Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Chapter 9

DAVE JERDEN WAS A VETERAN producer with extensive credits who in 1989 was most known for his work on Jane’s Addiction’s Nothing’s Shocking. In the late summer or early fall of that year, he got a copy of the Alice in Chains demo from Nick Terzo, who had sent it to other major producers.

“Everybody passed on it,” Jerden said of this demo. “This was the time of Guns n’ Roses, and everybody was looking for people with that high voice, like Dio or whatever. But I grew up a product of the late sixties, seventies. I liked deep voices, bluesy voices, and when I heard this tape, I just went, ‘Wow!’” The general reaction to Alice in Chains in Los Angeles at the time was confusion, for lack of any point of reference. “There was a lot of head-scratching going on with that band when they were first doing it, but it was something that both Dave and I had already heard in our heads. It was a no-brainer this band is going to go somewhere, because it was just old-school Black Sabbath with new-kid mentality,” Jerden’s engineer, Ronnie Champagne, said.

A meeting between Jerden and the band was arranged in Los Angeles. The band was performing at a club, where four people were in the audience: Jerden, his manager, producer Rick Rubin, and one guy dancing in the middle of the floor “like he was on acid or something.” Rubin walked out after a few songs, leaving Jerden, Jerden’s manager, and the guy on acid to watch the rest of the show. When they met, Jerden and Jerry hit it off immediately.

“I said, ‘What you’re doing is what Tony Iommi was doing in Black Sabbath.’ And he goes, ‘Yeah!’ And I was in. It was pretty much Jerry’s call who was going to produce the record.” Terzo told Jerden the plan was to have them write more songs. The band returned to Seattle and cut two demos at London Bridge Studios with Rick Parashar. A dozen songs from these demos became the basis for the material on Facelift.

“‘We Die Young’ was on that, ‘Man in the Box,’ like six songs that were fucking amazing,” Jerden said. “They were doing a bit of every style: punk, heavy metal, to try and get a sound. I understand Layne at one point had a Mohawk. The idea was to cut out everything that they weren’t.”

At the time, Jerden and Champagne were working on Social Distortion’s first album and putting finishing touches on Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual de lo Habitual. Studio time was booked at London Bridge. According to Jerden, the production budget for the album was between $150,000 and $250,000. Champagne brought a cassette of the then-unreleased Ritual de lo Habitual, consisting of unfinished mixes. The album made an impression on the band. “That’s all they talked about. That’s all they wanted to know about when we first got there,” Champagne said. Mike made copies of the cassette and gave them to friends. “They devoured that record. So while we were making Facelift, their minds were expanding, because they’re starting to listen to this record that hasn’t been released yet, and Ritual was a big sonicscape record.”

Sean had broken his hand about a month before and couldn’t play drums. According to the Music Bank liner notes, it happened “during an altercation at a party one evening.” Mother Love Bone drummer Greg Gilmore was asked to fill in for Sean, and he wasn’t working out.

“The way Sean played, he had this heavy kick drum going, which was the basis of the sound, the bass and the kick drum, which coupled with the low chords that Jerry was playing … this guy just wasn’t hitting hard. I kept saying, ‘You’ve got to hit the kick drum harder. Please!’ He just could not give me that whack that I needed, that really solid backbeat,” Jerden explained. “And finally, after like three days of this, Sean says, ‘Fuck this!’ and he took off his bandages. He says, ‘I’m going to do this, broken arm or no broken arm.’ They changed then—all of the sudden, they sounded like Alice in Chains.” Champagne said after Sean removed his cast—about three weeks ahead of schedule—he winced every time he hit a snare drum.1

Aside from Sean’s mishap, Jerden said the recording process went very smoothly. “What we did was drums, bass, and basic guitars. I was up there for about a month. I had a great time. Jerry was a fisherman and I loved fishing, so we’d go salmon fishing in the mornings and then we’d go to the studio,” Jerden said. The songs were well developed by the time recording sessions began. “We did not stray from the basic tracks at all. We kept it pretty much the way the basic tracks were. I added some stuff to it, but I didn’t subtract anything.”

According to Jerden, his production process consisted of recording several takes of a song, maybe five to ten at most. He would sit with a pencil and notepad, making notes on every bar, whether he liked it or not. He listened to every take and would composite the song using the best takes based on his notes. “There was no click track,” Jerden said, referring to a signal routed into a musician’s headphones in the recording studio to serve as a metronome to keep time while recording. “So the timing would go up and down, but I’d pick the best overall take and then from other takes that were in the same time, I would edit those in.”

Dave Hillis, an assistant engineer at London Bridge at the time, credits Jerden for one element of the band’s sound. “If you hear the demos, the tempos are always faster. The thing that … Dave Jerden brought out [was to] slow the tempos down. Analyzing that now, it really helped develop the Alice sound, in that it became heavier with the tempo slowed down and more brooding.”

According to Jerden, “The midtempo, slow-tempo stuff just sounded heavier. If I sped it up, like ‘Man in the Box’ sped up, it wouldn’t have sounded right. I don’t remember from the demo what I did [in the recording], how much I slowed it down, but to me even a beat per minute slower or a beat per minute faster can make a big difference.” Champagne agreed, “It can’t be racing at you. It’s got to scare the fuck out of you before you even see it coming. That was the mentality.” According to Champagne, their message to the band as they were recording was “Play it like you mean it. Play it to us. Fuck everybody else. Make us impressed, because we’d seen it all already.”

Jerden was driving to the studio one day while they were working on “Man in the Box,” thinking they needed a hook sound for the song. At that point, Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” started playing on the radio, which features a prominent use of a Voice Box. This gave Jerden the idea of adding a Voice Box to “Man in the Box.”

The lyrics to “Man in the Box” can be traced to a dinner conversation between the band and Nick Terzo. Layne told Rolling Stone, “I started writing about censorship. Around the same time, we went out for dinner with some Columbia Records people who were vegetarians. They told me how veal was made from calves raised in these small boxes, and that image stuck in my head. So I went home and wrote about government censorship and eating meat as seen through the eyes of a doomed calf.”2

During a 1991 interview, Layne and Sean criticized bands for writing about subjects they didn’t know about, specifically “political stuff.” Layne said, “We write about ourselves, and we know about ourselves. I’m not any authority to write on any political nothing.” The interviewer asked, “What’s ‘Man in the Box’ about?” And Layne replied, “Ah, shit. It’s kinda loosely based on media censorship, but only my theory, so it’s not a fact or a statement.”

“It’s about veal,” Sean added.

“Plus I was really stoned when I wrote it,” Layne said. “So it meant something different then.”3

Layne’s “Sexual chocolate, baby!” scream at the end of “Real Thing” can be traced to the period when the band was living together after moving out of the Music Bank. According to Steve Alley, the band had been watching the Eddie Murphy movie Coming to America, in which a Murphy character is the singer of a band called Sexual Chocolate. Alley said it became a recurring joke for Layne, which eventually made its way into the song.

Mike bought his bass guitars and equipment from Evan Sheeley, formerly the bassist of Seattle hard rock band TKO, who at the time was working at Seattle Music. Sheeley was at home when he got a call from Jerden, who said they were having problems with the bass and amplifier he had sold Mike and asked him to come in. Once at the studio, Sheeley noticed Mike had set the levels on the instrument and the amplifier all the way up to 10.

“You can’t do that because that’s going to make it sound like crap. It’s going to sound all distorted,” Sheeley explained. “I’ve been in the studio a lot, so I just took the bass—there’s the tone. Dave Jerden came on the talkback and said, ‘That’s the sound I want. That’s perfect.’” According to Sheeley, after getting the right levels on the bass and the amplifier, they put duct tape on the bass knobs so Mike couldn’t touch or change them. The knob settings on the amplifier were marked with a knife so they wouldn’t be forgotten. More than two decades later, those markings were still visible on Mike’s amplifier.4

Champagne vaguely recalled this episode. Jerden doesn’t recall it but doesn’t dispute Sheeley’s account. At the same time, he points out that besides being a bass player himself, “I had extensive experience at recording bass in terms of techniques. At that time, I’d recorded Bill Wyman from the Rolling Stones and I’d worked with tons of great fucking bass players, so I knew how to get a bass sound.”

During separate interviews with Greg Prato and Mark Yarm years later, Susan said, “The only one that was difficult to manage was the original bass player—he had that notion that if you sign a major record deal, you can go and spend a lot of money. The rest of the guys were really great about being money conscious and realizing that the money you get is your money, and the way you spend it is going to be how much you have at the end.” Beyond her criticism of Mike, Susan said Jerden had something of a profligate attitude regarding the budget and encouraged the band to buy gear.5

Jerden disputed Susan’s claim, saying only two pieces of equipment were bought for Facelift. The first was a six-string bass that cost around five hundred dollars, which Jerden bought from Sheeley and paid for himself. This bass was used for the choruses to make the songs sound heavier.

The second piece of equipment was the Voice Box for “Man in the Box,” which the band paid for so Jerry could use it to perform the song live. “I think that Voice Box cost like a hundred dollars, and that was the hook sound for ‘Man in the Box,’ and to me it made the whole difference in making a hit record. I had them buy two things totaling maybe six hundred dollars for a hit song that sold millions. I didn’t tell them to go to the store and just start buying shit. Anything else they bought after that, I don’t know about and I had nothing to do with.” Jerden and Susan were getting along during the making of Facelift, but they would have a falling-out several years later.

Champagne backed Jerden’s account, saying they went to American Music in Seattle once because Jerry needed to buy picks and strings. Regarding Mike’s spending sprees alleged by Susan, Sheeley backed up Jerden’s account, saying Mike did not spend a lot of money on gear.

Champagne went to a club with the band members one night. As they were about to leave, Champagne saw Layne go in the bathroom, light a paper towel on fire, and throw it in the garbage can. “He’s like, ‘Run!’” Champagne recalled. “I’m like, ‘Oh, shit.’” They left and piled into Layne’s car, a station wagon Champagne thinks he borrowed from his mother. “It seems like everywhere that we went, we were running for our lives to get out of there.”

A frequent hangout for all of them was the Vogue. One night the bathrooms were so full, women were using the men’s room. At that point, either Layne or Jerry decided it would be easier to go outside. He was in the parking lot urinating when a woman sitting in the car behind where he was standing turned the lights on. Layne or Jerry, whoever it was, turned around and peed on the hood of the car. The woman was furious and started yelling. She followed him inside, still screaming. At that point, everyone bolted out of the club. Layne went into getaway-driver mode, got the station wagon, and drove up and down the street picking people up. “We are literally diving into the car, because people are chasing us. It was that bad. I swear to God. It happened almost every time we went there … some crazy shit,” Champagne said. It got bad enough that he started going to the Vogue by himself.

Champagne stopped by the band house once. His reaction was “Holy shit.” He remembers one girl going downstairs with Mike to have sex. After she had left, another girl came over and went downstairs with Mike. Champagne got the impression that Demri didn’t like that Mike was such a womanizer, because she thought he might be a bad influence on Layne. Jerden and Champagne said Layne was not using heroin at the time. However, they heard unconfirmed rumors at the time that Demri was using. People who knew Demri well do not know when or how her heroin use started.

The sessions at London Bridge wrapped up in December 1989. Jamie Elmer vividly remembers Christmas of that year, although it might have been 1990 or 1991. “Layne and Demri came over to where my mom was living, and my sister and I were there. And they had actually bought Christmas presents, because it was the first time Layne had money to buy Christmas presents.”

The band, Jerden, and Champagne relocated to Los Angeles after the holidays to finish the album, mainly vocals and guitar overdubs. “They had just rebuilt Capitol Records Studio A, and I was the first client in there, and my wife managed the studio.”

Bryan Carlstrom was an assistant working at Capitol Records, floating between three different projects at the time, one of them being Facelift. Carlstrom had not heard of the band before they came to the studio. Because he was hearing only bits and pieces of the record, he hadn’t really formed much of an opinion on the band. Outside the studio, Carlstrom hung out and smoked pot with Layne. Carlstrom’s impression at the time: “Kind of a Birkenstock kind of hippyish kid, really skinny, pretty innocent kid, to tell you the truth. He looked really young, really childlike, aside from I think he had a goatee, a goatee with a couple of beads in it or something, very childlike.”

Champagne described the remodeled Studio A as “a million-dollar coffin,” meaning that if you went into the middle of the room—which was about the size of a gymnasium—and spoke, “you could see your words stop in the air like a cartoon word bubble.” He had Layne go out in the middle of the room with only a stool to place a water bottle, an ashtray, and his sunglasses.

“Turn the lights down low so you can barely see me,” he told Champagne, who was in the control room. He agreed, and responded, “Okay, I got to turn down the control room lights, too, so you can just barely see me.” Champagne said Layne nailed his vocals on the first take pretty much every time. Jerry was the same. According to Jerden, “When I was doing lead vocals, I’d double them. And then any harmonies we did, which were not extensive, we’d just do maybe a third harmonic harmony, but it wasn’t that stacked vocals that came out on Dirt.”

Phil Staley came to the studio while Layne was recording his vocals. Champagne thinks there might have been an element of surprise to the visit. Layne was happy to see him. Beaming with pride after hearing his son sing, he turned to Champagne and asked, “Man, where the fuck did he learn how to do that? I just got the chills!”

The band asked Jerden where they could find a strip club. “Go to the Tropicana,” he told them, which he described as “a tourist strip bar.” Champagne went with them the first time. “I started half of that mayhem,” he said. “The first night that we went there, Mike was goofing around with this one stripper, and he paid her to walk up to me, grab the back of my head, and shove it—she had massive breasts—shove my face and rubbed it, and she had the worst perfume I’ve ever smelled, and it was all over me.”

When Jerden visited them at the Oakwood Apartments complex where they were staying, he saw they had a Tropicana calendar, featuring pictures of the girls. They put an X over each girl they had slept with. During the recording sessions, the band played a show at a club called English Acid. A lot of Tropicana girls showed up at the gig.

In mid-March 1990, Alice in Chains took a short break from the recording sessions for Facelift in Los Angeles and returned to Seattle. Shortly after, the local music scene would be rocked by a tragic loss.

Chapter 10

MOTHER LOVE BONE front man Andrew Wood—dubbed by Experience Music Project’s senior curator, Jacob McMurray, “the Freddie Mercury of Seattle” for his charismatic, goofy personality—had been quietly struggling with a heroin addiction since the mid-1980s. According to music journalist Jeff Gilbert, Wood’s heroin addiction was a secret held “in closed circles” by the people close to the Mother Love Bone camp, especially in comparison to Layne’s and Kurt Cobain’s addictions a few years later, which were public knowledge. “People knew, but it was something you didn’t go around talking about.”

Wood had had drug and alcohol problems for years. In a handwritten piece of paper dated from 1989 that Wood called a “Drugalog outline,” which his family shared with filmmaker Scot Barbour for the documentary Malfunkshun: The Andrew Wood Story, he chronicled his nearly lifelong progression through drugs and alcohol. He started using heroin in 1985 or 1986. He moved to Seattle, moving back in with his father after getting hepatitis from dirty needles. According to The Seattle Times, “His body turned yellow and his liver was shot.”1

During a December 1986 interview with The Rocket, Wood said he and his Malfunkshun bandmates had quit drugs “a few months ago,” and specifically stressed to the interviewer, Dawn Anderson, that it was okay to print that. Their song “With Yo’ Heart (Not Yo’ Hands)” is about heroin and hepatitis.2

Friends staged an intervention around Thanksgiving of 1989, after which Wood checked himself in to Valley General Hospital in Monroe, Washington. It is likely during this treatment that Wood prepared his Drugalog. The final entry in the document reads, “1990—one of two roads.” While there, he told his fiancée, Xana La Fuente, that if he ever had to make a choice between his music career or his sobriety, he’d choose the latter.3

Mother Love Bone played a show at the Central Tavern in Seattle on March 9, 1990. This was Andrew Wood’s final public performance. He had been out of rehab, was allegedly drug-free for 100 to 116 days, and had been working with a therapist and attending AA and NA meetings. On March 15, 1990—a few days before the scheduled release of Mother Love Bone’s album—Andrew Wood’s brother, Kevin, had a premonition Andrew had relapsed. He called Andrew out on it, a charge he would deny.4

The next day, he was supposed to meet with Jeff Ament to work out at a gym. Wood had been on the program to get in shape for his live performances. Wood called Ament, telling him he wasn’t feeling good. “His voice was kind of scratchy,” Ament wrote. “Looking back on it, he was high, but at the time I didn’t notice that. He sounded sick; no big deal.”5

Wood was supposed to meet with his tour chaperone that night, whose job was to ensure that he stayed sober. He called Kelly Curtis and told him he wouldn’t be able to make it to practice and that his fiancée was going to think he had done drugs.

“Did you?” Curtis asked.

“No,” Wood responded.

Also on that same day, Mike Starr said he ran into Wood in Kelly Curtis’s basement. Wood asked him for a ride home. Mike passed it by about three blocks, after which Wood got out. When he did, Mike said he “went up to this Mexican guy when he got out.”

David Duet, the singer of Cat Butt, saw Wood copping drugs at the Denny Street house, which, as he told Mark Yarm, was inhabited by “a bunch of crazy kids … and there was a drug dealer that lived there … I used to spend the night over there sometimes. I would wake up and there would be a cast of characters there. Multiple people moved in and out of that place. They had parties, and bands played in the basement.” David added, “I saw him that day. It was devastating ’cause it’s one of those people you did not expect.”6

La Fuente was at a work meeting that night and left at 10:00, instead of her usual 6:30 or 7:00 time. Two coworkers asked for a ride home, which she agreed to, but it added another thirty to forty minutes to her trip home. When she got there, Wood was lying facedown, unconscious on the bed. According to The Seattle Times, which attributed this information to Wood’s father, who had heard it from La Fuente, Wood’s arms were sprawled out at his side, his face was tinged blue, and he had blood in his mouth. There was a needle puncture in his arm, with a syringe found nearby. La Fuente called 911 at 10:10 P.M., and the dispatcher told her how to administer CPR while paramedics arrived. Although initially presumed dead, at 10:34 P.M. Wood was revived and placed on a respirator.

He was admitted to intensive care at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle at 12:40 A.M. He initially showed signs of improvement, but a CT scan showed brain swelling. La Fuente called several people with the bad news, probably too many people. “I wish I would have never called anyone and told them he was there,” La Fuente told Mark Yarm. “Because of that scene there. A lot of people didn’t deserve to be part of that. There were a lot of groupies showing up.”7

La Fuente may not have been entirely responsible for the “scene” at the hospital. A few other people overdosed that weekend as well—possibly caused by the same batch of heroin. One of them was the keyboardist from the band Sleepy Hollow. His bandmates, including future Tad roadie Ben Rew, were at the hospital at the same time Alice in Chains and other friends of Mother Love Bone were there to see Wood.

“I think Jerry Cantrell thought I was there to pretend I was cool, because there were a lot of people that were there that shouldn’t have been there. There’d be like random chicks. So I think it got confused that I was there for the wrong reasons, and Jerry brought it up,” Rew told Mark Yarm. “He asked me why the fuck I was there. It was as simple as, ‘My fucking keyboard player is dying in there, asshole!’ That normally will spark some confrontation. Basically, I think I lunged at him. And I think Jeff and some other guys and my guitar player Rick got in between us. I was pretty stoned at the time.” Rew’s keyboardist would spend the next four and a half months in a coma before he eventually recovered.8

Wood’s roommate, Chris Cornell, was touring with Soundgarden in Brooklyn at the time, and the band’s tour manager got the bad news. The tour manager didn’t tell the band until after the show, so it wouldn’t affect their performance.

According to Soundgarden’s soundman, Stuart Hallerman, “We did tell them after the show, and Susan was out with us, and she started plying herself and Chris with liquor to dull the pain a bit. Driving back to Manhattan, Susan was like mumbling and falling over in the van. It was maybe the only time I’ve seen Susan drunk. The band played the last show of the tour in Hoboken the next night, and Chris and Susan flew out and got to the hospital.”9

Once at Harborview, “All the band was around, and his girlfriend. They told us when we got there that they were going to take him off life support,” Susan recalled.10

According to Scot Barbour’s documentary Malfunkshun, by 11:20 A.M. on Monday, March 19, Wood was unresponsive, with no reflexes or signs of brain function. Wood’s parents decided to remove him from life support, but La Fuente would not let them until Cornell arrived.

According to La Fuente, “His whole family was at the hospital, like twenty people. They all went in and saw him. Then all of his friends went in and saw him. Then I went in, had cut his hair off, and kept it. I played some Queen for him—they were his favorite band. The doctors turned everything off, and I just held him really tight and listened to his heart until it stopped. It took like fifteen minutes.” He was twenty-four years old. A coroner concluded he died of hypoxic encephalopathy—lack of oxygen to the brain—as a result of his overdose.11

A public memorial service was held at the Paramount Theatre on March 24. Ken Deans and La Fuente spoke. There was a video tribute put together by friends. David Wood, Andrew’s father, addressed the audience, saying, “My son was a junkie.” He urged the crowd not to do drugs. He addressed the surviving members of Mother Love Bone: “I want you guys to go on and be the biggest stars you could be. I want to see you guys on TV. If you’ve got to get another singer, don’t get a junkie.”12

A private wake was held at Kelly Curtis’s house immediately after the memorial. There were between twelve and twenty people there, according to Ken Deans, mostly local musicians. “The fans went home. His friends went to Kelly’s,” Chris Cornell wrote. Nancy Wilson of Heart brought her three springer spaniels along. “Everybody at the place took turns getting down on the ground and hugging the dogs because it was really comforting.”13

Cornell remembered being in the crowded living room, with La Fuente telling everybody, “This is just like La Bamba,” the 1987 Ritchie Valens biopic. At that moment, he heard “slapping footsteps growing louder and louder as they reached the front door and Layne flew in, completely breaking down and crying so deeply that he looked truly frightened and lost. Very childlike.” Cornell added, “He looked up at everyone at once, and I had this sudden urge to run over and grab him and give him a big hug and tell him everything was going to be okay.

“Kelly has always had a way of making everyone feel like everything will turn out great. That the world isn’t ending. That’s why we were at his place. I wanted to be that person for Layne, maybe just because he needed it so bad. I wasn’t. I didn’t get up in front of the room and offer that and I still regret it. No one else did, either. I don’t know why.”14

Mike walked in and said, “Who wants to smoke a joint?” He immediately regretted the insensitive nature of his comment when he saw Cornell in tears looking at a photo album of Wood.15

Nick Pollock came to the wake and ran into Layne, and the two talked a bit. “I remember hanging out with Layne and how upset Layne was because he was much closer to him than I was … I remember [Layne] being upset and I’m pretty sure he was crying, and I remember becoming emotional talking to him about that situation,” Pollock recalled.

“I think I felt a certain amount of that for Andy Wood. I was not friends with him. I was an acquaintance. Layne knew him more because they had played, and I believed that he identified with that, and he felt his pain and the way he dealt with it.” Asked if Layne was distraught at the wake, Deans said he was, but noted everyone else was as well.

Mother Love Bone was thought to be on the brink of stardom. No one knows what might have been if Wood had survived. Just before his death, Mother Love Bone’s management had received a bonus check from Polygram Records. “I remember sitting with Kelly at the house and we’re looking at this check for $250,000, and he’s going, ‘Fuck, I got to send it back.’ It was the signing bonus for finishing the record,” Ken Deans explained. “The check came on Friday and Andy died on [Monday], so it hadn’t been deposited yet.” Mother Love Bone broke up, but bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard stuck together and started the band that would become Pearl Jam. In retrospect, Wood’s death was not an isolated incident but a foretaste of things to come.

“Andy was that sort of big precursor to all of those later worries about heroin and drug addiction. He was the first major blow that had happened, that sort of realization that there is a dark side to all of this,” Jacob McMurray explained.

“Andy dying was a huge blow. And unfortunately, it wasn’t a wake-up call,” Deans lamented. “And a funny thing—at that time, nobody was, other than some occasional binge drinking or some cocaine here and there, nobody was out of control.”

“It’s difficult to articulate it, but up to that point, I think life was really good for us as just a group of musicians in a scene making music,” Cornell said during an interview for the Pearl Jam Twenty documentary. “You know, the world was sort of our oyster, and we had support, we supported each other, and he was kind of like this beam of light sort of above it all. And to see him hooked up to machines, that was, I think, the death of the innocence of the scene. It wasn’t later when people surmised that Kurt [Cobain] blowing his head off was the end of the innocence. It was that. It was walking into that room.”16

In death, Wood proved to be as influential as in life, if not more so. His loss inspired Cornell to write “Reach Down” and “Say Hello 2 Heaven,” songs that eventually led to Temple of the Dog. Candlebox’s “Far Behind” was also a tribute to Wood.17 Alice in Chains would dedicate Facelift to his memory and that of Gloria Jean Cantrell. In time, they would pay their own musical tribute to Wood as well.

Not long after finishing Facelift, Jerden offered Bryan Carlstrom a job as his engineer. Carlstrom happily accepted, even though it meant taking a pay cut. “It was like, ‘Wow, it’s going to be like the Wild West. I’m going to be working with a guy who works on the records that I like.’ He’s probably my favorite producer at that time. It was an amazing opportunity to go work with him and get that kind of experience and those kinds of credits engineering,” Carlstrom said. He would play a key role in the recording sessions for Dirt.

On April 6, 1990, Alice in Chains met with artist, photographer, and video director Rocky Schenck. They made a good pairing. “I had listened to Alice’s music before the first meeting, and it definitely made a strong impression on me. To be honest, it was darker than anything I had heard previously in my music-listening experience, and I didn’t know quite how to react when I first heard it,” Schenck wrote. “Creatively speaking, I had already been walking down a rather dark road myself for many years before I met these guys. I think the band picked this up when they first viewed my photography portfolio and looked at my previous videos, and that’s why we connected so naturally and quickly. Like minds, I suppose.

“I thought what I had to offer visually and creatively would complement what they were creating musically. And looking back on the work we created together, I think it did.”18

They discussed several ideas for the album art. For one of the photographs, the band came up with the idea of making it appear as if they were emerging from an eyeball, so the conversation focused on how that could be created. The record label didn’t give the band a large budget for this photo shoot, but Schenck liked them so much, he was willing to make it work. He took a budget scarcely enough for a one-day shoot and stretched it out over three days.

The first shoot took place on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 2, 1990, at the swimming pool of the Oakwood Apartments in Burbank. To execute the idea of their emerging from an eyeball, the pool was covered with a thin piece of plastic. The band members had to swim under the plastic, rise to the surface, and breathe in as they emerged. “The plastic distorted their faces, and I got some great, ghoulish band shots with the very first roll of film,” Schenck wrote. They experimented with several ideas, including a shot of Layne wrapped in plastic with the other members holding him that was used as the cover for the “We Die Young” single.

They spent the next day and night at Schenck’s Hollywood studio. “I had been experimenting with in-camera multiple exposures, where I would create a distorted image by exposing different parts of a single frame of film one exposure at a time. I had been utilizing this technique in videos and in my art photography for years, and it was perfect for this assignment,” Schenck explained. In his portfolio, the band members had seen “experimental multiple-exposure black and white portraits of haunted, distorted faces,” and asked that he duplicate the technique. Schenck didn’t want to duplicate the original photo, which was in black and white, so he tried the same technique in color using photos of each band member’s face. A photo of Mike was chosen for the album cover. Upon seeing the photo, they decided to name the album Facelift. The original concept for the cover was to have all four members’ faces “superimposed into one startling expression,” which appeared years later in the Music Bank box set.19

“What I enjoyed about this process is that I could never quite predict how the final image would look with this technique, but it usually resulted in an image that was somewhat bizarre and twisted—perfect for Alice,” Schenck wrote. “We spent many hours creating distorted portraits of each band member, lighting each of their features individually with a single gelled spotlight and creating the portrait one exposure at a time.”

On May 4, Schenck and the band went to a sulfur plant in Wilmington, California, an experience he described as “very intense” because if the wind shifted, the sulfur would get in their eyes, and they would all start crying. There were eye baths located throughout the plant, so they were constantly washing their eyes. At one point, the band was standing in a cactus patch near a mountain of sulfur when the wind shifted and they all started crying. Schenck kept shooting and got what he described as “some odd pictures of the band crying in the cactus.”

After reviewing the proof sheets two decades later, Schenck wrote, “I think this first marathon shoot captured them in a wonderful way. They were in rare form, and I was having the time of my life working with them. I didn’t know at that time if I would be working with them again, but I was hooked.” Schenck and the band were out having dinner when Layne, for no particular reason, started singing “We Die Young” in the style of Broadway actress Ethel Merman. These shoots were the beginning of a professional relationship between Schenck and the band that would continue for years, covering most of their albums and several music videos.

Schenck and the band regrouped on August 9 to discuss ideas for their first video, “We Die Young.” At the time, there had been several fires in the Los Angeles area, and Schenck suggested using a burned-down house and a swimming pool filled with debris as a location. He also wanted to replicate the swimming-pool photos into sequences for the video. Filming began on August 28 at a home in Glendale. Schenck requested the ruins be painted bright red, and they filled the pool with debris found on-site. “I can distinctly remember the looks on the family’s faces who once lived in this home watching us from the sidelines. Their expressions were quietly horrified as we filmed in their once-lovely swimming pool, using their burned furniture and their children’s burnt toys as props,” Schenck wrote.

On September 10, Schenck organized a shoot at a Hollywood studio, where the band’s performance was projected on floating and burning debris. The final cut of “We Die Young” was finished on September 17. “The band and the record company seemed to like it, and I was happy with the way it turned out. The video seemed to fit the music quite well, and I think it utilized a lot of different elements that I had not seen in music videos at that point.”20

The three-song We Die Young EP was released in the summer of 1990, with Facelift shortly after, on August 24—two days after Layne’s twenty-third birthday. Layne had given his mother a cassette copy of the finished album to listen to and asked for her feedback.

“I think there’s a sleeper on that album”—a song that was going to creep up on people—“It’s called ‘Man in the Box.’”

“Mom, I wrote that song.”

“Layne, it’s so beautiful.”

In retrospect, years later, Nancy Layne McCallum said, “I didn’t know he was the man in the box. I’m sure he just kept wanting me to get it.”21

She was ultimately proved correct about “Man in the Box” being a sleeper. But it took a while for it to catch on. First, they had to tour in support of the album.

Chapter 11

ALICE IN CHAINS HIT the road almost immediately following the release of Facelift. They warmed up by playing a few local Seattle shows first—at the annual Bumbershoot festival at Seattle Center, followed by headlining performances at the Vogue and the Central Tavern. At the time, Soundgarden was wrapping up their tour in support of Louder Than Love, so Susan hired that crew to work for Alice in Chains. The crew consisted of a drum tech, a guitar and bass tech, a sound engineer, a merchandise seller, and a tour manager.

Jimmy Shoaf was Sean’s drum tech during this first tour. In that capacity, he was responsible for setting up and maintaining Sean’s equipment before, during, and after the shows, and he was also running the lights. Susan had given him an advance copy of Facelift. He had never seen the band live before. “I’m listening to it, like, ‘These guys can’t do this shit live. There’s no fucking way. It’s overproduced,’” he said. Shoaf met the band at Mark Naficy’s warehouse after Bumbershoot in early September 1990. In a small rehearsal room, he watched them perform “Sunshine” and was amazed by what he was hearing.

Randy Biro, the guitar and bass tech, who also doubled as a stage manager, was similarly skeptical at first. “To be honest, I didn’t want to. Susan asked me to do it as a favor, because I didn’t like the band at first.” He had first seen Alice in Chains live when they opened for Soundgarden at a show in Portland. His impression at the time: “Wow, these guys are really good.” But for some reason, there was a disconnect between the band he saw live and the band he was asked to work with. Biro had also been given a copy of Facelift. “I thought they were a lame attempt at trying to do Aerosmith, mixed with [Guns n’ Roses].”

The first thing he said to the band after Soundgarden got off the tour bus and Alice in Chains got on was, “Hey, you. This is my bunk. Don’t fucking touch it.” During the first week of the tour, Biro didn’t even know any of their names.

Up first was a monthlong opening slot for Extreme, where they would be performing in clubs ranging from five hundred to fifteen hundred people in support of Facelift and Extreme’s sophomore album, Extreme II: Pornograffiti. It was an odd pairing, one Alice in Chains and their crew weren’t particularly happy with. “Extreme fans were generally little seedy guitar-player-wannabe dudes. I think they were starting to hit with that ‘More Than Words’ god-awful ballad; they took that one to the bank,” Shoaf said.

“It was terrible,” Biro said, adding, “Extreme was, like they really thought they had made it big. And Nuno Bettencourt, the guitar player, he really didn’t belong with them. They were just really, really, really cheesy guys. Their music was exactly like they were.”

As the tour progressed, Alice in Chains began winning over Extreme’s audience. One detrimental factor was the shoddy treatment they were getting from the headliners. “Extreme were from the old school of rock, and that was you pretty much screw over the opening act,” Shoaf said. “You turn down the PA on them, you didn’t give them as much lights as you got, they didn’t get treated necessarily with open arms. Grunge kind of changed that, too. It was more kind of punk rock: we’re all in this together—it’s a smarter attitude. Today’s opening act is tomorrow’s headlining act.”1

In Atlanta, the bands were playing at a venue where the physical space onstage, specifically the lack thereof, became an issue. “They had this cheesy drum riser. They called it their set, and it took up way too much room,” Biro said. The stage was so small, Layne had to stand stage left of Sean, whose kick drum had to be nailed down so it wouldn’t fall off the stage. “They refused to move anything, to make our life a little bit more bearable. And they’d say, ‘You’re just the opening act.’ And thanks to assholes like that, we never treated people bad.”

