Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Chapter 23

IN 1996, DAN GALLAGHER and his wife moved into the house next to the small two-room house that John Baker Saunders had been living in near the Crown Hill area. They would hear Saunders playing bass at night. “All I remember is it was very melodious. It was bass, so it was very deep and you could feel it as much as you could hear it and it was just beautiful,” Gallagher said. Saunders played late—often starting at around eleven o’clock at night and sometimes ending at three in the morning.

After making formal introductions, Saunders admitted it was his music. They discovered they both had common ties to the same general area on the north side of Chicago and several common interests. At the time, Gallagher had left his law firm to work from home while raising his firstborn daughter, Rachel, so his wife could continue her career as a scientist. Saunders and Gallagher began spending a lot of time together. “He was just a really sweet guy, just a really nice guy,” is how Gallagher described him. “Kind of introverted, a … very sensitive person, very intelligent, and a great sense of humor, really funny, really sarcastic, very dry sense of humor, and loved to laugh.” Gallagher and Saunders would often take Rachel to the beach. Baker would occasionally go to Gallagher’s house and would “eat a jar of candy in about ten minutes, and then leave.”

When Saunders told him about his background and the different bands he had played with, Gallagher didn’t have a clue who any of them were. “I think he liked the fact that I wasn’t a fan or that I wasn’t really very familiar with his work,” Gallagher said. Occasionally, he would be over at Saunders’s home and ask him to play, and he would improvise something. Gallagher didn’t listen to Above until about a year after he met Saunders.

Although Gallagher wasn’t privy to all the details of Saunders’s personal life, he did know he would hang out with musician friends in Seattle. Saunders mentioned visiting Layne, although these visits may have taken place before he met Gallagher. He would jokingly tell Gallagher that he was proud of his self-control and willingness to stay sober despite being around drugs at Layne’s home. “There’s a big pile of heroin sitting right in front of me and I didn’t even try and steal it,” he told Gallagher. Gallagher added, “That’s how well he thought he was doing in rehab that he could just … It could be sitting right in front of him, and he wouldn’t use it.”

Eventually, Layne stopped answering the door and wouldn’t let Saunders in. He was worried about Layne, Gallagher said, but at the same time would respect people’s privacy. “If that was Layne’s position and what he wanted to do, I think he would just say, ‘Hey, that’s his decision,’ and just respect it.”

After the success of Above, Saunders had some money and was eager to continue working on Mad Season. When it came time to do a follow-up album in 1996, Saunders, McCready, and Martin wrote and recorded instrumental tracks for seventeen songs. The idea was to continue what they had done on the first album, but there was a significant problem: Layne and Mark Lanegan never showed up to the studio. According to Krisha Augerot, “I think he [Layne] was pretty much MIA at that point. During the second Mad Season album, Layne couldn’t even come in and sing, he was so fucked up.”

McCready’s initial plan was to have Lanegan take over as singer and rename the band Disinformation, but, according to Martin, Lanegan never showed up.1 With Mad Season in suspended animation, Saunders began to feel a strain on his finances. According to his brother, he had received a $50,000 advance for the second Mad Season album but, because it was never finished, the label began withholding his royalties from Above to recover the advance money.

Saunders eventually joined the Seattle band the Walkabouts. In 1997, the Walkabouts did two European tours. The band was performing at a festival in Belgium in September, where a Belgian graduate student named Kim De Baere was in the audience. The two met and hit it off, and she traveled with him for about a week on that tour, which led to a long-distance relationship.

A few months later, Saunders invited her to visit him in Seattle for two weeks during the Christmas holidays, after which she had to go back to school. He visited her in the spring of 1998, and, after finishing her exams, she visited him in Seattle from June until nearly October—the maximum length of time she could stay on a tourist visa. She still had to write her dissertation, so she went back to Belgium and made arrangements to get a student visa that would allow her to stay in the country longer; she returned in November. He took her to Chicago, where his mother lived. He took her to venues he had performed and places where he used to buy heroin. Saunders had told her he was a recovering heroin addict, and De Baere never saw him use any. However, around Christmas, she made him quit the pills he was taking. She doesn’t know what they were but said he went through withdrawals. She also said he had been fired from the Walkabouts but did not know why.

