchphrase “Don’t Say No … SATO,” an idea which was credited to John Starr. Its members were between sixteen and twenty-one years old at the time but acted like professional musicians, practicing four or five nights a week, according to a 1983 article about the band published in The Profile. The band played their first show on November 20, 1982—a Battle of the Bands held at the Crossroads Skating Center in Bellevue—and won it, as reported by the December 1, 1982, edition of the Hit Line Times. They received a $1,000 gift certificate and a $500 photo session to promote the band. In its first year, SATO performed at the Seattle Arena, the Spokane Convention Center, and the Showbox and won the Washington State Battle of the Bands, held at the Moore Theatre in Seattle on December 3, 1982. The band used lights, pyrotechnics, and fog machines for their shows and, like many bands of that period, wore spandex and had well-rehearsed stage choreography. They recorded their original song “Halloween” at Entertainment Plus Studio on April 21, 1983. “Leather Warrior” was recorded at Triad Studios in January 1984.21

At some point in 1983 or 1984, Jeff Gilbert was working at Penny Lane Records when he put out a call for local bands to submit a song for a compilation album he was producing called Northwest Metalfest. SATO’s was one of the hundreds of tapes he received. “I went through and picked out the ten bands, because I wanted to represent a wide range of all the different styles of hard rock and metal. I was really young at the time; whatever sounded polished or pro I went with,” Gilbert said. “Leather Warrior” made the cut. According to Gilbert, “They were just kids. They were just trying to invoke the most powerful words or imagery. They didn’t even know what they were saying or doing. I had to laugh. They were so popular—I mean, they had ladies all over the place. So I thought, ‘If I put them on the record, I’m going to sell lots of records.’” The Northwest Metalfest album was released in 1984. It was at some point after Mike was out of SATO that he joined Gypsy Rose. By the time Mike joined Alice in Chains, he was probably the most experienced musician of the four founding members.22

Gypsy Rose had three managers who concluded Graue wasn’t right for the band, for reasons Branom still doesn’t know. In retrospect, Branom called the decision to fire him a mistake. Gypsy Rose was in the market for a new guitar player.

Branom went to a party at Vinnie Chas’s home in Tacoma, where he met Jerry, who was staying there and asked Branom to listen to some demos he had recorded. Branom described the recordings as sounding like Boston because of the guitar harmonies. He told Gersema about Jerry and arranged for an audition at some point in July 1987. Jerry got the job. For a brief period, the band’s lineup featured half of the future Alice in Chains. Branom described the band’s sound as Dokken with Ronnie James Dio–style vocals. After getting the job, Jerry moved into the basement of Gersema’s mother’s home in the Des Moines area of Seattle.

Jerry didn’t last very long in Gypsy Rose—about three or four weeks. Branom said neither he nor Mike Starr were involved in the decision to dismiss Jerry. By process of elimination, this means the decision to fire Jerry was Gersema’s. To make things worse, Jerry had also lost his place to live.

Although Branom disputes Jerry’s explanations for why he was dismissed from the band, he acknowledges Jerry had a legitimate reason to be upset about it. He also disputes Jerry’s comments putting the whole Gypsy Rose episode on him. “People think because I’m the singer that I’m the boss of the band, but it wasn’t really that way,” Branom explained. “I got kicked out [of Gypsy Rose]—I mean physically beat up, like I might die because of it.”

Mike Starr didn’t fare much better. He was dating a girl who had drawn the attention of Mike Gersema. According to Branom, the two Mikes, Tony Avalon—Jerry’s replacement—and the girl had gone out to a club, where there was a huge argument between the two Mikes, which culminated in Mike Starr’s leaving the band. “Both Mikes were fighting over this girl. Because basically it was Mike Starr’s girlfriend, but Mike Gersema wanted her, and she started going to him. So, unfortunately, that was the end of that. I didn’t have any say in it. It was just done,” Branom explained. Jerry never played a show or recorded any material with Gypsy Rose, and Mike played bass on about twenty recordings and in one show before he left the band. The most consequential event of this brief but turbulent period was that Jerry met Mike Starr.

According to Jerry, the first time he met Layne was in the summer of 1987, after the Tacoma Little Theatre show and after Gypsy Rose. The timing of the events in Jerry’s life at the time suggests it is likely he met Layne in August of that year. According to Nick Pollock, “I remember we talked on the phone, and he wanted to hang out with us. So I had him come up, and he stayed overnight at my parents’ house, because I was still living at home.

“He and I went to a party and met Layne at the party—something like that. Then I came up and said, ‘Hey, Layne, this is Jerry. Jerry, this is Layne Staley,’ and that’s how they met.”

“I met Jerry at a party, just out of the blue,” Layne said years later. “I didn’t think he was the coolest guy in the world or anything. He had no family in the area, so he’s kind of struggling, didn’t have any money or a place to stay or anything. And me being completely drunk, just offered a total stranger a place to stay and clothes and food and musical instruments. I think two days later he moved his stuff up into the rehearsal room that I was working [out of].”23

Jerry eventually moved into the Music Bank at Layne’s invitation, although his bandmates weren’t exactly thrilled about it. According to Johnny Bacolas, “Layne brought it to us, and we were like, ‘Well…’ I think all of us were a little bit hesitant at first. He wasn’t a total stranger; we knew him. But we didn’t want somebody crowding our space really, and with all his suitcases and socks and shoes in our jam room.”

At around the same time, Alice ’N Chains was beginning to drift apart. Pollock described it as an amicable split. “It was never anything any of us had against each other, or anything like that. There was no fight, nothing about that,” he recalled. “I can say for me that I knew where things were going to go with Layne, and I knew that he wasn’t going to stop [using drugs], and I knew that I couldn’t go there with him and that I needed some distance. Part of it really broke my heart to do that because he and I were such close friends.”

Toward the end of Alice ’N Chains’s run, Johnny Bacolas and James Bergstrom invited a Seattle musician named Ron Holt to check out their band. Holt had known them from several years earlier. He had moved to Los Angeles but came back about a year later.

“When I met them, their songs were really horrible. Layne didn’t know anything about song crafting. He didn’t know anything about dynamics. He was really just shouting against the music. Their songs did have some structure, but they didn’t have any songs yet.”

Holt thought “Party People,” one of his earliest compositions, might be a good fit for them. He played it for them, and they liked it. Holt was appreciative that they wanted to play his song. He explained the guitar, bass, and drum parts to Pollock, Bacolas, and Bergstrom. When it came time for Layne’s vocals, Holt pulled Layne out into the hallway, because he couldn’t hear him in the jam room. According to Holt, Layne was “still green” at this point, and he didn’t want to embarrass him.

While standing in the corridor, Holt told the other guys to start playing, at which point Layne started to scream with the music. Holt cut him off and walked him through it. Layne sang it back, and Holt could see he got it. He was impressed by Layne’s vocal talents.

“At the time, they were still just all energy. They wanted to do it—they had all the enthusiasm, and they had all the energy, but they just didn’t know exactly how to do it. I’m not saying that ‘Party People’ or any of the stuff I gave them was great, but they were structured and they were more than what they were doing at the time, and they dug the song. When they played it, they got a pretty good response,” Holt recalled.

For a brief period, according to Bergstrom, there was talk of possibly having Jerry join as a second guitar player. The closest this ever came to happening was when Jerry joined them onstage to play guitar on “Party People” during a show at the Backstage in Ballard in the late summer or fall of 1987, the only time they ever did that. This show was one of the band’s last.

With the demise of Alice ’N Chains, Layne and Bergstrom were drawn to Holt’s music. Bergstrom described the band as “pretty ahead of its time, semi-industrial, kind of hard funk, heavyish rock combination.” Holt noted how their sound deviated from the hard rock norms of the time. “Synthesizers and electronic is not something that a heavy metal band would have anything to do with. It was looked [at] as faggy, new-wave bullshit.” Holt compared the material to Ministry, who may have already released The Land of Rape and Honey by that point.

By late 1987 Jerry decided to form a new band. Layne, remembering his encounter with Sean at Alki Beach a few years earlier, still had the piece of paper on which Sean had written his girlfriend’s phone number. Jerry called the number, spoke with Melinda Starr, and ultimately set up a meeting with Sean. Sean and Melinda went to the Music Bank and listened to Jerry’s demos. At that point, Jerry mentioned that they would need a bass player to jam with and had someone in mind. “I jammed with this guy Mike Starr a year or so ago, and he seemed like kind of a cool dude.”

“That’s weird, because this is his sister,” Sean said as he pointed at Melinda, “and I’ve been in bands with Mike on and off since we were eleven or twelve or something.” Sean called Mike, and within a day or two he came to the Music Bank, borrowed some gear, and jammed with Sean and Jerry for the first time.

Layne would jam with Jerry’s new band. During their second or third rehearsal, they were playing a cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Hanky Panky”—an idea credited to Mike—when a local promoter walking the hallways of the Music Bank overheard. He was looking for bands for a show he was putting together at Kane Hall.

“Hey, what’s the name of the band? Can you play?” the promoter asked.

“We didn’t really have a band, but we were like, ‘Yeah, totally,’” Sean recalled.

“Can you play a half hour, forty minutes?”

“Sure, we’ve got a bunch of songs.” In reality, Sean later explained, “We didn’t have any of the songs or anything, so we lied and said we could, and then we got a gig.”

They liked Layne and wanted him to join full-time. There was one problem—Layne didn’t want to commit because he was already working with Bergstrom and Holt. Ultimately, Jerry said, they worked out a short-term solution: Layne would sing with Jerry’s band, in exchange for Jerry playing guitar in Layne’s band.24 This is the beginning of Alice in Chains.

Chapter 6

LAYNE INVITED JERRY to spend Christmas of 1987—the first since his mother’s death—with him and his family. Layne had approached his parents about it, telling them about his friend who was “kind of homeless” and didn’t have a family. “We made sure that Jerry had some gifts and some clothes, because he didn’t have a whole lot,” Jim Elmer recalled. “We bought him an army coat and a couple of other things that were kind of trendy at the time, and Layne got that as well.”

This was the first time Layne’s family met Jerry. Jim Elmer’s initial impressions at the time: “You could tell these guys were buddies, and Jerry was very respectful—he was not loud or boisterous or too into himself or whatnot. He was very pleasant and certainly liked—in the outset, he really liked being there, and so he wasn’t rambunctious or anything.”

At the beginning of 1988, Jerry and Layne were pulling double duty between the then-nascent Alice in Chains and 40 Years of Hate—with Layne singing and Jerry playing guitar in both bands. For a brief time, Alice in Chains went by the names Mothra and Fuck. Jerry credited Sean for coming up with the name Fuck. “We weren’t getting work anyway, so we thought it wouldn’t hurt us,” Layne said.1

They made stickers that said FUCK (THE BAND) and put them on condoms to pass around as a gimmick. The novelty and shock value of the name was offset by its detrimental effect on publicity, problematic for any new band when print and broadcast media can’t print or say the band’s name.2 Years later, a FUCK (THE BAND) sticker can still be seen on one of Jerry’s guitars, but the letter F has either worn away or been deliberately removed. But this name didn’t work out, and the band became Diamond Lie after Jerry got permission to use the name from his former bandmates.