According to Jerry, “We’d gotten attitude about what we could do, what we couldn’t do onstage, because the singer did his set barefoot. So we drank, spilled shit over the place, smoked. We were like, ‘What are you going to do, kick us off the tour? It’s the last gig!’ And Mike Starr would get a case of the nerves and puke. I think he had some beers in him, so he turned around and puked all over the drum set. That was our last gig with Extreme.”2

There was another incident involving Extreme’s gear. “I remember the bass tech for Extreme freaking out because Mike Starr had gotten drunk and jumped up on Extreme’s bass cabinets, had fallen down and knocked over Extreme’s bass rigs right before Extreme played,” Shoaf said. “Mike’s stuff is in front of theirs. He’s not supposed to be back there on or near their crap. I remember they were pretty upset about it and understandably so. They haven’t done the show yet, and there’s only fifteen minutes technically between Alice in Chains and Extreme. If something’s broke, you’re trying to fix it in fifteen minutes—good luck.”

Further complicating matters was the Extreme crew’s inexperience. According to Biro, except for two members, none of them had ever toured before. “It was like they had hired professional friends.” On top of that, they had no sense of humor. Before Extreme’s homecoming show at a theater in Boston, the Alice in Chains members and crew were walking into the venue when they came across Extreme’s production manager.

“Wow. You ever been in a room this big?” the production manager said to Biro.

Biro, a veteran crew member who had played large and small venues before, looked at Sean and facetiously asked, “Wow, is this as big as a stadium?”

“Fuck you,” the production manager said, and walked away.

Jerry was happy to be there performing on that first tour, Shoaf said, but he was also his own biggest critic. “I think Jerry was a little hard on himself and a perfectionist. Like after a show, he’d think he fucked up here or he fucked up there. He would take his own CD after the show, put a set of headphones on, and practice getting better.”

Regarding Sean, Shoaf said, “He can play anytime, anywhere. He knew the songs backwards and forwards. Generally, when the drummer knows the songs backwards and forwards, he’s a great drummer. He’s one of the nicest guys you could ever hang out with, unless he’s got twenty-four beers in him, and he just doesn’t pass out.”

One of Shoaf’s most vivid memories of this tour was when Layne made him a Neil Diamond fan. They were at a truck stop and heard an elevator-music version of “Love on the Rocks.” While walking out, Layne did a pitch-perfect imitation of Diamond’s vocals on that song. Shoaf bought a cassette copy of Diamond’s greatest hits at the next truck stop.

“He’d sit there and make jokes. And he would sing anything,” Biro said. “He used to make fun of Styx songs, but he did it so well. The guy was just an incredible singer. He was ridiculing it, but it was so good that it was perfect. I don’t know what it was. But his sense of humor—that band was constantly, constantly, constantly, twenty-four hours, joking around.”

Shoaf remembers Jerry working on new material backstage or on the bus. “Hey, Jimmy—what do you think of this?” It was the beginnings of what would eventually become “Rooster.”

“I’m like, ‘Fuck, dude…’ I remember them doing it at sound check, going, ‘Holy shit, another one…’ because of the vocal part. Layne busted that shit out at sound check in front of me and six other people. He’s singing that stuff, and I’m like, ‘Holy moly…’ I was ready for that second record by October of 1990.”

After a show in Denver, Biro saw a girl get on the band’s tour bus, which he and Shoaf were following in a rented Ryder truck full of gear. By the time Biro and Shoaf arrived at the hotel where both Extreme and Alice in Chains were staying, someone had a video camera and was filming what Biro characterized as a sex tape in that pre-Internet era. Members of Extreme were in the hotel room watching the mayhem. According to Biro, “They were watching, and the video camera got them a few times. They waved at the video camera, laughing—you know, showing a beer, being, ‘Yeah, we’re cool. We’re one of the guys.’”

A day later, they approached the Alice in Chains crew, begging them to get rid of the tape. “They didn’t want anything of them being in those situations going public, ever,” Biro said. They didn’t do anything on the tape, Biro said, beyond possibly posing with the girl. Not long after this incident, Alice in Chains was doing an interview with Z-Rock, the Dallas-based syndicated radio station. The band was taking questions from callers on the air.

“Hey, I met you guys once in Denver,” a female caller said, according to Shoaf’s account of the conversation.

“Yeah, really?”

When she mentioned the debauchery that had taken place in the hotel room, the station cut her off and hung up on her.

While the band was on tour, Susan celebrated a personal milestone in her life. After five years together, she and Chris Cornell got married on September 22, 1990, during a ceremony at their Seattle home, according to a brief mention in The Seattle Times. They went to Victoria, British Columbia, for a short honeymoon before Cornell had to go back to work on Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger album.3

For the next leg of the tour, Alice in Chains would be supporting Iggy Pop and playing in small theaters with a capacity of one to three thousand. There was a noticeable improvement in the relationship between the headliner and the opening act. “They were much more welcoming. They treated us a lot better on ego stuff. We got cut back on lights somewhat, but it’s Iggy’s show, and the sound was boosted up a little better,” Shoaf said.

Both bands were in Louisville, Kentucky, for Thanksgiving and stayed in the same hotel, where they would be spending a day off. Coincidentally, Pantera was touring with Prong and Mind over Four, and they were staying at the same hotel. After eating their Thanksgiving meals, the bands and crew members had to wait until one o’clock for the hotel bar to open.

“Envision this: thirty to fifty rock guys, band and crew, standing outside the door of the bar waiting for it to open, and there’s this poor little girl thinking she’s going to be at the hotel bar and have a nice, easy day bartending because nobody’s going to be at the hotel for Thanksgiving, [and she] has got Prong, Pantera, Mind over Four, Alice in Chains, and Iggy Pop’s band and crew ready to watch football!” Shoaf said, laughing. “Within thirty minutes, she gave up and just put bottles up on the counter, with the money flowing.”

“We started drinking at one in the afternoon, and you can imagine as it went on into the night. We tore that hotel apart. They were like, ‘Please, leave. Everybody leave.’”

Around Halloween, the tour hit New York City, and Alice in Chains booked a headlining show at the Cat Club. In the audience that night was Paul Rachman, a music-video director who had worked with punk and hardcore bands during the 1980s. “I just fell in love with the band and the music,” Rachman said. The next day he called the woman in charge of commissioning music videos at Columbia Records and told her he wanted to work with them.

At that point, Rocky Schenck’s “We Die Young” video had been airing on MTV’s Headbangers Ball and 120 Minutes but hadn’t really caught on. The label was getting ready to release “Man in the Box” as the second single and offered Rachman the chance to do the video. Since it was Layne’s song, the label put him in touch with Layne, so the two of them could talk. Layne briefly touched base with Rachman by phone while on tour. They talked about not making it a typical live-performance video. Rachman told him to write down any specific ideas he had and send them via fax, in that era before cell phones and e-mail. Shortly after, Layne sent Rachman a fax consisting of a scribbled handwritten note, which read:

Rainy drippy barn.

Farm animals.

Baby with eyes sewn shut.

Rachman spent a few days listening to the song. “I came up with the idea of placing the band in this barn and creating this kind of dark mood, making it a sepia tone [with] some farm animals around them, [building] up towards the end where there’s this kind of rebirth character.”

In December 1990, the band traveled to Los Angeles to shoot the video for “Man in the Box.” With a budget of less than fifty thousand dollars, Rachman and the band met on a farm at Malibu State Park for the one-day shoot. Susan was there, and according to Rachman, she was excited.

Rachman said the band members were a bit tired because they had been touring, but overall they were nice and were having a great time. “The thing about working with young bands in terms of, like, it’s their first or second video is, if they like your idea, they trust you. And I really felt trusted and supported, and she really just wanted the band to look great and for this concept to work,” he recalled. They used only two cameras, one of which was a handheld filmed by Rachman himself. “I was watching [Layne’s] close-up take, and I was like, ‘Wow.’ I knew that was a winner. There was something about the shot where you could tell his eyes and the emotion in which he was singing the song just connected.”

Layne’s fax had specifically called for a baby with its eyes sewn shut, which Rachman said would have been impossible. He proposed an alternative. “I had this idea of this kind of rebirth. I thought that there was a dark mood around this barn and there were animals there. I just felt that … all of a sudden, towards the end, that this reaper—this guy in this cape—is kind of walking by, and could look pretty cool. And that could be the person with the eyes sewn shut. He’s kind of taking care of the animals, but he’s blind.”

In the role of the caretaker, Rachman chose the parking-lot attendant of a bar owned by a friend of his. “This guy ran the parking lot. Just had this kind of Jesus Christ look, and I cast him in actually two or three things I’ve done in the past.” The shoot went off without a hitch. Rachman spent the next two or three weeks producing and editing the video.

The Iggy Pop tour ended in Tijuana, Mexico, at a club called Iguana’s, a thousand-capacity venue fifteen minutes from San Diego described by the Los Angeles Times as “the set of ‘Jailhouse Rock’ as designed by Dante.”4 By the end of the night, Biro and Iggy Pop’s production manager had their hands “swollen from beating the shit out of people left and right.

“Anyone that was getting onstage—at first we were stopping people. Then it reached the point where we were just cracking people in the face. Like, someone would get onstage, you’d punch ’em in the face. Someone else, punch ’em in the face.”

According to Biro and Shoaf, everyone went shopping in Tijuana. “We went down Revolutionary Boulevard, bought switchblades and lots of drugs. And then we had it all stuffed in our pants,” Biro said. Iguana’s was a few blocks from the border, so they walked back across.

Josh Taft, a filmmaker, had been around the Seattle music scene, having grown up with Stone Gossard. It was through Gossard that he met Alice in Chains. On December 22, 1990, Alice in Chains was set to play a homecoming show at the Moore Theatre. In an event as memorable and arguably more significant than the headliners, the then-unknown Mookie Blaylock would be the opening act. At the end of their set, Chris Cornell took the stage and joined the band to perform songs from the Temple of the Dog album.5

Taft was there with a camera crew filming the Alice in Chains performance for a home-video release. He had a budget of fourteen to sixteen thousand dollars, which he described as “extraordinarily low for six cameras live.” Put into perspective, it was nearly a third of the budget for the “Man in the Box” video. Taft suggested shooting in black-and-white film. “Of all the bands that were coming out of here, I think it made the most sense visually to [do] something super stripped-down and kind of tough-looking and simple,” he explained. “I think it really kind of shifted perspective, and especially that night because it was one of those shows that kind of, I think, stands alone unto itself in people’s memory. It’s sort of a time when it all was about to turn.”

Jerry’s guitar that he used for the show—which he referred to as his baby—featured a picture of a topless woman that he had laminated onto the body of the instrument. Producer Lisanne Dutton told Thad Byrd later on that the single biggest expense in making that video was blurring out the image on Jerry’s guitar. Taft said, “Back then that was actually pretty high tech to blur a handheld shot. It took a lot of technology.”

SPIN chose Alice in Chains as one of the bands to watch in 1991. According to The Seattle Times write-up of the issue, “Writer Daina Darzin says ‘the band’s clearly being groomed as Columbia Records’ next big thing,’ and notes that the last two bands that got that treatment were Faith No More and Living Colour. The piece also has guitarist Jerry Cantrell confessing ‘we were all on coke, high as hell’ the first time big labels came to town to check out the band. But Darzin adds, ‘Alice in Chains cleaned up its act a while back.’ Drummer Sean Kinney says his father, a policeman, is a big fan of the band—‘He’s a really cool guy’—and Cantrell explains why so many of the group’s tunes deal with doom and depression: ‘We’re all outcasts.’”6

For New Year’s Eve, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Mookie Blaylock went to “an old-fashioned hootenanny at the Seattle-area ranch of writer-director Cameron Crowe and his wife, Heart’s Nancy Wilson.” According to Nancy Wilson, they sat around with acoustic instruments playing covers or making up new songs. She had a mechanical elephant windup toy, a gift from Chris Cornell. The next afternoon, she found a note from Jerry that read, “Look at the elephant.” In Wilson’s words, “Apparently Jerry had been fixating on it overnight, and in the morning he was feeding champagne to the horses.”7

Alice in Chains closed out the year having accomplished many professional goals—finishing and releasing their first album, shooting their first two music videos, and going on their first national tours. But the album and the band still had not taken off. That was about to change. The fuse for the Seattle music scene had been lit. It was only a matter of time before the rest of the world was in on the Emerald City’s little secret.

Chapter 12

PAUL RACHMAN HANDED in his first cut of the “Man in the Box” video to the band for approval at the beginning of 1991. “They loved it,” he said. “We made a couple of adjustments, like we added a couple of close-ups of Layne and made sure the whole band was evenly represented, and that was it. There were no creative differences of any sort.” The final cut was released at some point in January 1991.

On February 7, 1991, Alice in Chains began a brief West Coast tour, with Mookie Blaylock along as the opening act. Jerry said, “Things had happened for us, and we were on our way. These guys were starting again. We just wanted to give them as much support as they’d given us in the early days of our band.” One highlight: the two bands, each in their respective van, having food fights while driving eighty miles an hour on the I-5 freeway.1

During that tour, Alice in Chains had landed an opening slot at Ozzy Osbourne’s Children of the Night benefit in Long Beach, California, on February 8. The show was memorable for two reasons. At the end of the night, members of several bands got up onstage to jam a Rolling Stones cover. Mike was one of them, but had no idea how to play the song. “I was stage right, and I was teaching him how to play ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ by giving him these sign languages on how to play it—like, which way to go,” Randy Biro recalled.2

The second and ultimately more consequential reason for the significance of that show was that it was the first time then–Ozzy Osbourne bassist Mike Inez saw Alice in Chains, and he was impressed by what he saw and heard.3

Biro said crew members from both bands put together a band called Sexecutioner. “It was a joke band, because there was nobody at the shows. Mookie would play, and Sexecutioner would play, and Alice would play. And we’d take turns out in the audience to applaud the other band, ’cause there was nobody there. You talk to people now, and there were ten thousand people in these clubs.”

As Operation Desert Storm was winding down, Alice in Chains, along with Ann and Nancy Wilson, were the headliners of a daylong “concert for peace” at the Paramount Theatre on February 23. The show closed with a group-encore cover of Cat Stevens’s “Peace Train.”4

Alice in Chains was nominated for nine Northwest Area Music Association (NAMA) Northwest Music Awards that year during a ceremony on March 3 at the Moore Theatre. They won only one—Rock Recording, for Facelift. There were problems backstage that had nothing to do with the band but did affect them. The show started at approximately 7 P.M. according to The Seattle Times. It ran for a marathon five hours, with about 90 percent of the audience gone by the time the last award was presented at around midnight.

A third of the audience left during the intermission three hours into the show. Alice in Chains was supposed to perform immediately after the intermission, but according to Randy Biro, saxophonist Kenny G threw a tantrum and took that slot instead. Another third of the audience took off after his performance. According to The Seattle Times, “People kept drifting out until only a hard core remained for a short closing performance by Alice in Chains.”

“‘The sax star threw a tantrum,’ Alice lead singer Layne Staley told the crowd when the band finally took the stage,” reported Patrick MacDonald.5 Randy Biro has a different recollection: that Layne said words to the effect of “We’d like to thank you. And this one’s dedicated to Kenny G and his flesh flute.”

Mike’s friend Aaron Woodruff was stationed at U.S. Army Garrison Hohenfels in the heart of Bavaria when, shortly before Alice in Chains left for their first European tour, his mother sent him a cassette copy of Facelift—a gift from Mike. Sometime later, Woodruff’s mother called him to tell him Mike was in Europe and trying to get ahold of him. There was a desk with a phone at the entrance of the barracks. Woodruff was walking by the unattended desk one time when the phone started ringing. He picked up. It was Mike, calling from Amsterdam.

Woodruff arranged to get some time off to watch the Alice in Chains show at Nuremberg. At the time, they were opening for the Almighty and Megadeth, a tour lineup that began in March.6 “The first time I saw them, I was with them. I went backstage with them, on the bus with them, and then I went out in the audience when they were playing and watched them. I was blown away. The only thing I didn’t quite understand was why Mike kept spitting loogies out in the crowd,” Woodruff recalled. “I think somebody, some Germans, pissed him off or something.”

Woodruff brought a video camera to the show and shot footage of himself hanging out with Alice in Chains, which he has since posted on YouTube.7 The material is an interesting snapshot of the band on the cusp of fame. Mike Jordan, another of Mike’s childhood friends, spoke of traveling with the band during this early period. “I was there to see Mike realize his dream of making it big in the music industry. That will always be something I cherish. It was a blessing to be along for the ride [for] a couple of dates on the tour. The guys in the band always treated me like I was one of them, and it was really cool.”

Coming off the success of his first film, Say Anything, writer-director Cameron Crowe had been working on the script for Singles when Andrew Wood died in March 1990.8 The emotional reaction and coming together of the music community after Wood’s death had a profound impact on him and the script he was developing.9 Crowe approached Alice in Chains to ask for a song for the movie’s soundtrack. He wound up paying for much more than what he actually got.

“Cameron wanted a song, so we got him to pay for us to record ten songs,” Jerry told Greg Prato. “We gave him an inflated budget. We came up with ‘Would?’ for the movie, and we demoed a bunch of shit.” “Would?” was the band’s tribute to Andrew Wood, the music and lyrics credited to Jerry, with the song’s title presumably being a pun on Wood’s surname. Some of this material would appear on Sap and Dirt. One of the songs, “Lying Season,” didn’t make the cut for either release.10

On the night of April 17, 1991, Alice in Chains shot their scenes for Singles at a warehouse on a pier in downtown Seattle, which the film’s art department had outfitted to look like a club. “That part of it was really fun, just being in that movie. But playing that song over and over on that pier was murder,” Jerry said during a 1999 interview.11

Michelle Ahern-Crane, an extra for the shoot, said, “It was a cool shoot in that it was fun, but it was terrible in that it was outside and we were standing dressed in club wear.”

“I was freezing, and I knew the guys had a little backstage area and they had heaters. I was freezing and wanted to go back there and hang out because it was a shoot that started at six in the evening and went until six in the morning. I was too shy to assume it was okay for me to walk back there.”

The singer of the Derelicts, Duane Lance Bodenheimer, was also there. At one point, Layne walked up to him and said, “I need to talk to you.”

Bodenheimer had met Demri through mutual friends, and she made quite an impression on him. “She really just like blew me away. Beautiful, amazing girl. Good energy. Just amazing. I developed a little crush on her,” he recalled. “Demri and I started hanging out. She was a very sexual girl, and I tried to not do that because I knew who her boyfriend was, but it just happened one day. We had a relationship, and there were drugs involved. We were together a lot.”

Bodenheimer dates the beginning of his involvement with Demri to some point during 1990–91, after Alice in Chains started touring. While Layne was gone, Demri and Bodenheimer would hang out at another local musician’s home and do drugs, and they became close. “I fell in love with her. I really cared for her and loved her.”

Not surprisingly, Layne didn’t like Bodenheimer at all and had his suspicions. One time he called Bodenheimer over to another local musician’s house and confronted him. “If you’re fucking my woman, why don’t you tell me?”

Bodenheimer denied it, because he wasn’t proud of it. He kept seeing Demri—mostly while Layne was touring, but occasionally when Layne was in town. Layne called him again, telling him he knew what was going on, and that—in Bodenheimer’s words—“it was out there, pretty much.”

“You could have told me the first time you were sleeping with my girlfriend,” Layne told him. “You’re not a good person. You’re a piece of shit.” For all his jealousy and anger, Layne was not a model of virtue and fidelity himself. Cat Butt’s singer, David Duet, said, “Layne and Demri had kind of an open relationship. In the position he was in, it’s probably the only way he could’ve had a lasting relationship. Layne was very true to Demri in his heart, but he related many, many wild touring adventures to me.”12 According to Bodenheimer, Demri was aware of Layne’s flings on tour. “She kind of said that they had that kind of relationship.”

“She would complain sometimes about she knew he was probably fucking other girls,” Bodenheimer said, but beyond that, she never said anything bad about him.

At one point, Bodenheimer went to Denver to visit his parents. Demri came down and stayed for about a week and a half. The next time Bodenheimer hung out with her in Seattle, “it was just kind of different.” She explained her feelings for Bodenheimer in a letter—which he has since lost—in which she wrote words to the effect that Layne was her white knight and Bodenheimer was her dark knight.

At the Singles shoot, Bodenheimer and Layne sat at a table, and Layne—presumably with long-built-up jealousies and frustrations finally reaching a boiling point—tore into him. “You’re a piece of shit. It should have been you that died instead of Andy Wood. I fucking hate you.” This comment was made with Layne knowing full well that Bodenheimer was a heroin user, and it came a little more than a year after Wood’s fatal overdose.

Bodenheimer was shocked. “Layne said that to me, and that was very hurtful—it hurt me. I wasn’t, like, a total dick. I did have feelings, I felt bad about what was going on, but I couldn’t help it, because I truly … I really did love her.” Although he wasn’t there, Bodenheimer later heard from a friend who attended the Clash of the Titans show at Red Rocks that Layne had introduced a song—he doesn’t know which one—saying words to the effect of “This is about Duane Bodenheimer, scummy drug junkie.”

The same night as the Alice in Chains shoot, Nirvana was performing a last-minute show at the OK Hotel before heading to Los Angeles to record their sophomore album, Nevermind. The show is best remembered for being the first public performance of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and has since grown to near-legendary status in Seattle grunge lore.13

Alice in Chains landed the opening slot on the Clash of the Titans tour during the summer of 1991, literally by accident. Musically, they were the odd men out—the other three bands on the bill were Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax. The opening slot was originally supposed to go to Death Angel, who had to bail out of the tour after a bus accident.14

Asked by Riki Rachtman, host of Headbangers Ball, what it was like to be opening for them, Mike responded, “It’s really smelly, but it’s great—it’s awesome—we’re having a great time. All of the guys are really cool.”15

A more candid assessment of the experience came years later. “Slayer fans were brutal to us,” Jerry would recall. “When we played at Red Rocks, they were throwing so much shit at us that we could hardly see the crowd.

“Someone threw a huge water jug that knocked over Sean’s cymbals, and spit was flying everywhere. Layne just shouted ‘Fuck you!’ and spit back at them.”

Their toughness and willingness to stick it out in the midst of a relentless onslaught from a hostile crowd won them a few converts. “We finished the set and we were like, ‘Jesus Christ, that was insane,’” Jerry recalled. “We’re waiting to get in the bus to leave, and there were a bunch of Slayer fans backstage that had passes and they started walking toward us. We’re like, ‘We’re gonna get our fuckin’ asses kicked.’ But they walked over and went, ‘Okay, man. You didn’t puss out. I guess you’re all right.’”16

Before the tour came to Seattle on May 30, Jeff Gilbert was interviewing Megadeth front man Dave Mustaine for an article for Guitar World magazine. Gilbert mentioned he was friends with Alice in Chains. Mustaine asked what he knew about them. Gilbert praised Alice in Chains but noted, “They used to be a full-on Poison-style glam band.”

Mustaine looked at him and said, “Are you kidding me?”

“No. In fact, I still have pictures of them from back in the day.” He was referring to the Alice ’N Chains design he had pressed onto T-shirts a few years earlier. He sent it to Mustaine, who had the tour manager make posters out of it and place them all over Mercer Arena. “By the time Alice in Chains showed up, you couldn’t walk anywhere. Those poor guys would walk in and see this glam band Alice ’N Chains, and it was so flippin’ funny. Just everywhere, before the doors even opened. So that way, when these guys rolled in backstage, it was the funniest thing,” Gilbert said, chuckling pretty hard.

Gilbert was walking down the hallway backstage when he saw Layne.

“Hey, Layne.”

“Hey, man.”

And then Layne put two and two together.

“HEY!”

“Layne knew exactly when he saw me. He goes, ‘God dang it, man!’ He liked the joke, though—he thought it was pretty funny,” Gilbert said. “I asked [the other members of Alice in Chains] later, and Jerry and I were talking. He said, ‘Oh, man. We did some shows with those guys and they just ripped us into the ground. They were busting our chops left and right.’ I’m like, ‘Well, you deserved it. Look how goofy you guys used to look.’”

The most important thing to happen during this tour wasn’t even the tour itself. “Man in the Box” was about to jump-start the band’s career.

At some point in the late spring of 1991, there was a meeting at MTV to decide which of two videos—“Man in the Box” or either Blue Murder’s “Valley of the Kings” or “Jelly Roll”—would get the network’s coveted “Buzz Bin” seal of approval. In that pre-YouTube, pre–realityshow era when music videos formed a large part of MTV’s daily programming, getting a video in regular airplay on the network could have an enormous impact on a band’s career. According to Rick Krim, at the time MTV’s vice president of music and programming and a participant in that meeting, “Buzz Bin” meant a video would get heavy rotation: “That clip got X number of plays for that week and then it probably goes into some other kind of rotation after that.”

Krim said the discussion centered on “whether we pick this big, glossy hair band, sort of late-in-the-game hair-band video by this band [Blue Murder] or this dark, sepia-toned, sort of weird band, Alice in Chains. I don’t remember the deciding factor, but we decided it was time to change the landscape a little bit, try something different, and we went with Alice in Chains.”

As far as the decision-making process, Krim said they would have votes or try to reach a consensus. For “Man in the Box,” he said, “I think we talked both sides through, and I do think the consensus ultimately was, ‘Let’s just try something different,’ which it certainly was.” This was how a group of fewer than ten people broke Alice in Chains nationally.

“That video in the MTV ‘Buzz’ clip helped us out a lot, and I know it helped a lot of other bands as well,” Jerry said during an interview with MTV. “It can blow you up really fast.” The impact was immediate. One week after MTV put “Man in the Box” in the “Buzz Bin” in early May 1991, Facelift jumped from number 166 on the Billboard chart to 108. A month and a half later, the album peaked at number 42.17

“I think MTV had a lot to do with it. I think MTV at that time in particular was really leading the drive on record sales. It was kinda the peak of MTV. Everybody was watching. When MTV put it in ‘Buzz Bin,’ everything changed for that band, everything,” Paul Rachman said. He also thinks it was MTV that drove the song’s airplay on rock radio.

According to Jerry, Facelift had sold only about forty thousand copies after eight months of touring by the time the “Man in the Box” video hit.18 Another indicator of the song’s success happened when the band and crew walked into a bar on a night off from the tour and heard the bar band performing a cover of “Man in the Box.”

“We couldn’t believe it. We were blown away,” Biro said of the band and crew’s reaction. “They didn’t know we had come in through a back door. Nobody knew we were there.”

“[The ‘Man in the Box’ cover] sounded atrocious, but they knew who it was,” Biro said, referring to the band’s recognition of their song. “And then [the bar band] got all weirded out when they realized the band was there.”

Another sign was when the band started getting recognized at truck stops and people were asking for autographs. It was during this period that Jerry realized he would have to learn how to read sheet music. According to Biro, that decision came after seeing transcriptions of Alice in Chains songs and discovering they were inaccurate.

The band’s popularity in Seattle grew by leaps and bounds. “I almost can’t describe it. They were just ridiculously popular up here,” Jeff Gilbert said. “Fans would call KISW and just demand that KISW keep playing them. That led to ‘Metal Shop’ putting them into regular rotation. That album got more airplay than Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden combined. That is a fact right there—that band got sick amounts of airplay. Everybody was an Alice in Chains fan.”

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Alice in Chains should have been very flattered after the success of “Man in the Box” and, later on, the Dirt album. Jack Endino, who produced Bleach, told Nirvana biographer Everett True, “Right around ’92, ’93, that was everybody’s meal ticket. ‘Oh, we’ve got to sound like Nirvana, or the Melvins or Soundgarden’ … or, times a thousand … ‘We’ve got to sound like Alice in Chains.’ That was the easiest blueprint for the suburban metalheads to follow because Alice in Chains made the transition from metal into grunge, whereas the other bands came from punk rock.

“Everybody copped to the metal side of grunge and that was where the really bad horde of imitators came from, the Soundgarden and Alice in Chains side of the grunge equation. The people who were hair metal bands a few years ago and now they’re a grunge band.”19

Kathleen Austin said Layne was having issues with his newfound fame. “Layne hated the fame. He couldn’t go to a cash machine without it being written up,” she said. “The Rocket … would say, ‘Seen at ATM outside 7-Eleven on such and such at three A.M., Layne Staley.’ He couldn’t go anywhere. The next time he’d go to that machine, there’d be people hiding in the bushes. He hated it.”

Another time, Layne and Demri had gone out to dinner with Austin at one of their favorite restaurants. “They had just brought our food, the three of us, and we’re involved in a family conversation. This guy comes up and just, ‘You’re Layne Staley! My girlfriend’s in the back in the bar. I really need your autograph. I have to take it to my girlfriend.’ It just kind of hit me the wrong way,” Austin recalled. “I turned and I looked at this person, and I said, ‘You know, we’re trying to have a family dinner here. I’m sure that Layne would love to write his name on a napkin for you after we have our dinner.’ And of course, he’s backing up and backing off. He apologized and he left.”

After this happened, she looked at Layne and said, “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. That was not for me to do. Please forgive me.” He replied, “Oh, Kathleen, I just wish I could take you with me everywhere I go.”

Layne later told Jon Wiederhorn, “When someone’s excited about what you do, you’ve got to give them respect and be grateful. But when they run by and pull a clump of dreadlocks out of your head and your scalp is bleeding, then you should just kick the shit out of them.”20

A few years later, Layne was talking to Randy Biro. “The greatest line he ever told me: he said if he had known that being in a band was going to be such a tough job, he would have stayed dealing weed,” Biro recalled.

Layne wasn’t the only one having issues with fame. According to Austin, “People approached my daughter and [would] say, ‘Oh, I know you! You’re Layne’s girlfriend!’ And she would say, ‘No, I’m Demri.’ Demri had had a strong sense of self since she was two years old, and she started losing her identity to Layne, being identified as Layne’s girlfriend. Layne, on the other hand, started losing his identity to the band.” She added, “There were times that people came up to him and [said], ‘Oh, I know you! You’re Alice in Chains!’ And he’d say, ‘Do I look like an Alice to you?’”

At some point during 1990–91, Layne and Demri got engaged. Austin does not know the specifics of when or how this happened but says that Layne bought Demri a claddagh ring, an Irish design consisting of two hands clasping a heart, often surmounted by a crown. She recalled that Layne and Demri went to see her at Harborview Medical Center, where she worked, to tell her of their engagement, adding “and then they had a big engagement dinner, down at the Old Spaghetti Factory.”

Jim Elmer recalls that the two families went out to dinner to celebrate the engagement. Wedding plans were made, though the engagement was eventually called off. According to Austin, Layne and Demri chose Kiana Lodge for the venue, located on Bainbridge Island, a ferry ride away from downtown Seattle.21 Demri bought a wedding dress from a vintage clothing store in Pioneer Square.

Johnny Bacolas remembers the engagement and thinks it happened in 1991. He recalls one time while working at his father’s Greek restaurant in the U District when Layne, Mike, and Demri came to see him. Layne told him he was engaged. He also recalls Mike taking a shot of whiskey and saying, “I’m going to be his best man! He’s my bro. I’m going to be his best man at the wedding!” Bacolas assumed this to be true, because he was saying this openly with Layne and Demri right there. In terms of Layne’s demeanor, Bacolas said, “They seemed happy. It just seemed logical because he loved her and that was the next logical step.” Neither Jim Elmer nor Kathleen Austin had ever heard that Mike was to be Layne’s best man. “It never got that far,” Austin said. “There wasn’t a date. There were colors picked out, and nobody told them to me. But I do know that they were very happy at that time.”

Coming off the success of “Man in the Box,” Paul Rachman traveled to Seattle to direct Temple of the Dog’s video for “Hunger Strike,” which was shot in the spring of 1991. It was during this period that he met Demri. One night she came up to Rachman and told him, “I’m an actress up here and I’d love to audition or whatever.” On a napkin, she wrote down what Rachman described as “a handwritten head shot” with her name, contact information, and adjectives such as “good-looking,” “short,” “loud,” and “exotic” to describe herself.

Demri told him she was modeling and wanted to do music videos and then movies. “She really needed to move to LA but didn’t—she thought she could get gigs with contacts in LA and fly there to work but that doesn’t really work,” Rachman wrote in an e-mail. Of the note’s significance, he wrote, “That note does give proof of her professional dreams.”22

After the “Hunger Strike” shoot, Rachman went out in downtown Seattle with members of Temple of the Dog, where Rachman ran into Layne, and the two hugged. Rachman remembers Layne looking “a little more worn down” than a few months earlier.

By early June 1991, with “Man in the Box” in heavy rotation, Columbia Records was pushing for a follow-up single to capitalize on their breakout hit. It was also Rachman’s impression that the label wanted another single “in case ‘Man in the Box’ ran out of steam.” He got the nod to direct the video for “Sea of Sorrow,” which he says the label wanted to be “a little more conceptual.”

Columbia wanted to make the video while the band was on the Clash of the Titans tour. Rachman was pushing back, trying to postpone it until the band finished the tour and could travel to Los Angeles or New York, where he had people and resources to make the video properly. But Columbia was adamant, asking Rachman to shoot the video in Salt Lake City on the band’s day off from the tour.

The video was “very high concept” in terms of stage design, with a production budget that was probably double what he had for “Man in the Box.” But according to Rachman, the label’s insistence on shooting the video immediately affected the production. “It was probably one of my most nightmarish shoots. I’d never had so many problems. We shipped the lights there, and we shipped one extra in case something happens, and I needed four minimum, because there was one for each guy in the band. They were going to be each their own color. Of course, two of them get there broken, so we have to find another one. The local crews are really slow, so setting up the stage took forever. We’re hoping to start shooting at like eight in the morning, nine in the morning. We didn’t start shooting until five P.M.”