With no regular source of income, Saunders discovered eBay and quickly realized its potential application. He told Dan Gallagher that Eddie Vedder had given him a box of rare Pearl Jam 45s and started selling them on eBay. “He’d be like, ‘You know, I figured out you can’t put on ten of those at once, or the value goes way down. You can only put on one or two at once, and then people will pay fifteen dollars or whatever for a forty-five,’” Gallagher recalled. “He would spend his time doing that, marketing the forty-fives and making enough to buy his food and stuff.”

When he was short on cash, he would stop by Evan Sheeley’s store, Bass Northwest, to pawn gear or instruments. Each time he did this, he raised a few hundred dollars. Sheeley said, “I don’t think he really cared about having some big mansion and a fancy car and all the stuff like that. He just wanted to be recognized as a good bass player in a good band. He wasn’t getting the recognition. It was the other guys who were getting the recognition. He really was the odd guy out in that band. So that’s basically—whenever he and I would hook up and we would talk at my store, that’s more or less what we’d talk about.”

In late December 1998 or early January 1999, Johnny Bacolas went over to Saunders’s home. He remembers Saunders being stressed over his financial situation because the second Mad Season album wasn’t happening. That was the last time he saw him.2

On the morning of January 15, 1999, Saunders drove De Baere to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Though she had originally planned to stay for six months, De Baere decided to go back to Belgium to finish her dissertation. The relationship was ambiguous, but De Baere said they had not broken up. “I don’t know if he believed me, but the plan was definitely like, ‘See you soon,’” De Baere said.

De Baere noticed he had instruments in the trunk, not knowing of his plans for later. She had an eerie feeling at the airport. “I knew when we said good-bye … When I got on the plane, I almost got out because—I don’t know—something got me very worried the way he walked. I will always have that vision in my head of him going down the automatic stairs, our last kind of look.” That was the last time she saw him.

Later that day, Saunders went to Bass Northwest to pawn a black Fender jazz bass guitar, which he told Evan Sheeley had been given to him by his parents when he was a teenager. “He said that he had to sell it because he needed money for rent, or else he was more or less going to be evicted, which is kind of the same story he gave me every time,” Sheeley said. He wrote Saunders a check for $800 to $850. The bank that the store kept its account with was a block away. Saunders walked over and cashed the check. This was the last time Sheeley saw him.

Barrett Martin, who lived close to Saunders, would often have him over for breakfast. That evening, Martin called him to suggest that they meet for breakfast or lunch the next day at a restaurant instead of at his house. Saunders agreed. Martin said he was the last person to speak with him.3

According to the medical examiner’s report, Saunders spent “the majority of his day with his friend, Mr. Christopher Williams.” They had been drinking beers, and at approximately 9:00 P.M. they shot up. Williams described Saunders to authorities as being very high, and Williams noted that Saunders had “quit using drugs for a long time until this incident.” Saunders became “lethargic and unresponsive” before collapsing on the kitchen floor. Williams tried reviving him by pouring cold water and placing ice cubes on him before calling 911. Medics arrived on the scene and declared him dead on arrival. He was forty-four years old.4

Dan Gallagher had been worried about Saunders because he had been very withdrawn and because he was taking De Baere to the airport that day. At the same time, he had a four-month-old daughter who had a severe cold or flu. “I wanted to go check on him that night, but I literally was [with] two sick kids, and I was trying to keep the baby alive, basically.” He kept walking to the back door to check on Saunders’s house and noticed flashing lights from police cars and an ambulance. He walked over. The EMTs eventually filed out, unsuccessful in their efforts. Knowing they were there for Saunders, Gallagher asked if he had made it. They told him he hadn’t. Gallagher was on the porch when Williams came out. “Here he was on the porch and he looked pretty upset, kind of strung out as you might expect. I actually told the cops, ‘You should arrest that guy. He’s the one that brought the shit over there.’