The lineup for 40 Years of Hate consisted of Layne on vocals, Jerry on guitar, James Bergstrom on acoustic drums, Dave Martin on electronic drums, and Ron Holt on bass. They had about a dozen songs they would perform at rehearsals, but recordings exist for only seven or eight of them. Holt, who was traveling back and forth between Seattle and Los Angeles, recorded several songs during a series of sessions at the Music Bank and his home in Edmonds, Washington. The earliest four-track master, which Holt thinks was recorded in the fall of 1987, was titled “1988 Full of Pain, Full of Hate.”

Around this time, another Holt composition titled “It’s Coming After” was recorded. The song had great meaning to Layne. Bergstrom called it “a song Layne was crazy about,” adding, “He loved it. It had a David Bowie–esque kind of … It was the most industrial song of the group. It isn’t necessarily industrial, it just had some elements of that for that time.” At the time, Holt was in a band in Los Angeles with Faster Pussycat singer Taime Downe. He originally wrote “It’s Coming After” with Downe’s voice in mind. “[Faster Pussycat] just got signed, and I thought, ‘This would be something that would look good on them,’” Holt said. One day Holt read Layne the lyric, “I’m gonna stretch your skin across her frame and paint it…”

“So what happens to the rest of that part?” Layne asked.

“I don’t know, but that’s where I wanted to go.”

After a few days, Layne decided he wanted the song for himself. The next time he saw Holt, he told him, “I got it.”

“But there’s some things…” Holt interjected.

“I got this one.”

“It was weird for him to be that confident with me. It was weird for him to throw down the gauntlet on it,” Holt recalled with a laugh. “He explained to me what he did, and I was like, ‘Oh my fucking God.’ It’s the swagger,” he said, referring to Layne’s vocal performance on the song.

“It’s too bad it wasn’t released at the time, because it would have been huge. If it had come out in 1987 when Layne and I first did it, it would have been huge, because the swagger and the sense of dark core that he gives it. That was his particular genius, where I started to go, ‘Oh, wow. Maybe I need to give him more freedom and not stick around so much.’” The song was released on Second Coming’s L.O.V.Evil album in 1994. Several years later, Layne told Holt in one of their final conversations that it was one of his favorite songs to sing, ever.

“I Don’t Care” is another song from this period, driven by a James Brown–esque horn part and funk-style bass line. Layne’s vocals sound somewhat similar to those of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler. “The Things You Do” is very different, more along the lines of Depeche Mode, with a darker, brooding feel to it. Layne would rerecord his vocals on this song several years later for the Despisley Brothers project with Jesse Holt, Ron’s brother.

Besides “It’s Coming After,” the most significant recording is a song written by Holt called “Tribute.” According to him, it has a very similar opening guitar riff and melody to “Man in the Box.” Bergstrom confirmed this account, describing “Man in the Box” as “very influenced by ‘Tribute,’ and I mean that in a good way.” Holt never sued the band for songwriting credits or royalties after the release of Facelift, nor did he try to exploit his connection to Layne for personal gain. He also had not spoken publicly about his interactions with the band until being interviewed for this book. Also worth noting is the fact that the lyrics for “Man in the Box” were entirely Layne’s and that the song was credited to all four band members. As of this writing, Holt is in negotiations to sell these early recordings to Layne’s estate.

At some point in early 1988, Holt went back to Los Angeles and didn’t return for at least nine months, although it wasn’t his intention to be gone for that long. After he left, Layne called him, asking, “What happened to you? Why did you split?” At around the same time, Jerry, Mike, and Sean wanted Layne to commit to Alice in Chains full-time. They thought it would only be a matter of time before he agreed. When waiting for him to come around didn’t work, they resorted to reverse psychology: they told Layne they were getting a new singer and began auditioning his replacements in Layne’s rehearsal room at the Music Bank.

“We just brought in the shittiest guys we could find,” Jerry recalled years later. One of them was a redheaded male stripper.

“The worst singers we could find … We’d bring them in and have them sing, and he’d be coming in and out and just [makes a cringing face], ‘Oh, God. What are you guys doing?’” Sean elaborated. “‘Oh, nothing. He wasn’t that bad.’” The others continued the act.

Jerry: “‘He wasn’t too bad. I kind of liked that guy.’”

Sean: “‘Yeah, he’s pretty cool.’ We kept purposely doing that, and after about three guys that were just so horrendous, he came in and he was like, ‘Okay, fuck that. I’m joining. Let’s just do this thing and I’ll quit the other bands.’”3

It’s not clear which of the two events came first: Holt leaving Seattle or Jerry, Sean, and Mike holding mock auditions for a new lead singer. Regardless, by the beginning of 1988, the founding lineup for Alice in Chains—still known as Diamond Lie—was in place.

The next step was to develop original material. They had the time, physical space, and incentive to hone their craft at the Music Bank. At some point not long after they formed, they borrowed a van belonging to the band Coffin Break to haul their instruments and gear to Issaquah, where they recorded a demo in an eight-track studio in a tree house belonging to the producer PC Ring. On it were early original compositions (“I Can’t Have You Blues,” “Social Parasite,” and “Whatcha Gonna Do”) as well as covers of Layne’s “Queen of the Rodeo” and David Bowie’s “Suffragette City.” Later dubbed the “Treehouse Tape,” it would play a crucial role in the band’s early history.4

Diamond Lie played their first show at Kane Hall on January 15, 1988.5 Not long after this, the new Diamond Lie was featured in a City Heat story by journalist Jenny Bendel, who had seen the Kane Hall show. This was probably the first time the band was covered in the press. Bendel wrote, “Diamond Lie’s attitude is a refreshing one. Most other bands around walk around with this ‘we are rock stars’ attitude. Sean sums it up by saying, ‘Ha! We’re not rock stars! We’re in Seattle!’”

“I feel really lucky to have been able to work with the quality of musicians whom I have because I love ’em all! We’re sticking together,” Jerry said.

Sean added, “As long as I can play drums with a beer on my head, we’ll be together!”

“Our stuff can hold up! I have the nastiest guitars in town!” Jerry said. “Our motto is, ‘We rock the deaf!’ Our music comes by instinct; we play the first thing that kicks in. If we’re not havin’ fun doin’ it, no one will have fun listenin’ to us.”

“We’re in it for the money and fame,” Sean added. “And anyone who says they’re not, they’re lying.”

Mike said he was in it for the women.

Besides the feature, the article includes a detailed account of that first show at Kane Hall. The set list included “Can’t Have You Blues,” “Killing Yourself,” “King of the Cats,” and “Some Girls,” during which Jerry split his pants.

They played a cover of the Hanoi Rocks song “Taxi Driver,” which Layne dedicated to Razzle—the Hanoi Rocks drummer who was killed in a car accident in 1984. Nick Pollock joined them onstage for “Queen of the Rodeo.” They also did “Suffragette City,” during which the band brought more than twenty people onstage for the song.

The idea for the “Suffragette City” cover can be traced back to the final days of the original Diamond Lie in Tacoma. “I said, ‘We need to do that cover,’” Diamond Lie singer Scott Nutter recalled. “We never ended up doing it. We broke up right before we started learning it.” Nutter later saw Alice in Chains perform it at the Grand Central Tavern in downtown Seattle.6

A few months later, Bendel helped put together a submission packet for the band to send out to record labels. The packet—which includes a photocopied band photo, biography, and letter from Bendel to Columbia Records—is now part of the Experience Music Project’s collection. The letter, dated May 17, 1988, and addressed to Brett Hartman, an A&R representative at Columbia Records in Los Angeles, reads in part:

Enclosed, finally, is Diamond Lie’s tape, picture, and their bios. More quality pictures can be sent to you if you’d like, but for the time being the band is broke and a photo-copy is the best we can do. We hope you like the tape. Please see what you can do so we can get these boys out of Seattle!

The band biography reads:

From the heart of Seattle and the Ballard Music Bank comes a band to reckon with: DIAMOND LIE. The band has been together in Seattle now for about six months, and has left a favorable impression on most of Seattle’s music enthusiasts. Their sleazy, bluesy, in-your-face, tough rock n’ roll is unable to be matched by any other band in Seattle. They bring new life to their cover tunes and put new hope in our local music scene with their originals. DIAMOND LIE’s live performances are overwhelming with the electrifying music and the raw attraction of the band. They’ve already taken Seattle by storm and have created a devoted following; keep an ear out in YOUR town for DIAMOND LIE!7

This packet is probably the band’s first submission in an effort to get a record deal with Columbia. When asked about it, Ken Deans—who would briefly comanage Alice in Chains later on—said he had never heard of it and that the mailing didn’t lead to anything.

Randy Hauser had been involved in the Northwest music scene in management, promotion, or production capacities off and on since high school. According to court documents filed by Hauser and his attorney in 1991, he was arrested and charged with cocaine distribution in federal court in 1977. In addition to dealing, he had a cocaine addiction. In the summer of 1979, he walked into another person’s deal and was arrested. He pled guilty in federal court to conspiracy to distribute cocaine, for which he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, to be served concurrently with the 1977 conviction. He was paroled in 1985.8

In 1986, he was back in Seattle and decided to enroll in a local beauty school. While a student there, he met Melinda Starr, with whom he developed a friendship. After finishing the program, Hauser kept in touch with her and would occasionally see her.

“She was just amazing, and I got a little tired of hearing her talk about her boyfriend’s band,” he recalled about a conversation that took place in early 1988. (Her boyfriend at the time was Sean.) At the time, Hauser was involved with all-age dances and managed or booked thirty acts, mainly local bands that would never make it. He booked bands to play at small venues in the Seattle area: Patterson’s West, the Federal Way Skate King, and the Kent Skate King. The venue owners allowed him to do it because Hauser assumed responsibility for security and insurance.

Hauser estimates he would see between three and six bands play live each night and would often get two or three cassettes. One day at Melinda Starr’s beauty shop, she handed him a cassette of her boyfriend’s band and asked him to listen to it. He took it home and threw it in the box with the others.

About a month later, Nick Loft—at the time, an A&R man for Atlantic Records—was staying at Hauser’s home. He was going through the tapes in the box to gauge the potential of each band. He would listen to the first four bars of a song, and if he didn’t like it, would make a game show–esque buzzer noise and eject the tape. Hauser stepped out of the room while Loft was going through the tapes. Eventually, Hauser noticed Loft had listened to the first song on one cassette all the way through and was beginning to listen to the second.

“Who are these guys?” Loft asked him.