Rachman said the band members were “more cranky. They were kind of bigger rock stars.” Another difference was they wanted their girlfriends at the time to appear, but Rachman didn’t want to do a “cheesy rock chick” video. Demri did not travel to Salt Lake City for the shoot, although Rachman said other members’ girlfriends did. For the others, they cast local girls from Salt Lake City.

The change in attitude wasn’t just toward Rachman. “They weren’t listening to Susan as much anymore. They all had their own ideas. They were all taking advantage of a little more power and influence. And that affected me indirectly.” Rachman remembered Susan and Jerry arguing about Jerry’s choice of jacket he wore in the video.

“What happens to this video is just tragic,” Rachman said. He was under pressure from the band and the label. “So stupid ideas were coming from the band a little bit, and I’m getting challenged by the label to deliver this high concept in a difficult situation and the shoot was a nightmare.” He didn’t feel good about the shoot when he returned to Los Angeles, but to his surprise, he liked the footage. “It was very dark and moody and kind of trippy. There was a psychedelic tone to it. And if you listen to the song, it has this very psychedelic drone to it.”

By the time Rachman delivered the first cut of the video, “Man in the Box” was peaking in its MTV popularity. The song got another boost after it was nominated for Best Metal/Hard Rock Video at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards, scheduled for September. “In retrospect, we never had to go do this ‘Sea of Sorrow’ video in such a rush, because effectively ‘Man in the Box’ outlived and outperformed even the ‘Sea of Sorrow’ single that came after.”

The “Sea of Sorrow” video went through several cuts. Rachman kept arguing with Columbia Records, culminating with an incident in which he was on the phone with a vice president of the company, describing the feedback he was getting as “so ludicrous, and they had no ideas.” Rachman lost his temper, telling the executive to go fuck himself and hanging up the phone. He didn’t work with Columbia Records again until several years later. Rachman’s cut of the video began airing, but the label took some of his footage and provided it to another director, who added new black-and-white material he shot later. Both versions of the video would later surface on the Internet.

With “Man in the Box” as their breakout single and video, Alice in Chains was beginning to reap the rewards of years of hard work. For the rest of 1991, the band members would reach new professional heights, but at the same time, their future was about to take an ominous turn.

Chapter 13

ALICE IN CHAINS GOT the nod to open for Van Halen’s North American tour from August 1991 to January 1992, with a few breaks scattered throughout. For Mike, it was the culmination of a high school dream. In his senior yearbook, he wrote that his goals were to become a rock star and tour with Van Halen. Seven years later, it was mission accomplished.

Former SATO guitarist Ken Kramer was sitting at home one night when he got a call from Mike, saying, “Dude! I can’t talk very long. I have this girl’s cell phone and I’m in the bathroom. We’re about to open for Van Halen! Man, I love you so much! I wanted to call you. I want you to be here—this is so great! I wanted to share it with you. I’m going to try and call everybody I know before she finds me!”1

Sammy Hagar claimed credit for getting Alice in Chains on the bill. “I picked this band,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “I said, ‘Let’s find a new cool band that needs exposure.’ I was watching MTV and saw the [‘Man in the Box’] video. Layne [Staley] is one of the great new singers today.”2

On September 5, both bands were on hand at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles for the MTV Video Music Awards, and both were nominees. Paul Rachman was with the band at the ceremony. He recalls seeing a red-carpet interview with Metallica being broadcast inside the venue. When they were asked who should win, they responded “Man in the Box.” When it was time to announce the winner for Best Metal/Hard Rock Video, Rachman, who was sitting a few rows behind the band, said, “I remember sitting there at the MTV Awards and they come up and it’s like, ‘A…,’ and I thought it was gonna be Alice in Chains, and it was Aerosmith. I was like, ‘Aw, shit.’”3

It was also during this tour that a dangerous new element would be added to the Alice in Chains mix, one that would have repercussions on everyone for years, in ways they probably couldn’t have imagined.

If there is a villain in this story, it would unquestionably be heroin. No biography of Alice in Chains could be considered credible without examining the consequential and ultimately destructive role of the drug in the band’s art and personal lives, particularly for Layne and Mike Starr.

No one knows exactly when or how heroin first appeared on the Seattle music scene, but the general estimate is that it happened at some point during the 1980s. “Sometime in 1982, as the music scene became bigger and a recession hit Seattle, we all noticed a huge influx of heroin and pills,” Duff McKagan wrote in his memoir. “Addiction suddenly skyrocketed within my circle of friends, and death by overdose became almost commonplace. I witnessed my first overdose when I was eighteen. I saw the first love of my life wither away because of smack and one of my bands imploded because of it. By the time I was twenty-three, two of my best friends had died from heroin overdoses.” He added, “In Seattle, heroin was fast becoming a staple in pretty much everyone’s diet—not just musicians. With beer in hand, I watched it take over the city during Ronald Reagan’s first term as president; as jobs disappeared, smack oozed into the vacuum left in people’s lives. Up to 1982, I heard about heroin but rarely saw it. Then suddenly I began to see a lot of older kids starting to use heroin openly. As more and more of my contemporaries lost their jobs, smack spread quickly. It would be everywhere by 1983.”4

Evan Sheeley said, “What was happening in Seattle, somehow during the early days of grunge, heroin entered the scene. Back in my days, when I was playing, it was pot, cocaine, alcohol. It was pretty much those three. [Acid and mushrooms were] previous to that. That was in the sixties and seventies. Later in the eighties, it was more about cocaine, alcohol, and pot. Somewhere along the line, in the mid- to later eighties, heroin crept into the scene somehow. Don’t know how, don’t know why, but, for whatever reason, it seems like that generation of musicians … certain ones unfortunately latched on to it.”

Bob Timmins, a drug counselor who was a heroin addict for sixteen years, worked with several Seattle musicians. He said the musicians he works with “are very successful, and it gives them a sense of power and control—that they’re immune and they can control their use,” and that denial makes them typical heroin addicts.5

Heroin use was on the rise in Seattle during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Heroin-related deaths increased from thirty-two in 1986 to fifty-nine in 1992, a rise of 84 percent. Heroin overdoses were at “record level” when 410 were reported at Harborview Medical Center in the first six months of 1993. However, according to a 1994 Seattle Times report, heroin use was also on the rise nationwide.6

Susan commented about heroin in the 1996 documentary Hype! “It’s just fucking heartbreaking to see how disillusioned people get, to where that escape is so sought after,” she observed. Even before heroin use had entered the Alice in Chains camp, Susan already had experience dealing with the drug because of her brother, Bruce, who was an addict.7

The event that should have had the most immediate relevance and deterrent impact on Alice in Chains and their contemporaries was Andrew Wood’s death in 1990. It didn’t.

One of the central questions of the Alice in Chains story is when, where, and how heroin entered the picture. Casual drug use had been part of the band’s recreational activities long before they signed a record deal. John Starr, Mike’s father and also a drug addict, told Mike’s biographer that it was Demri who introduced Layne to heroin: “The drugs came as a result of Layne’s connection with Demri. They did no drugs until they started touring. I loved her; her and I got along great. Mike and Layne and her had more fun than everybody else on the tour together. But she introduced Layne to heroin. Layne introduced Mike to heroin.”8

Demri’s mother, Kathleen Austin, does not dispute this claim, but she points out that she doesn’t know when or how Demri first used heroin, because her daughter never told her. “My daughter told me just about everything. My daughter told me things I didn’t want to know. But she never called me and said, ‘Hey, Mom, guess what? I used heroin last night.’ That’s something that most people don’t want other people to know.”

According to multiple sources, John Starr’s claim is accurate. Layne told Johnny Bacolas that he began using heroin during the Van Halen tour. According to Greg Prato, Bacolas said, “I asked him, ‘How did this happen?’ His exact words were, ‘Johnny, when [I] took that first hit, for the first time in my life, I got on my knees, and I thanked God for feeling good.’ From there, it just didn’t stop.”9

“He would go shoot up in his bedroom and he would come out; he would seem really relaxed and really at peace with everything,” Bacolas explained during an interview for the book. “A couple of times, I would say, ‘What’s it like? What do you feel?’ And he would just tell me, ‘Everything is really peaceful.’”

Bacolas asked Layne how his heroin use began. He recalls Layne telling him they ran out of cocaine, and Demri went out looking for more but came back with heroin instead. This, Bacolas says, is his best recollection as to when and how Layne first tried heroin, as told to him by Layne himself. Regarding Demri’s use, Bacolas said, “I think she was using at that point on and off. I don’t know how seriously she was using, but [she] was using enough to take it when someone gave it to her.”

Alice in Chains’s producer, Dave Jerden, offered some insight that might verify Bacolas’s account. He said unequivocally that Layne was not doing heroin when they worked on Facelift, an account corroborated by Ronnie Champagne. Asked to comment on the account provided by Bacolas, Jerden said, “That’s totally possible. I went to Arizona and saw them play with Van Halen. Layne was definitely acting different at that point. Layne did coke and he drank a lot, so I didn’t know if he was drunk or whatever, but he wasn’t the same. Layne was usually gregarious and cracking jokes all the time. I went to their tour bus and saw the band before the concert, and Layne was really quiet. I didn’t know what was up with him. He is the only one, besides later Mike Starr, of course. Jerry never did heroin; neither did Sean.”

During this visit, Jerden jokingly asked Layne, “How does it feel to be famous?”

Layne answered him, seriously, “It’s freaking me out. People treat me like an object. I’m not a person anymore. I’m just a commodity to be sold. People don’t really know who I am. People grab things from me.”

“It [was] like he [wasn’t] having a conversation with me [but] was making a statement to the universe. He wasn’t being vitriolic about it, just really honest,” Jerden recalled. He compared what Layne was going through to Beatlemania.

Jerden also said he heard Demri had introduced Layne to heroin from a source close to the Jane’s Addiction camp—another band he had worked with.

Why Layne decided to try heroin after having been openly against it a few years earlier is not known. According to Nick Pollock, “Everybody’s got to live with their part in this life. Nobody should be hung up on a cross because of it. Layne made the choices that Layne made. Layne chose to do drugs. Layne chose to continue to do drugs to compensate for other things.”

It may be easy to blame Demri, but doing so would absolve Layne of any personal responsibility for his decision. It should be noted that even before he was successful, Layne had a drug problem—having used marijuana, cocaine, mushrooms, and acid, at least. It was serious enough for his previous bandmates to organize their own private intervention. On the other hand, Kathleen Austin noted, “People who love Demri blamed Layne for her addiction. That’s what people do when you love somebody and they’re hanging with somebody else and they’re doing bad things. You don’t blame that person. You say, ‘Oh, it’s their friends,’ ‘Oh, he’s running with a bad group of people.’”

Although nobody noticed at first, Mike had been putting names on the guest list, but it wasn’t until later that the band and crew figured out why. “We did notice that at one point, ‘Man, he’s got a lot of fucking relatives,’” Randy Biro said. “Mike was putting names on the guest list every night. And he’d fill out raffle tickets for the spot and scalp them.” Van Halen’s security people caught Mike scalping tickets outside a venue. According to multiple sources, Mike had been caught trading or selling backstage passes, spots on the Alice in Chains guest list, or tickets in exchange for drugs or money on multiple occasions.10 This issue was likely a contributing factor in the decision to fire him in early 1993.

Mike told Mark Yarm he did it to get drugs for Layne.11 Biro disputes this account. “Demri would come up to me and say, ‘I guarantee I can find dope in this arena.’ I was [like], ‘Bullshit.’ We’d be out in the middle of some fucking cowpoke little town somewhere, and she walked into this arena, and she would find some heroin and bring the person backstage.” He added, “Layne never needed anybody to hunt down drugs for him. People came to us. Especially Van Halen; we were starting to get recognized. That was a big [turning] point, and people were starting to come to us.”

It should also be noted that not everything that happened on the Van Halen tour was bad. According to Shoaf, Eddie Van Halen spent a lot of time hanging out on the Alice in Chains bus and became good friends with Jerry, a friendship that continues to the present day. In Jerry’s words, “He hung out in our room more than he hung with his own band.”

At one point, Jerry expressed an interest in buying one of Eddie Van Halen’s guitars and amplifiers, a proposition Van Halen refused. After the tour was over, Jerry went to Kelly Curtis’s house, where he was still living in the basement. Curtis asked him to move out the garageful of amplifiers and guitars Van Halen sent over as gifts.12 Michael Anthony gave Mike several of his Spector basses that he wasn’t using, along with some Mesa Boogie amp heads.

There was a prank war between the two bands. Van Halen pulled four pranks on Alice in Chains during one set, consisting of strips of upward-facing duct tape placed all over the stage, a group of ugly strippers who stayed onstage for a song, one of their techs in a Little Bo Peep outfit with live sheep, and, during the set-closing “Man in the Box,” the Van Halen crew came out and started breaking down their gear while they were still playing the song. “They left Sean with a kick and snare, left me with one cab. They just unplugged Mike Starr. And that was all in one set!” Jerry said.

Alice in Chains was determined to have the last laugh. “Van Halen used to do this signature walk across the stage, and at the time they had these skimpy panties that they would sell to the chicks in the audience. Really skimpy panties,” Jerry said. “So we took some of these panties and put them on—of course they weren’t big enough [to] keep our junk in, so we had to turn them around with the butt parts in front to keep our stuff together—and put on some combat boots, and we made ourselves up as strippers and did that Van Halen signature walk across the stage behind them, and they didn’t know it was happening, except for Alex.” He adds, “There’s a great photo of it, taken right as Eddie turns around and realizes what’s going on, and he’s totally losing it. He’s one of those guys who never fucks up. I’ve seen him play in so many different states, and he’s always on, but hearing him miss a couple notes while getting a laugh out of us was great.” A photo of this is on the Internet.13

The band’s ambitions for Facelift were fairly low to begin with. “When Alice in Chains packed out the Central Tavern two nights in a row, that’s when I was completely satisfied,” Layne told MTV. “That’s when my dreams came true. In Seattle, I was a rock star. Record companies started coming around, but I had never even thought about that. It was enough for me to be a star in Seattle.”14 By September 1991, the band’s hard work had paid off. Thirteen months after its release, Facelift was certified gold for selling in excess of five hundred thousand copies—the first Seattle grunge band to reach that milestone. That bar would be matched and significantly raised after Pearl Jam and Nirvana released their landmark Ten and Nevermind albums on August 27 and September 24 of the same year.15

Once the money started coming in, the band members were modest in terms of what they did with it, buying homes and cars. According to Ken Deans, “The most nuts [thing] Sean ever did was he bought a Porsche. And he bought a couple of nice Harley motorcycles. Jerry bought a really nice truck. He bought a Dodge pickup truck, [his] Oklahoma roots coming through. Nobody bought a Ferrari. They all live in fairly modest homes today. It’s not like they really ever did the giant rock star thing.” According to Aaron Woodruff, the first thing Mike bought was a Nissan 300ZX, paying $36,000 cash.

Layne told the story of how, after getting his first credit card, he maxed it out the first three months during shopping sprees at Toys “R” Us. In the same interview, he also said, “After I got my first gold record, my friend came over and pulled out a couple lines of blow, and I pulled the gold record off the wall, because that was a dream of mine. If I ever got a gold record, I was going to do my first line of coke on that.”16

While it is possible he did cocaine off his gold record, his claim that it was the first time he tried it was an outright lie. Multiple sources have said on the record that Layne was using cocaine as early as the mid-1980s.17

As the money started coming in, Jim Elmer said Layne worked with an accountant to keep track of his finances, developed a budget, and paid his credit card through a trust account. Elmer described Layne and his accountant as “conservative” in terms of managing and spending his money. In terms of his personal expenses, Elmer said that once he had money, Layne bought a car and video games and, later on, a condo.

Chapter 14

IN THE FALL OF 1991, the band booked recording time at London Bridge Studios, where they would be working with Rick Parashar as producer. Sap emerged from the demo commissioned by Cameron Crowe for Singles. Although “Would?” was already booked for the movie, what to do with the rest of the material was in question. “We had all this acoustic stuff, and we’re thinking, ‘What the fuck can we do with this? We’re a hard rock/metal band.’ We figured people might not dig it, also,” Jerry recalled.1 According to the Music Bank liner notes, the title came to Sean during a dream in which the EP’s title was announced at a press conference. “In deference to déjà vu, the name stuck.”2

Assistant engineers Dave Hillis and Jonathan Plum both credited Rick Parashar for helping Layne and Jerry develop their vocal harmonies, possibly as far back as the original 1988 demo that helped get the band signed. “Doing so many records on the other side of the glass with Rick, part of his whole production style and technique is to sit down with the singers at the piano and help write harmonies. I think he did some of that with Temple of the Dog as well. That’s just part of almost any record that he works on. That’s definitely one of his strong points, one of the main aspects of hiring him as a producer that he’s known for,” Hillis said, who also worked with Parashar on Pearl Jam’s Ten album. “There wasn’t a time that I worked with him that he didn’t do that. It was always part of his production style to really work the vocals, comp vocal-track takes together, then build on them from that, come up with harmony ideas, sit at the piano, do harmony parts, or sing them over the top back to him.”

According to Hillis, Parashar ran a tight ship at the studio. “When Rick was there, it was all business. There were a couple of parties we had at London Bridge with the Alice guys involved, but it was not during a recording session. If there was any type of drug use during some of the other, like the Dirt demos and whatnot, that was Layne sneaking off in the bathroom or something like that. When we were working on the record, there was no partying.”

Jonathan Plum was a twenty-year-old student at Central Washington University who had been working as an engineer with other bands when, through mutual connections, he found out that Rick Parashar was looking for an assistant engineer. He applied and was accepted for the position, which started as a three-month unpaid internship. “It was like sixteen hours a day, every day, and then the salary was terrible, but I was working with Alice in Chains,” he said.

Within his first two weeks on the job, Plum noticed that a week and a half of studio time had been blocked out on the calendar for Alice in Chains. By his own admission, Plum was “superexcited,” having been a fan since he saw them perform at Bumbershoot in 1990. Layne was friendly and polite with the studio staff. “He seemed very down-to-earth of all those guys, the most down-to-earth, the most humble,” Plum recalled. “He would always show up sort of late because it was always like the Jerry show. Jerry seemed to be doing everything, and Layne would come in later. But Layne was superfriendly to me, and he’d ask about my background, how I got a job there, and how my day was. I always thought that was really cool.”

Plum added, “Jerry was very focused; he was the creative force of the band from what I could tell, and he’s just very intense. He wasn’t the kind of guy to stop and say, ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ or get to know me at all, so I was sort of in awe of him a little bit. But I also sort of stayed away from him a little because I knew he just wasn’t interested in my existence at all unless he needed coffee or needed me to help set something up or if I happened to run the tape deck, he’d have to deal with me.”

Though Layne was probably already using heroin by this point, Plum never saw any evidence of drugs during the making of Sap. The only drug anecdote he had direct knowledge of was when he first met Mike, who told him he was high on Ecstasy from the night before.

Hillis noticed that Layne was different. “He wasn’t like the Layne I knew from the Music Bank days; he wasn’t, like, totally in the mix. Now, in hindsight, he’s probably definitely dealing with drugs. But he wasn’t as involved—he’s more quiet, out of the way. I don’t remember seeing him a lot. I think there [were] some issues of him being in the bathroom way too long. I think Jerry and them were trying to keep it on the down low because they didn’t want Rick to know. Rick totally frowned on anything like that, especially in the studio, and in general. Really, really antidrug, in general.” Multiple sources who worked with Alice in Chains on later releases consistently describe Layne’s habit of locking himself in the bathroom for long periods of time.

Plum also recalled Mike rerecording a bass track that Jerry had done. “He told me the main reason he wanted to redo the bass track was because he was afraid his mom was going to hear it and would be able to tell that it wasn’t him playing bass on the record.

“Jerry had recorded this bass track, and Mike wanted to come back and replace it. He said he was happy with the bass track, it sounded fine, he just wanted to play it himself because he was worried his mom would hear it and say, ‘That’s not you!’ I think that was sort of a joke.” A highlight was when Ann and Nancy Wilson came to the studio to record their vocals. “I remember this really clearly because we were all so excited and sorta nervous,” Plum said. At one point, Sean asked Parashar, “Can we get her [Ann] to do the ‘Barracuda’ song?” referring to Heart’s signature song.

“I’m not going to ask her. You can ask if you want.”

Parashar handed Sean the talkback, so Ann could hear him from inside the studio. “Ann, at the end of the song, can you do the ‘Ooooh, barracuda’?”

According to Plum, “Ann took the headphones off, walked in the control room, and sat down next to Sean and whoever else, probably Sean and Jerry.”

“‘Look, in ten years, when you’re fucking sick of playing your song “Man in the Box,” the last thing you’re going to want to do is have someone ask you to sing “Man in the Box” on someone else’s song,’” she told Sean, according to Plum’s account.

“Basically schooled them on … why that wasn’t a good question to ask. The whole room was sort of quiet, like ‘Okay, you’re right; we’re sorry.’”

Chris Cornell and Mark Arm came to the studio to record guest vocals for “Right Turn,” a song that would be credited to Alice Mudgarden—a mash-up of the three bands involved: Alice in Chains, Mudhoney, and Soundgarden.

“It was Jerry Cantrell who called and asked me to sing on Sap. I was surprised, like, ‘Why would you want me to sing?’ I could understand why they’d want Chris Cornell to sing,” Arm told Greg Prato.3

“I remember Mark coming in being very nervous,” Hillis said. “We started talking in the lobby and he had a six-pack of beer with him, and he started drinking a beer because he was nervous. I was like, ‘What’s up, man? Why are you so nervous?’ He was nervous about the fact that Chris Cornell was there, and Layne and Ann. ‘They could all really sing, and I don’t fit in. My voice doesn’t come out as a singer like that.’ I remember kind of giving him confidence, ‘Man, you’ll do great. You’ll be fine.’

“I was also curious of how Rick, the producer, what he was going to think of Mark, because he was quite different, and I know that Rick wasn’t really familiar with that kind of music, with Mudhoney and Mark’s style. I remember as soon as he sang, he looked at me and goes, ‘This sounds great!’”

On the other hand, Parashar had to encourage Cornell to show some restraint during his performance. “When he came in, he kept really wanting to belt it out like he does, and I remember Rick kind of messing with him a lot. ‘Well, let’s try this,’ kind of having fun with him, not letting him belt it out with the classic Cornell high scream and stuff,” Hillis said.

Plum said that he and Parashar spent time together one evening and the following morning setting up microphones and getting sounds right for Sean’s drums. When the band came in, Plum and Parashar were working on overdubs and thought that they were going to play. They had other plans. “They were fucking around all day, and eventually they played a song, but they were each playing different instruments. Layne was playing drums, Sean was singing, and it was ‘Love Song.’ [Jerry and Mike traded places on guitar and bass.] It was stupid. I mean, they were just fucking around, and I was pissed that we spent all this time and effort trying to get these drum[s] [to] sound amazing and they wrote this stupid song. It was a joke. They were bored. I don’t know why they did it—they just did it,” Plum recalled.

Rocky Schenck got a phone call from the band to discuss ideas for cover art. Schenck is “pretty sure” Sean came up with the cover concept. On December 22, 1991, Schenck and his assistant went to Griffith Park and took photographs of several different old wooden buckets and taps attached to trees. “I got some great shots of four buckets hanging from a massive old tree, with each bucket representing a different band member, but they ended up using the photo of a single bucket,” Schenck wrote.

For the back cover, Schenck flew up to Seattle for a band photo shoot that took place on January 3, 1992. He took several different photos, which he thinks were never published. The band’s idea—which ultimately became the EP’s back cover—was a shot of them urinating on photos of themselves previously taken by Schenck. That same night, they all went to see Pearl Jam perform at Rock Candy. He called it “a great night, great show” and says he met Demri for the first time that night, saying “she was very sweet to me.”4

The nature and extent of Layne’s drug problem was probably a closely held secret at this point. However, word somehow got around to Layne’s ex-girlfriend, Chrissy Chacos. At one point during the early 1990s, she had tried heroin, and Layne had gotten wind of it. “I was at the Vogue when Layne confronted me—like, ‘I heard you’re smoking heroin. You’re not to do that,’ dah-dah-dah. I’m like, ‘Well, I heard you’re shooting it,’” she said.

Layne’s friend Ron Holt, who had his own struggles with heroin, said, “There’s something that happens when you’re an addict, where it becomes bad and you want to stop. And you do want to stop, even if you stay realistic about it and you accept it. Before you acquiesce, there are points where you try to stop, and you say, ‘I’m going to stop … my record label wants me to,’ whatever.” Holt added, “You draw a line in the sand, but you break it. And then you do it again, and you do it repeatedly. You do it so many times that at a certain point in your head, you go, ‘I can’t fucking even promise myself. What is the fucking use?’ So you start losing your faith in your ability.

“And so you hang on, so when you find something that you can do or you can hang on to, you tend to overemphasize it, shut everything else that you fail at out.” As Holt explained, “Pretty soon, what happens is that you’re in this mind-set too long that when you finally get clean, like when I did, I found out, ‘Wow! I’m not Ron Holt the Conqueror or creative guy anymore. I’m this beaten-down, frightened person.’ I think that’s what Layne became. I think that he could have, and probably somewhere desired to, create more than he did.”

At some point during this period, Layne went to rehab for the first time. Though he’d had issues with drugs during his teen years, Jim Elmer had no idea how serious his drug use was until he got a phone call from management telling him, “We need to have an intervention.”

“That’s when it really sunk in that this is real serious,” he said. He spoke with Susan, who wanted a family member present to show support. Elmer thinks Layne’s mother—whom he divorced a few years earlier—was living in Alaska at the time. He agreed to take part in the intervention, which was to be held at Susan’s office, with Susan, the other band members, and at least one person from the band’s record label. In terms of Layne’s reaction, Elmer said, “He was real surprised, because they’re supposed to be a surprise.”

“He didn’t try to run out. He was respectful to the process. Everybody went through their dialogue on their thoughts and concerns and what he meant to the people in the room there. Once we got through that, he consented to go.” He checked himself in that same day.

Based on multiple interviews and reviewing the band’s recording and touring schedule at the time, it would have happened at some point in the second half of 1991 or the beginning of 1992. He went to Valley General Hospital in Monroe, Washington—the same clinic Andrew Wood had checked in to in 1989. The other patients noticed they had a celebrity in their midst.

According to Kathleen Austin, “I go to visit him on a Sunday afternoon. I think Jerry and Sean had been there and left when I got there. I think I saw them. Layne was sitting outside on this picnic table talking, and all of the sudden you hear Alice in Chains music.” Austin says he wasn’t incognito going into the program but that he wanted to keep a low profile.

Someone—presumably another patient—had brought in a copy of the Live Facelift video, and people were watching it in the treatment center during visiting hours, knowing who Layne was and that he was a patient there. “Layne was devastated. He started to cry. Because from that point on, he wasn’t [a] guy with [an] addiction problem going to treatment, he was Alice in Chains,” Austin said. Layne’s mother and stepfather estimated he went to rehab approximately twelve or thirteen times over the years.5

But even with Sap finished and scheduled for release in May, and Layne’s first attempt at rehab, the band was getting ready to write and record the proper follow-up to Facelift. In doing so, they would make their masterpiece.

Chapter 15

BY LATE 1991 OR EARLY 1992, Alice in Chains returned to London Bridge Studios to begin working on a demo for their second album. Rick Parashar would be producing, and Dave Hillis would be engineering. “I think at the time I thought we were actually making a record with them. Like I said, it was always … You never really knew—everything was kind of vague,” Hillis said. The recording sessions for the demo took two to three weeks and were fairly uneventful. According to Hillis, the songs were fairly developed at the time. They may have had working titles, but he doesn’t recall what they were.

Layne had expanded his musical horizons somewhat, possibly as a result of the band’s experience touring in support of Facelift. “With Dirt, I remember Layne getting into Slayer. I don’t know how much that influenced them, but I remember that because Layne would talk to me about that kind of stuff because he knew my background from the earlier metal days and that my band [Mace] had opened for Slayer.”

John Starr was hanging out at the studio while the band was working on the demo. Hillis recalls hearing that there was “kind of an issue” with him being around too much and that maybe the two Starrs were “partying together.” At one point, Mike asked for a rough copy of the material that had been recorded. Parashar told Hillis to make him some mixes. Hillis was excited, because he got to play around with and mix the songs himself. He made a rough mix for Mike, without making a copy for himself—a decision he would regret later on. He ran into Mike years later, who told him, “Man, my favorite version of Dirt is that one I have that you made me!”

Jerry, Nick Terzo, and Dave Jerden were looking at different studios to record the album. They considered San Francisco as a possible halfway point between Seattle and Los Angeles. They had an appointment to look at one studio without telling them who the band was, when the studio manager came in and told them, “Oh, no, you can’t come in today. We have a really important band in.” They passed on the studio, even though it was their first choice. Jerden doesn’t even remember the other band but said they amounted to nothing.

They also considered Skywalker Sound, located on George Lucas’s four-thousand-acre ranch about forty minutes north of San Francisco, but it was too expensive.1 Ultimately, they decided to record it in Los Angeles. Jerden thinks the only reason for this was because he wanted to do it at One on One Recording Studios, which is most known for being where Metallica recorded … And Justice for All and the Black Album.

The band rented a house in the mountains near Malibu, where they lived and rehearsed for about five days before they went into the studio. Jerry had high expectations. “We were coming up with all this stuff that was just aggro. Superpowerful, very heavy lyrical content. It was a serious step up from Facelift—I equate it, as far as artistically, [to] … Nirvana from [Bleach] to Nevermind. To many people, it’s a record unto itself,” Jerry told Greg Prato.2

One factor that affected the making of the album was Layne’s relapse. Alice in Chains had been working with the addiction specialist Bob Timmins. In a 1994 Seattle Times interview, Timmins said that since the Seattle grunge scene took off in 1991, he had been called up to Seattle to work with six musicians in three prominent bands. “Interestingly, it’s all been for heroin.”3

According to Jerden, Timmins was Layne’s sponsor. Layne got word that Timmins had been bragging at a party about how he’s “got” the lead singer from Alice in Chains. Layne was furious and started using drugs again. Jerden was critical of Timmins’s modus operandi, saying, “He was notorious for doing interventions on bands where he would just show up at a gig where the band’s playing, where someone’s got a problem in the band, and he’d charge forty thousand dollars for one intervention. AA is supposed to be for free, and this guy was charging money for what Layne could have got for free.” Timmins died in 2008.4

By the time they went into the studio to start recording, Jerden said the songs were well developed and that the demo made at London Bridge was great. Work on the album began on or around April 27, 1992. Bryan Carlstrom spent the first two days getting sounds before outside events brought the studio and the city to a screeching halt. On April 29, a grand jury acquitted four Los Angeles police officers of beating Rodney King. Angry mobs took to the streets for hours of mayhem and destruction. Stores were looted, motorists were beaten, and more than 150 fires were ignited. By the next morning, four people were dead and at least 106 were hospitalized. Over a period of six days, more than three thousand structures or businesses were destroyed, resulting in $1 billion in property damage and fifty-four deaths.5

Jerry was in the middle of it when the riots began. “I was actually in a store buying some beer when some guys came in and started looting the place. I also got stuck in traffic and saw people pulling other people out of their cars and beating the crap out of them. That was some pretty scary shit to have to go through, and it definitely affected the overall feel of the album.”6

In a separate interview, he said, “We came down to LA, started tracking the record, and that Rodney King verdict came down. The fucking town went up in flames.”7

At the studio, there was a TV screen about the size of a huge wall. According to Carlstrom, it was showing images of Los Angeles burning, which the band members could see while they were tracking their parts. “At the time it didn’t seem that significant. Now, after hearing the vibe of the album, it’s just so symbolic of Layne’s life—literally, a city on fire—and the things that he was singing about. It was the perfect backdrop to what that album would be about.”

Jerden offered a similar account. “They were all set up, and then the LA riots started and we had to shut down for a week. We were watching it on television right from the beginning.”

They had started recording “Sickman,” which would be the most technically difficult song to record from the album. Sean didn’t play to a click, so the timing on his drum parts varied. Jerden found a bar and a half of drumming that was steady and would become the centerpiece of the song. He wanted the song to speed up gradually, so he had Carlstrom do the tedious copying and editing work. “I had to make copies of bars from one tape machine to another tape machine and slowly change the speed on one tape machine as I made copies of the bars. Make a copy of the bar at one speed, and then I’d have to do it again slightly faster. ‘Well, just gradually make that song speed up,’ which at the time I was thinking, ‘How the hell is this going to work? I’ve never heard [of] anybody doing this before,’” he said.

“Throughout the whole song, it’s the same bar and a half over and over and over again,” Jerden explained. “We had to make copies and copies and copies onto two-inch tape of that drum part and then edit that bar and a half over and over again, just loop it back in with a razor blade. And it took him like two days to do that. I think he was doing that in the studio when the LA riots were going on, but Bryan Carlstrom is like a wizard engineer.”

Carlstrom was under the impression that Jerden was making up this production technique on the spot, but Jerden said he had done it before, crediting that experience to his work on Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts album. Carlstrom said those early sessions would have to be cut short to get the band members back to their apartment complex in Marina del Rey to beat city curfew. “It was basically martial law. I think it was after six o’clock at night, you weren’t allowed to drive in Los Angeles. You weren’t supposed to … but there was no police. I don’t know who would have enforced that.”