“Then we went back and forth. I was yelling at him, and he was yelling at me. A lot of fuck-yous and accusations.”

Police asked Gallagher to identify the body. “He was laying on his back on the kitchen floor with a mask from a respirator … still on. He was gone at that point. I looked at him and it was Baker but it wasn’t Baker. He was gone.”

At about three or four o’clock in the morning, Florida time, Joseph H. Saunders woke up to a phone call from Gallagher informing him of the bad news. Joseph called his mother and sister to tell them. “It was shocking and heartbreaking and it made sense, because he had not been communicative, and I know that when he wasn’t communicative, that meant something was wrong,” his sister, Henrietta Saunders, said of her reaction.

She had normally spoken with her brother about once a month, but noted that in the final months of his life, he had become more difficult to get ahold of. “He was very unhappy in the last few months of his life, and he was casting about for meaning, in my view,” she recalled. The last time they spoke was during the Christmas holiday of 1998.

“I think there’s an aspect of suicide in Baker’s death,” Henrietta said, citing the uncertainty of his relationship with De Baere, the financial pressures, and Mad Season’s being on hiatus. She noted that at some point in the early 1990s, he had told her, “If I use heroin again, I will die.” There is no evidence Saunders intentionally committed suicide. He had plans to meet Barrett Martin the next day. His sister acknowledges there was an element of self-destruction in his decision to use heroin again.

Kim De Baere was at home in Brussels when Dan Gallagher called. De Baere had occasionally worked as a nanny for Gallagher’s children. Because, in her words, “I’m not good at good-byes,” and because she had every intention of returning to Seattle, she had not said her farewell to Gallagher before she left town. When he got her on the phone, the first thing he told her was “Hey, you didn’t say good-bye.” After some lighthearted conversation, he told her Saunders had died. De Baere was shocked. “My first reaction was disbelief and anger. Shortly after, I realized it had to be true, because no one in the world would make a sick joke like that, especially not Dan,” she wrote. “[I] did stay angry, first at Baker but mostly at myself, for not seeing that coming and feeling like my departure was the main trigger (of several other triggers) for what he did, not that I think he wanted to die. I think he just wanted some relief.” In the days after getting the news, she was hoping to get a letter from Baker. No letter ever came.

Evan Sheeley was at his store when he got a phone call from somebody asking, “Have you heard about Baker?” Sheeley didn’t even know he had a drug problem and thought back to the events of the previous day. “It was the money, unfortunately, and I’ve always carried this a little bit heavy on myself. It was the money that I supplied to him that ended up paying for the heroin overdose that killed him,” he said.

Barrett Martin went to the restaurant the next day to meet Saunders as planned, but he never came. “When Baker died, that was it. The band was done,” he told Mark Yarm.5 His brother, Joseph, and his mother went to Seattle. Joseph assumed responsibility for taking inventory of Baker’s things and clearing out his house. He and his mother also met with Williams.

“We tracked down the guy that he was shooting heroin with and met with him to find out about what happened. The guy was kind of a younger guy and he said, ‘Oh my God.’ The guy called 911, so they came, but the guy said, ‘Baker was like the most experienced amateur pharmacologist I’d ever seen, so I totally trusted him with the dosages, quality, and everything, and I couldn’t believe that this happened,’” Joseph recalled. He and his mother wanted to talk to him because he had been with Saunders at the end. He described Williams as a “misguided young kid” who may have “idolized” Baker as a musician.

A memorial service was held in Seattle, attended by approximately two to three hundred people. Representing the family were his brother, mother, and stepfather. Joseph spoke first, followed by Mike McCready, who wrote an editorial for The Rocket in his friend’s memory.6 Dan Gallagher spoke next. Barrett Martin was the final speaker. According to Gallagher, Martin lamented the demise of Mad Season in his speech. Layne did not attend the service.

Saunders’s body was cremated, and the ashes were interred at the Crown Hill Cemetery, located a few blocks from the house where he spent the final years of his life. “Really little, tiny, out-of-the-way cemetery that I think he had mentioned [liking] to his mom … He used to go there and just chill by himself,” Dan Gallagher explained.