Hauser checked the tape and saw it was blank—no label with the name of the band or a contact person. “If my life depended on it, I had no idea where that tape came from,” he recalled. Loft made a copy of the anonymous demo and returned to Los Angeles. Within a few days, Loft called asking about the tape.

“Jesus,” he told Hauser, “I went into the office and put that on the intercom system. Everybody’s calling my office wondering, ‘Who is this? What kind of music is it?’”

Hauser still had no idea who the band was, and he was trying to figure it out. “I’m on the edge. I know I’ve got an act,” he said.

A few days or possibly a few weeks later, Hauser went to see Melinda Starr. When he got to the shop, she asked him, “Did you listen to my boyfriend’s tape?”

He put two and two together, matching the unnamed tape with Melinda’s boyfriend’s band. He named a few songs from the tape, which she confirmed was her boyfriend’s band.

“Okay, where do I find these guys?” he asked her.

“They’re practicing at the Music Bank.”

He arranged a meeting with the band, during which they would perform for him. When he arrived, his initial impression of them was, “Four more lowlife rejects you’ve never seen in your life.” He said they had been banned from several venues, including the OK Hotel, the Vogue, and the Grand Central Tavern. During a performance at a VFW, Layne had thrown a milk shake into the crowd, effectively blacklisting the band. Sean had allegedly punched the owner of another club. Hauser was able to get the bans lifted at these venues by cosigning for the band.

Hauser sat on the couch as he watched the band perform their five-song set. “My exact thoughts were, ‘What the fuck do I do now?’” Hauser said. “I’m sitting in front of what I know is the real deal, and I have no idea. I’d never been there.”

Hauser and the band went outside and sat under the Ballard Bridge and began talking about the future. Hauser was direct. “I’d love to work with you guys. I’d love to manage you,” he told them. They were excited, but one member expressed skepticism. “Well, what are your plans for us?” Layne asked. “What do you do?”

“You kind of got me off guard ’cause I’ve never been here,” Hauser responded. “What I’m going to do is promote the hell out of you, get a demo done, and when you guys get big enough, I’ll hand you off to one of the big LA agencies that knows what to do.”

His response was good enough for Layne, and Hauser became their manager. “That was honestly the only thing I could think of to say, which is probably what I would have had to do,” Hauser recalled. He acknowledged he didn’t know what he was doing—in his words, he was “feeling my way out”—and the idea might have been naive in retrospect. At the time, Hauser said the band was two months behind on rent for their rehearsal room and about to get kicked out. Hauser picked up the seven hundred dollars in back rent. (David Ballenger said Hauser never paid him but acknowledges it is possible Hauser paid one of his employees.)

The first thing Hauser did as their manager was call Nick Loft in Los Angeles, telling him he had found the band. Loft returned to Seattle, went to the Music Bank to meet the band, and saw them perform. Loft went back to Los Angeles to rave about the band he had discovered. On his next visit, according to Hauser, Loft wanted to sign the band but couldn’t, because he had already signed two other bands. Hauser decided to reach out to two figures from the local music scene with experience and connections in management and the music industry.

Kelly Curtis was a veteran of the Seattle music scene, having dropped out of high school in the 1970s to work as a roadie for Heart.9 By the mid-1980s, he and his business partner Ken Deans had been working as managers and promoters for several years. Their partnership began after both had moved to Los Angeles in 1984 and started managing a band named Maurice and the Cliches. Deans moved back to Seattle in December 1986, and Curtis followed suit the following year, moving in with Deans. The two started Mark Alan Productions—the name being a combination of both their middle names—which produced concerts and corporate events. They would eventually rent out office space to another local manager named Susan Silver, who had been a figure on the local music scene since the early 1980s.

Curtis and Deans would often go to the Grand Central Bakery for lunch. Deans knew the cashier, former Green River guitarist Stone Gossard. One day Gossard gave Deans a copy of the demo made by his new band, Mother Love Bone, which Deans described as “terribly recorded, but [having] some really great songs.” He liked it enough to take it to Curtis, and he tried to convince him they should go back to managing, an idea Curtis was initially against.

They split the company, with Curtis managing the band and Deans producing concerts. At some point during the spring or summer of 1988, Randy Hauser walked in with a proposition. “Hey, I’ve heard about you guys. I’ve got a band that I’m working with that I want you to check out,” he told Deans. The two of them went out to lunch to discuss it. “He starts talking about it, and Randy really wanted to do something, and I think he saw this as an opportunity to maybe change his life,” Deans recalled. It was his impression this band was more than just a business opportunity for Hauser. “He truly believed in the band. It wasn’t just that he thought, ‘Hey, here’s some guys. Maybe I can get them a record deal and make some money and stop doing what I do and get legitimate.’ He was a fan and passionate, and he was smart enough to know that he couldn’t do it by himself because he didn’t have the connections.”

According to Hauser, Deans told him that Curtis and Susan had already passed on the band. Hauser also alleges they called the band losers. Deans has no recollection of this, but does recall Curtis referring to Jerry as the band’s biggest asset, because he was the main songwriter. Deans agreed to comanage the band with Hauser.

There are differing accounts of when and how the decision to change the band’s name came about. Ken Deans said he went to the Music Bank for a meeting. At the time, he recalled they were still undecided about whether to stick with Diamond Lie or switch to one of several possible spellings of Alice in Chains. “I remember one night Randy made up a bunch of T-shirts, and we decided that it looked cooler on T-shirts that said ‘Alice in Chains,’ and then … they decided to [use] that [name],” Deans said.

Hauser has a different recollection of how the name change came about, although he does admit that Diamond Lie T-shirts were made. According to him, when Nick Loft came back from Los Angeles, he told them, “Diamond Lie is not going to work. We’ve got to change the name.” Hauser knew what a big deal a name change was and would not have suggested it on his own. However, when the head of A&R at Atlantic Records told them to do it, they all got on board.

According to Hauser, they started thinking about names. “The conversation kind of fluttered a little bit, and I go, ‘What do you guys think about instead of Alice ’N Chains, Alice in Chains?’” At the time, there was an Alice ’N Chains banner furled against the back wall—presumably a remnant of Layne’s previous incarnation of the band. Hauser unfurled the banner, paintbrush in hand, and added an i to the name, which now read ALICE IN CHAINS, and showed it to the band. “Within seconds, everybody was on board. It was that easy.”

Mike told Mark Yarm that it was his idea to put the i back in, so it wouldn’t sound like Guns n’ Roses. Layne contacted his former bandmates and asked for permission to use the name. Nick Pollock recalled not being particularly thrilled about it at the time and thinking that he should come up with a different name, but ultimately both he and James Bergstrom gave Layne their blessing to use the name.10

They played their first show as Alice in Chains some time later. Tim Branom has evidence that the name change happened that summer. On July 14, Diamond Lie and Branom’s band Gypsy Rose were on the same bill, opening for the band Helix. It was the first time the two bands had met since Jerry and Mike had been dismissed from Gypsy Rose almost a year earlier.

On his blog, Branom later wrote, “In anticipation of the show, some band members thought a band feud could spark controversy and therefore bring even more people to the show by generating more publicity. Unfortunately, the issues were too close at hand, and the feud was a bit too real. The show was a tremendous success, but both bands watched closely to see how the ex–band members and replacements were doing. Gypsy Rose created more outrageous stage antics and thought they had left their mark on Seattle. But Diamond Lie had record-label representatives wanting to sign them, and it escalated their career. Diamond Lie would now be called Alice in Chains for their next show, eleven days later.” He added, “The bitterness of record labels passing on Gypsy Rose would only add fuel to the fire created by drug abuse and jealousy of Alice in Chains’s sudden success. The attitude was ‘How could two guys that used to be in our band do better than us?’” If Branom’s account is correct, that means Diamond Lie played their first show as Alice in Chains on July 25, 1988.11

Besides committing to Alice in Chains full-time and being in a band that was beginning to make a name for itself, Layne had another significant event take place that spring: meeting Demri Parrott.

Demri Lara Parrott—she pronounced her surname Puh-row, not like the exotic bird—was born February 22, 1969, to Steven Parrott and Kathleen Austin, who were twenty-two and nineteen years old at the time and had met through mutual friends. Austin originally planned to name her Erin Lynn Austin, but after she and Parrott got married, the name changed. Her husband didn’t like the name Erin, but he did like Lara. Austin thought she had heard the name Demery somewhere and suggested it. He asked her to write it down, and she spelled it Demri, adding Lara next to it. Parrott liked it, and when Demri was born the next day, the name stuck.

Years later, Demri would jokingly tell people that when her mother was in labor, the doctors had given her a shot of Demerol for the pain and she liked it so much, she named her daughter after it. Demri didn’t like her name at first, because people would mispronounce or mishear it. At the age of two, she had a strong enough sense of self to tell people her name and how to spell it.

Demri could communicate and socialize beyond her years. As a three-year-old, Demri was tested by experts at the University of Washington, who told her parents she had the vocabulary of a high school senior, but her exceptional language skills weren’t always well received by adults or other children. When she was two, her grandmother had made her an angel costume for Halloween with a gold halo that went above her head. Kathleen Austin and her mother were taking Demri to her great-grandmother’s house so she could see Demri in her costume. During the car ride, Demri was tugging at the halo.

“Demri, you’re going to mess up your hair, honey,” her grandmother told her.

“But, Grandma, the goddamn halo won’t stay up.”

Demri’s grandmother almost drove the car off the road.

Demri’s parents’ marriage did not last long. Austin later married a Child Protective Services caseworker and gave birth to their son, Devin Remme, on June 20, 1974. That marriage ended in 1976, and Austin would later marry Dennis Murphy, with whom she would have two children: Derek Murphy, born November 15, 1980, and David Murphy, born on June 12, 1982. According to her mother, Demri was closest to Devin and Derek—the oldest two of her siblings. Like Layne, Demri used her stepfather’s surname—going by Demri Murphy—while growing up but never legally changed her birth name.

The family moved to Arlington, a town about an hour north of Seattle. When Demri was in grade school, her friend Nanci Hubbard-Mills says she was “boisterous, not afraid to speak her mind.” In an art class, the teacher had assigned them to make pumpkins and fruit out of clay. As a joke, Demri ignored the instructions and made a head with an arrow in it.

In eighth grade, she ran for student body president. She won by a landslide—the teachers stopped counting the ballots after she was leading her closest competitor by more than three hundred votes. After a few months, she was removed from the position by the faculty because she had fallen behind on her schoolwork.

Demri won a state prize for a project about alcohol and drugs. For source material, she approached her mother, who had been a practicing counselor working in the addiction field since 1976. Demri borrowed a display case from Austin’s office, which had fake samples of different types of drugs and a film. In retrospect, Austin said, “If anybody had ever told me that my daughter would become a heroin addict, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

Hubbard-Mills remembers that exhibit, saying Demri had put it together for the cultural fair at the middle school. It was so well received that it was eventually shown at the high school. “This is when Demri was happy, would hang out for lunch. This is when she thought people doing drugs would die.” She and other friends from Arlington say Demri had tried marijuana and mushrooms by the time she was in high school.