According to what Evan Sheeley heard at the time, Mike was clashing with Jerden, and the argument escalated to the point where Mike said, “I’m not going to play on this album unless you get Evan [Sheeley] down here.” The day after the riots started, Kelly Curtis called Sheeley, explained the situation to him, and told him, “I need to have you go to LA tomorrow.” Sheeley didn’t want to be down there, but he went because of his friendship with Curtis. He was flown down at management’s expense and paid for his services. Mike was supposed to pick him up at the airport, but Sheeley waited at the airport for two hours because Mike never showed up. Sheeley eventually got to a phone and got ahold of Mike.

“Where the hell are you, Mike? You’re supposed to be picking me up.”

“Oh … I forgot. I got a friend here. Can you get a taxi?”

“Yeah, but if you haven’t looked lately, the city’s on fire. There are no taxis,” Sheeley said. “I’m pissed off. I’ll see what I can do.”

When Sheeley arrived at Mike’s apartment, he saw a girl who looked underage leaving. Sheeley was furious and berated Mike. Sheeley laid down the law very clearly from the beginning: if he was going to help Mike, as he had been hired to do, he was going to take it seriously. He told Mike, “You treat me like your big brother here. I’m here to help you, and I will make you sound like a bass god. But I don’t want to see you doing shit in front of me that’s going to jeopardize my life or put me in potential trouble with the law.” Sheeley was referring to drug use—specifically, harder drugs like cocaine or heroin. Mike agreed to Sheeley’s terms and never did anything more than smoke an occasional joint when he was around.

Mike asked him, “Can you help me with some of these songs? Because I haven’t been able to come up with bass parts.” He handed Sheeley an acoustic bass that Sheeley had once sold him and started playing him a cassette with rough demos of the songs. The first song Sheeley heard on the tape was “Down in a Hole.” “What would you play if you were playing this song?”

“The way I look at songs is [not] for myself [but] if I was a different person playing the songs.” After listening to the song, he told Mike, “Okay, now I’m going to play it like I was John Paul Jones playing on the first Led Zeppelin album.”

Sheeley played the bass line for “Ramble On” and handed the guitar to Mike, who tried to match what Sheeley had just played. “I’m more of a technical bass player. Mike was more of a thrasher, which I think made the band, honestly. It was a big part of their sound. So when he took the bass from me, he could not play all the notes I was playing. Out of all the notes I showed him, he took certain ones, and that became the bass line.” They would repeat this process for every song except “Would?” which had already been completed. Sheeley used songs by Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath as a point of reference for Mike to develop his bass lines.

The sound and tone of the bass on the album can be credited not only to Mike but also to Sheeley or Jerden, depending on whom you ask. Jerden bought an electronic piece of gear for nine hundred dollars—whose name and brand he can’t remember—which, when mixed in with Mike’s amplifier setup, would be the sound of the record. “I remember I made it programmable and got a sound on this thing that was great. It was like a growl. We made a program. I named it ‘Mike Starr.’ I don’t know what the piece of equipment is, but whoever’s got it, it probably has a program on it called ‘Mike Starr’ that was the sound of Dirt, the lower end,” Jerden said.

Sheeley offered a similar account but claims he was the one who programmed the settings. “I took a particular piece of equipment down there to One on One that I ran with the Ampeg SVT that gave the signature sound of Mike Starr for that album. I programmed my own setting for that album, and that’s what you hear on the album.”

The band wanted Sheeley to stay in Los Angeles as long as a month, Sheeley said, but he stuck around for only about a week. On one occasion, Sheeley accidentally walked in on Layne shooting up while he was writing lyrics at the studio. According to Jerden, Layne was sneaking out after curfew to score drugs downtown while the riots were still happening.8

Another vivid memory of Sheeley’s is from his first day with the band at One on One. The gear was set up and all four members were supposed to be there, but Sean hadn’t come back the night before. Jerden was not happy, Sheeley said, because they were wasting studio time and eventually decided to call it a day. “So about that time, the door flings open and in comes Sean. His hair was all sticking out, looked like he had stuck his finger in a light socket. He had been out the night before partying in Hollywood.”

“He’d been up probably twenty-four hours, I’m guessing, because he had probably been out drinking all night long and was still on a drinking high,” Sheeley said. “Sean comes in the studio, and everybody’s kind of pissy from him not showing up. It was told to him, ‘Nah, we’re just going to call it a day. You need to go home, get some sleep, and come back,’ blah, blah, blah. And he said, ‘Let me play my drums. Let me just try one song.’”

The studio was set up so everyone’s instruments were in the big room, but the amplifiers and PA were each isolated in separate rooms. Microphones were set up inside the big room to capture Sean’s drums. They went inside and ran through a performance of “Rooster,” and Sean nailed it. Sheeley thinks this first take is the cut that appeared on the album. Jerden and Carlstrom did not recall this, but did not dispute Sheeley’s account.

It was obvious early on that “Rooster”—Jerry’s tribute to his father who served in Vietnam—was special. “The first time I heard it on the demo, it just sent chills up my spine when he starts singing the ‘ooh, ooh, ooh.’ It’s just a great song: the guitars come crashing in. My idea was just to make them gigantic when they came in,” Jerden said. Cameron Crowe was visiting from Seattle, and he was allowed to come into the studio while the band was working on the song.

Production was eventually shut down for a few days as the band members left town to get away from the riots.9 They regrouped and continued recording.

Jerden heard “Them Bones” when the song was in its infancy. “That song is what Alice in Chains is all about, and only Jerry Cantrell could come up with something like that. He played that for me over the phone. We keep in contact, and sometimes he’d call me at three o’clock in the morning and [say] he just wrote a song or something.”

While recording “Junkhead,” Sean—for no particular reason—said the words “junk fuck,” which were picked up by the microphones. While editing the song, Jerden said, “Let’s leave that in there!” Carlstrom put it at the beginning, so it would start the song before Sean’s opening count.

Once the basic drum, bass, and guitar tracks from One on One were finished, production moved to Jerden’s El Dorado Studio, where they would focus on recording vocals, guitar, and bass overdubs, as well as editing and mixing. Annette Cisneros was Jerden’s assistant engineer at El Dorado. According to her personal calendar from this period, the band came to El Dorado on May 19, 1992. The next several days were spent setting up equipment, editing, and transferring the One on One material to forty-eight-track digital tape. From May 26 to May 28, they did bass overdubs. On May 29, the band flew to Seattle for three days to shoot a music video for “Would?”

Josh Taft got tapped to direct the video. Cameron Crowe was there to offer feedback and watch the shoot. Taft said of Crowe, “He was such a positive influence and so supportive, and he just allowed me to sort of run with my instincts. He was there to kind of get everyone on board. At the end of the day, it was for his movie, and he couldn’t have been more inspiring and helpful in the process of making the video and superinvolved.”

The shoot took place at a now-defunct venue called Under the Rail. Duncan Sharp, a local film director, had filmed a scene as an extra of him making out with his girlfriend in the front seat of a car. Layne had to go home at one point in the middle of the shoot. The word on the set was he had to feed his cat and get some aspirin. “I think everybody at that point knew that he had to go home to get high,” Duncan Sharp said. “Everybody was just sort of shaking their heads, like, ‘Yeah, right.’”

Asked to comment, Taft said, “I’m not gonna go any further with what happened in that moment, but we had to stop shooting, and then we started again an hour [or] so later, and you can fill in the blanks.” The excuse about having to feed his cat was a lie. Layne did adopt a kitten, named Sadie, but not until 1994—two years later.

Evan Sheeley got a call from Kelly Curtis, asking if he had a white Spector bass at his store that Mike could borrow for the shoot. Mike wanted one that looked like the bass he normally used, which was in Los Angeles. Sheeley had another white Spector, although it wasn’t the exact same model as Mike’s, but only a serious bass player would have noticed the difference. The guitar was brand new, and Sheeley warned Curtis that if Mike scratched it, he would have to buy it. He taped a diaper to the back of the guitar so Mike wouldn’t scratch it. On top of that, Sheeley had to duct-tape two straps together for Mike to play the instrument, because he played bass extremely low on his body, almost down to his knees.

In retrospect, Taft said of the “Would?” shoot, “It wasn’t the funnest night of my life. It was hard to get it done, and we got it done, and it was good in the end. But that wasn’t the experience of the first time [Live Facelift] and it was all kind of just—the innocence was starting to unravel and get a little more complicated, and you could see it in that room kind of happening. It was tough to watch. I had a lot of respect for those guys. At the time … I considered [Jerry] my friend, and I could sort of see what he was going through to try to keep it going. So I remember feeling a little sad for him for what was looking like it might continue to go that way.”

While the band was out of town, the production staff back in Los Angeles edited “God Smack” on June 1. Work on guitar overdubs began on June 3 and would continue through June 6. “Down in a Hole” was retracked on June 9. “Fear the Voices”—a song Mike had written—was tracked the following day. More editing and bass overdubs were done on June 12. Upon returning to the studio on June 16, they did more bass and guitar overdubs.

Layne came into the recording sessions with lyrics already written for two songs from his stint in rehab: “Sickman” and “Junkhead.” According to Jerden, “Those songs are coming from a real place. They’re not songs that are written for commercial consumption. They’re songs that are written totally from somebody who’s crawled through two miles of rusty razor blades. And it comes out in those songs—the anxiety, the torture, the physical and mental anguish.”

Layne also brought in two musical compositions that did not have lyrics written yet, which would eventually become “Hate to Feel” and “Angry Chair,” the two songs on the album credited entirely to him. When asked for working titles, Layne named them either “Rock On” and “Rockmanoff,” or “Rockmanoff I” and “Rockmanoff II.”

The problem was, the titles kept getting switched around between the two songs, and no one could tell which one was which. This led to a near disaster when Carlstrom almost erased a bunch of vocals on one of the songs when the band wanted to work on the other song. In those days before ProTools and other digital recording software, everything was on tape. Out of an abundance of caution, Carlstrom checked the tape first, and catastrophe was avoided.

Recording of Layne’s vocals began on June 17. It was during the Dirt sessions that he developed what became his signature sound: heavily layering his vocals in the studio by recording two or three vocal tracks in multiple intervals. The technique, called stacked vocals, “was totally Layne,” Jerden said. Layne hadn’t discussed his ideas in advance with Jerden, who recounted, “What he would say to me when we did that stuff is he had it all worked out, and he would just say, ‘Give me another track.’ ‘I want to double it.’ ‘Now let’s triple it.’ He was just telling me what he wanted to do, and we’d do it … He’s the best I’ve ever worked with doing that. Without a doubt.”

The vocal sessions got off to a rocky start. According to the production staff, Layne’s drug use was affecting his performance, and Jerden asked him about it. “When he started singing, he was singing off-key—he was loaded. So I told him not to come into the studio loaded. I said, ‘You can get loaded wherever you want, but don’t get loaded on my time,’” Jerden said. “It was the first time I’d ever heard him sing bad.”

As Carlstrom recalled, it was Jerden who finally went up to Layne and addressed the elephant in the room. Layne did not take it well. In what Carlstrom described as “a major blowup,” Layne stormed out of the studio, slamming every door on the way out. Cisneros, who was also there, said, “I remember doing vocals and Layne wasn’t singing very well, and Dave said, ‘You’re not singing good because you’re high.’ And then Layne denied it. Whether he was high or not, I don’t know. But I know that there were tensions.”

“It takes a lot of focus the way Layne did the vocals. If he wasn’t up to singing, if his voice was gone or he couldn’t sing in tune or he couldn’t concentrate, then what’s the use of continuing?”

Jerden called Layne that night to apologize. He told Layne he didn’t say that to be mean to him, but because he wanted to “make sure they got a great record.” Layne accepted his apology, Jerden said, and apparently took Jerden’s comments to heart.

“I don’t know what happened, but suddenly after that, the next week after that, they started getting vocal takes,” Carlstrom said. “I don’t know if Layne cut back on his using, or if he was just not going out partying at night, at least resting even though he was using. You can’t just stop using if you’re a heroin addict, but yeah, we started getting vocals, and the vocals are obviously pretty amazing, to say the least.”

Layne asked the production staff to put up a makeshift wall made from soundproof material inside the studio so that he couldn’t be seen from the outside while he was recording his vocals. Inside the wall, Layne created a little shrine that, according to Carlstrom, consisted of “candles and a picture of the Last Supper, and then a dead puppy in a jar.” This is what he was looking at as he was recording his vocals for Dirt. Cisneros confirmed Carlstrom’s account, saying, “It was scary back there. I tried not to go back there.

“If that’s what he needed to see to get him into the mood of the song, if that’s why he had it, I don’t know. I don’t know why he had that thing in a jar sitting there. I didn’t talk to him about it.” Jerden, who said he vaguely remembered the shrine, offered a similar possible explanation for its purpose as Cisneros: “There’s all kinds of fun, nutty, weird stuff that bands do for studio decorations.”

Layne wrote bleak, brutally honest depictions of drug addiction on this album. Lyrics like “What’s my drug of choice? Well, what have you got?” “We are an elite race of our own / The stoners, junkies and freaks,” and “Stick your arm for some real fun” left little room for misinterpretation. Later on, Layne would be disturbed by the idea his music might inspire some of his fans to use drugs. The phenomenon was not new. When former Velvet Underground front man Lou Reed was at an AA meeting in New York City during the early 1980s, one of the other participants said, “How dare you be here—you’re the reason I took heroin!”10

Once recording of Layne’s vocals was under way, Carlstrom began to have some reservations about making a pro-drug or pro-heroin record. He said, “I never talked to them about it, but that was on my mind as soon as we started doing vocals.” He added, “It concerned me so much that at one point I was like, ‘Should I be here doing this?’ I really, really questioned it. Obviously I loved the music, and my gig was being Dave’s engineer. At that point, I was clean. I had my issues and was clean and sober at this point in my life. It was a hard thing for me to deal with, as far as, ‘Is this right for me to do?’

“The weird thing about that story is that ten years later, as I started to encounter kids who grew up with that album, and even today, I’ve never bumped into one kid that said they used drugs because of the album,” Carlstrom noted. “In fact, it’s been the contrary every single time, not just like half and half, but every single kid is like, ‘Wow, I didn’t do drugs because of that album. Just listening to Layne’s lyrics was like this big sign that said, ‘Don’t come this way.’ That was a big shocker for me,” he admits. “I’m sure that people out there did drugs because of that album. It’s hard for me to imagine that that didn’t take place, but I haven’t met any of them.”

Vocals and guitar overdubs for “Down in a Hole” and “Rooster” were recorded on June 23. The next day, they did vocals and guitars for “Rain When I Die,” Jerry’s guitar solo for “God Smack,” the vocals for “Angry Chair,” and the backing vocals for “Rooster.” On June 26, vocals and guitars for “Dirt” and “Angry Chair” were recorded.

Layne’s vocals on “Angry Chair” are massive, unusually so compared to anything else on the album or in the Alice in Chains catalog. The reason for this? “On the part where he’s singing, ‘Sitting on an angry chair…’ there’s sixteen tracks of vocals going there,” Carlstrom said. “All different harmonies, and multiple layers of harmonies. Maybe there’s a harmony part and it’s tripled, and another harmony part and it’s tripled, and the lead part. It was crazy. And then I had to find space to record all those delays, because all the delays you hear on the vocals I actually printed … on tape along with the vocals.” The delay Carlstrom refers to is an echolike effect Layne used when recording his vocals.

Carlstrom had two other vivid recollections of recording Layne’s vocals. While working on “Them Bones,” Layne showed an improvisational element when he told Carlstrom, “Oh, I hear a little vocal part I want to stick in the song.” As he was hearing the music played back to him on his headphones, Layne began singing the “Ah!” screams timed to Jerry’s guitar riff. He tracked the screams once or twice. “He just made that up on the spot,” Carlstrom said. Jerry is credited for the music and lyrics to the song, but it’s difficult to imagine without those screams.

Layne also demonstrated an ability to innovate in using his voice as an instrument. “He sings on the verse on ‘God Smack’ with this effect that literally sounds like there’s a tremolo [effect] or a Leslie [speaker] on his voice, and he is doing that with his voice,” Carlstrom said. No studio wizardry was necessary. Carlstrom had no idea how he was doing it. He couldn’t see Layne singing because of the makeshift wall in the studio.

Cisneros also noted that Layne could be very sensitive. She recalls one day while on break, they were watching To Kill a Mockingbird on TV, and she noticed he started to tear up during a scene near the end of the movie.

Cisneros’s calendar shows no entries until the second week of July. Vocals and guitars for “Sickman” and guitars for “Fear the Voices” on July 7. July 9 is marked down as vocals, although the song is not identified. July 10 is marked explicitly as vocals for “Fear the Voices.”

“Mike talked to me before we did the album. He said he had these songs and he wanted publishing—he wanted to get more money,” Jerden said. “He wanted to know if as producer I would help him out and get these songs, make them really good so they could make it on the record. I worked really hard. I spent more time on those two songs, one in particular, than any of the other songs on the record. They just were not good songs. I tried to make them work for Mike, but I just could not do it. And Jerry and Layne were getting fed up with the whole thing.”

One of those songs—likely “Fear the Voices”—was referred to as “Mike’s Dead Mouse” by the band and Jerden. “It was like a kid bringing a dead mouse to school and showing it to everybody, and he pets it and it’s all dirty and all that stuff, and it’s like nobody wants to see this dead mouse anymore.”

There were two memorable and, in retrospect, foreboding incidents during the recording of this song. On a Saturday afternoon, Carlstrom was in the studio with Layne and Mike working on the song, which was already difficult because of technical issues. “That was actually a fairly stressful thing right there, because we’re trying to edit things that they had recorded from Seattle, edit together multitracks of things from Seattle with things that we had recorded here in Los Angeles, which I’d never done before.”

“Jerry and Sean didn’t like the song,” Carlstrom explained. He speculated that it was because the song “didn’t feel like it fit” on the record, but Mike persisted. “Mike really wanted that song on the record, and at the time Layne was the only one backing the song, so there was stress regarding that situation.”

At some point during that session, Layne and Mike went to the bathroom together. Layne gave Mike a shot of heroin, and Mike had an extremely adverse reaction. He left the bathroom and threw up all over the carpet in the studio lounge. After the incident, there was a conversation between Layne, Mike, and Carlstrom. Carlstrom recalled hearing from somebody—“ninety-nine percent sure” it was Mike, but acknowledges it could have been Layne—that that had been the first time Mike ever tried heroin. When he was interviewed in October 2011, Carlstrom was the only person still alive of those three, so only his account is available.

Years later, Mike would offer different accounts of when his heroin use started. Once he denied ever doing heroin while in Alice in Chains. “I never did dope when I was in the band. I didn’t need to. I got high off of playing music,” he said on Celebrity Rehab. He contradicted himself in that same episode. When asked how long he had been using intravenous drugs, Mike answered, “Seventeen years.” The program was filmed in 2009, so he dates the beginning of his heroin use to 1992, while he was still in the band.11

The second incident, which Carlstrom called “the nail in the coffin” for the song, happened after Layne had recorded his vocals. Mike came in later, high. He listened to the song, was not happy with the vocals, and called Layne. He wanted him to come back to the studio and do it again. Layne lost it. Jerden and Carlstrom’s accounts differ slightly as to what he said. “I remember the end of that conversation was Layne on the phone saying ‘Fuck this song!’ and hanging up on him,” Carlstrom recalled.

According to Jerden, Layne said, “Fuck you! I’m not singing this again!” Jerden thinks the tensions from the recording of this song were a contributing factor in Mike’s eventual dismissal from the band. The song did not make the final cut of Dirt, but was eventually released seven years later as part of the band’s box set. Mike said, “I wrote a song called ‘Fear the Voices.’ We did record it, but they didn’t let it on the album because Jerry didn’t have nothin’ to do with the writing of the music. But they put it on the box set later, and it got some recognition and got played on the radio.”12

Mixing began on Monday, July 13. At some point, Jerden was mixing “Rooster.” He had previously seen a drug dealer hanging out around the studio and told Layne not to bring him in. On this particular day, Layne walked in with the dealer. Jerden played Layne and the dealer the mix he had been working on over the speakers. Layne said it was great, but the dealer decided to offer his unsolicited advice.

“Well, I think you should…”

He didn’t even get to finish the sentence. “Shut up,” Layne told him.

At that point, Jerden lost it. “Who the fuck are you? Get the fuck out of my studio!” He turned to Layne and said, “Don’t bring your drug dealers around.”

The band-approved final mixes were completed on July 29. Cisneros sequenced the album from August 5 through 7, after which it was sent off to be mastered. The exception from all the songs that appear on the final cut of Dirt was “Would?” The song had been recorded for Singles at London Bridge Studios in Seattle, and Jerden made several mixes, but it’s not Jerden’s mix on the finished album. According to Jonathan Plum, “Jerry was unhappy with the way the song came out. I remember him complaining that there was no cymbals on the record and that he liked the demo song better, so he came back [to London Bridge Studios] and Rick [Parashar] and I remixed ‘Would?’”

Rocky Schenck met with the band on April 27, 1992, to discuss their new album and videos. He went to the studio on May 7, where he got to hear some of the new material for the first time, which he says “completely blew me away.” They looked through his portfolio and started discussing ideas for the album cover.

“Their idea was to have a nude woman half buried in the desert. She could be either dead or alive,” Schenck wrote. They discussed the type of woman the band wanted, and Schenck began casting shortly after. Eventually, Schenck submitted a photo of Mariah O’Brien, a model he had worked with for the cover of Spinal Tap’s “Bitch School” single. The band chose her.

The cover shoot took place at Schenck’s Hollywood studio on June 14, 1992, with Sean supervising. “We created the cracked desert floor with clay rolled out on foam core raised up on apple boxes. There was a cutout in the center of the foam core for the model to slip into, so she would appear half buried in the desert floor. I cut the miniature mountains out of more foam core, and we put up a painted sky backdrop behind the mountains,” Schenck wrote.

“Mariah’s hair was short at the time, so we put a long wig on her so her hair would flow out artistically into the desert floor. After getting her in place, we sealed her up with more clay, which we dried around her with hair dryers. Poor Mariah was stuck in that position for many, many hours as I tried a variety of different lighting effects and visual approaches.”

As soon as the shoot was finished, O’Brien bolted from the set and ran upstairs to use the bathroom, but her wig remained in the clay. Schenck shot several photos of the wig and the empty hole. The album cover would be the subject of a widespread and erroneous rumor: that Demri was the model. According to her mother, it bothered her. “Demri was really hurt when they chose a model that looked so much like her that people thought it was her … because it put her in a position where people would come up to her and say, ‘Oh, wow, I saw you on the cover of Dirt.’ And she’d have to say, ‘No, no, that’s not me.’”

“Sometimes people believed her, and sometimes they didn’t believe her. She wouldn’t have minded if they got a model that didn’t look just like her, but it put her in a really awkward position and it was really hurtful to her,” Kathleen Austin said. Asked if Demri would have posed for the album cover had the band asked her to, Austin said she doesn’t know because Layne’s fame was overshadowing Demri’s identity. “She was just trying to maintain her own identity, never wanted to be somebody’s girlfriend.”

The band regrouped with Schenck at his studio on July 19 to shoot group photos, in what Schenck called “a crazy, creative night.” Schenck also wrote the concept for “Them Bones,” the first music video, on August 5. It went through several changes before the actual shoot, which took place on August 18. Schenck called it “a complicated shoot, and technically challenging” for everyone involved. “To visually accentuate the aggressiveness of the song, I wanted the camera moves to be extremely accelerated—faster than one could achieve using a normal crane. To achieve this effect, I had the band lip-synch, perform, and play their instruments in slow motion to the song played back in slow motion at twelve frames per second, while having the camera moves executed as fast as possible. We filmed at twelve frames per second and then transferred the film at twenty-four frames per second, doubling the speed of the camera moves and making the band’s performance appear as if it was shot at normal speed,” Schenck wrote. “The band gave a great performance, and Layne was extraordinary.”

After having worked on Dirt and listened to rough mixes for ten hours a day, Bryan Carlstrom was feeling pessimistic about the final product. “I listened to it, and all I could think of was, ‘Oh shit, man, I failed. Every song sounds the same, production-wise. People are gonna hate this record and I’m never going to get a job again after this thing.’”

Dirt was released on September 25, 1992. Carlstrom’s fears were seemingly confirmed by a scathing review in the Los Angeles Times: “Hear them sneer. Hear them moan. Hear them try to sound like Nirvana or Mother Love Bone or something, but come out closer to Kansas … On this album, which doesn’t even have the benefit of the slightly charming naivete of its debut, Alice in Chains is pompous, turgid, no riffs, a bore. And the group doesn’t even rock—this album is about competence, not ideology.”13

Carlstrom’s reaction? “More than anything else, I felt like I failed the band and I failed Dave. It sounds like I made every song sound the same. That was unfortunately my perspective, because of how close I was [to] it.”

Carlstrom would have the last laugh. The album entered the Billboard 200 chart at number 6, and would eventually be certified quadruple platinum by the RIAA. “Now I listen back to it, I’m like, ‘Oh my God…’ I’m just honored I got the opportunity to be the one to record that album. I’m just honored. That record … I listen back to it—it was pretty emotional.”

In retrospect, Jerden said that in comparison to Facelift, Dirt was “a totally different record, and it’s all songs that were written from emotional and personal experiences. That’s the reason that record resonates with so many people. A lot of people love that record because it’s real. They’re not pop songs written for pop consumption. They’re songs that are written almost like a personal diary.”

Chapter 16

AFTER THE RELEASE OF DIRT, Alice in Chains finally made the cover of The Rocket after a lack of coverage in previous years, possibly due to the influence of the paper’s managing editor, Grant Alden, who said, “I did my level best not to do anything on them at The Rocket, to squash them.”1 The magazine assigned the story to Jeff Gilbert, who was on the receiving end of Jerry’s verbal wrath. The story’s opening sentence is Jerry saying “Fuck The Rocket, man!” The cover of the October 1992 issue was a photo of the band with a caption reading, “Jeff Gilbert Sucks Up to Alice in Chains.”

“It isn’t that we’re pissed off at The Rocket or anything,” Jerry said. “That’s stupid. Magazines have the right to do what they want. It’s just that there seemed to be a lot of bias with the type of bands that end up in The Rocket.”2

To promote the album, the band tapped Gruntruck to tour with them for most of the final months of 1992. The connection with Alice in Chains happened when Gruntruck was performing a show where Layne happened to be in attendance. The tour would take both bands across North America for an initial run from August 23 through September 5 and then pick up again from November 13 through December 20.3 The initial leg—dubbed the Shitty Cities Tour—was a regional tour consisting of nine dates through the Pacific Northwest. It was a low-key affair, with both bands touring in vans.

Norman Scott Rockwell—the drummer for Gruntruck who went by the stage name Norman Scott and had previously been the drummer for Skin Yard—said, “I remember coming in and the first person I ran into was Sean Kinney and everybody—it was just like any tour. It’s like everybody’s like, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ It was like we’re just kind of sizing each other up a little bit type of thing,” Rockwell said. “We met in Ellensburg and through the night we all got kind of our drink on and sort of started to talk to the crews.

“And through the night we just slowly started to hang out and kind of get used to each other. And then the next day, it seemed like we had known each other forever, best friends, and got into a shitload of trouble. It was just on after that,” he said.

Crank calls were a popular pastime for a while. According to Rockwell, “We’d sit there in the hotel room in the middle of the night, nothing to do, it’s after two, all the bars are closed, whatever. And we’d just sit there and dial out of the phone book. We’d do things like dial a Denny’s, and it would be like, ‘Hey, are you hiring? Is your manager there?’

“I think this was sort of Jerry’s sort of shtick. He would be like, ‘Yeah, well, do you have fluorescent lights?’

“‘Yeah.’

“‘Well, I can’t stand fluorescent lights, and I’ll just bash them out. So you guys got to get rid of those if I’m going to ever work there. Where’s your manager?’

“‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir, he’s not here.’

“‘Well, do you got his phone number?’”

The gag would go on and on, sometimes as long as fifteen to twenty minutes, and people would keep talking. Other times, they would randomly call somebody in the middle of the night. “We did that night after night until that got kind of old.”

At another town, someone thought it would be a good idea to try cow-tipping. “We go find some cows sleeping on their feet and tip them over, and it’s just hilarious,” Rockwell said. “We get into the pasture, and all of a sudden we hear this, like, big ‘moo’—like, it’s a bull, and we all freak the fuck out and hightail it out of there.”

Rockwell and Sean, both being drummers, wound up hanging out together quite a bit. “When Sean got lit he was pretty unstoppable. He was sort of a classic destroyer of hotel rooms.”

Case in point: the two drummers walked out of the room looking for something to do when they noticed the hallway was illuminated by tulip-shaped sconces lining the hallway. Sean, with beer in hand, walked down the corridor and poured a little beer in each sconce before walking to the next one and pouring more beer as he and Rockwell continued down the hall. A few seconds later, each lightbulb would explode. Rockwell thinks the band might have been banned from the hotel where this happened.

Sean had an alter ego he called Steve, which he referred to whenever he was particularly rowdy or destructive. According to Randy Biro, Sean once walked into the restaurant of a nice hotel in Toronto where a brunch had been set up. “He’s standing on a chair, peeing onto the dessert cart in the middle of the dining hall,” Biro said. For some mind-boggling reason, the band was not kicked out of the hotel. When Sean was asked about it later, he allegedly responded, “That wasn’t me. That was Steve.” Multiple sources have said that Sean has given up drinking in recent years.

Rockwell’s memories of Sean during the Shitty Cities Tour aren’t all mayhem and destruction. After the first show, because they had similar drum kits, Sean suggested they share his kit for the tour to avoid changing drum kits between sets. As the tour progressed, Sean used his contacts in the drumming industry and got Rockwell endorsements with DW, Vic Firth, and Sabian. By the second leg of the tour, several boxes of brand-new drums and drumming equipment had been delivered for Rockwell.

Mike was known to like younger girls, and this became the subject of a prank. “We knew he had this girl down in his hotel room. We were all upstairs drinking, bored out of our skulls—needed something to do,” Rockwell said. “So we all decide to run down to his room, and we knew she was in the room, knock on the door, and, like, ‘This is the hotel manager. We know you’ve got a young girl in there.’” Jerry told them Mike had gotten in trouble for this on a previous tour.

“We’re knocking on the door, and he won’t answer the door, just will not, and we’re all snickering.” The gag changed from being the manager to the girl’s father. “Finally, he cracks open the door and realizes it’s us. We bust into the room, and the sliding glass door in the back of the room is open, and she’s, like, out—like, gone.” When she heard everyone laughing and realized it was a joke, she came back, but Mike was furious. Rockwell said for the most part, Mike kept to himself on that tour, as did Layne.

After the conclusion of Shitty Cities, the band opened for Ozzy Osbourne for about a month in the fall of 1992. There was a noticeable difference in the crowd’s reaction to Alice in Chains compared to two years earlier. “By then, ‘Man in the Box’ had hit, and Dirt was out. So as a rock fan, if you didn’t have it already, you went out and bought it after that,” Jimmy Shoaf said.

There were two mishaps during the tour. Mike drank a water bottle full of bleach by mistake and had to be hospitalized, leading to the cancellation of a few shows. The bleach was used to clean out syringes. According to Randy Biro, “It looked like some water. Poured it down his throat. And before he could realize what the taste was, it pretty much had gotten into his system.” Biro thinks Mike was using heroin at this point. “I could see him doing heroin, because he really looked up to Layne. And if Layne was doing it, he would be doing it.”

In September 1992, Layne was at a state fairground somewhere that had a racetrack where people were driving trikes or three-wheeled ATVs, which caught his interest. According to Randy Biro, “People were saying, ‘You shouldn’t ride those things. They’re dangerous.’” Layne dismissed the concerns and took one for a spin.

“He ends up going … I don’t know how far—not that far—and he puts his foot down to make a turn, like you would a motorcycle, and the back wheel runs over his foot.” His left foot was broken, and he would be in a cast and on crutches for several weeks. He kept performing, on crutches or sitting in a wheelchair or on a couch onstage. When asked about it later, he said, “I didn’t break my neck, so there’s no excuse not to play.”4 Mike noted that Layne stage-dived with his foot still in the cast.5

The subject matter on Dirt left Layne open to legitimate questions from journalists about drugs. Layne told Rolling Stone, “The facts are that I was shooting a lot of dope, and that’s nobody’s business but mine. I’m not shooting dope now, and I haven’t for a while … I took a fucking long, hard walk through hell. I decided to stop because I was miserable doing it. The drug didn’t work for me anymore. In the beginning I got high, and it felt great; by the end it was strictly maintenance, like food I needed to survive. Since I quit doing it, I tried it a couple of times to see if I could recapture the feeling I once got off it, but I don’t. Nothing attracts me to it anymore. It was boring.”6

During a November 1992 interview with Canadian TV channel Musique Plus, the host asked Layne, “When you have a problem with heroin, does it automatically make you think about death because you’re playing with your life a lot?”

“Yeah, I suppose that comes with the territory. Flirting with death … That’s probably what’s most attractive about it at first, is the danger, you know?” Layne answered. “But I beat it, I beat death! [Layne cheers.] I’m immortal!”

Later in the interview, the host asked, “What’s the hardest part when you’re trying to get over that?”

“The cravings, probably.”

“Has it been an excuse for creativity?”

“No. I never created anything when I was in that state of mind. It was only when I stopped that I could create.”7

The persistent questioning bothered Layne. He told SPIN about a French journalist who accused him of being on heroin during their interview. “I asked him if he was on heroin,” he recalled. “The guy got all offended. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘now you know how I feel.’”8

Drug and heroin references were part of the band’s live act on this tour. Layne introduced one song as being “about a hopeless fucking junkie” at a show in Dallas in October 1992. During a performance of “God Smack” at the same show, Layne repeatedly jabbed his arm with the microphone while scooting around onstage in a wheelchair. “I really like the wheelchair effect,” Mike said. “I don’t know, it somehow makes Layne seem more … evil.”9 According to Biro, Layne was sober during this tour.