On the tomb is a series of small plaques listing the names and dates of all the people whose remains are contained there. Midway down the list of names on the right-hand side, one plaque reads, BAKER SAUNDERS 1954–1999 with a bass clef symbol next to the year of his birth.

Chapter 24

IN APRIL 1997, an entity known as the Larusta Trust bought a three-bedroom, fifteen-hundred-square-foot, fifth-floor condominium at a building in Seattle’s University District for $262,000. A review of the property records, when cross-referenced with Alice in Chains’s album liner notes and other public records, shows that the Larusta Trust shared the same Bellevue address as VWC Management, a business management and accounting firm that has counted Alice in Chains among its clients in the past. Larusta is named for John Larusta, the alias Layne was using at the time, according to Ken Elmer. The property was acquired through this roundabout mechanism, presumably to keep Layne’s name off any public records associated with the transaction. This condo would be Layne’s home for the final five years of his life.1

At some point after Layne moved in, Toby Wright set up a home-recording studio for him. Wright described it: “I think he had some [Alesis Digital Audio Tapes] up there, a small console. I set up guitar paths. I set up a couple of vocal paths, and I think I had a keyboard path as well and some multiple things where he could just go in, hit a button, and record … He had a little drum machine and that kind of thing he used to do demos.”

Jerry seemingly confirmed the existence of Layne solo recordings or demos during a 2010 interview, saying, “I’d fucking go over to his place and he’d be playing me shit he’d be writing all the time. I would, too. He’d play me stuff, I’d play him stuff, vice versa.” He did not specify the period when he heard these recordings, if they were from the period when Alice in Chains was still active, or if they were from Layne’s later years. Jerry also said in the same interview that there are no more unreleased Alice in Chains recordings with Layne’s vocals, although Sean did not entirely rule out the possibility. “If there is, it’s nothing that we would want, or he would have wanted released.”2

Jamie, Jim, and Ken Elmer are unaware of any solo demos Layne might have recorded during his later years, though he had the means to do so. The one person who would know for sure is his mother, who declined to be interviewed for this book. Layne did at least one confirmed guest recording from this period. His friend Jesse Holt—known as Maxi when he was the singer and guitarist of Second Coming—was working on a new project under the moniker the Despisley Brothers—the name presumably a play on the R&B group the Isley Brothers. Layne rerecorded his guest vocal for the chorus of the song “The Things You Do,” which is musically different from an earlier version he recorded with Ron Holt in 1988.

There are at least two recorded versions of this song, the first from the spring or summer of 1996, the second dated November 3, 1997. Musically and lyrically, the two later versions are the same. Stylistically, Layne’s vocals sound very different from any of his previous work. The difference is that in the 1997 version, he sounds indifferent, with no real power or feeling in the performance. Jason Buttino, who has recordings of both versions, attributes the change to the fact that the second version was recorded more than a year after Demri’s death. Buttino also said Jesse Holt—who declined to be interviewed for this book—had to boost the level on Layne’s vocals in the 1997 version because his voice was so soft and quiet.3

Soundgarden broke up in spring of 1997 amid rising tensions. The band played what at the time was their final show in Honolulu on February 9. Chris Cornell decided to call it quits shortly after. Susan Silver Management and A&M Records issued a joint statement announcing the split.4

In October 1997, according to a report in The Seattle Times, Susan was a panelist during a discussion about rock management at North by Northwest Music and Media Conference. Susan responded to a question about whether her gender ever blocked her progress, saying, “It didn’t even enter my sphere of reality.” The report also notes, “She also hinted, with a sigh, that Alice is about to ‘self-destruct.’”5

That fall Susan announced she was closing down her management business. The news was mentioned in the Lip Service section of The Rocket, which also made the sarcastic comment, “Sources within the company report that Silver will close up the shop near the end of December. Sure, Soundgarden don’t need a manager anymore, but who will burp and change Alice in Chains?”6

At some point after that edition was published, the magazine received a package containing a jar of urine and a bag of feces. It also included a note, which read, “Wipe and change this, motherfuckers!” The assumption is it came from Layne.7

Susan Silver Management organized a Christmas party that year, held at a bar in the U District. Randy Biro went to the party, along with his former roommate, Kevin Shuss, who had worked with Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam over the years.