Karie Pfeiffer-Simmons met Demri when she was in fifth grade and Demri was a year ahead of her at Post Middle School, and the two became friends about a year later. “She was very outgoing, very well liked. Just petite, beautiful. She just lit up the room. She liked to be the class clown, get attention and joke around. She would sneak out through the windows of the classroom and skip class. She was always doing funny things or charming the teachers so that she would get good grades that way.”

Demri’s interests and ambitions at the time were in the arts. “I know that she wanted to be in acting and I know that she wanted to be an actress and be in movies,” Pfeiffer-Simmons said. “She had to be in the limelight.” Lyle Forde, Demri’s high school choir teacher, said, “She really did love music and the performing arts. She definitely had the bent toward the performing arts, and was very social. Some students, they don’t really go up and talk to teachers. They kind of hang with their friends. She was social with other students and their teachers. She was a competent singer, but I think she also was a dancer.”

When she was about fifteen or sixteen, Demri was one of three hundred prospective students to audition for twenty-five openings at a performing arts school in Jacksonville, Florida. Though the odds were against her, she was admitted. She came home for Christmas break after a few months, and, in her mother’s words, “She blew it.” She had fallen in love with a young man back home, left the school, and moved back to Washington.

A few months before meeting Layne, Demri went to a mall to audition in front of an audience for a singing part in a musical called Cinderella Rock. “She starts this song and then she stops and says, ‘Obviously, you can all tell that I can’t sing,’” Austin said. “Then she just played the crowd—it was amazing.” There were three or four agents at the audition, who were impressed enough that they gave her their business cards.

There are two stories of how Layne and Demri met. Although there are a few slight differences in the two versions, they do not necessarily contradict each other.

According to Kathleen Austin, “She met Layne in 1989. She was working at the mall, and there was a girl working in the store with her, and the girl invited her to a party. And the girl was from the Seattle area. Dem told me later that on the way to this party, the girl turned and looked at her and said, ‘I just made the biggest mistake of my life.’ And Demri said, ‘What?’ And she said, ‘Bringing you to this party. I know my boyfriend’s going to fall in love with you.’ That was Layne, and the rest is history,” she said. “I think it was love at first sight.”

The only detail that can be corrected in this account is the date. Evidence shows that they met in 1988. Demri’s signature appears several times in the guest sign-in notebook kept at the Music Bank, which closed its doors for good in February or March 1989. There are also photos of her and Layne together in Randy Hauser’s Polaroid collection from this early period in the band’s history.12

The other story of how they met comes from Layne’s friend Sally Pricer Portillo, who says she was the one who introduced them. Pricer Portillo was at a party the first time she met Demri. Pricer Portillo isn’t certain, but she thinks Demri knew about her friendship with Layne. “My feeling on it—I mean, I can’t say for sure—is that she knew that we palled around together: I was always with him, he was always with me, I was always at Music Bank.” Demri asked her, “Tell me a little bit about Layne. Will you introduce me to Layne?”

Another time, Pricer Portillo and Demri were out in Pioneer Square, when Demri asked, “Will you please invite me to this party, because I know he’s gonna be there, and I want to hang out.” Pricer Portillo agreed to bring her along. At the time, Layne was twenty-one or had just turned twenty-one. Demri would have been eighteen or nineteen—too young to get into bars, as Pricer Portillo recalled. Based on Layne’s age and birth date of August 22, this would have happened in the late summer or early fall of 1988, but Demri may have already been in the picture before that. Regarding the women Layne had been with or dated before, Pricer Portillo says, “No one ever was serious until it came to Demri, and then when it came to Demri, it was all about Demri, which I was happy about because that got rid of some of the riffraff.”

Not long after, Demri asked Austin to come to her apartment north of Seattle and give two friends—Layne and Sean—a ride into the city. This was the first time Austin met Layne. “I knew they were hanging out,” Austin recalled. “Layne was very respectful. I don’t think I formed a first impression at the time. These were two guys who I picked up that are burned out. They’ve probably been partying all night long. They get in my car, and we drive to Seattle. They tell me where to go, and I let them out.” Demri saw Layne’s talent immediately and did not hesitate to say so. “Mom, Layne’s going to be a star,” she told Austin.

Austin was skeptical, although she didn’t say it out loud. “I’ve known a lot of musicians who were going to be stars, and just a few who actually made it.” She humored her daughter: “‘Well, that’d be nice,’ ‘I hope he is,’ things like that.” The first time Austin ever saw Layne perform was at the Pain in the Grass concert at Seattle Center in 1990. Austin brought along Demri’s brothers—who were sixteen, ten, and eight at the time—and they wound up becoming part of the show. “Layne took them up onstage, and they were so thrilled.”

“They loved their sister and they loved Layne. These boys were little—he’s giving them piggyback rides, they’re playing. Layne was a funny guy. He was a sweetheart.”

“The two of them together, before drugs, were always laughing. They were always happy,” Austin says of this period. “They’d go to clubs. They would go see their friends.”

According to Darrell Vernon, there was a joke going around the Music Bank at about the time they started dating—that Layne had found the woman of his dreams with the body of a twelve-year-old boy, a reference to Demri’s small stature. According to her mother, Demri was barely five feet tall and never weighed more than a hundred pounds. Though they didn’t have much in terms of money or possessions, both of them were generous. During Thanksgiving of 1988, David Ballenger said several girls showed up and brought Layne a huge dinner, but that nobody had brought him anything. Layne and Demri shared their dinner with him. On another occasion, Ballenger asked Layne to take him shopping for nice clothes, because Layne was a good dresser. Layne took him to a mall in Bellevue, where Ballenger spent about five hundred dollars. He still has the Capezio shoes and Armani clothes from that shopping spree. Ballenger had a folding metal chair in his office at the Music Bank, which Layne decorated with Jackson Pollock–style splotches of paint. Ballenger was annoyed that it took so long to dry, but he still has the chair.

Jamie Elmer, who was about ten years old at the time, visited the band at their rehearsal room. “I remember sitting on the couch with the girlfriends or the wannabe girlfriends at the time and watching them practice. I mean, it was fun for me. I was the little tagalong sister that got to see a whole world most people my age didn’t get to see,” she said. “I remember [Jerry, Mike, and Sean] being like older brothers to me in the best sense of the term. They were taking me under their wing, and I never felt like I was a bother. They were always cool with me hanging out or watching, and were always really nice to me. Growing up, to me it felt like they were extended family. They felt like … siblings that were part of our family.”

The punk rock band Cat Butt moved into the Music Bank in the summer of 1987. It was a transitional period for the band, since two of their members returned to their main band, the U-Men. After several personnel changes, front man David Duet and guitarist James Burdyshaw decided to revive Cat Butt with new members and do it full-time. They met Layne early in their time at the Music Bank because of his job there.

“Layne was just so enthusiastic and interested in who you were. It was like, ‘Hey, cool! You guys got a band! What’s the name? Cat Butt—that’s really funny! All right! Oh, man, we should do a show sometime!’ Then he’d say things to you: ‘Do you need anything? ’Cause I can get you anything you need. You need pot? I can get you pot. You want some acid? I can do that. Whatever you want. Want me to go on a beer run for you?’” Burdyshaw recalled.

“It’s like he just was eager to please, just wanted to be your friend so bad. I thought that was real endearing about him. I didn’t think it was phony. I thought he was just like this metal kid who was nice, whereas a lot of time the metal guys were too cool for school, and they wouldn’t talk to you because you were in the punk band.” They also met Demri, who, after being told of their band’s name, lifted up her shirt, pushed her abs and belly button together, and said, “Look, I can make a cat’s butt!”

Soon after meeting Layne, they were introduced to Jerry, Mike, and Sean. “When we started practicing there, they got real curious about us and they wanted to know about us. And to be honest with you, my whole attitude was like, ‘They’re really nice guys, but, Jesus Christ, I don’t want to hook up with these guys. They’re like Lynnwood rockers.’ It wasn’t that I didn’t think they were nice people. I just thought that their music was dumb.

“We didn’t want to be mean to them. They were so nice it was impossible. I sort of figured we could be friends with them at the Music Bank, but there was no way we were going to have anything to do with them outside the Music Bank.”

Besides Layne, the person Burdyshaw had the closest relationship with was Jerry, although for very different reasons. “Jerry was cool with hanging out, but he wanted to learn about you. He wanted to learn about your influences. He liked picking your brain.”

“He was very complimentary and asked me about my guitar sound. He liked to talk shop a lot. I probably had the most interesting conversations with Jerry just about music in general, because Jerry seemed to know more about stuff. Even though they were playing rock music, he knew about Bowie, he knew a lot about the history of rock and roll, so we could talk about the stuff I was into, like the Who and that kind of thing. He didn’t know a lot about punk music, but he sure wanted to. He was really curious.”

Burdyshaw credits Jerry for reinventing and developing what would eventually become the Alice in Chains sound. Of Cat Butt’s influence on Alice in Chains during this crucial early period, Burdyshaw said, “It seemed like Cat Butt was one of the catalysts for them to be like, ‘Hey, these guys are doing something different than what we’ve been doing. Let’s get in their circle.’ And then, I don’t think it was necessarily calculated, but I think they just found us fascinating and they wanted to be a part of our world and they invited us to be a part of theirs.”

Burdyshaw won’t take credit for being an influence, because he said they were picking the brains of every band they could get near. Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil said he was at a show and ran into Jerry, who asked him about the songs “Beyond the Wheel” and “Nothing to Say”—specifically, if the songs had a different tuning. Thayil explained to him the concept of dropped-D tuning—a popular tuning among hard rock and metal musicians in which the low E string on the guitar is tuned down a whole step to D, giving it a heavier sound. According to Thayil, “Alice in Chains became a different band almost overnight!” (Jerry disputes this claim, saying he first learned it from Van Halen’s “Unchained.”13)

Thayil wasn’t the only one to notice the change. Grant Alden, managing editor of The Rocket, said, “There were a series of bands who saw what was working and began to try to do that. I think Alice in Chains was one of them. It doesn’t mean they were without talent, but it meant in some ways that they were without heart or without soul.” His dislike of the band got to the point that he made an effort to deny them coverage in the pages of his publication.14

Former Diamond Lie singer Scott Nutter ran into Layne in Seattle during the band’s early days, and they talked about Jerry, “lead singer to lead singer.” As Nutter recalled, Layne referred to Jerry as a “pisser,” and the two talked about how temperamental he was. The gist of Layne’s comments was, “‘Was it worth it to put up with him in order to have the writing and the guitar?’ He said they loved the guy, but that at times he was very difficult to deal with.”