When the tour came to New Orleans, Layne and Mike appeared as guests for an edition of Headbangers Ball. At one point, Layne was sitting on a stool, with his crutches and the cast on his foot visible to the camera. Riki Rachtman asked, “If you see people walking around with crutches, it doesn’t mean they hurt their leg. They might just be using Layne Staley as a role model, and that’s why crutches have become a fashion statement, is that correct?”

“Well, what it is … my foot isn’t injured. I use this to get pity dates,” Layne responded. The episode had segments filmed at the Historic Voodoo Museum and at a cemetery. The most memorable thing about this shoot happened off camera. According to Randy Biro, Layne and Mike were being escorted by New Orleans police officers. They gave the cops autographed T-shirts in exchange for a couple of police badges and a bag of speed.

The second leg of the Alice in Chains/Gruntruck tour kicked off in Fort Lauderdale on November 13, 1992, and ran for about five weeks. The Screaming Trees would join a little later, and would tour with Alice in Chains into 1993. Layne developed a preshow ritual on that tour with the Screaming Trees’s sound engineer, Martin Feveyear. “He would have some whiskey, and he would pass it to me, and I would check it for him to make sure that it was all okay and find a drink and hand it back to him,” Feveyear said. “It was just our way of sharing a moment before, or maybe him relaxing a little bit before he went onstage.” He added, “He was a real gentle, sweet man. He was quietly spoken. He was attentive to me—I’m not quite sure why—and he was delicate and funny, and we would laugh.”

There was a noticeable difference in the size and choice of venues between the first and second legs of the tour, as well as the quality of transportation and hospitality. “The other one was like vans and crappy little hotels. Small places in crappy little towns. This was like the Roseland and bigger rock venues in major metropolitan areas with three buses and a semitruck full of gear and full road crews,” Rockwell explained.

Another story comes from Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin, which he told during Layne’s memorial service: “[Layne’s] guest list … was not for friends or elite patrons of the rock circuit; it was for kids who couldn’t afford to buy a ticket.”10 Rockwell had a similar recollection, saying, “I remember something along those lines, where Layne was like, ‘Yeah, this fucking jackass from a record label wants to get in. Fuck him. He’s an industry guy. You don’t have to come to me for this shit, and if you do, you ain’t shit.’”

The other noticeable difference was that Susan hired bodyguards to try to keep Layne in check and to keep him away from people who might try to pass him drugs.11 According to Rockwell, the bodyguard’s job was to be Layne’s handler and chaperone at the same time. Although the exact nature of his relationship with Demri at this point is not known, Feveyear saw Layne in the company of other women at shows and hotels.

Following the success of Pearl Jam’s landmark music video for “Jeremy,” Mark Pellington’s representative was approached by Alice in Chains in late 1992 asking if he’d be interested in directing a video for “Rooster.” “This is a little different,” Pellington was told. “This is very personal, because it’s kind of about Jerry Cantrell and his dad. Would you talk to him?”

Pellington agreed. The two bonded about the conflicted relationships they had with their fathers. At the time, Pellington was making a documentary about his father’s struggles with Alzheimer’s disease.

Pellington’s treatment called for three elements: a performance video with front and rear projections made of precut footage; hallucinatory color re-creations and stock footage of combat scenes in Vietnam; and black-and-white, present-day, documentary-style footage of Jerry’s father living in Oklahoma. Because of the success of “Jeremy,” Pellington was given a great deal of free rein. Pellington hadn’t made any films yet, but his thinking at the time was “I need to make it like a movie,” he recalled. “You’re really trying to stretch the ambitions of it, and you had the resources in those days with videos to shoot three or four days and really put a lot on the screen.” He had a budget of about $250,000 to make his vision happen.

Pellington traveled to Oklahoma for two days to shoot footage and interviews with both Cantrells. For the video, he worked with Hank Corwin, who edited Oliver Stone’s JFK, and John Schwartzman, who would later work as a cinematographer for Michael Bay. Oliver Stone’s military consultant, Dale Dye, was hired to assist with military training and the combat sequences, which were influenced by Stone’s film Platoon. Casey Pieretti, an amputee, played a soldier who steps on a land mine and loses his leg.

Pellington had a day to shoot the performance scenes. Layne was high and wanted to wear a cowboy hat. “He looked pretty fucked up, and I was well aware of his addictions,” Pellington said. He told the label rep or manager with them he didn’t think the hat was a good look for the video, but that it was their decision. Pellington offered a solution: “Layne, I think the sunglasses actually look cool because it’s more sinister, and the song is kind of evil and you guys are fucked up and evil.” Pellington’s talk worked, because Layne wore the sunglasses in all his scenes. Layne also wore an earring with a peace sign, which Pellington said was a coincidence.

While Alice in Chains and the Screaming Trees were touring, Trees’s manager, Kim White, got a phone call from the band’s singer, Mark Lanegan, who was on a cot in a Canadian hospital. It was the first time he did heroin with Layne, and he got blood poisoning. Layne filled in for Lanegan that night.12

Issues arose when Gruntruck’s singer, Ben McMillan, was mimicking Layne’s appearance, to the point it made Layne so uncomfortable that, according to Rockwell, instead of continuing the tour in Europe at the beginning of 1993, Gruntruck wound up opening for Pantera. “I don’t know what happened between them together, but Ben wanted so bad to be a rock star, and he just coveted Layne’s position and stuff that it affected him in a way that I think it worried Layne.”

According to previously published accounts, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love sent Susan a Christmas card, addressed to “our favorite inside source,” based on their erroneous belief that she was an anonymous source for a controversial Vanity Fair article alleging Love had used heroin while she was pregnant. She got a phone call from Nirvana/Hole manager Danny Goldberg on the Cobains’ behalf, who said, “They just really want you to stop talking about them.” Susan did not like that Courtney Love was taking shots in the media at other musicians, but she denied talking about them. Love left “a super abusive voice mail” on Susan’s answering machine, which she still has. She was later approached by a British journalist writing a book about Nirvana to ask questions that apparently came from the Cobains’ rumor mill. “At that point, I was pissed. Like, ‘Wait a minute, they’re talking shit about me to other people? She’s leaving me abusive phone messages. She’s having Danny Goldberg calling to basically give me a gag order.’”13

Alice in Chains closed out 1992 by performing at MTV’s New Year’s Eve Party at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City.14 They had achieved new professional, critical, and commercial highs. Regardless, a change was imminent.

Chapter 17

MINISTRY WAS PERFORMING at Pearl Harbor Naval Station on January 2, 1993, a show Layne attended while Alice in Chains was in town for a show scheduled for January 8.1 “Not all junkies are scumbags—though many of them are. Some are just lost souls, misguided fuckers, or glamour seekers. The vocalist from Alice in Chains, Layne Staley, was the latter,” Al Jourgensen wrote in his memoir. He continued:

He got backstage into the dressing room and saw [Ministry guitarist Mike Scaccia] shoot up. So he asked if he could try. I looked him right in the eye, held up a syringe, and said, “Are you sure you want to do this, man?” And he nodded. I feel really bad about that because we turned him on to needles, and now he’s dead.

I don’t feel responsible, because he was gonna find someone to shoot with; it just happened to be us. He did a dose and passed out and didn’t wake up. He was barely breathing. I don’t know if he was dead or alive. I had to keep checking. Then he woke up, got some more dope, and shot up again. He took to needles like a fish to water, but I could tell he got into it for the glamour. That was a mistake. Other than the fact that he died from drugs, there’s no glamour in being a junkie.2

The account is probably accurate, but there are two details that deserve correction. First is the timing of the Ministry show in Hawaii. Jourgensen thought the show happened during the 1989–90 period. According to a Ministry fan site with a detailed tour history of the band, the show happened in 1993.3 Second is the claim that Ministry introduced Layne to intravenous drug use. By this point Layne had already been using heroin, off and on, for a little more than a year, and Alice in Chains had already recorded and released Dirt. Multiple sources who knew and worked with Layne in the 1989–90 period have said on the record that there is no evidence of Layne using heroin at that time. Ministry was not responsible for introducing Layne to shooting up—he was already doing it on his own.

That same month, Alice in Chains was starting an extensive touring schedule. By this point, something had to change. There are different and sometimes contradictory versions of the story told by Alice in Chains members and associates, but the outcome in all versions is the same: Mike Starr was out of Alice in Chains, replaced by Ozzy Osbourne’s bassist, Mike Inez. Susan told Mark Yarm the other three band members made the decision to fire Starr on their own and told him—and that it happened in Hawaii, just before two large festival shows in Brazil with L7, Nirvana, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.4

According to Randy Biro, there was talk within the band about dismissing Starr potentially as early as the Ozzy Osbourne tour the previous fall. Whatever the tipping point that precipitated the decision to fire Starr and how it went down, only Jerry and Sean—the two surviving original band members—and possibly Susan would know. Sources have speculated that Mike’s desire for more publishing rights, his attitude, his scalping tickets and backstage passes, his drug use, or some combination of these all were contributing factors to his dismissal. Starr’s friend Aaron Woodruff said he wasn’t showing up for band practice and speculated that was when his addiction was starting to take hold.

Because the band had spent weeks touring with Ozzy Osbourne, they had a replacement in mind. “We made one phone call—we called Mike [Inez]. If we’re going to get another bass player, we’re going to have to at least get another guy with the same name, smokes the same cigarettes, plays the same bass, looks the same!” Jerry explained. According to Sean, no other bassists were called or auditioned.5

“My phone rings and it’s Sean Kinney, and he’s calling me from Hawaii,” Inez recalled during an interview with Behind the Player. “He says, ‘I think our bass player Mike wants to quit the band. Would you consider going to Brazil with us?’

“‘When?’

“‘Get on a plane.’”

Inez was in Nevada at the time mixing Osbourne’s Live and Loud album when the call came. Inez, who was initially under the impression it would be a temporary gig, explained the situation to Osbourne and asked if he thought he should go.

“If you don’t go, you’re going to be in the hospital for about seven days,” was the Prince of Darkness’s response.

“Why?”

“It’s going to take them that long to get my foot out of your ass.”

With Osbourne’s blessing, Inez was ready to hop on a plane to Brazil and perform with Alice in Chains without any rehearsal. He even got vaccinations for the trip. Ultimately, they told him to hold off and meet with the band in London.6 Biro thinks the band may have held off on dismissing Starr until getting a commitment from Inez but isn’t sure. “It was a very weird time for the band. It was a very emotional time,” he said. “They used to live together. They starved together. And one of them was being kicked out.”

He added, “Layne and Starr were buddies. Layne was never the same after Starr left. He knew Starr had to leave on a business level, but on a personal level, I think it really fucked him up. It fucked all of us up. I felt really bad because there was a part of me, the business side, there is no question Starr had to go. It was sad but he was still family, and once he was out of that band he had nothing.

“[The decision to fire Starr] was brought up in privacy with myself and other crew members. They were looking for our input,” Biro said. “I think they were looking for maybe someone to say, ‘No, that’s not a good idea.’ But I think the label was pushing for it in some ways. I think Susan might have been pushing for it in some ways. It had to be done on a business level.” At one point in Brazil, Layne asked Biro, “Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”

“Unfortunately, I think you are,” he responded.

The fact that Starr’s days with the band were numbered did not make them any easier. Randy Biro was in his hotel room in Brazil when he got a call from Susan. According to Biro, she was “yelling and screaming at me because I was talking shit about Mike Starr. Like calling him a loser for being kicked out of the band to his face.

“I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’” According to Biro, Susan said Starr had told her that Biro was saying mean things to him. “I would never, ever say something mean to the guy, especially when he was just about to be kicked out,” he said. Susan was yelling at him, and Biro was dishing it back. The conversation got so heated and so loud, Biro claims, that Mary Kohl, the band’s associate manager, could hear Susan yelling at him on the phone while standing in the corridor outside the open doorway to Biro’s room.7

Over the years, Mike Starr gave several excuses for why he was kicked out or left the band, some accurate, others outright fiction. “He told me that Jerry didn’t like him and Jerry wanted him out of the band and that he was blackmailed out of the band by Susan Silver,” his close friend Jason Buttino said. The evidence—Susan’s comments that the band made the decision to fire him and her phone call to Biro in Brazil—shows his blackmail claim is false.

Starr told his biographer that he informed the other band members he was quitting and that his last performances would be the Brazil shows. According to the book, “Mike had initially made the formal decision he would leave the band. He firmly believed it would be only temporary. It became permanent.”8

He told Mark Yarm that he was fired not only for scalping tickets on the Van Halen tour but also because Jerry was jealous of him for getting more attention from women, noting that he was in a magazine as “sexiest babe of the month.”9 Biro dismissed this claim. However, he did note, “My impression was it was almost like he felt the amount of blow jobs you get in one night represented fame to him.” He also speculated that Starr had a sexual addiction.

Several years later on Celebrity Rehab and after, Starr said he was fired from the band and that he never would have quit. “When they asked me to leave the band, it broke my heart.” During a 2010 interview on Loveline, he said, “I don’t care about a band thing. I don’t care about them dismissing me from the band. I never quit the band, for one thing. I’m not a quitter.”10

After the firing, the band said publicly that Mike had left of his own accord. An edition of the fan-club newsletter published in spring of 1993 reads, “For those of you who have not heard, Mike Starr is no longer with Alice in Chains. He decided all this touring stuff just wasn’t for him. We wish him all the best of success in all of his future endeavors, we’ll miss him.” A February 1994 Rolling Stone feature reads, “The rift with Starr occurred, Staley explains, as ‘just a difference in priorities. We wanted to continue intense touring and press, Mike was ready to go home.’” The biography on the band’s first official Web site—the now-defunct aliceinchains.net—reads, “Mike Starr reaches the top of the mountain, then retires.”11

On January 22, 1993, the band took the stage to an audience of tens of thousands in Rio de Janeiro and performed a blistering hour-long set, firing on all cylinders. “I remember the last song. I think it was in Rio. I was in tears on the stage,” Biro said. “I couldn’t even see straight, I was so upset over it.” Starr later told Jason Buttino that he shot up before the show. “He said when he was playing ‘Would?’ he could barely move. His knees were shaking and his hands weren’t working the way he wanted them to, and he felt like he was going to collapse.” Although this doesn’t appear in the footage, Biro said Starr was crying onstage during the final songs. During the last instrument change, Biro hugged Starr, and they said that they loved each other, despite everything that was going on. Biro also told him to never give up. After it was over, without any public acknowledgment of what had just happened, the band left the stage. Five years after the band started out at the Music Bank, and unbeknownst to anyone on the outside at the time, the Rio de Janeiro audience had just seen Mike Starr’s final performance with Alice in Chains.12

There were two red flags during the Brazil trip indicating how severe Starr’s heroin addiction had become. The first, according to what he told Aaron Woodruff, was when he was riding in a helicopter and had to throw up outside of it in midflight, possibly because he was going through withdrawals. This account was corroborated by Randy Biro, who was present. The second red flag was after the show, when he decided to shoot up with two of the most notorious addicts in the Seattle grunge scene and barely lived to tell the tale. According to Biro, when the bands got to Brazil, it was discovered that there was cocaine but no heroin. The solution they worked out was that Kurt Cobain would pay for the heroin, and Layne would pay for the plane to bring it down.

“On the day they kicked me out, I was like, ‘[Kurt] Cobain, shoot me up,’ because we were playing with Nirvana and the [Red Hot] Chili Peppers down in South America.… Layne shot me up first a couple of times. Then Kurt shot me up, and then Layne shot me up after that same night, and I died, for like eleven minutes.…‘Dead for eleven minutes,’ Layne said. I woke up, I was all wet and I was in a different room. I was in the bathroom and Layne just punched me in the face, crying.”13

Mike Inez was born in San Fernando, California, into a very musical family, with relatives who played in church bands and “old Filipino folk bands.” He was delivered by his grandmother, a nurse at the hospital. After Mike and his mother were released from the hospital, Mike was brought to his grandmother’s house, where his uncle was living at the time and practicing in a Top 40 band with members of Earth, Wind & Fire. His grandmother got “really pissed off,” and told the band to stop rehearsing because the new baby was home. In Mike’s words, he went “from the hospital straight into a live-band situation.” Mike credited his parents with letting his musical interests blossom and his relatives for having places where he could practice his craft.

He started out on clarinet and saxophone in fourth or fifth grade. One of the first songs he learned was the Commodores’ “I’m Easy” on piano. By junior high school, he was getting into hard rock and heavy metal. He grew up in the late 1970s in Pasadena, just as Van Halen was taking off. By high school, he knew he was going to be a musician for a living. He was in the marching band in high school and at Pasadena City College but was also involved in rock bands. Around the time he was twenty-two, he was rehearsing with his band when an employee at the rehearsal space told him he had tried out for Ozzy Osbourne’s band and encouraged him to do the same. Mike’s reaction: “I’ll never fucking get that gig!”

When Mike arrived at the audition, his attitude was, “I’m just happy I’m going to get to jam with the man!” He learned the songs by listening to other people playing them through the wall. When it was his turn, he wasn’t nervous because he had no expectation of getting the job. As he was in his car about to leave, he saw Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne in the rearview mirror, walking toward him. They asked him to come back the next day, because he was one of the top five.

By the next day, the finalists had been narrowed down to three. Even then, Mike still wasn’t expecting to get the job. About a week later, he auditioned for the job again. The plan was for the new bass player to go to Europe and play with Ozzy Osbourne at Wembley Arena. Mike was at his grandfather’s house when he got the phone call from Osbourne. He beat two hundred bassists for the job. In Mike’s words, “I went from playing the Coconut Teaser [a club in Los Angeles] to living in a castle with Ozzy Osbourne in one week and playing Wembley. It was an amazing experience.” He also worked on Osbourne’s No More Tears album.14

According to Mike, he and his new Alice in Chains bandmates spent his first day in London smoking “killer hash.” The band rented out a room at a rehearsal studio, where, for the next two days, they gave Inez a crash course in the Alice in Chains catalog. Biro was impressed—he thought Inez knew the songs better than Starr did. The band began a two-month European tour with the Screaming Trees.15

During the February 8 show in Stockholm, Sweden, there was a skinhead in the audience making Nazi salutes and beating people up. According to Randy Biro, “He was doing that thrashing in a circle, just elbowing people in the face, just punching people out.” Bootleg video of the concert shows that after “It Ain’t Like That,” Layne spoke to the audience, saying, “We love you fucking Swedish people.” He then walked over to the edge of the stage and knelt down to talk to a security guard. He pointed the skinhead out and invited him to the stage.

“Come on up onstage. Come on, man. Come join the band—have a good time.”

According to Biro, the skinhead was incredulous, pointing at himself and asking, “Me?”

“Everyone’s looking at him going, ‘Why the fuck is Layne being nice to this douchebag?’” Biro recalled. “The local security’s looking at him—‘What the fuck’s going on?’”

Layne walked to the edge of the stage and squatted, repeatedly motioning with his hands for the skinhead to come up. He took him by the hand and pulled him up onstage. As soon as he got up, Layne punched the skinhead in the face twice, who fell back into the audience, which was roaring with approval. Security hustled him away. Layne went back to the microphone and said, “Fucking Nazis die!”16

After the show, the band was hearing rumors that, in Biro’s words, “the shit’s gonna hit the fan”—meaning local police might be involved. Layne and his security guard John Sampson went to the tour bus to get on the ferry to Finland and wait for the others to leave the country.17

The band and crew were about to check out of their Stockholm hotel when they saw police officers waiting in the lobby. The skinhead had called the police, who went to the hotel looking for Layne and seized the band and crew members’ passports so they couldn’t leave the country. When they discovered Layne wasn’t there, officers hurried to the ferry, pulled him off, and arrested him. According to Biro, the skinhead’s brother, who was also at the concert, went to the police and told them his brother had been picking on people at the show and Layne helped stop him. At that point, Biro said, “the police congratulated us and let us go.

“Layne was a really good person about bullies because he had been bullied when he was a kid,” Biro explained. “He wasn’t a good-looking guy and everything, so he got picked on quite a bit as a youngster, and he seemed to remember that. And when he got into a powerful position, he paid people back or he helped out the people that were weak, like he was at one point.”

When the tour hit Paris, the crew discovered the venue had a decibel limit regulating the noise levels. The band was warned about it ahead of time, but they—minus Layne—went to sound check. Mike and Sean tested their gear and were told it was already too loud, all this before the PA and monitors were even turned on. At that point, they looked at each other and left, calling off the show. According to Biro, Layne stayed at the hotel so they could say he was sick and have a legal excuse to cancel the show.

The band came back from Europe in mid-March 1993. Shortly after their return, they did a quick headlining U.S. tour with Circus of Power and Masters of Reality. Mike’s first studio experience with Alice in Chains was when they recorded two songs in April 1993, “What the Hell Have I” and “A Little Bitter” for the soundtrack of the movie Last Action Hero. Stuart Hallerman, owner of Avast! Studios, recorded some demos with Alice in Chains and hosted them for rehearsals while they wrote the songs. There were signs of Layne’s drug problem during these sessions.18

Producer and engineer Toby Wright was friends with Nick Terzo, who asked if he would be interested in working with the band on the songs, an offer he accepted.

Riki Rachtman interviewed Layne and Mike on Headbangers Ball during this period and asked whether there was a “big difference” having Mike Inez in the studio as they worked on new songs.

“No, not really,” Layne responded, laughing.

Mike added, “I don’t want to be in this band, and they won’t let me quit. These guys are crazy, man. They’re holding my family hostage.”

Layne jokingly replied, “You’re contractually obligated, so stick with it, big guy.”19

The Alice in Chains Fan Club newsletter noted, “As of now, Mike Inez of Ozzy’s band has been filling in the bass position. Things have been grooving so well, it looks like Mr. Inez may just become a member of the Chains gang. We’ll keep you posted.” The band returned to Europe for a series of dates opening for Metallica, after which they would return to the United States to play Lollapalooza.20

Rocky Schenck traveled to Seattle to direct the video for “What the Hell Have I,” which was shot on June 13. “Layne and Jerry particularly enjoyed creating the sequences where their faces were projected live onto their own faces and each other’s faces.” Jerry was responsible for the oversize masks surrounding the band. This was also Schenck’s first time meeting Mike, whom he liked right away.

During the summer of 1993, Alice in Chains would be the second-to-last band on the main stage of Lollapalooza. The tour kicked off on June 18 and would perform across North America until early August.21 Layne was trying to stay clean, according to Randy Biro, so he got his own bus with a recording studio in the back lounge and a security guard traveling with him at all times. According to multiple sources, Layne relapsed, using alcohol and drugs on the tour.

Johnny Bacolas and James Bergstrom went to the Portland show. “Johnny and I sat on the side of the stage by the manager watching them, and it was a fabulous show,” Bergstrom recalled. “We just hung out with Layne and had so much fun—you know, it was like we were kids again. I think he struggled being away: the grind of the road and the whole lifestyle … Obviously with his addiction, it was just fostering sadness and unhappiness.”

Nick Pollock went to another Lollapalooza show, accompanied by one of Layne’s ex-girlfriends. “We went on his bus and he showed us a bunch of his artwork, which was very dark and introspective at that time, in some cases kind of odd,” he recalled. “I don’t know how to really qualify that more than it was odd. I think that he was in a pretty dark place.”

Pollock added, “Here’s Layne, who’s kind of an alien in his own skin, showing us, ‘Here, I’ve been doing this artwork and I did these photo things.’ I think they were with Demri and stuff like that. They were just like, ‘Wow, where the hell is he?’ But it wasn’t obvious by looking at them that he’s got all the drug problems and that stuff.”

In comparing what he saw to Layne’s artwork for the Mad Season album, Pollock described it thus: “That would be more stylized things that are evocative of what I was talking about. But he had things where he actually had photographs of himself that were very gaunt, that had a certain sort of bondage-ish type of feel to it. It was just strange.”

They went to the soundboard to watch the other bands perform, and they talked. According to Pollock, “He loosened up. We got back to like we were kids. He was dealing with the weight of his musical career and everything that was going on with that, the weight of his drug situation, and I think that emotionally in a lot of ways, just the weight of a lot of things from his past that he never could deal with, that he was still dealing with and trying to blot out with drugs.”

The former singer of Cat Butt, David Duet, was living in Texas when he got a call from Layne, telling him he would be in town and giving him a list of drugs and alcohol to bring for him. Duet was excited to see his old friend when he got on the bus, ready to give him the bag of stuff. Layne cut him off—Duet later found out he was on Layne’s personal sober bus and that his stepfather and manager were there. Duet left before the bag could be confiscated and made arrangements to meet with Layne fifteen minutes later.22

Jim Elmer—who traveled to three Lollapalooza shows in Washington State and Texas that summer—did not recall this but did not dispute the account. He also noted, “Layne was very, very careful of not being public with family on his addiction. I don’t know if that’s true or not, or if I was oblivious, but he put up a good shield. There was no doubt he had a problem, and we all agree on that. But in terms of how he handled that and so forth, he was very discreet, I thought, toward the family.”

There were issues with one of the people traveling on the tour as part of the Village, which was described by the Fort Lauderdale–based Sun-Sentinel newspaper as “a place Lollapalooza is creating to be a surreal world where art, music and politics collide.”23 This person was discovered to have been providing Layne with heroin. He was warned repeatedly to stay away from the band and Layne. It got to the point where Biro thinks his wife at the time—who was an assistant tour manager—may have threatened to have the guy arrested and ordered him to never come backstage again. (Biro got married during the tour, and Layne lent him and his wife his private bus while the tour was traveling from Orlando, Florida, to New Orleans, where the wedding was to take place. Layne traveled on the band bus for this leg of the trip.)

The musicians on the tour hit it off with each other for the most part, leading to many onstage collaborations: Jerry would perform with Fishbone; members of Fishbone would perform with Alice in Chains; and Layne would sing with Front 242 or Tool. Layne became friends with Tom Morello, the guitarist for Rage Against the Machine. Morello would later recall how the two of them would be laughing pretty hard while arguing about which of them was more metal. Layne also became close friends with Babes in Toyland—a three-piece female punk rock band from Minneapolis.24

According to the band’s bassist, Maureen Herman, Babes in Toyland had one of the most popular dressing rooms on that tour. “It seemed like everybody on the tour had these healthy riders, like, ‘No alcohol, we’re only bringing in fruit juice, we only have really healthy food,’ and our rider was not that way. Our rider was full of really fun junk food and cool stuff and tequila, vodka, and Jack Daniel’s and lots of beer, and so everybody was always coming to our dressing room because their fucking dressing rooms didn’t have rock-and-roll accoutrements, and Layne was one of those people who was attracted to our dressing room.”

Drummer Lori Barbero had a similar recollection. “I think seriously it was the very first night. Layne came to our backstage room, and he was like, ‘Hey,’ and just became our friend immediately, and that was kind of his tree house, as I like to say—where he hung out pretty much all the time. Every day he’d come and hang out with us.”

Susan would come in asking if they had seen Layne, and Barbero or someone else would confirm he was hanging out with them. Eventually, it got to the point that Susan went to the Babes in Toyland dressing room when she had to find him. “He hung out in our room all the time. I don’t really know why. Maybe he just liked to be around ladies. Or just to get away from his own crew that he had to be around all the time, but he just really liked hanging out with us, and we just had a lot of fun.”

Regarding Demri, Barbero recalled, “[Layne] really adored her. I mean, he wasn’t a shit talker. Some guys in bands are just like ‘Rawr…’ and they pretend their girlfriend’s a drag, so if anything happened with another girl it would be cool because he didn’t really like his girlfriend anyway. From what I gather, he really adored her at this point.” Layne also spoke about the recently departed Mike Starr. “Whenever he spoke about him, he was sad about whatever happened,” Barbero said. “He had a really good heart, and I know he was really sad about whatever went down and why he wasn’t in the band anymore.”

Layne had a bodyguard and personal chaperone named Val who he was always trying to get away from. According to Herman, she didn’t think Val knew about the contents of their dressing room, so Layne would hide out there. He got along with Babes in Toyland singer/guitarist Kat Bjelland, and the two began hanging out on the tour—as drug buddies and possibly an occasional tryst.

“Kat was, in some ways, his style of a girl except she was a gross version of what he liked. She was very much like a fucked-up version of Demri,” Randy Biro said.

“Kat and he seemed to really hit it off and get along and that ended up turning into a relationship during the tour. And I do remember Val throwing Kat into a tub of water once because, at one point, they did kind of connect the dots of [Layne] getting into trouble by hanging out with us and/or Kat more specifically,” Herman said.

There is a disagreement on whether or not Layne and Bjelland were hooking up. According to Herman, “I wasn’t in the room with them to watch them have sex or anything like that, but I find it extremely hard to believe that there was not a relationship going on there. It’s just not possible.” Barbero thinks they weren’t: “They didn’t disappear that much that I ever thought anything was really going on. I think they were more drug buddies.”

At some point during the tour whatever relationship existed between Layne and Bjelland went south. “It was clear that there was rejection going on, and Kat doesn’t take rejection well. Some of her best songs cover that territory,” Herman said. According to Herman, Bjelland decided to cope by doing heroin and overdosed on the bus after their show in San Francisco. This happened within the first week of the tour.25 Entertainment Weekly was in town to do a photo shoot with Babes in Toyland. Because Bjelland was unavailable, they shot Barbero and Herman and ultimately used a photo of Herman for the magazine cover.

There was at least one other incident, which Barbero thinks happened after Bjelland’s overdose. At one show, she wanted to hitch a ride on Layne’s tour bus, and he said no. She did not take it well. “He was just like, ‘No, you’re going crazy,’ and she jumped on their bus, and as it was going, jumped on the front and tore off their windshield wiper blade in a rage,” Barbero said. “She’s a real spoiled brat, and she didn’t get what she wanted, so she causes chaos.”

It got to the point that the Alice in Chains crew started running interference to keep Bjelland away from Layne. “That whole overdose thing—I think she tried to guilt Layne, and he just said, ‘Well, it’s not my responsibility to look after her.’ He felt bad about it, but you can’t. It wasn’t his fault. He never felt like he was at fault for any of it,” Biro said.

Layne briefly dated an African American girl that Biro thinks he met on the tour. When Speech, the lead singer of Arrested Development, got wind of the relationship, he told Layne, “Okay, you’re not all that bad. I can talk to you now.” Biro, who was there with Layne when this happened, said, “We’re looking at each other, going, ‘Wow, that’s weird.’” He doesn’t remember her name or how they met but described her as “a really nice, sweet girl.”

Besides Layne, Lori Barbero bonded with Mike over their mutual Filipino heritage. She also hit it off with Sean and eventually met his Steve alter ego. On a night off from the tour, several musicians went to a bar and did karaoke. “We took over the stage, and we all just started playing, and we did this superjam, and that was the night where they were like, ‘Lori, can you take care of Steve?’ And for some reason I don’t know, everyone always thinks that the woman needs to take care of the guy, so I did, and he was actually really pleasant with me.” They had warned her he could be difficult to keep under control, but she did it.

“He seriously did not know any of his bandmates. He didn’t know Alice in Chains. He didn’t know how to play drums. He didn’t know anything. You could talk to him, and he was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and he’d look at you like you’re fucking crazy.”

Mike had brought Chuck, his golden retriever, along for the tour. Chuck had his own laminate VIP pass with a smiling dog face on it, which a girl stole and used to get backstage.26 During one show, Layne, Jerry, and Sean went onstage during Primus’s set in the middle of “My Name Is Mud” dressed up wearing Les Claypool–style hats and playing bass guitars while emulating Claypool’s style of performing during the song’s signature bass riff. Claypool apparently returned the favor when he took to the stage dancing in a chicken costume while Alice in Chains was performing “Rooster.” Jerry threw a bottle at him before he ran offstage.27

In retrospect, Jerry said, “Lollapalooza was probably the funnest tour I’ve ever done, and it’s probably the funnest tour I’ve ever seen because there was so much interaction between the bands, with the exception of Arrested Development. Everybody was playing—we were playing with each other, doing it onstage. It was great.” Mike called it “one of those tours where lifelong friendships were made.”28

Alice in Chains went back to the studio in September to write and record an EP of new material, which is covered in the next chapter. That fall, the band returned overseas for another European tour and their first tour of Australia and Japan. The band was checking into their hotel in the Roppongi district of Tokyo when Layne; his security guard, John; and Todd Shuss, another crew member, came running in. There was a forklift or tractor-type vehicle parked outside on the sidewalk with the keys in the ignition, so Layne decided to take it for a spin. “Layne started [it] up and started driving down the sidewalk, and he tore a sign off a building or something like that, and then the police showed up and [Layne and others] took off,” Biro said, describing what he and everyone else found out afterward. Police came looking for what witnesses described as a tourist-looking white male who had ducked into a hotel.29

When the tour hit Australia, the itinerary was four or five shows in a row in different cities, which presented a logistical challenge. According to Biro, Australian shows end at one o’clock in the morning. Lobby call to leave for the next city was at 6:00 A.M. After three or four shows, Layne was exhausted, and fatigue was beginning to affect his voice. The tour manager insisted the show had to go on. According to Biro, “Kevan Wilkins, the road manager, he sat there and he guilted [Layne]. I think that’s when his hatred for Wilkins really kicked in, and he’d guilt him. I actually sat there and listened to him say, ‘You’ve got to play the show. Think of all the kids that went out and bought tickets just to see you. Are you gonna deny them that?’”

One other episode Biro remembered from the 1992–93 period while the band was touring in support of Dirt—although he doesn’t recall which tour—was what he thinks was the only time they had to cancel a show in the middle of a performance. “Layne was too screwed up,” Biro said. Susan asked him to go onstage and tell the audience the show was over.