Chapter 7

THE SUMMER OF 1988 was an eventful one for Alice in Chains and the Music Bank, for good and bad reasons. On June 1, Iron Maiden was performing at the Seattle Center Coliseum with Guns n’ Roses as the opening act. Jerry went to the show and handed Axl Rose a copy of the band’s demo, who immediately threw it away as he was leaving.1

David Ballenger got into a huge argument with Mike Buckner, one of his employees, because Buckner wanted to work more hours, but Ballenger didn’t have any to give. Buckner held up a beer bottle, acting like he was going to smash it against Ballenger’s face.

Ballenger was furious. “I got in my truck and I drove full blast for ninety miles, and I ran through the American-Canadian border. I go, ‘Goddamn! I’m in Canada!’” He turned around in the parking lot to drive back to Seattle, and American border authorities found three joints concealed in his boot. They seized his truck, and Ballenger had to take a bus back to Ballard.

Besides not getting enough work hours, Buckner had health issues. According to Ballenger, “He had this disease in his legs and his feet that would just drive him crazy. Layne and all of us, we took him to the hospital. We thought we wouldn’t see him back, and three or four days later he popped back in and it was all in remission.” According to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, Buckner suffered from a “severe bee sting allergy” and had “scars on ankle due to bee sting allergy.”2

Buckner could be very funny, and he found a comedic sparring partner in Layne on at least one occasion. Ballenger recalls one time he, Buckner, and Layne were sitting in the office and Layne started doing his Popeye impression. “He could do a very great Popeye voice, and this would be all X-rated,” he said. Buckner played off that and assumed the role of Olive Oyl. “They’d break into some shtick where basically Popeye was butt-fucking Olive Oyl, and everybody would just be rolling on the floor laughing.” Layne was generally a popular guy at the Music Bank, but according to Ballenger, Buckner once caught another musician with a knife at the door, angrily looking for Layne.

At 7:00 P.M. on the night of June 18, 1988, Seattle police officers were dispatched to a wooded area near Lake Washington Boulevard after a passerby saw Buckner “lying in the woods with a rifle.” As they approached the area on foot, they heard a gunshot. After trying to coax Buckner to drop the weapon and come out, they heard a second shot. The area was cordoned off, and a K-9 unit was brought in to search for Buckner. According to the medical examiner’s office, “He was found shortly lying supine with a Springfield Model 15, .22 Cal. bolt-action rifle (no visible serial number) on his chest with the barrel pointed towards his head.” Buckner was brought to Harborview Medical Center at about 9:30 P.M. to treat a self-inflicted gunshot wound, where he died about twenty-two hours later. He was forty years old.

Regarding his possible motive, Buckner’s girlfriend later told the medical examiner’s office that the two of them had had an argument before the incident and that Buckner “stated that he had made a prior attempt by pistol. Apparently, something was bothering him lately.”3

Shortly after, Ballenger said he and other Music Bank employees made arrangements for the burial. “We didn’t have any money and got one of them common burial sites. We all went there one day on the cheap and buried our friend.” Not long after Buckner’s death, Alice in Chains and Hit and Run were scheduled to perform together at a benefit show held at the Pickwick Tavern in West Seattle, according to Hit and Run’s drummer, Dean Noble. The plan was for any proceeds to go toward paying the costs of Buckner’s headstone.

The bar was packed that night, Noble recalled. Before the show, Layne and Noble were in the men’s room smoking a joint. Layne had to pee, but all the urinals were taken, so he used the sink. One of the regulars at the bar got livid, Noble said. Layne was apologetic. “Hey, I had to go really bad. All the urinals were taken. I had no choice. I just had to go.” The man stormed out of the bathroom. Layne and Noble kept smoking.

Noble returned to his bandmates’ table inside the tavern. They were under twenty-one, so none of them could order alcohol. Mike sat down at their table and started chatting. He asked them how they were doing, and then, “Gosh, where’s your beer? Let’s get a couple of pitchers here.”

“We’re like, ‘Hell, yeah!’ because we’re eighteen,” Noble said. Mike asked the barmaid for two pitchers of beer. She came back a few minutes later and asked for money. “We’re expecting Mike to pay because we don’t have any money. We’re eighteen—shit, we can barely afford drumsticks and strings! And he looks at us like, ‘Well, you guys gotta pay for it.’ We’re like, ‘We don’t have any money.’”

Mike tried to smooth-talk and flirt with the barmaid so she would give them the pitchers, but she wasn’t having it. “She ended up yanking the pitchers of beer and bringing them back to the bar, and he kind of looked dismayed that it didn’t work, because he wanted beer just as much as us.”

Hit and Run went onstage first. The bar provided a community drum set, which the two bands had to share. The throne on which the drummer sat consisted of two milk crates stacked on top of each other held together by a seal, which wasn’t the most stable arrangement.

Hit and Run was finishing their set with a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” when, during the drum solo at the end of the song, Noble noticed the seal holding the crates together had snapped. To prevent himself from falling, Noble stood up and finished the rest of the song without missing a beat. “My bandmates are looking back at me thinking I’m just getting into it, and truth be told, I was trying not to fall on my ass,” he said.

Alice in Chains took the stage. They closed their set with “Suffragette City.” At the end of the song, Sean, possibly feeling the need to match or top Noble’s performance, “stands up and goes full-on the Who on that drum set, kicks them off the stage, starts pounding the shit out of them, and they were just flying everywhere. The crowd is going nuts,” Noble recalled.

After the performance, Noble said, “Layne is just pumped up beyond belief, and he walks up to that guy we saw in the bathroom that bitched him out for peeing in the sink, and from a distance all I could see was Layne’s little finger going directly into the center of this guy’s chest as he’s bitching out this older guy, and this older guy is getting beet-red-in-the-face pissed off, and he’s towering over Layne.

“Layne wasn’t a huge guy. So he gives him a couple of more taps on the chest and then storms off toward the front door, and this guy’s getting ready to follow him. Mike and Sean run up to the guy and they’re like, ‘Hey, don’t listen to him. He’s a little messed up. His girlfriend said you were cute and he’s just a little jealous. Just blow it off—he’s just a little guy,’ and basically talked the guy out of kicking Layne’s ass.” Noble thinks the show raised about eight hundred dollars for Buckner’s tombstone. A few years later, a brief mention was included in the Facelift liner notes: “In memory of Mike Buckner.”4

Color Tech, one of the Music Bank’s neighbors in the Ballard Building, went out of business, freeing up thousands of square feet of additional space. Unbeknownst to Scott Hunt at the time because his name was not on the Music Bank lease, the landlord approached Bengt Von Haartman and Gabriel Marian directly. On February 3, 1987, Marian and Von Haartman signed a thirty-one-month lease for a nearly fourteen-thousand-square-foot industrial space adjacent to the Music Bank. Under the terms of the agreement, Marian and Von Haartman would pay the landlord $3,447 in rent, and the property was to be used “only for recording and audio visual studios.” Without Hunt’s knowledge or consent, he said, his business partners “decided behind my back to rent the rest of the Ballard Building and turn it into a thirty-million-dollar … pot operation.”5 No one knew it at the time, but this was the beginning of the end of the Music Bank.

On June 20, 1988, an anonymous informant called the Seattle Police Department’s narcotics office with a tip. The informant was very specific, telling Officer Mac Gordon about a possible marijuana-growing operation at a large commercial warehouse in Ballard, providing the specific address, and noting that the power consumption for the facility was “unusually high,” according to court documents. Scott Hunt found out from Von Haartman later on that the informant was a third business partner, who was a materials expert. Marian thought the third partner was making too much money and wanted to renegotiate the terms of their deal, and allegedly threatened him. The third partner wasn’t having any of it. He took his money and his wife and fled the country, but not before tipping off the cops.

On the same day the police received the tip, Officer Mike Severance went to the warehouse and made his way up to the roof, where he noticed two vents—the exhaust from one of them emitting a “strong odor” of marijuana. Police later obtained power records for the businesses inside the warehouse from Seattle City Light. Records showed “an unusually high consumption of electricity,” Gordon wrote in an affidavit. There were two different addresses for the same building, each with a separate power meter. For the four-month period ending July 8, 1988, the two meters recorded a combined average consumption of 42,261 kilowatts per month. Put into perspective, this was “29 times higher than with the previous lessee.”6 Other power readings taken during the investigation showed similar spikes in power usage.7

Gordon contacted the Seattle office of the Drug Enforcement Agency and asked them for information on Marian and Von Haartman. The DEA search turned up a cocaine charge from 1972 in Berkeley, California, for Marian, and a pending investigation of Von Haartman by the DEA for drug conspiracy. All this evidence was cited in Gordon’s application for a search warrant on July 20, 1988. The request was approved and signed by Judge R. Joseph Wesley at 9:05 P.M. on the same day.8

Two hours later, a joint team consisting of several units from the Seattle Police Department served the warrant at the two registered addresses at the warehouse. According to a police report, “Plainclothes and uniform officers entered [the Music Bank] after receiving no response. Inside the business, numerous people were milling around the video area and the studio areas. Officers took all of the occupants into temporary custody and began searching through the maze of studios that exist within the business.”9

Darrell Vernon was the employee on duty the night of the raid. “All of the sudden, all of these people come busting through the door and the first few were plainclothes cops and there was these couple of guys in plainclothes waving guns at us. I thought we were getting robbed,” he recalled.

“They had no idea it was a rehearsal studio. They were saying things like, ‘What are all these little rooms full of drums?’ and stuff, like they had no idea where they were. I’m saying, ‘This is a rehearsal studio. This is a business. I’m the employee on duty.’ There was a black cop pointing the gun at me saying, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’”

Dean Noble had just finished rehearsing with his band and was getting ready to leave the building with his bassist, who needed a ride to the bar where he worked. The room was “like a sweatbox,” and Noble was wearing nothing but a pair of Adidas shorts. He had his car keys and a small amount of marijuana on him when the door flew open and fifteen to twenty armed police officers stormed into the building, pointing guns, yelling, “Stand against the wall!”

In a case of impeccably bad timing, Noble said Layne “had just walked around the corner and was getting ready to head out with a couple of strippers, and they were obviously coked out because they just started bitching up one side and down the other ‘These pigs,’ to the point where Layne actually told them to shut up because they were making it worse than what it needed to be,” he recalled. “It wasn’t uncommon for him to have strippers. They weren’t naked walking around, but you knew that they were strippers.”

As the manager for the Music Bank, David Ballenger had to deal with the police directly. They wanted access to all the rooms. Ballenger got the keys from Darrell Vernon. “So the guy took me with the keys and had a gun at my back and said, ‘Dave, you understand that we can shoot you, legally shoot you, if you cause us any problem,’” Ballenger recalled.

“You won’t have any problem with me,” he responded.

Ballenger went room by room, unlocking every door for the police to see. When he got to the Alice in Chains room, Jerry was in for a wakeup call. “I believe it was Jerry that was sleeping on the couch, woke up, pots strewn across his coffee table, things like that. He thought he was getting busted, but they just wanted to see what was in all the rooms.”

Steve Alley, a graphic artist who had designed logos and flyers for several local bands including Alice in Chains, was in the band’s room partying with Mike. “He heard a commotion coming from the hallway, leaned out, comes back in and shuts the door, and says, ‘It’s the cops, man! It’s the feds!’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, right. Bullshit. Whatever,’” Alley recalled. “So I lean myself out the door just to prove him wrong, and sure enough there’s a dude running down the hallway with a blue jacket on and a German shepherd.” Alley closed and locked the door, and he and Mike hurriedly finished the cocaine they had in the room before police came to their door. When they came in, they were rounded up and put in a line in the hallway with musicians from other bands, with their hands against the wall. Alley saw Layne walking up the hallway—“not detained”—with two officers following him. “He was holding court and they were laughing about something,” Alley said. Layne walked up to the crowd standing in the hallway, looked around, and said, “Hey—where the fuck’s Geraldo?” This was presumably a reference to Geraldo Rivera, possibly to his infamous The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults special. However, Alley noted, “He had a string of shows where he was ‘embedded with the police,’ but all of the episodes were pretty hyperdramatic and cheesy.”

The band had plans the following day to record another demo to send out to record companies. All of their gear was packed up and ready to go when, in Jerry’s words, “The Seattle SWAT team comes down and takes over the whole place! It turns out the party scene that was the Music Bank—we’d been living next door to a fucking forest of pot. I can’t remember how many times we’d been like, ‘Man, we need some weed,’ and it’s right through the wall.” At the time, the police had a lockdown on everything in the building, including the band’s gear. Jerry spent the next several hours trying to convince the police that there were no drugs there and pleading with them to not confiscate the band’s gear the night before the recording session.

While Jerry was working his charm offensive, Layne, Mike, and Sean got into Steve Alley’s car—a 1974 Ford Mustang II—and drove to a nearby 7-Eleven. Layne walked into the store and ran out a few minutes later carrying two cases of beer. He dove headfirst through the window and into the passenger-side front seat and, with his legs still sticking out, yelled, “Floor it!” They returned to the Music Bank, where they handed out beers to people standing outside waiting to get back in.

As the night progressed and the officers hit it off with the band, Alice in Chains was the only band allowed to remove their gear, after the police had thoroughly inspected it to make sure there was nothing in it. The band members stacked everything outside the front door, and ultimately had to sleep under the stars, some of them sleeping on top of their cases “so nobody would steal it,” others “in Layne Staley’s old VW Dasher which hadn’t moved for years.” Jerry called Ken Deans, who went to the Music Bank with a van the next morning to pick them up and get all their gear for the recording sessions.10

Eventually, everyone at the Music Bank at the time of the raid was allowed to leave the building, but Ballenger, Vernon, and Barry Oswald—the other employee on duty that night—had to stay in the office in the company of two police officers. Vernon recalls sitting around the office with Oswald and the two officers watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A young police officer gave them money to go out and buy sandwiches and a six-pack of beer for himself and his colleague.11

As for what the police were looking for, and eventually found, Ballenger said, “Further down, the warehouse was a big, huge, long complex. And there was a solid wall between us and the rest of the complex, and that’s where the big pot-growing operation was. [It was] unbeknownst to me and everybody that they had extended the lease and started [this] operation.

“They were getting all the electricity from their supply room, which was on the Music Bank side. I had a key to it, and surprisingly that key would be missing all the time off that ring, because Bengt or Gabriel came through every three months, ‘Oh, we’re gonna fix this or that, Dave. You’re gonna get cheaper water now,’ or something like that. I’d be, ‘Oh, okay.’”

It is worth noting that, although police questioned David Ballenger and Scott Hunt, in the hundreds of pages of police and court records there is no evidence or allegation that any of the employees or bands at the Music Bank had knowledge of or involvement in the marijuana operation. Ballenger told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “This is a clean place. I keep it clean … No one likes this kind of thing going on in the neighborhood.”12

Scott Hunt saw local news coverage of the raid. Hunt was stunned as he heard the details. He got in his car and went straight to the Music Bank, after which he was questioned by police. “They wanted to know my life story, so I had to go downtown with the one-way glass,” Hunt said. “So I told them everything that they needed to know and they were convinced beyond reasonable doubt that I had nothing to do with it, so they let me go.” Though he was never charged with anything, Hunt was dismayed by what the drug raid would mean for the Music Bank, specifically the loss of income and any chance of recovering his loan.

The Seattle Police Department estimated the operation was capable of growing $30 million a year in crops—calculated at a potential output of 10,000 plants per year valued at about $3,000 each. According to a document, authorities seized 28 boxes of marijuana plants, weighing a combined 448 pounds (204 kilograms).13

According to an article in the Ballard Tribune, the Seattle Police Department turned the case over to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle because of the amount of marijuana involved. “It’s a very complicated case and you want to take your time in cases like this,” the Seattle Police Department’s Ed Joiner told the paper. “We want to indict as many people as possible in this, so time is not a factor.”14

The band went to London Bridge Studios to make a twenty-four-track rerecording of the “Treehouse Tape” and to record some new material. This was the demo the band would shop around to the record labels. Hauser financed the sessions, which took place over the course of approximately one week and were produced by Rick and Raj Parashar. “We got off hours, and Rick and Raj worked with me because I promised them that I would come in later when we were recording and do full price,” Hauser said. He estimated the cost of the demo at about seven thousand dollars. They were able to get it so cheap because they would come in during overnight hours and work until five or six o’clock in the morning. If they had recorded at full price during regular hours, it would have cost Hauser twenty thousand dollars, which he couldn’t afford.15

Some time after the raid, the band moved out of the Music Bank and into a house near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport that they rented from Bob Jeffries, Gayle Starr’s boyfriend at the time. Though money and resources were scarce, somehow they managed to pay their rent. The house had four bedrooms—three upstairs that were occupied by Layne, Mike, and Sean, and one downstairs that was occupied by Jerry to minimize any possible damage in case his waterbed leaked. Layne cut a hole in the floor of his bedroom, which was directly above the rec room where the band jammed, so he could hear the music from his room.

There was a problem when they moved in: one of the toilets had clogged the plumbing for the entire house. They set up a portable toilet in the backyard while doing the necessary repairs themselves, which took about a month. Their next-door neighbors, an elderly couple, offered to let them use their guest bathroom as a short-term solution, an offer that was accepted. Coincidentally, the woman’s name was Alice. They told her that they named the band after her, presumably to get on her good side and so she wouldn’t complain about the loud music. On Sundays, the band went to Gayle Starr’s house, where she would cook them dinner with enough leftovers that would feed them through Wednesday. They would survive until the following Sunday on a diet of pizza, beer, and whatever food girls would bring over.

On August 11, 1988, Alice in Chains was part of a four-band bill performing at the Kent Skate King—a local roller rink—organized by Hauser’s company Standing Room Only Productions.16 Layne had shaped his hair into a Mohawk. One of the people there was Diana Wilmar, a news photographer and editor at KING 5, a Seattle affiliate of NBC News. She had heard about the local music scene and wanted to do a story about “a wannabe famous band.” After the show, she talked to Alice in Chains. “They were just a ton of fun, and they played off each other. They were really funny. Like one guy would start a sentence, and somebody else would finish it.” As they told her their story—about how they all lived together in a house, with one car for the four of them, Wilmar began thinking about these details as visual elements for a story. The band agreed to do it. Wilmar pitched it to the station and brought KING 5 news photographer George Stark and reporter/producer Jack Hamann on board to help write and shoot it.

The KING 5 crew filmed the band hanging out at their house and at the Music Bank, taking showers at Susan Silver’s house and getting ready for a show, and during a performance at the Vogue. Another time, they went with the band to Fishermen’s Terminal, where the band had a job unloading fishing ships that Randy Hauser had gotten them so they could cover the rent on their rehearsal room. “My memory of it was that after ten minutes they’re like, ‘Fuck this, there’s no way I’m gonna do this work. Are you shitting me?’ It’s hard, it’s smelly, and we never ended up really getting any video out of it because they were like, ‘I ain’t doing this. I’ll find some other way to make money,’” Hamann said. He interviewed all four members. It was his impression everybody except Layne was playing to the camera. “When this was done, there was very little role model for [reality television], and so clearly Sean, Mike, and to a lesser extent Jerry had a consciousness that the cameras are there and ‘we’ve gotta be good TV.’ From Layne a lot of it was, ‘I don’t give a shit—take my picture.’ He said a few things, but a lot of it was like, ‘I’m about my music and that’s what I’m here for, and if you guys wanna take my picture, that’s fine.’”

After they finished filming, Wilmar had to go to South Korea to assist with coverage of the Olympics. Hamann and Stark worked on the story while she was away, getting her feedback from abroad as the script came together. The finished story was unconventional for two reasons: first, it would run longer than five minutes; and second, there was no voice-over narration. They used sound from interviews with the band members to move the story along. It aired on October 14, 1988. Stark would later win the National Press Photographers Association National Award for Editing for his work on it. Hamann ran into Jerry after Facelift was released. “I don’t know if we would’ve gotten in the door with CBS if we hadn’t had that video, if you guys hadn’t done that for us,” Jerry told him. “I can’t thank you enough.”

Layne turned twenty-one on August 22, 1988. His bandmates and David Ballenger took him to a strip club to celebrate the occasion. On the milestone nature of the age, specifically the ability to buy alcohol and go to strip clubs, Ballenger told him, “Now you get to legally do what you’ve been doing for years.” Also at some point during this period, Ballenger recalls Layne and Jerry coming back from a night out in Seattle with their first tattoos—skull-shaped designs on their upper left and right arms respectively.

With Layne now of legal drinking age, going to bars and clubs became a much more frequent and easier endeavor. Before, he technically wasn’t even supposed to be in some of the venues where the band had played. The compromise solution, according to Jerry and Sean, was Layne had to stand outside until the band was ready to perform. He would go straight to the stage, play the set, and then have to leave immediately.17

Alice in Chains still had their room at the Music Bank and owed rent. Because Layne wasn’t working as many hours, Ballenger gave his job to somebody else. “I didn’t figure I’d ever get paid, because normally there was never, ever any money that changed hands,” Ballenger said. To his surprise, Jerry came back one day with cash to pay the outstanding balance.

In the months after the drug raid, Bengt Von Haartman and Gabriel Marian were trying to hand over ownership of the Music Bank to Ballenger, even going so far as to present legal documents to the city of Seattle. At the same time, Ballenger was still friends with Scott Hunt, who was involved in a lawsuit against them. Hunt was confident about the prospects of getting the building back and asked Ballenger if he would keep running it.

Ballenger politely declined, saying he had no interest in running the Music Bank and that there wasn’t enough money in doing so. Von Haartman and Marian got wind of this discussion, and about a week later they told Ballenger, “We put you in place here. We can kick you out just as easily.” Ballenger called their bluff. “And who would run it?” Ultimately, nothing changed.