“There’s no fucking way I’m doing that.”

“I pay you. Go fucking do it now.”

As he recalls, “It was bad. People were really pissed off. They were playing, and Layne was singing, and he’d put down the mic and walk offstage and go to the bathroom and start getting high, like in the middle of a song. I don’t know what was going on with him.” Ultimately, 1993 was the last year Layne would do any major touring.

There were two other events that year worth noting. Heart was working on their Desire Walks On album, which featured a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Ring Them Bells.” The Wilsons wanted a male voice to harmonize with on that song. Chris Cornell got the initial nod and recorded the track, but Cornell’s record label wouldn’t give them permission to release it.

At that point, Ann Wilson called Layne, and he agreed to do it. Nancy Wilson recalled that she and Ann were like, “This will be great! Let’s have a moment!” Layne came to the studio and, self-conscious when recording, as usual, didn’t want anyone else there.

“He was like, ‘Oh no, you can’t be in the control room when I’m singing. You have to go away.’ He was too shy to be singing where Ann Wilson might be listening,” Nancy Wilson said. “We went out to dinner or something and came back, and he didn’t want to be there when we heard it, so he left. He was just like that.” The engineer later mixed Layne’s take with the Wilsons’ vocals and—in Ann’s words—it sounded “perfect.”

Ann Wilson noticed the toll Layne’s drug use had taken on him. “You could see that day, though, that his struggles with drug addiction had taken away part of Layne,” she wrote. “He had become smaller and smaller, inside and out, even hunched over. He was little to start with, but when I gave him a hug, I was afraid I might break his bones.

“I had seen some of Alice’s first shows when Layne was luminous onstage, whiter than white, as if he was lit from within. It was like he didn’t have a body when he was performing.

“As the years went on, he shifted, and by ‘Ring Them Bells,’ his light was flickering.”30

The other event, arguably more consequential in terms of the band’s career and future, was the dissolution of Susan’s business partnership with Kelly Curtis. There are differing accounts for why they split. Curtis told Mark Yarm he quit right as Alice in Chains was taking off because, having lived through the trauma of losing Andrew Wood to heroin, he didn’t want to go through that again with Layne. There was an incident during which Layne was holding Curtis’s daughter when he nodded off. “He was a great guy—all those guys were great—but there was a dark cloud over them, and it really affected me. I hated it,” Curtis said.31

Curtis’s former business partner, Ken Deans, did not disagree with his account, noting, “At that point, it was becoming very obvious that Kelly was going to be hugely successful with Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam didn’t have any of those trappings that Mother Love Bone did, or Alice in Chains … And I can believe that Kelly didn’t want to deal with that.”

Krisha Augerot, Curtis’s assistant at the time, had a similar recollection. “When I was working with Kelly, it was the very beginning of Pearl Jam. He was also comanaging Alice in Chains with Susan and comanaging Kristen Barry with Susan. When they split ways, Alice in Chains, I think, wanted more attention. I think they felt like Susan had Soundgarden [and] Kelly had Pearl Jam. Alice in Chains, although they were having success, maybe they didn’t feel like they were getting the attention they needed. They were like the stepchild kind of thing, so they wanted to go with one side or the other. It was really hard for Kelly to let that go, because Jerry Cantrell lived in his basement for a long time. They were like family.”

In terms of the band’s relationship with Susan and Curtis, Augerot said it was “like having a pseudo-mom and dad with Kelly and Susan. I think Jerry was really close to Kelly. Clearly because they lived together and [Kelly] gave him so much support, Peggy [Curtis’s wife] gave him so much support. I think Susan was a very calming influence on those guys, really caring, really solid. I do remember it being really hard on Jerry, the Kelly-Susan split.”

Randy Biro alleges the split was purely a business decision and that Curtis did not leave of his own accord. “Eventually [Alice in Chains] just fired him. The Pearl Jam thing—he just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Alice in Chains became managed a lot better once he was out.” He disputes Curtis’s explanation that he left because of drug issues. “Kelly Curtis is strictly money. It’s all about money. He didn’t leave. They fired him. They felt that he was not focusing on them at all, and him and Susan did not agree on the way to manage it. If I remember right, he gave the band an ultimatum.

“I think the ultimatum was, ‘It was me or Susan. You can’t have both.’ And they said, ‘Okay. Bye.’ Which kind of threw him for a loop, because he said it in such a cocky way, thinking that it was just automatically going to go to him. And they just didn’t like it.”

Chapter 18

ALICE IN CHAINS WAS TOURING when Jerry called Toby Wright, asking if he would be interesting in recording an EP with them. “Absolutely,” Wright responded. “Can you send me any of the songs?”

“We’re on our way home. By the time they get to you, we’ll already be done,” Jerry responded. “Meet us in Seattle.”

Despite what Jerry had told Wright, no material had been written. According to Jerry, the band had planned to take a break and wanted to work on the songs together after they got back.1 Alice in Chains and Toby Wright went into London Bridge Studio on September 7, 1993, with little or no material prepared. As soon as everyone arrived, the band members began talking about their experiences on the road.

“Wow, that’s awesome,” Wright said. “So you wrote a lot on the road?”

“Uh … funny thing about the songs—I don’t have any,” was Jerry’s sheepish response. Everyone laughed.

“Okay. What do you want to do for the next ten days?” Wright asked, referring to the fact that they had already booked studio time.

“Is it okay if we just jam for the next ten days?” Jerry asked.

“Yeah. Best band in the world, jamming? What bad could happen? I didn’t have anything better to do,” was Wright’s response.

The writing, recording, and mixing process was quick. According to the liner notes, the album was written and recorded in the studio during a five-day period and mixed from September 17 through 22.2 Sessions for the seven-song EP, titled Jar of Flies, were grueling round-the-clock affairs, as long as fourteen to eighteen hours a day. Wright was coproducing and engineering himself, with help from Jonathan Plum as his assistant engineer. “I remember I would leave and they’d still be up. I would go home, get a few hours of sleep, and come back,” Plum said of those marathon sessions.

Once an idea was fully worked out, the band members were very efficient recording their individual parts. “Some of those, once they got an arrangement down, it was one or two takes and they’re done. That being one of the most prolific and best-feeling bands, we got a great take, and that was the song,” Wright said.

Plum remembers seeing Layne sitting on the couch in the lobby watching TV. One morning, Layne was watching cartoons and eating kids’ cereal out of the box with his hands. On the back of the box was a fill-in-the-blank game, which Layne completed with his own twist. “He filled it out, and it was totally disgusting, talking about putting things in your urethra. He cut it out and put it on the refrigerator,” Plum recalled.

The band brought in a four-piece string section for “I Stay Away.” Wright asked Jerry if he wanted to chart out everything he wanted them to play into sheet music.

“No, I’ll just tell them what to play,” Jerry responded. Dave Hillis, who worked at London Bridge at the time but did not work on Jar of Flies, remembers seeing Jerry go into the big room with a guitar in hand, sit down on a metal folding chair, and walk the other musicians through the song, explaining what he had in mind.

“What I’ve learned from other sessions, you have a conductor and everything is written out musically-speaking on paper for them in notes, and usually there’s a lot of preproduction in that, meaning there’s a score and things written for them,” Hillis said. “I remember Jerry being fearless, as he usually is, very confident, and going out there with a guitar into the main room where the orchestra is sitting and showing them the parts on his guitar, what he was hearing, what he wanted, which is not something you normally do because orchestra musicians usually don’t work that way.”

Sean was messing around playing side-stick drumming, a technique consisting of hitting the rim of the snare drum with the side of the drumstick. Wright, who is not a fan of the technique, heard this and was not having it. “We eventually wound up with some bongos and some smaller drums set up over the high hat that we incorporated into that groove.” This became the opening for “No Excuses.” Jerry sang lead vocals and Layne harmonized on the verses, and then they would switch parts during the chorus.

“Don’t Follow” would provide some of the most memorable moments of these recording sessions. Randy Biro; Jerry’s guitar tech, Darrell Peters; and Mike sang backing vocals for the second part of the song. A harmonica player was brought in. “They sent this guy up—he’s this older dude. He was a good player, but he would grunt when he was playing, these really weird kinda disgusting grunting noises,” Plum recalled.

“I remember Jerry was just like, ‘What’s that noise?’ Toby would say, ‘Hey, that sounded great. Can you do it with less grunting noises?’ And the guy would say, ‘Oh yeah, yeah. Sorry about that.’ He would do it again, and he’d still make the same grunting noises.”

After an hour of this, they realized it wasn’t going to work out. Eventually, David Atkinson was called in to play the part. “I remember the harmonica player was like a friend of Chris Cornell’s who came in, blazed around, had to comp it all together into what that performance is,” Wright said. Plum thinks he nailed it one take. Jerry sang the first half of the song; Layne did the second half. Plum had the impression Layne didn’t like the song for some reason, because, while he was recording his vocal, he added a little something extra that wasn’t part of Jerry’s original lyrics. After the “It hurts to care, I’m going down” lyric before the brief break leading into the second half of the song, Layne deadpanned, “How now, brown cow?”

“It was on the recording for a long time, but when we mixed it, Jerry asked us to take it out,” Plum said, laughing. Wright doesn’t remember this but does not dispute Plum’s account. “It was Jerry’s concept of having him start out the song, Layne come in, and then we finish up [with a] two-sides-to-the-story type of thing, which I thought was a brilliant concept,” Wright said.

Rocky Schenck shot the cover in his dining room on September 8, 1993. “The band had come up with the idea for the title and wanted the cover to be a young boy looking into a jar filled with flies. I remember they asked me to use ‘crazy colors’ in the shot, so [I] utilized lots of different color gels over the lights to achieve the final look,” he wrote. Schenck’s assistant made several trips to a nearby stable to collect hundreds of flies with a butterfly net.

Released on January 14, 1994, Jar of Flies was an immediate success, debuting at the top of the Billboard album chart. It was the first EP ever to reach number 1, a feat that has been matched only once—by Jay-Z and Linkin Park’s Collision Course—in the twenty years since its release as of this writing.

In March 1994, Kurt Cobain was in trouble. Courtney Love had already seen him overdose on heroin a dozen times by the time he tried to kill himself by taking sixty Rohypnol pills in a Rome hotel room with a three-page suicide note clutched in his left hand.3 Despite the history between them, Susan got a panicked phone call from Courtney Love.

“You have to help me—Kurt’s going to kill himself. What should I do?” she asked. Susan put Nirvana’s manager in touch with Dr. Lou Cox, a New York physician who had worked with Aerosmith and was working with Alice in Chains at the time. Susan told Greg Prato that they agreed to do an intervention but chose a different interventionist, and not everybody showed up.4

On April Fools’ Day 1994, Cobain went AWOL from the Exodus Recovery Center in Marina del Rey, California, two days after checking in. A week later, his body was found in the greenhouse in his home. He had killed himself by a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head after shooting up a lethal dose of heroin. He was twenty-seven years old.5

Susan helped organize a private service for Cobain at a church as well as the public memorial at Seattle Center, both scheduled at the same time out of concern that fans or the media might try to go to the private service. After it was over, Susan felt “the same sort of overwhelming compassion” for Courtney Love as she did for Yoko Ono after the murder of John Lennon. Susan walked up to Love to offer her support. When she was about ten feet away, Love saw her approaching, turned her back, and walked away.6

“I saw all the suffering that Kurt Cobain went through,” Layne would recall. “I didn’t know him real well, but I just saw this real vibrant person turn into a real shy, timid, withdrawn, introverted person who could hardly get a hello out.”7 Layne’s private views were skeptical of the official story. “Layne was a little more vocal on the Kurt issue, because he never thought Kurt would take his own life,” Jim Elmer said. “He mentioned that multiple times, about that issue, that he never did believe it. And so this was not right after he died, this was years after, too. He still remembered that and just thought that was not characteristic of Kurt.”

A few weeks after Cobain’s death, Jim Elmer got a call from Courtney Love. She had been trying to get ahold of Layne and somehow got Elmer’s phone number. According to him, they spoke twice. “The gist of the conversation was that she was looking for Layne because she knew Layne and Kurt were friends and wanted to find out what had happened the last few days, that she intimated to me that she was not happy with the outcome that it was a suicide. She thought there was more to it than that, and she wanted to chase down Layne and have a discussion with him.”

Love was probably assuming that because Cobain and Layne ran in the same social circles—musicians, drug users, and drug dealers—he might have seen Cobain or have some knowledge of his final days. Whether Layne saw Cobain during his final days is not known, but there is evidence of at least one mutual drug connection.

Cobain confidant Rene Navarette told Nirvana biographer Everett True about an encounter with some of Seattle’s highest-profile musicians in the spring of 1993, who all coincidentally found themselves at the same place at the same time trying to procure drugs. “When Courtney went to England, that was the first time me, Kurt, Dylan [Carlson, guitarist from the band Earth], and Cali [DeWitt, Frances Bean Cobain’s nanny] had a few days to mess around without her … We had too much fun. We would go into town, walk into a drug dealer’s living room: Kurt, Dylan, Mark Lanegan, and Layne Staley coincidentally walking into the same basement at the same time. It was pretty amazing. Everyone had mutual admiration for each other. Now, looking back on it, there were all these great talented guys who were tainted forever because of their drug use.”8

Tool was performing at KISW’s Rockstock concert held at Kitsap County Fairgrounds on May 28, 1994, when Layne made a surprise appearance and joined them for a performance of “Opiate.” According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Layne “looked sickly and wore a wool ski mask to hide his face.”9

That summer, Alice in Chains had plans to tour with Metallica. They were also on the bill for Woodstock ’94, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the seminal concert festival, scheduled to take place in Saugerties, New York, that August. Layne had just returned from another stint in rehab and had relapsed, while Sean was struggling with a drinking problem.10

Sean later told Rolling Stone that the final straw was when Layne showed up for practice high the day before the start of the Metallica tour. He threw down his sticks and vowed he would never play with Layne again, a sentiment shared by Jerry. Shortly after, Susan issued the following statement: “Alice in Chains has withdrawn from the Metallica summer tour, as well as an appearance at the Woodstock ’94 festival. This decision is due to health problems within the band. Alice in Chains apologizes to their fans and appreciates their support and concern. The band hopes to resolve the situation in privacy. The members look forward to returning to the recording studio in the fall.” The tour was canceled and—according to Rolling Stone—the band broke up for six months. Candlebox got the band’s slots on the Metallica tour and at Woodstock.11

Jimmy Shoaf had made plans to tour with Alice in Chains that summer and had spent some money in anticipation of getting paychecks from the tour. He was sitting on a plane about to take off when a stewardess approached him.

“We’re pulling your bags off. Kevan Wilkins called. He told us not to let you fly.”

“I was like, ‘Shit!’ That was when I learned my lesson: don’t spend your money before you make it,” he recalled.

Metallica weighed in on the Alice in Chains situation during the tour. They would play the opening bars of “Man in the Box” with their front man James Hetfield doing Layne’s opening wail while mockingly rubbing and smacking his left arm in a shooting-up-heroin gesture.

“I can’t tour. I can’t tour,” Hetfield moaned. Drummer Lars Ulrich and lead guitarist Kirk Hammett also made the shooting-up gesture with their arms. Ulrich pressed one of his drumsticks into the vein on the inside of his left arm, so it stuck out like a giant wooden syringe.12

Sean later said of this period, “Nobody was being honest with each other back then. If we had kept going, there was a good chance we would have self-destructed on the road, and we definitely didn’t want that to happen in public.”13 During this hiatus from Alice in Chains, Layne tried to kick heroin again and found another musical outlet for his creativity.

Chapter 19

IN THE LATE SPRING or early summer of 1994, Michelle Ahern-Crane was living in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood. She had heard Layne was living in the area but hadn’t seen him in several years. One night she had a very vivid dream about him.

“I had this epic dream that I was walking around this sixties motel, the kind that every motel room has its own door and you walk on the outside on the railing,” she recalled. “I was walking by all these motel rooms and each door was open; in each room there was a totally different scene going on. I walked by one door and look in and Layne is in the motel room. There’s a kitchenette and there’s a pot on every burner of the stove, they’re boiling over and he was really perplexed and like, ‘Aaah … the stuff’s boiling over!’ Kinda chaotic. I go in and take his hand, I’m like ‘Let’s get out of here.’”

The next thing she remembered was “We’re in this gymnasium running around like kids, just having fun, laughing, running, playing like kids.” At that point, her phone woke her up. It was her aunt, Lisa Ahern Rammell, who had introduced her to Layne several years earlier.

“Guess who I saw last night?”

“Layne.” Michelle correctly guessed.

Ahern Rammell said she had been out with another girl the night before when they saw him. Layne gave the other girl a big hug, thinking she was Michelle, and was embarrassed when he found out it wasn’t. Michelle told her about her dream. After their conversation, Ahern-Crane was walking along Queen Anne Avenue. A car drove by and she noticed the passenger. “I just see these huge blue eyes and I just knew it was him. And I look and it’s like, ‘Whoa! That’s so weird, the dream and my aunt saw him last night, and I think that was him that just drove by.’”

The car pulled over and Layne got out, holding a kitten. She was taken aback by his physical appearance. “He looked really bad. It was pretty shocking because I hadn’t seen him in a long time. It was sad,” she said. He had let his hair grow, and it was his natural brownish-blond color. He had gauze on his hands, which was only partially covered by fingerless gloves. He was wearing a long-sleeve shirt and a leather jacket.

She told him about the dream and mentioned his running into her aunt and how weird all these coincidences were. Layne told her that he and his mother, who was driving the car, were returning from taking the kitten to the vet.

“Hey, do you go to AA meetings?” Layne asked her.

“No, I don’t. I know a lot of people that do. If you want, I could give you somebody’s number, a cool person’s number if you need to do that,” she offered.

“How about I take your number?”

She gave Layne her phone number. While flattered by the attention, she wasn’t attracted to him, fully aware of his drug problem. She thought that maybe because of all the coincidences, that might have been a sign she was supposed to help him. She had the impression Layne was interested in her for companionship, not sex.

Layne began calling her right away. They lived a few blocks from each other and began talking on the phone and hanging out on a regular basis. She would go to Layne’s apartment to watch movies. Although she would often spend the night and they would sleep in his bed, she said nothing sexual ever happened—she never even kissed him.

“His desire to want to spend time with me without wanting anything but some companionship was nice. Being invited into his rather isolated, private world was intriguing, to say the least. That, coupled with a fantasy that he might get over his addiction, or that I could play a part in him getting over his addiction, was intriguing and even exciting. He was a beautiful person under all of that sickness. But I wasn’t delusional, and I wasn’t about to express these thoughts to him because I guess I had decided rather quickly that ‘to hope’ would be ‘to be disappointed.’ So I remained rather ‘cool’ during our time spent together.”1

There were visible signs of his drug problem at home, although Layne never offered her any. In the middle of watching movies, Layne would excuse himself to go to the bathroom and stay in there. “Eventually, he’d come out. We’d hang out, talk, watch movies, and then he’d go back into the bathroom again.”

Layne mentioned the subject of drugs to her twice. During one of the first times she came over, they were watching TV in his bedroom. Layne was sitting on the floor; Ahern-Crane was on the bed. Layne looked up at her and said, “Hey, I want you to know I’m not going to be like this forever. I want to have a normal life, a good life. I want to get married, I want to have kids.”

Ahern-Crane was surprised. “Okay, that’s good,” was her only response. “Of course I hoped he would have a normal, happy life some day. I want that for anyone. But there was no evidence anywhere that suggested he was serious at that moment.”

“I thought what he said was sweet, I was flattered because I knew he was saying for my benefit … It was his way of saying to me, ‘I like you.’ ‘If you hang out for a while, I might be able to kick this with your support.’ ‘Give me a reason to stop doing drugs.’ That is what his words meant—at least to some degree. But how can you take someone so loaded on drugs very seriously? He may have thought that in that moment, and he may have considered it from time to time—but the fact is, just as quickly, he was back in the bathroom trying to find a vein.”

“I found his statement to be simultaneously sweet, flattering, hopeful, and manipulating at the same time.” The second time also happened at his apartment. He invited her into the bathroom, where his music equipment was set up. She walked in and saw Layne sitting on the windowsill. He didn’t say anything, and the two started making small talk. She noticed several plastic bags on a table. She didn’t know what they were at the time, but years later, with the benefit of hindsight, she realized they were full of heroin.

“I think he invited me back there to see if maybe I wanted to get loaded, but he didn’t offer it,” she recalled. “When he called me into that room and the drugs were in there, I almost feel like that was a test that I passed.”

Sometimes Layne would play her Mad Season songs he was working on. When they went out, sometimes it was to watch a show by Johnny Bacolas’s band Second Coming. When Ahern-Crane slept over, she remembers hearing knocking on the door at random hours. “Hey, who’s here at one o’clock in the morning?” she asked Layne.

“Shhhh … Be quiet, don’t answer it,” he said.

“Layne said it could have been Demri needing a place to crash or wanting to get high. It could have been fans coming over with drugs,” she explained.

According to Johnny Bacolas, Demri was a semiregular visitor at the house. He declined to comment on any specifics of what happened between them during this period but described their relationship as on-again, off-again.

Though Ahern-Crane got a small glimpse of his drug use during this period, Layne’s friend Ron Holt heard and saw more, because of their previous friendship and because Holt was also using heroin at the time. They had a mutual dealer. Holt was a regular, but Layne got VIP treatment. Sometimes the dealer wouldn’t let Holt up. One time he heard Layne was at the dealer’s house. Holt sent word upstairs: “Tell him that Ron Holt’s here.” Layne told him to come up, gave him a big hug, and told the dealer Holt was to be respected. “Fucking Ron doesn’t wait,” he said. The two also had candid discussions about their drug habits, which Holt called “junkie talk.” Layne told Holt he was using three grams of heroin a day. Based on that, in addition to roughly the same amount of crack he was using, Holt estimated Layne was spending between $250 and $400 a day on drugs.

“Every time I saw Layne, I always told him how proud I was of him, and he always treated me like an authority figure. He always treated me like my work meant something,” Holt said. He tried to take advantage of that respect to convince him to kick drugs. “We were having a candid talk about heroin and stuff. I was on methadone at the time, and I was trying to talk him into stopping. He had this thing where he said if I wasn’t meant to be one, I wouldn’t be one.

“He got mad at me. ‘Don’t bring heroin up. If you’re not going to accept it, don’t try to talk to me about it. Don’t try to talk me out of it.’ That was a bummer to me.”

While tens of thousands of fans were rocking out at Woodstock ’94 in Saugerties, New York—a show Alice in Chains was supposed to perform at and at which, instead, Jerry joined Primus onstage for “Harold of the Rocks”—Layne went on a camping trip near Winthrop, a small town in central Washington. His goal for the trip: to kick heroin. Also on the trip were Johnny Bacolas and two other friends, Alex Hart and Ian Dalrimper. He would try and detox on his own in the wilderness.

“He was using alcohol to help him with the withdrawal symptoms. During that trip, he was very depressed. I’m sure it had a lot to do with the withdrawal, because he didn’t bring any heroin with him,” Bacolas explained. While on a beach along Lake Chelan at two in the morning, Layne broke down in tears, crying on Bacolas’s shoulder.

“I need help. Would you consider moving in with me and helping me with this? I don’t trust anyone, and I can’t do this on my own,” Layne told Bacolas.

There was a bigger issue: Layne was suicidal. Bacolas said Layne wanted to jump off a nearby bridge. “He was at a very low point and dope-sick. He wanted to die at that time. I believed him.”

Shortly after, Layne and Bacolas met up with Hart and Dalrimper and went on a late-night run to a Safeway. “I remember some kid was giving [Layne] shit in the Safeway,” Bacolas recalls. “And Layne just fucking hauls off and clocks the guy.” Layne’s friends grabbed him and ran out of the store before anyone called the police. They wound up driving into a parking lot packed with partying kids. With Layne riding shotgun, Bacolas parked the car next to a pickup truck that was blasting “No Excuses.” Bacolas doesn’t know if this was coincidental or not—there may have been gossip that Layne was in the area. There were three or four kids in the pickup, and another dozen or so standing around nearby gawking at the celebrity in their midst. “They were cranking the song, and everyone’s like ‘No way, that’s not Layne Staley.’” Layne couldn’t resist. “All of the sudden, Layne just starts belting out the chorus of ‘No Excuses’ and nails it,” Bacolas said. “Right when the chorus kicks in, he just belts it, one chorus, and that’s it. It just shut everybody up. There was no question that that’s him now.”

Michelle Ahern-Crane hadn’t heard from Layne in a few days when she got a message on her answering machine. “Hey, sorry I haven’t been in touch. I went out of town,” she recalls him saying. “I’ll see you as soon as I get back.” Layne didn’t tell her what he was doing or where he was, but Ahern-Crane may have had some idea. “I’m kind of guessing maybe it was some attempt at kicking or something along those lines.” It’s possible the call happened during this camping trip.

Not long after, Bacolas moved in with Layne. Although he moved in to help him clean up, any pretense of that went out the window once he was there. Layne set two conditions for living with him: no interventions and no listening to Alice in Chains. “I think the thinking was he wanted to be in control of it,” Bacolas said. “He definitely liked control. His attitude was ‘No one’s going to force me to do anything. Don’t open the door to anybody that wants to. I’m not down with that.’ To me, that’s more like, ‘I’m not ready to quit. Don’t even try and force me.’”

Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready had been drinking so much that the issue began to come up during band meetings. Pearl Jam performed three songs on the April 16, 1994, edition of Saturday Night Live, closing their set with “Daughter.” The next morning, Stone Gossard asked him, “What’d you think of ‘Daughter’?” McCready didn’t even remember playing the song—he had blacked out on a live, nationally televised program. McCready eventually checked in to the Hazelden clinic in Minnesota, where he met blues bassist John Baker Saunders.2

John Baker Saunders, Jr., was the second of three children. His younger sister Henrietta described him as “the one who had the heart in the family.” He was a musician from an early age, according to his older brother Joseph, having sung in an Episcopal church choir and taken guitar lessons in fifth grade. He learned to play “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” on an acoustic guitar.3

At the time, he was listening to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks. “I liked to listen to records, so I moved around to a lot of different places and music kind of gave me some kind of continuity,” Baker said during a 1995 interview for the EMP’s oral history project. Baker attended the Fay School in Southborough, Massachusetts, from seventh through ninth grades. He said, “I just didn’t do my homework, didn’t give a fuck about it, and I played my guitar and listened to the radio a lot, all night long.”

His “one great memory” of boarding school was lying on his back with headphones on as he listened to Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” for the first time while looking at the sky. “I hadn’t really taken any drugs yet, but that was a heavy experience because I had been listening to John Wesley Harding for a long time—it’s one of my favorite albums by [Bob Dylan], and when I heard Hendrix doing that song, it was great.”

During this period, Baker, his brother Joseph, and a friend saw Hendrix perform at Philharmonic Hall in New York City. According to Baker, “Hendrix came out, but he didn’t just come out, first all you heard were like noises coming from backstage as he like made noises with his guitar and he did that most of the night, he played ‘Wild Thing’ and some other things but it wasn’t like he ran through the hit songs on his album, he just started making noises, worked some songs into that and walked off making noises, too, and it went a little over my head.”4

Joseph remembers that show well. In terms of its impact on Baker, he said, “[Baker] always was a creative musician. His rock was always anchored in the hardcore blues, much like the Rolling Stones. His gods were the black blues players. That’s where he got his inspiration. Hendrix’s foundation was that place, too.” He heard that after Baker moved to Seattle years later, he met Noel Redding, Hendrix’s original bassist.

By high school, Baker switched to bass. When he was in tenth grade, the family moved to Kenilworth, a suburb of Chicago. As he got older, Henrietta said Baker “naturally would be protective of the vulnerable people,” and she felt he was always looking out for her. It was during this period he developed an interest in the Chicago blues scene. Baker and Joseph would go into the city and see Muddy Waters perform.

Joseph doesn’t know exactly when or how Baker’s heroin use started but remembers he found out about it when Baker was still in high school, when he was roughly seventeen or eighteen years old. He noted the history of alcoholism in the family, so Baker might have had genetics working against him. What Joseph didn’t know at the time—Baker didn’t tell his family about this until well into adulthood—was that Baker had been sexually abused by a male neighbor when he was about eight years old. “I think that had something to do with his drug abuse,” Joseph said.

Baker graduated from New Trier Township High School in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1973. He took a few courses at Oakton Community College but didn’t finish. He moved to Chicago and played with blues musicians at local venues. Baker struggled with substance abuse and efforts to get clean. At one point, he went out to San Francisco, where Joseph was in college, and took classes and enrolled in a recovery program. According to Joseph, “I got so that I could identify immediately if he was on heroin.”

He went to rehab several times at Hazelden. While living in Minneapolis, he played with a local blues group named Lamont Cranston. Although Baker was a drug addict, he attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings because it “was the only program that worked to keep him sober,” Joseph said. He never told anyone he was a heroin addict. He told his brother that the people at Narcotics Anonymous meetings were just trying to network and sell drugs to each other but that “the old alcoholics were the guys who really had figured it out.”

When they first met, McCready remembers Baker—who would have been thirty-nine or forty years old at the time—had a bumper sticker on his car that read WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS A FAILURE TO GIVE A SHIT!, which he called “completely hilarious” but also “an insight into a dark, intelligent, and irreverent mind.” The initial spark for Mad Season was in Hazelden. “We had talked about doing a project together while we were there, we kicked around the idea.”5

Baker took McCready to AA meetings, Joseph said, adding that “they were supporting each other trying to develop a sober lifestyle.” At some point after this, Baker went out to Seattle with McCready and traveled with him on a few Pearl Jam tours. After relocating to Seattle, McCready took Baker to Bass Northwest, Evan Sheeley’s specialty bass store near Pioneer Square, to buy whatever gear and instruments he wanted. McCready picked up the bill. “It was a nice thing for Mike to do. Of course, at the time, Pearl Jam had definitely done well for themselves, so Mike was able to spend the money without thinking about it,” Sheeley said.

McCready contacted Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin, telling him he wanted to form a band. Martin accepted the invitation because the Trees were inactive. McCready said he began calling Layne while still in rehab to see if he was interested in working together.6

McCready had an agenda. It was his hope that playing with sober musicians would encourage Layne to clean up. “I was under the mistaken theory I could help him out,” McCready told Charles R. Cross after Layne’s death. “I wanted to lead by example.”7

Around this same period, Johnny Bacolas had moved in with Layne, and they started getting phone calls from McCready, who said he had songs he wanted to run by Layne. McCready eventually just started showing up at their place, calling Bacolas in advance.

“Layne’s asleep right now,” Bacolas would respond.

“I’ll hang out until he wakes up.”

McCready would hang out in the living room, waiting for Layne to wake up, which was typically at around four or five o’clock in the afternoon. Layne would stay up all night and go to sleep at seven or eight o’clock in the morning. Bacolas would make a pot of coffee as they waited for Layne to wake up. When Layne was finally up and about, McCready would start talking to him, pick up a guitar, and play him a riff.

In time, McCready started bringing Baker over. “Baker would just sleep. He would come over to the house almost every day because he just lived about a block away. He would come over, and we would make a pot of coffee. He’d drink like half the pot,” Bacolas said. Within a few minutes, Baker would be passed out on the couch, snoring. Layne was not happy about the slumbering visitor. “Dude, next time Baker comes over, we got to have a rule where he can’t just sit here and sleep all the time because I have to tiptoe around the house all the time and it pisses me off,” he said.

According to McCready, “The band came together after we had jammed together two or three times and decided to do a gig. We did a show at the Crocodile Café, just making up shit as we went along.”8 Mad Season played their first show at the Crocodile Café on October 12, 1994.9 For that performance, they used the name the Gacy Bunch, a reference to the serial killer John Wayne Gacy and the TV show The Brady Bunch. According to a bootleg recording of the show, the set consisted of early versions of songs that would appear on Above, in instrumental form or without fully developed lyrics, and an instrumental cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).”10

McCready floated the idea of putting together a demo, but Layne raised the stakes and said, “Forget doing a demo, let’s do an album.” At the same time, McCready realized the negative connotations of having a name like the Gacy Bunch. “That was a joke that was funny for about five minutes, and when the sixth minute hit, it wasn’t funny anymore,” McCready explained.11 When the name change became necessary, they settled on Mad Season. “A lot of hallucinogenic mushrooms grow in the area around Surrey, England, where we mixed the first Pearl Jam album, and the people there call the time when they come up the ‘Mad Season’ because people are wandering around mad, picking mushrooms, half out of their minds,” McCready explained. “That term has always stuck in my mind, and I relate that to my past years, the seasons of drinking and drug abuse.”12

Krisha Augerot, who was working for Pearl Jam manager Kelly Curtis at the time, was assigned to oversee the Mad Season project. As far as she knew, it was “definitely a side project,” with no plans to do anything bigger than play shows around Seattle.

The band went into Bad Animals Studios with Pearl Jam’s soundman, Brett Eliason, producing and engineering, with Sam Hofstedt assisting him. From what Hofstedt recalls, Layne was still working on his lyrics and vocal parts by the time it came to actually recording. “He would still go into the studio by himself, have no one else around at all. And he could operate the tape machine and just do a little experiment without feeling anybody was listening to him or watching him. And he would go in and just, like, work something out.” When Layne was actually recording his vocals, the only other person in the studio was Eliason, who told Mark Yarm:

I produced, recorded, and mixed the Mad Season album. Layne was not healthy. Heavy, heavy drug use. Such a sweet guy, such an amazing talent. One of the best singers I’ve ever recorded. He could just stand out there and light it up. The problem was getting him there. We were in cahoots with his roommate, who’d help get Layne off the couch and point him in our direction.