Ballenger was nervous about possibly getting involved in litigation in connection with the marijuana operation and sought advice from an attorney. “I told him about what I was doing, about the pot bust. I told him I was worried about getting sued, about losing my equipment. I was terrified of [Von Haartman] and [Marian] at that time,” Ballenger explained.

According to Ballenger, the attorney’s response was, “Just go. They don’t have a better case than you. You don’t have a better case than them. It’s not in their best interest or moneywise for them to chase you.” He began making plans to leave Seattle. According to Music Bank accounting records, the final rent payments were received in late February or early March 1989. On February 6, 1989—a date Ballenger remembers because it was his sister’s birthday—he told Scott Hunt he was shutting down the Music Bank.

“You kept it open way longer than it ever would have been,” Hunt responded.

The decision had been made, but not the date. Ballenger eventually packed his things and got out of there, taking everything to a motel room in West Seattle. Ballenger called a few friends, said his good-byes, and moved to Portland.

The federal government’s case in the Ballard marijuana operation went to court at the beginning of 1991 but never made it to trial. According to the terms of a plea bargain negotiated by his attorney, Gabriel Marian agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to grow marijuana. He was sentenced to a thirty-three-month prison term and had to pay a $7,500 fine. Court records show that Bengt Von Haartman failed to appear at his initial court arraignment. The prosecutor handling the case subsequently discovered that Von Haartman had left the United States and was residing in a country that would not extradite him.18

Chapter 8

AS A CONDITION OF HIS parole, Randy Hauser was subject to regular urine-analysis testing. Because of this, he wasn’t using any drugs himself, although he admits to having kept some around in case anybody wanted some. “Drugs and alcohol have always been part of my life, but money was the most important part, and so it was nothing for me to have coke around and not use.” At some point in fall 1988, Hauser’s drug test came back positive for cocaine. Hauser’s parole officer tested him again, and it came back negative. About two weeks later, Hauser tested positive again. A second test yielded the same result, and Hauser went to jail. Despite his denials, Hauser spent the next fourteen months in prison and wasn’t released until January 1990.1 By that point, the band was already signed and working on their debut album.

By late 1988 or early 1989, Ken Deans and Kelly Curtis’s business relationship was falling apart. At that point, Deans said he approached Susan with a proposition: “I’m not confident that Kelly has enough interest to see the Alice in Chains project all the way through. I want you to take my half of the partnership of the band, and I’m going to go into concert promoting. If we do this deal, then I want to be the promoter of Alice in Chains in the Northwest for as long as the band exists.”

Susan explained how she got involved with Alice in Chains. “Ken gave me a cassette tape of some of the songs that Alice had done, and they were so catchy and so wonderful. I went to see them live and thought they were great fun and very energetic and entertaining and spent a little time with them, and they were hilarious. In a matter of time, the fellow that they called their manager, who was a hairstylist slash coke dealer, took a second vacation to prison. Ken asked Kelly and I if we both wanted to work on the project together, so we said we’d give that a try.”2

Hauser disputes both Deans’s and Susan’s accounts. According to him, he was sitting in a county jail in Everett, Washington, where Kelly Curtis and Susan came to visit him. Hauser says they offered to take care of Alice in Chains for him while he was in jail, an offer he gladly accepted. Hauser spent the next several months incarcerated while challenging and appealing the parole violation. Nearly twenty-five years later, he still insists he had not used cocaine at the time he tested positive, nor would he have had any reason to do so. Regardless of which account is accurate, it was the beginning of a long professional relationship between Susan and the band that continues to the present day.

Susan Jean Silver was the oldest of Samuel and Jean Silver’s three children. Years later, she wrote that she was inspired by the creative process early in life, doing volunteer work with organizations and theater groups that were involved with music. This eventually led to her involvement with the short-lived but highly influential Metropolis.3

In 1982, a French-born ski instructor, Hugo Piottin, moved to Seattle after working several years as a commercial fisherman in Alaska. When he got there, he “connected right away with a group of young folks dabbling with video production.” They realized they needed a place to create videos, and because Piottin had about fifty thousand dollars in the bank from his fishing work, he wound up financing everything.4

They found a venue at 207 Second Avenue in downtown Seattle. It had a history of being a nightclub going back to the Great Seattle Fire of 1889. It was tiny—with a legal capacity of three hundred. According to Susan, “Hugo’s idea was the Factory West Coast, a place for people to come and express themselves in any way: hear music, see films, and make art projects together. And then commercial needs took over, so it morphed into a showplace.” The Metropolis opened its doors in May 1983. Piottin was later joined by the singer/guitarist for Red Masque, Gordon Doucette, as a business partner.5

To be an all-ages club, no alcohol would be served. According to a 1983 Seattle Times article, “Traditionally, nonalcoholic nightclubs haven’t lasted long in Seattle. Teenagers don’t seem to be much interested in them, and it’s been hard for such clubs to make a profit without highly lucrative liquor sales.”6 Susan came in to run the juice bar. According to Doucette, “Susan’s involvement in Metropolis was just monumental. She had a great business savvy. She’s a woman with a huge heart. There’s a lot of clubs where the owners are never present—they’re shrewd businessmen counting cash in the office—but Susan, Hugo, and myself were always out there; we were part of the crowd and directly involved. So ninety-five percent of the people who walked through the doors of Metropolis knew us by name.” Susan and Doucette started dating.7

Standing next to Susan at the bar, Bruce Pavitt, the future founder of Sub Pop Records, was the DJ, spinning records ranging from Minor Threat to Run-DMC. Pavitt called the Metropolis “an amazing opportunity for young people to perform in front of their peers.”8 Among the club’s regulars who cut their teeth there were future Mudhoney members Mark Arm and Steve Turner, and future Guns n’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan. McKagan’s band Ten Minute Warning was the opening act when the Replacements played at the Metropolis on November 30, 1983.9

For that show, Susan, Piottin, and Doucette made an effort to make the place look nice. According to Susan, the band was not as respectful. “After the Replacements left, we went into the dressing room, and they had just trashed it. They pissed in there and graffitied all over the walls—they drew a caricature of Fred Flintstone with somebody shitting in his mouth. It was juvenile, it was imbecilic, but, beyond all that, it was disrespectful. I was gutted.” This incident influenced her mind-set as a manager years later, telling her clients that sort of behavior was unacceptable.10

The club would not last long—only about a year and a half. According to Piottin, they were renting on a month-to-month basis. When the building next door started being developed into a condo, it was decided that having a club crowd next door on weekends was undesirable.11

Susan started her managing career in 1983 working with the U-Men. She didn’t have much experience but did it anyway, booking a U.S. tour from her bedroom using fanzines, 411, and a phone book. Tensions were building between bassist Jim Tillman and the other members. Because the others were too cowardly to do it themselves, they made Susan fire Tillman.12

Although involved with the music scene, Susan had a day job. She noted that “none of this was a way to make a living.” She worked at a local clothing store, which may have had an impact on her future clients. In the 1980s, this store was one of the few in Seattle that carried Dr. Martens boots and shoes. The British brand had been around since the early 1960s as working-class footwear. Different youth subcultures over the years embraced the brand. Coincidentally—or perhaps not—members of Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains wore Dr. Martens, associating the brand with grunge in the process. In the early 1990s, all three bands were managed by Kelly Curtis and Susan. After the grunge scene took off and Seattle rockers were seen wearing them, Charles R. Cross noted sales of the brand skyrocketed, and the shoes were soon being sold at Nordstrom.13

One day a local musician named Chris Cornell walked into the store, and Susan caught his eye. He kept coming back to try to get her attention, but she wasn’t reciprocating. She had broken up with Gordon Doucette a few months earlier and, in her words, was in “a pretty dark space.” Around Halloween 1985, Susan went to a party accompanied by a friend, the performance artist and singer Chuck Gerra. Gerra dressed Susan as himself in drag for the party—in a long blond wig, platform shoes, a kimono, and makeup. That party was the first time she saw a local band named Soundgarden, which featured Cornell pulling double duty on drums and lead vocals. Her impression: “It was mind-blowing—they were amazing.”14

After their set, Cornell came up to her and recognized her even in disguise, which Susan said “he got huge points for.” Cornell told her Soundgarden was trying to get a show in Vancouver, Canada. Susan told him she was going there for a show the following week, and, if he wanted to meet, she would take a tape for them. About a week after, they ran into each other at the Vogue, after which they headed to a twenty-four-hour diner. They tried to go back to Susan’s place afterward, but she had lost her keys. They made out for a while, and then he took her to her mother’s home.15 This was the beginning of a relationship that would eventually blossom into marriage.

As Susan and Cornell started dating, Cornell decided to step down as drummer to focus on singing, and Scott Sundquist was brought in to play drums. At the same time, the local buzz about the band was growing. According to Kim Thayil, they needed someone to answer phones, make calls, and book gigs. Labels were showing interest, and the band was about to make a record for Sub Pop, so they were anticipating the need for lawyers and an accountant. At the time, Susan had no intention of managing Soundgarden, since she was already doing that job for the U-Men and a pop group called the First Thought. She wound up helping them out however she could, despite her initial reluctance to take the job because of her relationship with Chris and the parallels of their situation to the film This Is Spinal Tap.16

Though they weren’t her clients, a few years later Nirvana would come to Susan’s office, where bassist Krist Novoselic asked about lawyers and record labels. She agreed to introduce them to Peter Paterno, the Los Angeles–based attorney who would later represent Alice in Chains. When that meeting fell through because of a scheduling conflict, she introduced them to Alan Mintz, who became the band’s attorney. More than two decades later, Novoselic publicly thanked Susan for introducing the band to the music industry during Nirvana’s induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.17

Susan’s main responsibility as a manager was to promote and defend the interests of her clients. One night, Soundgarden was playing a show with Redd Kross, Malfunkshun, and Green River. An A&R person was there to see Green River, but because Soundgarden was the first act, Susan was able to sneak the A&R person out during Green River’s set. At the time, there was no frenzy to sign Seattle bands. According to Green River guitarist Bruce Fairweather, his bandmate Jeff Ament was furious with Susan for a long time after that.18 Susan had been managing Soundgarden for several years by the time she agreed to represent Alice in Chains.

Thad Byrd was still working on his Father Rock movie when his producer, Mike Bentley, heard “Sea of Sorrow” playing on Seattle radio station KISW. He recorded it on a cassette and told Byrd, “I heard Layne on the radio, and they have a song!”

Byrd was impressed. He was twenty-one or twenty-two years old at the time and got a very ambitious idea, implausible as it might sound: he would finance and shoot a music video for “Sea of Sorrow,” which he would sell to the record label Alice in Chains signed with, who would then get it played on MTV. Byrd went to the club where Alice in Chains was performing and was reintroduced to Layne through Mike, where he pitched his idea of making a video.