Layne would show up and he’d go back to the bathroom and be doing dope back there and you’d wait for hours before he was ready to come back out. He was pretty open about it. I asked him, “Why? Why are you doing this to yourself?” He said, “I’m either going to drink or I’m going to do dope, and drinking is harder on me.”13

Hofstedt agreed with Eliason’s account. Hofstedt, who would work on the Alice in Chains album a year later, says Layne said something similar during the making of that album, words to the effect of “I’m gonna be on something. I drink a lot and I don’t like the way the drinking affects me.” He added, “I sort of recall him—I’m not certain of his exact words, but he didn’t like [that] drinking kind of made him doughy.”

Layne was in the studio lounge reading a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. Barrett Martin read it a few years earlier and began talking with Layne about what it meant to be an artist and have a spiritual message.14 Layne put the book into song, making reference to Gibran’s work in the lyrics. This became “River of Deceit.”

Despite Layne’s no-interventions rule, at some point McCready and Bacolas made plans to have Lowell—a counselor from Hazelden and friend of McCready’s—fly in from Minneapolis to come over and talk to Layne. Layne had previously met him, and according to Bacolas he “really respected him and just really liked the guy. [He was] someone Layne would actually listen to.” Layne agreed to check in to Hazelden, but he returned to Seattle after a few days. He startled Bacolas, who came home from a gig at two or three o’clock in the morning and, hearing noises from Layne’s room, thought a burglar had broken in. He walked in and saw Layne, then asked him what he was doing back.

“I just came back. It wasn’t for me,” he responded.

Nancy Layne McCallum alleged in a lawsuit that at one point in the mid-1990s, Layne told her he was “contemplating withdrawing from the band to address his health issues, but that Susan Silver, the band’s manager, was pushing back by reminding him that there were 40 people on the payroll counting on him to write and perform.”

She further alleged in the lawsuit that “during an ‘intervention’ with Mr. Staley, Ms. McCallum questioned the need for her son to continue to write, perform and tour with the band: ‘Why couldn’t the band audition for a replacement lead singer?’ In response, Ms. Silver told Ms. McCallum, ‘Nancy, you don’t understand; Layne IS Alice in Chains.”15

In mid-September, Michelle Ahern-Crane invited Layne to her twenty-fifth birthday party, thinking he wouldn’t show up. About a dozen friends of hers, as well as her on-again, off-again ex-boyfriend, The Accüsed bassist Alex Sibbald, were at the rooftop bar of the Canlis Hotel in downtown Seattle. Ahern-Crane saw Johnny Bacolas walk into the bar. “Layne’s here. He’s downstairs in the bathroom. He’ll be up in a minute,” he told her.

Ahern-Crane knew this was not going to go well, with Layne or with Sibbald. “I’m like, ‘Oh, God … How am I going to explain this to my sort of ex-boyfriend that I’m still close with?’” She told Sibbald she didn’t think Layne would come when she invited him as Layne walked in wearing a lavender-colored suit with a Colonel Sanders–style string tie and a cane. He gave her a handwritten letter, in which he wished her a happy birthday and said that her birthday letter to him was his favorite gift: “I’ve never felt better or more accepted and loved by someone as I did by you in your letter, at that moment, and every time I read it, I feel that same wonderful moment,” he wrote.

When she finished the letter, it dawned on her—“Oh my God! He thinks we’re dating!”

“I wanted to like him, but I don’t know if he’s got HIV; I don’t know what the deal is. I’m not going to get involved with that. But I guess that I was hoping foolishly that I could make a difference and inspire some sobriety or something and then maybe I would have tried dating him if he had cleaned up, because I was definitely fond of him. He thought we were, and then on my birthday he realized we were not.”

Ahern-Crane vaguely remembers writing the letter for Layne’s birthday, which would have been about three weeks before. She described it as “an inspirational note” in which she said she could see he was a sweet person deep down inside, and wouldn’t it be great if that person came out more. She also recalls writing that she felt he was special, and because of that he shouldn’t squander it. “I guess this meant a lot to him at the time because I think at this point no one was saying anything superpositive to him and meaning it. Or maybe it meant something to him (as he said it did in his birthday letter back to me later) because I was typically so reserved and emotionally cool—it may have been refreshing to him that I said ANYTHING positive about my feelings or perception of him,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Layne walked in, saw what was going on and that she was with Sibbald, and, according to Ahern-Crane, “His face kind of fell.” She excused herself to talk to Layne and try to make him feel welcome. Coming to the party was “totally humiliating for him, and I felt so bad and it was just a terrible thing. He got his feelings hurt.” Layne and Bacolas took off shortly after. Bacolas vaguely recalls going to this party but doesn’t remember any specific details. He did not dispute Ahern-Crane’s account.

Within a day or two after the party, Ahern-Crane went over to Layne’s apartment to pick up some things she had left. It was a bad sign when Layne wouldn’t let her inside. He brought her things to the door, and they spoke on the porch. Ahern-Crane didn’t mention the party. She decided to address his drug use.

“I think it’s really strange how you could clearly have a problem, and your friends and all these people that are kind of hanging around, no one talks about it. You’re in trouble. You clearly have a problem, you’re clearly in trouble. None of your so-called friends want to talk about it and it makes me really sad.”

Layne got defensive. Ahern-Crane described his response as “snotty,” and recounts that he said words to the effect of “If I make you sad, maybe you shouldn’t see me.” She got her stuff and left. Looking back on it years later, she wrote, “The fact of the matter is, that last day, when I said his drug use was sad to watch, he interpreted that as my disapproval of him. Or he thought it meant I didn’t like him.”

Mad Season closed out 1994 with a headlining show at RKCNDY on New Year’s Eve, with Second Coming opening for them. On January 8, 1995, Eddie Vedder hosted “Self Pollution Radio,” a series of live performances and interviews with Seattle musicians that took place in the basement of his house and was broadcast live by a satellite truck parked outside. Mad Season was on the bill and performed “Lifeless Dead” and “I Don’t Know Anything.”16

During this 1994–95 period, Layne would often join Second Coming onstage at local gigs to sing vocals on “It’s Coming After,” with Bacolas estimating the count at fifteen to twenty shows.17 According to James Bergstrom, all this happened in the weeks and months after Alice in Chains pulled out of their touring commitments because of an unidentified band member’s health issues. The explanation given for the tour cancellation indicated “that Layne was in deep water with his addiction, unhealthy and out of it,” Bergstrom said. Not long after this, Layne took the stage with Second Coming during a show at Under the Rail. MTV News obtained a video of the performance, and Kurt Loder did a story about it. The fact that Layne was performing around Seattle without Alice in Chains raised questions about the reason for the tour cancellation. “There was some controversy in the Alice camp. It was kind of a contradiction with what the press release said,” Bergstrom said.

At the same time, Second Coming was playing local gigs in the Seattle area as a cover band under the name FTA—an acronym for Funding the Album, in reference to their debut album that was in the works. Layne would occasionally come out to FTA shows, take the stage, and sing “Would?” or “Man in the Box.”18 Bergstrom recalls performing “No Excuses” at one show and Layne telling him afterward that it was his first time playing the song live.

By the spring of 1995, Bacolas decided to move out. “It was a culmination of everything. To me, it got to a point where it was just too depressing, too much.” Layne would leave handwritten letters to Bacolas on his bed. In one of them, he wrote words to the effect of how there was a black cloud over their house.19 Bacolas spoke to Layne’s mother, who told him, “You know you’re not helping him; you’re enabling him.” Bacolas sat down with Layne in the living room and told him, “I can’t do this anymore.” Bacolas isn’t sure how exactly Layne felt about it but thinks he was okay with his decision and understood it. The day Bacolas moved out was the last time he saw Layne.

At around the same time all this was going on, Jerry was quietly making moves in an effort to get Alice in Chains to regroup.

Chapter 20

ALICE IN CHAINS’S SELF-TITLED third album traces its beginnings to the 1994–95 period when the band was on hiatus and was originally meant to be a Jerry Cantrell solo album. He invited Scott Rockwell, the drummer for Gruntruck, to jam and record material on his sixteen-track home studio. These jams were recorded by Jerry’s guitar tech, Darrell Peters. Rockwell said, “I was playing drums and he was playing guitar, and we’d record, and then he’d—we’d talk about it a little bit, and then he’d pick up the bass and put on down some bass tracks and stuff … So we worked on like three songs. I think two of them made it on the album.”

After these initial demo recordings, Jerry and Rockwell went into a recording studio. Mike Inez was there, as were Ann and Nancy Wilson, who brought a bagful of wine. “Nancy Wilson steps up, never heard the song before, and just [does] this awesome duet on top of it, on the song. This was preproduction tracks for the [Alice in Chains] album. And I’m just sitting there, just like, ‘This is awesome.’ I’m sitting here playing drums, and there’s Ann and Nancy Wilson over there singing with me.”

One of the songs Rockwell recorded with Jerry eventually became “Again.” Rockwell ran into Sean about a year later and the subject of the song came up during their conversation.

“Dude, I got out of the studio recording this fucking song and all fucking Jerry said is, ‘Play it like McCullum [Rockwell’s surname at the time],’” Sean told him. According to Rockwell, the style of drumming on that song is his, not Sean’s.

Toby Wright got a call asking if he wanted to make another Alice in Chains record. First and foremost, Jerry, Susan, and Wright had to get the other band members on board. Wright went to Jerry’s house to start working on material while Layne was doing Mad Season. The idea was to jolt the other members into making another album once they got word that Wright was in Seattle working with Jerry.1

“Jerry’s mind-set was if it didn’t come out, if the band didn’t want to get involved as Alice, he wanted to put out a solo record. We had the working title of Jerry’s Kids because most musicians call their songs their kids and treat them like kids, very precious. The record was never going to be called that,” Wright explained. Jerry’s plan ultimately worked.

“Frogs” is another song from these early sessions. A week’s worth of studio time was booked at Bear Creek Studios in Woodinville. “By the lake there were these really cool, loud fucking frogs, so we put the mic outside and recorded them. It cost us ten thousand dollars for the week. We got nothing out of it other than those frogs,” Jerry recalled.2

Jerry would later say of these demos, “To be honest, I’m too much of a sentimental fuck; I don’t want to play with another band. I didn’t feel I could put something else out that could top what Alice in Chains could do together.”3

The band booked time at Bad Animals Studio in Seattle, with the idea of writing the new album—which would be titled Alice in Chains but become colloquially known as Tripod, the Dog Record, or the Dog Album for the three-legged dog on the cover—in the studio.4 The idea behind doing it at Bad Animals was proximity and convenience for Layne.

At the same time, the band was isolating itself from the record label. “The third album was when Alice in Chains accomplished their goal of boxing me out. I heard very few demos. They picked Toby Wright, who I brought in once to engineer something for them. I would not have picked Toby Wright. I think he was more of an engineer, and they could have used a full-on producer again,” Nick Terzo told Mark Yarm. “I felt Toby was more of an enabler in a way, too. Because he enabled the label to be shut out. As someone who’s being hired by a record label, I think you have to have better diplomatic skills than that. You’re serving two masters in a way.”5

Asked to comment, Wright said, “That was a very, very political thing. The band even shut out Susan Silver, their manager. I remember being the liaison between Susan and the band. At that point for some reason, the band didn’t want to deal with Nick anymore, and they only wanted to deal with Donnie Ienner and Michele Anthony. That’s who they considered their A&R people. I didn’t create that [dynamic]. That was already created by the band and Nick.”

“You would think that the manager would just walk in and say, ‘Hey, guys, how are you doing?’ That wasn’t happening. They didn’t want that to happen. They wanted me to tell Susan exactly what was going on in the studio, and then her to take it from there, and them not to be bothered by any management or record label or anything. All of that stuff was created by the band themselves. It was never created by me.”

In response to Terzo’s comment calling him an enabler, Wright said, “I am an enabler in the fact that I enable creativity in my artists, whatever that takes. I just want them to be as creative as they can all be, at all moments in time when they’re in the studio. That’s what I do. That’s what allowed the Dog Record to come out the way it did, because without that you never would have had a Dog Record.”

Wright said they did not have a recording budget or a timetable to finish the album. It was an extraordinary degree of artistic and financial freedom, even as their management and record label were almost entirely shut out of the process. Wright went to New York to meet with Don Ienner, who was not optimistic about the project, and said so openly. “I remember sitting in Donnie Ienner’s office in New York before we started the record and him telling me, ‘Good luck,’ because he didn’t think I’d be able to get a record out of them.”

Sam Hofstedt was a staff engineer at Bad Animals when he was assigned to work as an assistant engineer to Toby Wright. According to him, it was not uncommon for the band and production team to work twelve-hour days and overnight shifts. Wright asked the studio engineer to give Hofstedt a beeper. By this point, Hofstedt said, Layne was “a night owl.”

“The reason I had a beeper was when it got down to we really needed to get the vocals done, that’s what we were really waiting on,” Hofstedt said. “Layne was in, Toby would ask, ‘What time do you want to show up tomorrow, Layne?’ Layne would give a time; he would come down. We sorta learned early on that he wouldn’t always show up at that time,” he said with a laugh. “So we’d sit around the studio until midnight or one and Toby would be trying to call him—no one would answer or something. He’d say, ‘Whatever. Let’s just go home.’”

This was where the beeper system came into play. If Wright was able to get ahold of Layne and he was going to come in, Wright used the beeper to let Hofstedt know to get to the studio. “There’s a good period there where I just wore this beeper. I wouldn’t even know if I was going to be working that day or not,” Hofstedt said. One night he was sitting at home watching TV. At about one in the morning, he was getting in bed when the beeper went off. It was Wright.

Making the record took longer than anticipated. Hofstedt estimates the band went through about seventy rolls of two-inch tape, enough that “probably the tape budget alone is about what most album budgets are nowadays.” Jerry described the recording process as “a whole lot of not thinking about it, and a whole lot of just doing it—and making sure the tape is always rolling.”6

One reason the record took so long was the lyrics, which Layne sometimes wrote in the studio. He also spent time experimenting with different vocal and harmony ideas in privacy before he was ready to record. Layne knew how to operate the tape machine and some of the equipment. Hofstedt would give Layne a handheld microphone, load a track for him, and leave him alone in the control room.

“We’d go back to the lounge so he had privacy so he could experiment without feeling self-conscious, kinda coming up with stuff and ideas. Typically, Layne would work on that, and then once in a while he’d buzz back to the lounge when he needed to lay down another track for these scratch vocals,” Hofstedt said. “I’d run out, arm another track, make sure that the signal was there. ‘There you go, Layne.’ Then back out to the lounge. And then at some point, after he’d done a few takes or tracks, he’d say, ‘All right, you guys—you can come in.’”

At this point, Wright and the other studio technicians would listen to the tape Layne had recorded. Wright would offer his feedback, and then they would set up so Layne could record his vocals in the booth using a nicer microphone rather than the cuts Layne had recorded himself. But even then, Hofstedt said, once Layne had his ideas worked out, those scratch vocal recordings would have been good enough for the album.

According to Hofstedt, Layne’s drug use was not affecting his performance in the studio. “When he was ready to sing, he was ready to sing. And he took very little time to get the vocals.” Wright concurs, “When it was game time, he worked. It might have taken him a while to get there, but he got there.” However, it was obvious he had a problem. Hofstedt said, “It seemed apparent to me he was using, because when you go to lock yourself in the bathroom for a while, it’s not because you really like the bathroom.”

For “Grind,” Wright distorted Layne’s vocals on the master tape by having him sing through a Turner Crystal microphone from 1932 that he bought at a pawnshop for ten dollars. The song was Jerry’s angry response to the rumors of the time. Layne had found out through the Internet that he was dead or had AIDS. There were rumors he had had fingers or limbs amputated because of his drug use. Gillian Gaar, an editor at The Rocket, speculated that some of the rumors got started from people who saw Layne out and about, made assumptions, said something, and the stories spread. “You could see someone saying, ‘God, he was so wasted, he looked like the kinda guy that would have AIDS,’ and so then a person hears that and says, ‘Oh, he has AIDS,’” Gaar said. “So then it might just be a misperception and then a mishearing.”7

Layne and Toby Wright were in the studio at 6:00 A.M. when Don Ienner and Michele Anthony called from New York to congratulate Layne: Above had been certified gold. Then they turned on the pressure: they told Layne he had nine days to finish the record. “At that point, we had taken a lot of time. I don’t remember the amount of time, but we had taken a lot of time,” Wright said. “It might have been feeling like it was excessive, but in the interim there were a lot of things, a lot of drama happened, a lot of stuff stopping us from working every day and so forth.” Layne wrote this incident into the lyrics of “Sludge Factory”: “Call me up congratulations ain’t the real why / There’s no pressure besides brilliance let’s say by day nine / Corporate ignorance lets me control time / By the way, by the way.”

“That song is about them,” Wright said. “He was a little pissed off that they told him that he had nine days to finish this record, so he subsequently wrote about that.”

Layne had finished recording the scratch vocals for “Again” when he called Wright and Hofstedt into the control room. They listened and noticed the song ended with a “Toot, toot!” backing vocal over the final bars.

“That’s funny. You don’t plan on using those, right?” Wright asked, according to Hofstedt’s recollection.

“Yeah, I do. Those are going to be on the record,” Layne responded.

“Toby’s like, ‘Really?’” Hofstedt recalled. “I got the impression he wasn’t terribly thrilled with that idea. But I think Layne just sorta—when he saw his reaction, I got the impression that he decided like, ‘Oh, you don’t like it, huh? Well, guess what? It’s going to be on the record now!’”

Wright confirmed Hofstedt’s account but doesn’t think Layne left the “Toot, toot!” backing vocals in to annoy him. “I don’t know if he was that full of animosity at that point,” he said, laughing. “I was questioning that because I was expecting something completely different. It’s hard to say what his attitude was then, but I do remember, ‘That’s the chorus, dude? Really?’ ‘Yep, that’s it.’ ‘Okay, cool.’ And we went with it and that was the end of the conversation. It stands as it is today.”

For the beginning of “God Am,” Layne recorded himself doing a crack hit from a bong. “He thought it was kind of funny and apropos to the song that he included that in the intro,” Wright said. In all the years they knew each other, this was the only time Wright saw Layne use drugs. Layne was known to be a fan of the band Tool. The studio version of the Tool song “Intolerance” begins with a similar sound, which some have speculated to be a bong hit. Whether Layne meant the opening of “God Am” to be an homage to that, Wright doesn’t know.8

For Sam Hofstedt’s birthday, some of the studio employees went to an erotic bakery and bought him a cake shaped like a naked woman. After eating a few pieces, Hofstedt left the cake out in the lounge for anyone to eat. “I swear to God, it was in there for like a month, and it looked the same as it did a month later. There was a couple of pieces cut out of it after the first day or two, and then it just sat there.”

While this was going on, Layne was working on “Nothin’ Song.” Hofstedt had the impression Layne was tired of writing lyrics and was saying whatever came off the top of his head. One of the lyrics in the song was, “Back inside, Sam, throw away your cake.” Wright agreed with Hofstedt’s assessment. “He was probably pretty tapped out by that point. He was probably just picking stuff out and making it work.”

The sessions were briefly interrupted for a few days so Johnny Cash could record a cover of Willie Nelson’s “Time of the Preacher” for the Twisted Willie tribute album. Cash was backed by a grunge supergroup consisting of Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil, Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, and Sean on drums. Jerry also recorded a cover of “I’ve Seen All This World I Care to See” for the same album.

On April 29, 1995, the band and production staff took the night off to see Layne perform with Mad Season at the Moore Theatre. Duncan Sharp was hired to film the performance at the last minute. Originally, Sharp was told they wanted to shoot only two songs for music videos, but Sharp filmed as much of the show as he could—enough for a forty-five-minute home video. Brett Eliason was present to record the audio.

The people hired to do the remote recording left their post to go across the street for beers, thinking the show was over after the main set. As a result, no one was in place for the start of the encore, and thus the beginning of “X-Ray Mind” is missing from the recording, which Eliason was not happy about. The mistake was covered with a fade-up. Despite technical issues and limited resources, Live at the Moore was released on home video. This was Mad Season’s final performance. According to Joseph H. Saunders, his brother told him there were talks at one point for the band to perform on Saturday Night Live, but it never happened.

Susan would visit the studio to speak with Wright and the band. According to Hofstedt, “Because they were in here for a while, I think at times she was kinda trying to gently prod them to get the record done, without being too obviously prodding.” Despite the band’s decision to shut her out of the production process, Wright spoke very highly of her and her role in their career. “Susan is an amazing person, period. I think that without her, that record would have never been made.” It should also be noted that, two decades later, she still remains their manager.

Susan described the making of Alice in Chains to Greg Prato as “really painful.” She said, “It took eight or nine months—hours and hours of waiting for Layne to come out of the bathroom. Days of waiting for him to show up at the studio. And through all those last years, he and I were really close. I kept telling him, ‘You don’t have to do this. You have enough money to go and have a quiet life if that’s what you want,’ with his longtime girlfriend, Demri. ‘Just go and do what makes you happy—don’t do this if this is what’s perpetuating your addiction.’”

Susan said it was “horrifying” to see Layne in that condition and that while he was sweet and cognizant, he would fall asleep in a meeting. Production on the album was stopped “many times,” in her words, and that it was “tearing everybody to shreds.”9

Wright called her description “pretty accurate.” He further elaborated: “We talked about stopping the sessions several times, yeah. Obviously, we didn’t stop it. Did I go home for a week? I might have gone home for a week at one point. It was an extremely emotional time in everybody involved’s life.”

Toby Wright was called into Susan’s office for a conference call with Don Ienner and Michele Anthony. Wright was given an ultimatum, which he was to deliver to Layne: start showing up for work every day or production will shut down. “I had to have the conversation with Layne. I just remember I had to tell him if he didn’t step up to the plate and come in to the studio every day at a respectable time that I was being forced to go home and that this record wouldn’t see the light of day,” Wright said. Layne became “very emotional” and started crying.

By the time the band finished, they had a dozen songs for Alice in Chains. Hofstedt and Wright don’t remember the exact number of songs that were tracked and recorded, but think it was between twenty and thirty. “They were writing in the studio. The things that Layne would feel, he would write. The tracks that he didn’t feel, he just passed on and went to the next one,” Wright said. He doesn’t know what—if anything—became of the extra songs, which were in instrumental form. “They went to Columbia, and they’re probably sitting in their vaults somewhere.” Wright doesn’t think any of these outtakes resurfaced on Jerry’s solo albums.

Rocky Schenck photographed the three-legged dog for the album cover at a playground near downtown Los Angeles on August 23, 1995. The dog on the cover was “officially in memory of a dog which chased [Sean] during boyhood paper-route duty,” according to the Music Bank liner notes.

“I did a casting for three-legged dogs for the shoot, and the band ended up choosing a fax of one of the submitted photos as the cover shot. Eventually, the photos we shot at the playground appeared in [the box set] Music Bank,” Schenck wrote.

On September 24, Schenck flew up to Seattle to photograph the band and film what was originally intended to be a video press kit, which became something hilariously different: The Nona Tapes. Schenck called this “one of my absolute favorite experiences with Alice.” What began as a promo piece evolved into a Spinal Tap–style mockumentary showing how the band members spent their free time when they weren’t being rock stars. Schenck talked with each band member about how he wanted to be portrayed. Jerry is shown shoveling manure at a horse stable when he’s approached by an interviewer asking about the new Alice in Chains album. Jerry told Schenck’s producer Katherine Shaw he’s been working at the stable “since that music thing went sour a few years back” but that “Sony let us do another record, so I’m going back to that rock-and-roll thing.” Jerry also dressed in drag and played Nona Weissbaum, the title character, who is an aspiring journalist seeking Seattle rock stars for a story.

While cruising around Seattle, Nona stumbles onto Sean, who is standing on a corner, and she forces him into the car. Appropriately enough for his comedic nature, Sean is shown in his downtime dressed in a Bozo the Clown–style costume and rubber nose. Sean was later filmed at a bar drinking shots in full clown gear.

Mike told Nona he joined the band because they kidnapped his family and were holding his grandmother hostage until he did a few albums and tours with them. He is later shown at a hairdresser’s salon, with his hair in curling irons. He said since he read in a magazine that his band broke up, he stopped going to rehearsals and was running a hot dog cart on First Avenue.

Then it was Layne’s turn. Nona’s car is parked in an alley when they see him going through a Dumpster. According to Schenck, this setup was Layne’s idea. It was also Layne’s idea to have his lip and mouth movements not match up to the responses to the interview questions. He would say one thing during the on-camera portion of the interview and later overdub the video with an audio recording to an entirely different question.

There was a scary moment during filming in which a soundman almost died. They had spent several hours driving around in a convertible, with Schenck and his cinematographer in the front seat and the soundman in the trunk. When they stopped filming, Schenck noticed the soundman wasn’t responding to any of his questions. They opened the trunk and discovered he had passed out from inhaling carbon monoxide fumes.

“We ended up in a bar, quite drunk and having a great time. By that time, it was just me and my camera and the band. Sean, still in his Bozo outfit, stumbled out of the bar with a piece of toilet paper strategically attached to his foot as I followed him out onto the street. The evening continued to get wilder, but I decided that we had enough film for the project and stopped shooting.”10

On one of his trips to Seattle, Schenck went to Layne’s home with another band member and waited outside, but he never came out. As he was waiting, he wrote, “I experienced a variety of reactions and emotions—everything from frustration to anger to pity to compassion to empathy. The Layne I knew was such a complex conglomeration of diverse qualities, and I knew that if he had answered that door, I couldn’t have said or done anything that would have helped him or change the course of his life. He was determined to go down the road that he chose for himself, and nobody was going to change that.”

According to Schenck, all four band members could have been actors if they wanted to. He mentioned this idea to a few casting director friends, but nothing ever became of it. He also directed the video for “Grind,” which was shot at Hollywood National Studios on October 8–9, 1995, with the animated sequences filmed from October 11–21. “This was not an easy shoot. Layne was not in great shape during this period, and it was difficult to get him to come to the set to film his scenes. But, again, when he finally showed up, he was mesmerizing and unforgettable. This would be the last time I would see him.”

Alice in Chains was released on November 3, 1995, and, like its predecessor, it debuted in the number 1 position on the Billboard charts. Rolling Stone’s associate editor, Jon Wiederhorn, gave the album four stars in his review for the magazine.11 Not long after his review of the album, Wiederhorn was approached by Keith Mohrer, then the editor in chief of the magazine, and asked if he wanted to write a cover story about Alice in Chains, an assignment Wiederhorn accepted.

A lunch was arranged with Susan at the China Grill restaurant in New York City to discuss the story and lay out ground rules. Representing Rolling Stone were Wiederhorn, Mohrer, and Sid Holt, the managing editor. The lunch meeting gave Susan an opportunity to raise her concerns and ask any questions about the story. Most of the conversation focused on logistics—when and where the band members would be available for interviews while Wiederhorn was in Seattle. “It was kind of making sure we would have enough material to write a full-fledged cover story, and it wasn’t going to be an hour and a half in a conference room,” Wiederhorn said. One factor working in Wiederhorn’s favor was that the band had read and liked his review of Alice in Chains. He flew to Seattle in late November or early December, where he spent three days getting material for the story.

“One day it was sort of the ‘get to know you’ day, and we wanted to do something kind of quirky,” Wiederhorn recalled. Sean suggested playing Whirlyball—a game that combines elements of basketball, bumper cars, and lacrosse. Wiederhorn and the band went to an Italian restaurant after the game for the first formal Q&A. Wiederhorn noticed when Layne came back from the bathroom, he had not put his gloves back on, exposing “red, round puncture marks from the wrist to the knuckles of his left hand.”12

Wiederhorn spent several hours interviewing the band members as a group and individually. Sean drove Wiederhorn to Jerry’s house outside Seattle for their one-on-one interview. Along the way, Wiederhorn and Sean smoked a joint. Sean was open about the tensions that led to the withdrawal from the Metallica tour and the breakup in the summer of 1994. “Sean struck me as a guy who was sticking up for his bandmates. If I asked him any questions—I did ask him questions about the inability to tour or the frustrations of dealing with chemical dependencies or whatnot—he said, ‘Hey, none of us are perfect. None of us were free from blame in any of those departments,’” Wiederhorn said. “It was clear why they couldn’t tour, but they didn’t talk about it in specific terms and didn’t express any resentments toward Layne.”

Wiederhorn asked Layne about his heroin addiction, which he wouldn’t acknowledge was still a problem. Layne gave a candid assessment of his drug use: “I wrote about drugs, and I didn’t think I was being unsafe or careless by writing about them. Here’s how my thinking pattern went: When I tried drugs, they were fucking great, and they worked for me for years, and now they’re turning against me—and now I’m walking through hell, and this sucks. I didn’t want my fans to think that heroin was cool. But then I’ve had fans come up to me and give me the thumbs-up, telling me they’re high. That’s exactly what I didn’t want to happen.”13

Wiederhorn worked on the story over Christmas break. Rolling Stone sent a photographer to shoot the band. In the days and weeks after his trip to Seattle, Wiederhorn repeatedly contacted the band’s management and record label to set up a phone call with Layne to ask a few follow-up questions. Both management and the record label repeatedly assured Wiederhorn that Layne would call him, but it seemed the call would never come.

Wiederhorn was in bed when the phone rang at three or four o’clock in the morning. Wiederhorn groggily reached over and picked up. A familiar voice spoke. “Hey, this is Layne.” Then, possibly realizing the three-hour time difference between Seattle and New York, he asked, “Oh, did I wake you?”

“Um … yeah. It’s four in the morning,” Wiederhorn responded.

“Oh, that’s cool, man. Let’s just do it tomorrow. Go back to sleep. I’m getting ready to do what you were doing anyway.”

Wiederhorn doubted that. He had Layne on the phone and wanted to finish the interview. “No, no, let’s just finish this up now. It’s cool.”

“No, no, it’s fine, man. I’m so sorry I woke you up. Really, I’ll call you tomorrow,” Layne said, and hung up the phone. Wiederhorn never heard from him again.

“I’m sure he had been hounded on his end to make that phone call,” Wiederhorn said. “I don’t know if he made it solely, intentionally figuring I wouldn’t be able to do an interview at that time and that was his out, or he didn’t have any concept of what time it was and just saw a note perhaps on his desk to make the call and just started the phone call with me.”

The magazine hit newsstands in late January or early February 1996. Aside from the mentioning of the puncture marks on Layne’s hand, there wasn’t anything particularly controversial about the article. The magazine cover was a different matter.

Rolling Stone put Layne on the cover by himself. The photo shows a bearded Layne looking directly at the camera, with his sunglasses mounted high on his brow near the hairline. The caption on the left side read, “The Needle & the Damage Done: Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley,” a reference to Neil Young’s song of the same name about heroin.

Layne and Demri were shopping in a Seattle grocery store when they saw the issue on the stands. “Layne nearly collapsed” after seeing it, Kathleen Austin said. Demri told Austin that Layne had made a point of telling Rolling Stone, “This needs to be about the band, not about me.” According to Austin, Layne was promised by the magazine that the article would be about the entire band, not just him. “When he saw this, ‘The Needle & the Damage Done’ on the cover of Rolling Stone, his knees buckled, not for himself but for his family and his sister, the people that loved him. This really hurt him.”

The other thing that hurt him, Austin said, was the feeling he was being singled out as the addict in Alice in Chains, while his bandmates had their own issues. “They were all fucked up on something—every single one of them.”

Needless to say, the band and Susan were not happy about it. Wiederhorn was dismayed when he saw the cover. He had nothing to do with it in terms of photo selection or the caption and doesn’t know who was responsible for those decisions. “It does to a certain extent work for the story, but it’s very tabloidish and not usually the high road that Rolling Stone takes with its editorial decisions. ‘To Hell and Back,’ which is what they used as the tagline for the piece, to me made much more sense. But clearly it was an attention grabber.” He says, “I contacted [Susan] to apologize about the headline. I wanted to let her know I had nothing to do with … any decisions that were made in the Art Department or in the Editorial Department as far as headlines, cutlines, even final edits of the piece.”

“Well, you hardly represented two of the band members. That’s not Alice in Chains,” she told him, noting that Mike was barely mentioned and Sean was quoted only a few times. Wiederhorn pointed out the article had been cut down. “I wanted to assure her that my intentions had been purely honorable. I was very dismayed that there wasn’t a full band shot. She asked me a little bit about why I chose to address what I address in the piece as far as the drugs went. I explained that you can’t deal with this band without confronting that issue; it would be just a puff piece. I had an obligation to write about what the band was motivated by, what the band was dealing with, what some of the demons were.”

Chapter 21

JERRY FILMED A BRIEF cameo for Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire, in which he played a copy-store clerk inspired by the title character’s memo. “That’s how you become great, man. You hang your balls out there,” he tells Tom Cruise. The scene was shot at a Kinko’s on Sunset Boulevard in March 1996.

Alex Coletti was a producer at MTV who had been involved with the Unplugged series since its launch in 1989. Seven years later, Coletti and the network had plenty of episodes of Unplugged under their belt, and a commensurate amount of experience. Pearl Jam and Nirvana had already filmed their episodes a few years earlier, demonstrating the viability of grunge in an acoustic format. “They have the songs, they have the depth, they have the emotion where, when you strip it down, you really find something there. There was just something going on,” Coletti said. “There were other grunge bands, but the three that did it—Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Alice—they were the right three from that era. And there was just no denying that this band was going to shine, that Layne’s voice and those songs were going to shine through.”

According to Coletti, it was MTV who approached the band. The negotiations would have been handled by Rick Krim, who was the show’s talent booker. Rehearsals began in Seattle, although it wasn’t without complications. Sean told Greg Prato, “It became more apparent that unless things seriously change, we can’t go out and play to our potential—at this level. We can’t even get through a fucking week and a half without drama and scary shit going on. That’s about right when I mentally started preparing, like, ‘It’s done.’ Same thing with MTV Unplugged—they kept asking if we’d do it. Up to the moment, it was just a nail-biter. Barely any rehearsing at all, guys not showing up—the same shit. Rolled out there and everything worked.”1 Asked about Sean’s comments, Coletti said, “Clearly there was more going on behind the scenes than I was aware of.”

According to Coletti, one factor working in the band’s favor was that they weren’t touring. “If you’re on tour playing arenas and big rock venues every night, to unplug when you’re in that headspace is really hard, to kind of turn it down. But coming from kind of a resting period, they were able to approach it as they were rehearsing this one thing. It wasn’t an add-on to a busy schedule.” A few weeks before the show, Coletti flew to Seattle to meet with the band at their rehearsal space to check on how they were adjusting to the parameters of the show—from instruments and gear to stage positioning.

The band brought in Scott Olson, who had played with Heart, as a second guitarist. Things were looking good from what Coletti saw. Layne energetically walked into the room eating a bucket of chicken and greeted him. “Hey, man!” His hands, covered by fingerless gloves, were greasy from eating the chicken. Rather than shake hands, he gave Coletti an elbow bump. In retrospect, Coletti said of this visit, “I do remember going, ‘Oh, cool. Layne’s in awesome form.’ And then when I heard him sing, it was … already a home run—this was a slam dunk.”

The band traveled to New York City in early April to prepare for the show, which was scheduled for April 10, 1996, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Toby Wright got tapped to produce and sat in during rehearsals at Sony Studios, which, in his words, “went great.”

The show was to take place at what at the time was known as the Majestic Theater, a venue whose appearance reflected the music that would be performed there for the series. An art director had renovated it to intentionally look “kind of decrepit,” Coletti said. “The stagehands told me they shot bullet holes into the upstage walls to create the cracks. But all the flaking paint was beautifully hand-painted and done on purpose. You have this bowl shape, the semicircle amphitheater, and it was perfect for Unplugged. Out of all the bands we’ve done there, it was most perfect for Alice. It had this old-theater feel to it, it had a sense of history, a little sense of gloom to it, just enough moodiness, and it was art-directed beautifully.”

Coletti also got a last-minute request for lava lamps to decorate the stage, which wound up adding a visual element he hadn’t anticipated. “I was getting them so late. Apparently lava lamps need to be heated and turned on for quite a while before they do what they’re meant to do. So if you watch the show, they’re kind of sluggish and not at full potential. So the lava lamps themselves were kind of grungy and just barely moving around. It was kind of fitting, but we didn’t do it on purpose.”

Because Layne had dyed his hair pink, the lighting director tried to match the background to that. As the band was doing sound check and camera rehearsal, the lighting palette was chosen based on each song the lighting director was hearing them play. The fact that the band had a specific set list for that show and provided it to MTV ahead of time helped prepare the lighting.

Coletti would be responsible for producing the televised performance, splitting his time between the production truck outside and the floor, while Wright would be responsible for producing the audio, working from inside the truck and letting the band know what sounded good and what needed to be redone. There was an unforeseen preshow complication: Jerry had eaten a hot dog and gotten food poisoning. A wastebasket was placed next to his stool onstage in case he felt sick during the show. “They were expecting [the performance] to be problematic. Everyone was planning on it being a big clusterfuck,” Biro said. “Because of Layne, because of the shape the band was in, especially when we got there. Jerry was throwing up the whole time. Layne and I were going through withdrawals. It was a really ugly situation.”

Biro had run out of heroin and had someone bring some for him to the show. Layne had brought along his own precooked supply, which he carried in an old glass pill bottle covered by a cork top. According to Biro, “He hadn’t done enough where he was nodding off and drooling, but I was there right before he went on, and he did shoot up some dope before he went on. But he didn’t do a lot and he had enough, and at no point during the show did I see him run down to the bathroom or anything.”

When the band started the show—opening with “Nutshell”—Biro turned around and was in tears. He looked around and saw Susan and Michele Anthony in tears as well.

Layne blew the lyrics during several takes of “Sludge Factory.” Toby Wright speculated he might have been nervous singing that song because Ienner and Anthony—the subjects of part of the song—were sitting in front of him at the time. “I don’t remember exactly how many takes we did, but we did a lot,” Wright said.

Mike played the main riff of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” as the band was about to play “Sludge Factory.” The members of Metallica were in the audience, and one or more of them had recently cut their hair, inspiring Mike to write on his bass, “Friends don’t let friends get friends haircuts.” Later in the show, as the band prepared to perform “Angry Chair,” Jerry played the opening guitar riff of Metallica’s “Battery” and then switched to a cover of the song “Gloom, Despair and Agony on Me,” from the Hee Haw variety show.

Biro said that between songs “there was a lot of clowning around with the audience,” adding, “It was funny. Once the show started, it was regular Alice in Chains, but an intimate thing.” The band members would insult Biro during these interludes, referring to him as “a fucking Frenchman” or “a fucking frog from Montreal,” and Biro was yelling right back at them. Initially, the audience thought these barbs were serious. “Then, they started making jokes with the audience and just had a really good connection with the audience in that show.”

Coletti called Sean “the unsung hero of that Unplugged, because the thing about Unplugged, especially with rock bands, is you live or die by the drummer. If the drummer gets it and tempers his playing, then everyone can kind of play at a lower volume and play acoustically. When the drummer just plays like a rock show, everyone turns up their monitors, and then what’s meant to be this pretty, acoustic thing just sounds like shitty electric guitars.”

MTV sent the band the first cut of the show about two weeks later, since they had final approval. Layne didn’t like it, so Wright was given the task of reviewing the material. “When the video was finally cut together, Layne despised it. He didn’t want it coming out at all. They felt that they edited him into the worst light possible, so he asked me if I would edit it. So I ended up editing it, just picking the shots and redoing it, subsequently sending him copies of that along with the audio and boom! There it is,” Wright explained. The problem was “they would cut to him doing certain things during songs I remember, and he just didn’t like the way they cut it together and he was looking for something to show him in a more positive way, away from the stigma of whatever was going on in his personal life.

“He was always paying attention, but he looked like he was falling asleep at certain points or he’d nod out, and then all of the sudden his part would come up and boom! He’d be there. But they’d show him just sitting there with his eyes closed for several bars of the music and then they wouldn’t show him when it was his time to sing—they’d cut to Jerry or cut to Mike or cut somewhere else, and it just looked like he was sleeping through the whole thing during certain songs.” Wright provided suggested changes in the form of specific notes and time codes of what he wanted fixed, and MTV complied. The show aired on May 28, 1996, and the album was released on July 17, debuting at number 3 on the Billboard chart.2

Ken Deans got a call from Susan asking for help getting the band back together and preparing them for a tour with KISS, which had reunited with the four original members. Jerry and Sean were excited—Sean especially, because he had been in the KISS Army growing up. Layne kept saying he didn’t want to do it, after which the band had pretty much given up on the idea. Layne eventually changed his mind and agreed to do the tour.3

According to Deans, the band rented out the Moore Theatre for three weeks of rehearsals. “It was really challenging,” Deans said. “Mike Inez would show up around three or four o’clock in the afternoon. He and I would hang out. And then Sean would show up, and then Jerry would show up, and then Layne would show up around nine o’clock, maybe they’d go through a couple of songs, and then take off.” Deans estimates he spent as much as eight hours a day waiting around for people to show up. “By this time, it was becoming pretty evident that both Layne and Jerry were having some problems, not Jerry so much at that time, but Layne was definitely starting to. You could see that his years of drug use were starting to affect him.”

“I hadn’t seen [Layne] for a while until I saw him at the rehearsals. There was a part of him that was gone at that point.”

Susan was coping with the situation “as good as she could,” Deans recalled. “I remember thinking this tour wasn’t going to last that long or go that far. It was really kind of gut-wrenching for me to come back and work with the guys.”

During a backstage interview with MTV News, Sean was asked about his fondest memories of KISS as a kid, showing off his memorabilia from the 1970s.

“How old were you, where were you when you got that?”

“These were in Seattle. I was around ten, probably,” he answered, flipping through more memorabilia. “And then my seventy-nines, and look, I got that from a stagehand,” he said, pointing to a vintage backstage pass from that tour.

“Don’t ask him what he had to do for that,” Jerry interjected.

“I was young. I needed the money. That’s all I’m gonna say.”4

Alex Coletti went to the Detroit show on June 28. He had come to see KISS as a fan, having traveled with some friends. “We ran right down to the front of the stage for Alice and watched KISS from the soundboard. I thought they were great. I just thought I was so happy to see [Alice] onstage doing the rock show in front of that size crowd.” Smashing Pumpkins front man Billy Corgan was also there, and he would later recall, “I saw Alice in Chains at one of their final performances, opening for KISS at Tiger Stadium. They played outside in the sunshine, and they were awesome.” He described Layne as “a truly beautiful man. Gifted almost beyond compare. My fave singer of [the] 90s.”5 The Louisville, Kentucky, show on June 30 wasn’t significant because of anything that happened onstage, but because of who was in the audience—as had been the case so many times before. In this case, the audience included an Atlanta musician named William DuVall, whose own future with Alice in Chains was still a decade away.6

On July 3, 1996, Alice in Chains took the stage at the Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Missouri. “Howdy, Kansas City,” Layne said as the band kicked into “Again.” Susan was at the soundboard with Kevan Wilkins, the tour manager. As soon as the band went on, she looked over at Wilkins and said, “This is the last time we’re gonna see these guys together onstage, Kevan. I just feel it.”7 She was right.

After “Angry Chair,” Sean stepped up to Layne’s microphone and addressed the audience. “Okay, you guys, shut up for a minute. This is serious, really.” He cleared his throat and began singing the opening verse of “Beth,” the KISS ballad sung by the band’s drummer, Peter Criss. The audience was divided—Sean was cheered and booed immediately.

“What, you don’t like the song? Oh, I don’t have the makeup on, right? If I have big shoes and makeup, you love me, right? Well, fuck you, Kansas City!” he quipped before returning to his drum kit to perform “A Little Bitter.”

Layne addressed the crowd. “We got one more for you. We’ve been out a week; you’ve definitely been the coolest crowd. I’m not just saying that. We’ve got to do the mandatory crowd-pleaser now,” he said as the crowd began cheering and the band started “Man in the Box.” After the song, the four members locked hands and took a group bow. Bootleg video shows the band in good form onstage. What nobody in the audience knew at the time was they had just witnessed Layne’s final public performance.8

Things took an ominous turn after the show when Layne overdosed. Susan was flying back to Seattle the next morning. After her plane landed, she got a phone call saying they couldn’t revive Layne and he wound up being admitted to a local hospital.9

“Those were the last shows we played in public. They went great—they were fun. It was nice being out there. It was only five or six shows, and by the end of the shows, the last one, it was cops, ambulances, and, ‘Get on the plane! Hide the drugs!’ The same shit was going on,” Sean said. In retrospect, following the success of Unplugged, he said, “Right then is when I knew, ‘OK, if we never do anything again, I’m good with this.”10

Chapter 22

LAYNE AND DEMRI CALLED off their engagement at some point during the period between 1991 and 1994. He briefly addressed the breakup during his interview with Jon Wiederhorn: “I can definitely say rock and roll was a huge factor in us breaking up. When you’re in a relationship, the girl usually instigates the big idea that you were joined at the hip. So when the fighting comes, it’s really painful.” Layne added, “This isn’t a dig on women … but I think women are so different chemically from men, and that makes it hard to sustain a relationship. They have periods, they go through horrible, awful emotional swings, and trying to be logical with a person that’s got a whole different logic running around in her brain is just impossible.

“When you’re in a relationship, the girl usually instigates this big truth that you were put on Earth to be together. And after being with a person a long time and being convinced that you’re soul mates, you can get really crushed if things eventually fall apart. When I broke up with my last real girlfriend, life was just dismal. I didn’t know how to live or what to do. And then I had to realize, ‘Okay, I got along for twenty years before I met her, and I had good times.’ But right now I’m alone, and I’m totally cool with it.”1

Although the relationship between Demri and the other band members was good in the beginning—according to her mother, Jerry once gave Demri a couple of parakeets for her birthday—there is evidence that some people within the Alice in Chains camp blamed Demri at least to some extent for Layne’s drug problems. On the other hand, people close to Demri blamed Layne for her drug problems. At one point, Randy Biro got a phone call from Mary Kohl asking him to go with her and Kevan Wilkins to a Seattle hotel where Layne and Demri were living. They told Biro they needed help bringing Layne to the airport and moving his luggage. Unbeknownst to Biro until they got there, Kohl and Wilkins were staging an intervention and were sending Layne to Hazelden.

“I wasn’t very pleased about that,” Biro said. “[Layne] looked at me, and I was looking at him, and he goes, ‘What the fuck are you staring at, asshole?’ And it was really uncomfortable, because I had no idea. I wasn’t part of that.” No one else was there for this intervention. “It was ridiculous because Demri was in the room with him, and this was at the point where everyone said Demri was Satan, and she wasn’t. They were trying to keep those two apart, like when they were on tour, like the only people that were allowed in their room was me because I wasn’t out to break them up. I had no interest in breaking them up because they were doing what they were doing. There was no one to blame for his drug addiction.”

Biro explains, “He was in love with this girl. Now, by trying to break them up or trying to play a game with him, what he did was put up a wall. So, I go to this place, and I find out they’re doing this intervention. I’m going, ‘Holy shit.’ I was blown away. I had no idea. So I hang around long enough, they pack some bags, they’re checking him out of the hotel in an attempt to make sure Demri leaves, which was a load of shit in itself.”

Layne and Demri went to rehab together at least once, checking into the Exodus Recovery Center in Los Angeles—possibly the same clinic Kurt Cobain went AWOL from shortly before his death. Layne called Kathleen Austin one night, telling her, “I don’t know what to do. They give us so many drugs here. Demri’s higher in here than she’s ever been outside of here. Her blood pressure is so low, she can’t stand up without passing out.” From what Austin recalls, “He was really worried and this particular place, the way I understood it, is you go in there and they feed you a bunch of drugs, the ones you’ve taken and ones you haven’t, and then they detox you off of them.”

Although outside pressure may have influenced her, Demri instigated the breakup, according to what she told Randy Biro. “She stopped seeing him. She tried to get away from him, because she felt like she was going to ruin his life. He was in love with her.” He added, “Everybody that knew Layne was constantly blaming her for shit. Constantly. And people were trying to keep them apart all the time. So I was under the impression that she tried to get away from him to give him a chance to live life.”

The problem with this one-sided view is that it doesn’t take into account Layne’s history of drug use before he started using heroin, before Alice in Chains was even formed, before he and Demri met. Moreover, it completely absolves Layne of any personal responsibility for his problems.

“Heroin,” is Kathleen Austin’s response when asked why the engagement was called off. “You can’t do a relationship and drugs, too. Nobody can.”

She also clarified Layne’s “rock-and-roll” explanation: “As the band got famous and girls are sending Layne underwear in the mail and things like that, that really bothered her.” She said, “Layne and Demri, regardless of when they broke up—those are just words. They never stopped loving each other. They loved each other dearly.”

Demri was described by several sources as being very proud of her ability to get her drugs on her own, despite the fact that Layne was more than willing to provide for her. “At that point, Layne had, I’m guessing, a million or so dollars, if not more. Or at least he was worth quite a bit. And he would give her anything she wanted. He would give her everything he had to stop her from doing what she was doing. And she just [said], ‘No,’” Biro explained.

Perhaps because they had broken up, or possibly because Layne was touring and hadn’t given her money or drugs while he was away, or even because she didn’t want his help, Demri ultimately did whatever she had to to sustain her addiction.

Though Layne disliked interventions, he was involved in an intervention for Demri. Layne was in Europe when he got a phone call from Kathleen Austin informing him of the plan, possibly in 1993. He flew back to Seattle from Germany and was picked up at the airport by Austin and Demri. The plan was to go to Austin’s home north of Seattle, where the intervention would take place the following morning.

They stopped at a bar after leaving the airport. After Demri finished her drink, Austin said her drink tasted funny and asked Demri to taste it. Demri finished Austin’s drink as well. “The plan was to get her drunk, shut her up, and we’ll go from here. So that’s what happened, and we go up to my place, and we get up in the morning,” Austin said. The next morning, several of Demri’s friends and relatives had gathered in the living room downstairs, including her maternal grandparents, her brothers, and Layne. At some point that morning, Austin told Demri to lie down in her room, where she had disconnected the phone to avoid waking Demri up or tipping her off. When Demri came out to the living room, she knew exactly what was going on.

“You’re not fucking intervening on me, and I’m not going to fucking rehab,” she said, and went back upstairs. Ultimately, they talked her into coming back out to hear what everyone had to say. According to Austin, the most profound comment came from her son, Devin, who said, “You’re my sister and I love you and I don’t want you to die.”

Austin made plans to check her into one of three possible clinics, to give Demri some choice in the process. She chose a clinic in Port Angeles, a city in Clallam County on the shores of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Known as the Lodge, it supposedly specialized in treating heroin addiction, Austin said. Demri was going through mood swings during the entire drive.

“She would say things like, ‘I’m fucking leaving as soon as I get there.’ ‘As soon as I get there, I’m going in the front door and out the back door.’ And I would respond with, ‘Well, Dem, you’re going to do what you’re going to do. My job is to get you there,’” Austin said. “I’d wink at Layne. Then she would say, ‘Well, I hope the food is good.’”

They checked her in, and Austin and Layne drove back to Seattle. They joked that Demri would somehow get back to Seattle before them. Austin dropped Layne off at his home at around midnight; then she got home about an hour later and went to bed.

One aspect of Demri’s personality, according to Austin, was her inability to handle guilt. In Austin’s words, “If she offended you, and you didn’t have a cell phone or anything, she would start calling your house, waiting for you to get home to apologize.” Because of her mood on the way to rehab, she felt guilty about it after checking in. Once admitted, she was supposed to be prohibited from receiving phone calls or any type of communication from the outside for a week.

The staff agreed to make an exception and allowed her to call Austin and Layne. “Her thing was ‘I’ve got to apologize to my mom and Layne. I’ve got to tell them I’m sorry. I’ve got to tell them that I love them. I’ll stay. I’ll stay and be a good person, if you just let me say I’m sorry.’”

She didn’t get through to either of them. Austin’s bedroom phone was still disconnected from the intervention, and Layne was probably exhausted from his return trip from Germany. Demri checked herself out after a few hours. According to Austin, Demri went to rehab two more times, staying the longest at the Sundown M Ranch, which she left a few days before graduation. “She actually got kicked out of there for talking to people,” Austin said. “She did well there.” This was the only treatment Austin paid for herself. She said she would not be surprised if the others were paid for either by Layne, his management, or his record label.

Demri’s health began taking a turn for the worse around Thanksgiving of 1993. She told her mother she had been having fevers in excess of a hundred degrees. Austin told Demri the next time it happened, she should go to the hospital. The first of many hospitalizations happened shortly after. “She came in to the hospital for the first time at the end of November of ’93. She was in until January of ’94. She got out [and] was back in in March of ’94 and at that time put on life support,” Austin recalled. “When she would be in, she would come in to the emergency room. They would admit her up into a medicine floor; then she’d go from the medicine floor to the [Intensive Care Unit] and life support, and then she wouldn’t die. So she’d go back to the medicine floor—she’d be on IV and antibiotics for a month. This went on and on and on. She had her lungs operated on twice. She had her heart operated on twice. She suffered miserably.”

While in the ICU, Austin said Demri was conscious but intubated—she had a tube inserted down her throat to help her breathe, which she despised. She would tell her mother, “I hate being fucking intubated. I can’t talk, and these people come and they ask me these fucking questions, and I can’t fucking talk, and I feel like a fucking fish in a fucking fishbowl.” She communicated by writing on a small blackboard with a piece of chalk.

Demri visited Bad Animals Studio a few times during the Alice in Chains sessions, Sam Hofstedt recalled. “She did not look good. She was like so, so, so skinny. And I think at one point during the record, she was actually in the hospital, and she survived, but at one point they said all her organs pretty much shut down for a little while. She was knocking at death’s door.”

Despite the multiple hospitalizations and brushes with death, Demri continued using drugs. She had seemingly accepted that her addiction was going to kill her. One weekend, Demri was visiting her mother. After the visit, Austin was driving Demri back to Seattle when another car cut her off on the freeway.

“God, Mom! I hate you driving on this freeway every day. If anything were to happen to you, I don’t know what I’d do,” Demri said after the shock wore off. And then she said, “I don’t know why I said that. I’m going to die before you do.”

Austin turned to her and said, “Oh, okay. You love me so much, you’re going to have me bury you? Do you have any idea what that would do to me?”

Demri was silent and then responded, “Well, I never really thought about it that way, but I know that I’ll be dead before you. I’ll be dead before I’m thirty.” She was right.

According to Austin, while Demri and Layne’s relationship might have been over, they still cared for each other. “Demri was sick and dying for those last two and a half years. Layne would come and stay with her in the hospital at night.” Austin worked at Harborview Medical Center, where Demri was a patient, and would let Layne in the building with her pass. He would spend the night and leave the hospital in the anonymity of the early hours of the morning. Susan also visited Demri while she was hospitalized.

Russell—a pseudonym—is a foreign-born musician who came to Seattle in 1996.2 He overstayed his visa and remained in Seattle, living and working as an undocumented immigrant, doing a variety of jobs to pay his part of the rent on a downtown apartment. He was dealing heroin to make extra money on the side and occasionally used some himself.

One night in May or June 1996, a group of people came over to his apartment to hang out, Demri being one of them. Demri and Russell hit it off and began hanging out as friends. She eventually asked if she could stay at his place for a while. Russell agreed, and she crashed at his apartment off and on for about six to eight weeks that summer. Demri didn’t have much in terms of possessions, only a few small suitcases carrying her clothes and some books. Sometimes she would visit her mother or a friend for a few days and come back.

“A lot of my friends that I sort of knew in Seattle I wasn’t hanging around with for various reasons,” Russell said of the time he met Demri. “It was good to have a friend. So we went out to bars and [to see] rock bands—it was good to have a friend to hang out with.”

According to Russell, Demri told Layne “I’m staying with this guy. He’s a musician and he’s really nice, blah, blah, blah.” Although Russell was a heroin dealer, Layne was not one of his buyers. Layne was not happy about the arrangement. He called Russell’s apartment and left messages on the answering machine with comments like, “You’re not a musician—you’re a drug dealer.”

“I didn’t have a very good impression of Layne,” Russell said. “Every time I’d sort of say, ‘He’s an asshole,’ she would always stick up for him.” Demri told him they had met in high school—a story Russell did not know to be false until he was interviewed for this book fifteen years later. Russell did not recall if Demri ever told him why they broke up. He remembers her saying when Layne got rich and famous, he started hanging around prostitutes, but he doesn’t know if this is true or not.

Demri told Russell she was going to Layne’s home once a week to clean the place up. She told him Layne had gotten very paranoid about people coming over at all hours of the day and night and that he had set up a security camera outside his door and wouldn’t let anyone in unless he wanted to see them. Both Michelle Ahern-Crane and Jon Wiederhorn remember that Layne complained about random people coming over and was very conscious about his security.3

Whether Demri was going there to clean or for a tryst or to get high or some combination of the three, Russell doesn’t know. He does say that every time she came back from Layne’s, she brought cocaine that he had given her. Russell started using cocaine after Demri shared some.

Demri told Russell about her health problems—that she had bacterial endocarditis and that her heart valves had been replaced. She showed him the foot-long scar going up the center of her rib cage. Russell was worried about her continued use of cocaine. He told her, “I don’t care about heroin and stuff—I’ll give it to you. You don’t have to worry about it. But why do you have to do coke? It’s bad for your heart.” Russell got the impression that “she was sort of feeling resigned that it was going to kill her anyway.”

At one point that summer, James Burdyshaw ran into Demri while riding on a bus near Pioneer Square. “Hey, how’s it going?” Demri asked Burdyshaw, whom she hadn’t seen in several years. Burdyshaw was dismayed at the sight of his friend. “What made her look older was she was skinny, really skinny. Her face was kind of sunken in. She used to be really fresh-faced, really kind of full-faced.” He could see her bones through her skin. She showed him the scar on her chest, telling him it was from when doctors had to massage her heart and that she almost died. It was the last time Burdyshaw saw her.

Demri had been gone for several days and Russell hadn’t heard from her, so he called Austin’s home because he was worried and thought she might be there. She wasn’t, Austin told him. When Demri finally came back to Russell’s apartment, she was livid. “What are you doing trying to check up on me? I don’t want you ringing my mom’s house!”

Russell was developing a cocaine addiction, which affected his ability to make ends meet. He applied to go to a rehab clinic in California in early August 1996. “I used to only ever use heroin, and it wasn’t until I met Demri that I started using coke, and I think that’s what actually drove me to rehab, so it was probably meeting Demri that saved my life,” he said.

By late August, Russell was getting ready to leave. Demri had left a suitcase in his room, and he unsuccessfully tried to get ahold of her to tell her he was leaving and still had some of her stuff. “I can only assume she went back and got it once I left. I don’t know.” He thinks the last time he saw Demri would have been in August 1996 before he left for California. In retrospect, he said it was a bit upsetting he never had the opportunity to say good-bye to her.

Not long before her death, Demri had checked out of a hospital and spent about a month in a nursing home, where most of the patients were senior citizens. “She had these little old people doing tricks for her,” Austin recalled. While she visited one day, an older woman with no teeth came up to Demri and said something to her.

“Hey, I’m talking to my mom right now. But I’ll talk to you after a while. Show my mom one of your tricks.” At that point, Austin said, “She took her tongue and stuck it out between her eyes. Dem cracks up, and I cracked up, and this lady cracked up.”

Another patient, who had been a prominent architect in Seattle decades earlier, took off one night in his motorized wheelchair after taking his medication. He went into a Red Apple supermarket to buy donuts, soda, and potato chips. On his way back, he crashed his wheelchair and broke his glasses. When they took him in after the accident, he said, “I’m going to have a party with Demri—leave me alone!”

At some point in October 1996, Mike Starr and Jason Buttino were walking into Harborview Medical Center when they saw Demri walking out. According to Buttino, she came over to say hello, and they talked for a few minutes before going their separate ways. That was the last time they saw her. Austin did not dispute this account, noting it would not have been unusual to see her at Harborview. “She lived there two and a half years, and I worked there, so she was in and out.”

About a week before her death, Demri went over to Austin’s apartment and brought her a card. She spoke to her mother’s roommate, Sam, whispering something to him, which Austin could not hear. She assumed it was about his eleven-year-old daughter, who was missing at the time and was later found murdered by a serial killer. It was the last time she saw Demri alive.

After Demri left, Austin asked, “What did Dem want?”

“Oh, I’ll tell you later,” was his response. Austin didn’t want to push it and dropped the subject. After Demri’s death, Sam revealed to Austin the subject of that conversation, saying, “She told me something was going to happen. She didn’t know when, but it was going to happen, and I needed to be here because you were going to need me.”

“Dem knew,” Austin said in retrospect. “Before she died, she was reaching out and touching base with people, and after she died, she was reaching out and touching base with people.”

During her final days, Demri was staying with an older man, the father of a friend of hers, at his place in Bothell. Demri had lived something of a nomadic existence, staying with different people for periods of a few days to a few weeks at a time. Toward the end of her life, it became very difficult for her to find a place to stay. “People were afraid to have Dem stay with them, because no one wanted her to die at their house,” Austin explained.

Austin alleges that the older man was isolating Demri, keeping her away from people to the point where nobody, including Austin, was able to contact her. At one point, Austin called and told him, “I want to talk to my daughter.” He made up some excuse why she couldn’t. Austin wasn’t having any of it. “If I don’t hear from my daughter within the next twenty minutes, I’m going to call the police, and we are going to show up at your door.”

“Well, I’ll see if I can wake her up,” he replied. Demri called her shortly after.

On the afternoon of October 28, 1996, the older man drove Demri into Seattle. She told him she wanted a few things from a Fred Meyer grocery store. When he arrived at the store, Demri was unconscious, and he couldn’t wake her. He went into the store to pick up her things, leaving the car engine running so she wouldn’t get cold. He came out of the store, drove home, and still couldn’t wake her. He left her in the car unconscious so he could do his laundry. He eventually realized something was seriously wrong. He drove to the home of Jim and Marlene—two of Austin’s patients—freaking out, saying, “She’s dead! She’s dead! What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

Jim checked on Demri and felt a slight pulse. He got in the driver’s seat and told Marlene and the older man to follow him in another car while he drove to the hospital. Demri was eventually brought in to the emergency room at Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland at 7:30 P.M.—two and a half hours after she first lost consciousness.

Austin got a phone call from the hospital, telling her Demri was there. They told her that the older man—whom Austin said they erroneously identified to her in the phone call and in the medical examiner’s report as Demri’s boyfriend—had brought her to the emergency room. By the time she got there, the man had left the hospital. Eventually, he called Austin on the phone and filled her in on what happened that afternoon. Austin was dismayed. “I think, ‘What a dumb fuck. Why didn’t you take her to the hospital when you couldn’t wake her up?’”

Austin’s sister, Patricia Dean Austin, arrived at the hospital shortly after. At this point, Demri was still alive but unconscious. Kathleen asked the doctors if Demri could hear her. The doctors told her they thought she could. She clutched Demri’s hand and said, “Dem, if you have a choice to stay or to go, you don’t have to stay for me anymore.” During previous hospitalizations, she had always told her to fight, to survive. This time was different. “That was the only time that I ever gave her permission to go.” She found out later that Patricia had told Demri essentially the same thing. They stayed with Demri through the night, leaving only to get some sleep. Early the next morning, Patricia and Kathleen Austin walked into the room where Demri was. Kathleen turned to look at her sister, who immediately feared the worst.

“Oh my God, she’s gone,” Patricia said.

Kathleen went over to Demri, touched her face, and saw that her chest was moving. “I said, ‘Oh, her chest is moving.’ Then I said, ‘No, no. That’s the machine. She’s gone.’ I don’t know how to describe nothing, that feeling of nothing. The night before, I felt her presence.

“I believe she passed away when I went to sleep. She knew my family would be there in the morning. She knew my sister was there. She knew I wasn’t going to be alone. She knew I was okay, and I gave her permission to go. So when I went to sleep, she passed away.”

Demri was still on life support, but she was gone. After being with her a few minutes, Kathleen and Patricia left the room. The doctors came a few minutes later and asked her if she wanted to be present when they disconnected Demri from life support.

“There’s no reason for me to be there. My daughter’s already gone,” Kathleen responded.

A doctor came back and confirmed Austin’s conclusion that the life support equipment was keeping her alive. It was 7:40 A.M.—twelve hours after Demri was first admitted in the emergency room. She was twenty-seven years old. A coroner concluded that she died of acute intoxication caused by the combined effects of opiate, meprobamate, and butalbital.4

Jim Elmer got a phone call from Austin that morning, informing him Demri had passed. “I went over to Evergreen and gave her a kiss on the forehead good-bye, and she was looking very peaceful,” he recalled. He spoke with Demri’s family before leaving. He touched base with Susan, and the two agreed to go see Layne. He had already heard the bad news. By the time they got to his home, Layne was waiting for Mark Lanegan, who arrived a few minutes after them. “Layne obviously knew what had happened and was distraught and so forth, and while they had a very dynamic relationship, they certainly cared about each other and loved each other. So Susan and I said our good-byes and so Mark stayed with Layne and that was the best thing to do.” This visit was one of the last times Susan saw him.5

She invited Jim to lunch so they could speak privately. She took him to the Ruins, a private club and restaurant in Seattle. She suggested he become a member, which he did. They would meet again at this venue in similar circumstances a few years later.

Demri’s death devastated Layne. Austin thinks it weighed on him heavily: she heard Layne had told somebody, “I should have got us out of here. I had the money. I could have done it. I should have gotten us out of here.” Austin defined the phrase “out of here” as meaning, “Out of Seattle, away from all the people knocking on the door wanting to get him high.” Jim Elmer agreed that Layne had the resources to do it if he had been serious about it, but he never did.

A few months after Demri’s death, Layne asked Austin for the teddy bear Demri had had with her in the hospital and a few other things. They set up a time for Austin to meet at his condo in the U District. Austin arrived and repeatedly rang the doorbell and got no answer. She went back to her car, waited for about half an hour, and tried again. Still no answer. Austin went home. She got a phone call from Layne at ten o’clock that night, asking why she hadn’t shown up. Austin told him she had been there at the scheduled time, to which Layne responded that he had had to go out.

Austin suspected he was out getting drugs. She ran into him by accident on Broadway a few weeks later and still had Demri’s teddy bear and other things in the trunk of her car. They made the exchange at that point. This was the last time Austin saw him. The general consensus from people who knew Layne well is that he never got over Demri’s death. “Layne never recovered from losing her,” Austin said. Jim Elmer agreed.

“I know how much he loved Demri, and I can only imagine that that really just obliterated him,” Nick Pollock said.

“When she died, that was it. He was done,” Randy Biro said.

“After she did pass, I just remember thinking, ‘Oh, no.’ You could almost see the writing on the wall, because that was Layne’s soul mate,” Jeff Gilbert said. “Whenever I saw them together, they had that bond, so I thought that’s not going to be good.”

“I think it’s very likely he used her death as an excuse to throw in the towel, because that’s what we do. The addict is always looking for excuses to use, and that’s a pretty good one,” Michelle Ahern-Crane said.

If this generally held opinion is accepted and presumed correct, then her death triggered an irreversible downward spiral in which Layne would take his drug use to lengths that few could imagine or sustain.