Byrd recalled that Mike was the one who was most enthusiastic about making a video. “Mike was always the guy that was hovering around me every time I was with the band, and he was always like the buddy-buddy guy: ‘Hey, come on! I gotta show you this!’ He was such a nice guy; that was my impression. If you wanted to have a good time, Mike Starr was the go-to guy.”

Layne told Byrd he’d have to discuss it with their manager and gave him Susan’s business card. He called her shortly after, and Susan invited Byrd to a meeting at her office with her and Kelly Curtis to pitch his idea. Byrd’s plan was to hire a cinematographer friend and Steadicam operator. By doing so, they would have access to his camera cranes, have a production manager and crew, and shoot the video using sixteen-millimeter film. Byrd estimated he could do all this with a budget he would put up of five to seven thousand dollars—a feat possible only because the crew was working for free as a favor to him. Otherwise, the video could have cost as much as twenty to forty thousand dollars.

Susan and Curtis gave Byrd their blessing, and Susan gave him a copy of the band’s demo. Byrd thinks Susan offered suggestions for which songs might be best for a video. As he recalls, they considered “Killing Yourself” to be one of their best singles and were kind of leaning toward that. Byrd set up a meeting with the band at their house.

When he arrived, he noticed that planes were flying so low and making so much noise that when you were outside, you could hear only about half of a conversation. Once inside, Byrd recalled, “They all lived there in absolute poverty. It is not cool. These guys are really dedicated, because most people would not be willing to do this.” The initial plan was to do “Killing Yourself,” when Byrd said he liked “Sea of Sorrow.”

“Jerry was a little bit hesitant. He wasn’t sure we could do it because Jerry had a very specific vision. He had written a song, and he had a very specific vision in mind. In fact, out of all the music videos I’ve ever done, I’ve never seen a musician who was more specific.”

Byrd recalled Jerry’s ideas: “He wanted to do a spaghetti Western, and I convinced him we could do anything … Jerry started telling me what he wanted was, it was going to begin with the four of them riding into town during the little musical intro. And then they were going to go into a saloon with a brothel upstairs, and they were going to romance the hookers. Then there was going to be a shoot-out in the saloon.” The video would cut back and forth to live performance scenes, which would be filmed at the Redmond stage being used as Queensrÿche’s rehearsal space at the time.

The plan was to shoot over the course of two days in Winthrop, a small town several hours away from Seattle. It was going to be a big production, with horses, a shoot-out, and then the band members would ride off into the sunset. “There were things in the song that said, like, ‘I aim my smiling skull at you.’ Jerry showed me the skull tattoo on his arm. He wanted a shot of him pulling out a gun, and the camera was going to zoom in on the smiling skull. He very much wanted things that he had written for the lyrics to synch up with the visuals.” Mike had a cowboy hat with a clothespin on the front that looked kind of funny. With the hat in mind, Byrd had the idea of making Mike’s character the comedic relief, an idea Mike embraced. Byrd began storyboarding his treatment for the video.

One time Byrd went over to the band’s house, which happened to coincide with Jerry’s birthday, for whom he brought Heineken as a gift. The band members had been out partying all night, but Layne was the first one to get up. Byrd and Layne went to a convenience store up the street. Layne was so broke, he couldn’t afford to buy a pack of cigarettes. He would scrounge up enough change to go to this convenience store and buy a single cigarette at a time. Byrd felt so bad for him, he bought Layne several cigarettes. When they returned to the house, the other band members eventually woke up. His recollection was, “I remember every other word out of Jerry’s mouth was ‘fuck.’ ‘Yeah, man! We’re fucking happening!’ ‘Fuck yeah!’ ‘Fuck!’”

His other impression was similar to Salieri’s reaction when he first meets Mozart in the movie Amadeus: trying to reconcile the disconnect between the band he heard on the radio and the four young, immature musicians in front of him.

“They seemed like they were just children,” Byrd said. “They just seemed so irresponsible to me, and I was super irresponsible at twenty-one, but they would never be on time for meetings, every other word was ‘fuck,’ they were obsessed with getting pussy and who they were fucking. Everything was—it was like a bunch of children. I could not reconcile these guys that I saw with the brilliant music I was hearing them play.”

While this was happening, Byrd was living with his parents. He would occasionally use his mother’s Chrysler van for transportation. One time he went out to scout locations, and she got mad about it. Byrd suspects she told his brother-in-law Kevin about it. When Byrd got home, Kevin was waiting. “He gives me the whole guilt trip about, ‘You’re taking advantage of your parents. The only reason why you’re able to do this is because you live at home for free. It’s not fair to your mom. Your mom has said this to me. You don’t know if this band is going to go anywhere.’ I’m like, ‘No, I think they’ll be big.’ ‘You don’t know that; there’s no way to know that,’ things like that,” Byrd said. “I still don’t know why I listened to him, but I felt so guilty. Probably some of it had to do with the fact that I grew up Mormon and I didn’t go on a mission, and my mom used to come into my room and cry when I was nineteen. So I already had kind of a little guilt thing about my mom, and my brother-in-law Kevin knew how to bring it home.”

Byrd abandoned the project. He enlisted in the army. About a year later, his neighbor called him over. He had recorded a video from MTV: it was for Alice in Chains’s “We Die Young.” Byrd was furious when he found out Columbia Records had bought the video from the Art Institute of Seattle. It was confirmation that his idea to shoot, produce, and sell a music video for “Sea of Sorrow” would have worked. He didn’t forgive his brother-in-law for years.

The summer of 1989 was an interesting time, just before careers were about to take off. According to Krisha Augerot, Kelly Curtis’s assistant, “It was just an epic kind of summer, where there was a lot of parties and we’d go to the beach all the time, just a fun time. A lot of socializing, and just really good times, a really hot, fun summer.” This would become the subject of the Mad Season song “Long Gone Day.” “It’s interesting that he felt the same way … Kristen Barry rented a house where Screaming Trees practiced in the basement. Her band practiced in the basement. Alice in Chains was happening. All those bands were happening.” According to the Above liner notes, the song was “inspired by those who shared this memory.” The notes mention by name Augerot, Demri, Layne and Demri’s close friend Fabiola Gonzalez, Cole Peterson and Rich Credo of the band Sweet Water, and Kristen Barry. Absent from the list was Sweet Water’s Paul Uhlir, who, according to Augerot, had an off-and-on relationship with Demri during this period.

According to the band’s official biography from the summer of 1989, they were trying to decide if they were the “Jay Leno of heavy metal” or the “all-male Partridge Family.” The same biography notes claim that Alice in Chains is “currently the only unsigned band to receive regular airplay on KISW’s ‘New Music Hour.’” Their live credentials included opening for the Bullet Boys, Tesla, and Great White.19

“Even before we got signed, we had a lot of big shows and some arena shows through a friend of our manager’s,” Layne said. These early arena shows caused him a bit of stage fright. “I think the first time with Great White and Tesla, I was dry-heaving behind the bass cabinet. It was like halfway through the set until I actually realized where I was.”20

Press from this period shows the buzz around the band in the months before getting their record deal. KISW’s Damon Stewart, in February 1989: “To all A&R types—Alice in Chains, remember that band—they’re gonna be huge, and they RAWK!”21

Tower Records’s publication Pulse, in April 1989: “The latest conquest for the Alan/Silver team is a band called Alice in Chains. Emerging from the studio with one of the most original demos in memory, this little rat pack should have labels eating out of its hand in no time.”22

The Seattle Times, May 19, 1989: “Alice in Chains may be the next Seattle-based hard-rock band to land a major contract. Representatives of several labels, including RCA and Columbia, are set to check out the quartet at its show tonight at the Bellevue VFW Hall.”23

Don Kaye, writing in his Deathvine column for Kerrang, July 15, 1989: “This band should be huge, and I wanna say you heard it here first. Alice in Chains is the name, they’re from Seattle, and it’s sleazy, bluesy rock with needle-sharp hooks and monster riffs that would do Metallica proud. Emotive vocals, funky, dirty grooves, and a totally original yet heavy-edged sound guarantee some big things.”24

From the September 1989 edition of Rip: “Alice in Chains is rumored to be the next big thing from Seattle. The four-piece have only been together for one year and are already attracting the attention of major-label A&R departments.”25

One of their most important fans during this period was Don Ienner, who had recently been hired as president of Columbia Records. “I flipped out the first time I heard their demo tape,” he said. Timing was also a critical factor. The buzz around Alice in Chains happened when the label was trying to get a foothold in the hard rock/heavy metal market. “They came to us at a time when we were hungry for music,” Ienner told Rolling Stone. Another crucial business ally at this early point in their career was Nick Terzo, a rep who had been involved in the band’s music publishing and who later joined Columbia’s A&R team. “Everybody thought I was getting the worst of the bunch. But to me they were a diamond in the rough.”26

It was a slow start on the business side. Ken Deans and Sean Kinney estimated that negotiations between the band and CBS Records went on for about eight months by the time the deal was signed.27

“We had good managers and great lawyers, and we were trying to retain things that you can’t usually keep when you’re a new band,” Sean explained.

“Like your publishing,” Jerry added.

“We were fortunate to do that, but … when you’re young like that, you’re like, ‘Fuck! Let’s just do this. We’re gonna get a record deal,’” Sean said. “But we waited it out, and it ended up working out for us.”28

According to Ken Deans, “The most significant and important part of that deal was that Alice in Chains kept their publishing.” In a typical contract, Deans said record companies would ask for fifty percent ownership in the songs. Under the terms of their deal, this meant that Alice in Chains owned all the songs they had already written and would own all the material they would write in the future under this contract. “Alice got it all. Alice is probably one of the last bands to get signed that kept all their publishing.”

Timing was a key factor working in the band’s favor during negotiations. “It looked like Seattle was going to be the next big deal,” Deans said. “Everybody wanted a piece of it. So from Mother Love Bone on, the signings were virtual bidding wars. So everybody was trying to present the best deal.”

Representing Alice in Chains in the negotiations was Michele Anthony, a partner at the entertainment law firm of Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg & Phillips. Anthony made such an impression that she was later hired as a senior vice president at Sony Music. In this capacity, according to a 2005 press release, she “established and managed the company’s regional A&R offices in addition to overseeing special projects and new business opportunities. She was vital in negotiating and signing many of Sony Music’s most important artists and was also involved with talent development, soundtracks, new technologies, and myriad special projects.”

Don Ienner said, “When I first met Michele, she was the lawyer for Alice in Chains, who I was signing to Columbia. She was a brilliant negotiator who knew the business inside and out, and those factors, combined with her passionate, no-holds-barred approach to demanding the very best for her artists, made it clear that she had the makings of a truly great executive.”29

Nick Terzo joined the label as Alice in Chains’s A&R representative. After months of negotiations, Alice in Chains signed with CBS Records on September 11, 1989.30 With the deal signed, it was time to make a record.