“Hey, Layne wants to see you,” Shuss told Biro at the party.

“Great, where is he?”

“He’s right behind you.”

Biro turned around. “I’m looking past this really skinny, fucked-up-looking guy trying to see where Layne is, and it was Layne. I felt really awkward.

“He had a baseball cap on. He had glasses down to the end of his nose, and not very many teeth. It shocked me at first. It looked like death. It was gross.” Jim Elmer doesn’t know exactly when Layne’s tooth loss started but thinks it was around 1995 or 1996 and said it was a gradual process.

Layne invited Biro to check out his condo, which was around the corner from the bar. He described Layne as being very proud about his home. Layne had a massive rear-projection TV. “The fucking thing was huge. I’d never seen a TV that big. He had gotten it through the label some way, and all he did was sit there and get high and play video games all day.”

Biro, who was clean, asked, “Wow, have you got anything?”—referring to drugs.

“Yeah, but I’m not gonna give it to you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re clean. I’m not gonna be part of this. If you need to go do that, you do it somewhere else. I don’t want to be part of it. I don’t want you to end up like me again.” That was the last time Biro saw him.

With Alice in Chains on hiatus, Jerry called Toby Wright. “He was compiling songs for a while, and then he just called me up and asked if I would help out with a solo record, which I gladly did,” Wright said.

Jerry tapped Sean to play drums and a series of guest musicians to record parts, including Mike Inez, Fishbone’s Norwood Fisher, Pantera’s Rex Brown, and Primus’s Les Claypool.8 Three of the four members of Alice in Chains were appearing on this album, with the exception of Layne. “At that point, they weren’t really speaking for whatever reason. There was some kind of something going on. I don’t know the cause of it or why,” was Wright’s explanation for whether Jerry tried to get Layne onboard. Wright said there was more pressure on Jerry because, in addition to being the main songwriter and guitarist, he had to sing.

The album was titled Boggy Depot—a reference to the area of Oklahoma where Jerry’s father grew up. Rocky Schenck, Mary Mauer, and a crew traveled to Atoka, Oklahoma, on September 7, 1997, to shoot photos for the album. “Great trip, although all of us almost got arrested for smuggling liquor into a local restaurant in a dry county,” Schenck wrote. The cover shows Jerry covered in mud standing waist-deep in a branch of the Boggy River. Jerry made several trips to Oklahoma as he was writing the album and would drive his truck to the edge of the river at the location where the cover was shot.9

Jerry sent Rex Brown a tape with eleven songs he wanted him to play on. Brown agreed to do it, seeing it as an opportunity to expand his horizons and also to get away from some of the issues in Pantera. He went to Sausalito, California, to record his parts. According to Brown’s memoir, he was butting heads with Toby Wright during the making of the album. He also noted Jerry was dealing with his own addiction. He wrote, “Let’s just say I would go past his place from time to time and see his dog chained up with no food in the bowl for three fucking days, and that indicated to me that maybe something was seriously wrong.”10

By the time the album was finished, Wright said, “A lot of anxiety was pent up during the recording, about its outcome, its success rate, expectations, all that kind of stuff. And I think once it was done, mixed, [Jerry] approved everything, I think it was a great relief to him.” The album, originally scheduled for an October 1997 release, was delayed to the following spring.11

Boggy Depot was released April 7, 1998, reaching number 28 on the Billboard chart its first week.12 After the album’s release, Jerry made it clear that Alice in Chains was his priority, but would not give a definitive answer on the status of the band at the time. “It’s something I never really wanted to do, but the way things have played out, it’s like, why not?” he told Guitar World of his decision to do a solo album. “To be honest, I’d just be happy being the lead guitarist and singer for Alice in Chains. It’s always been my first love, and always will be, but the situation being what it is … we’ve been together for a long time, and right now it’s kinda played out. It’s time to let it be.” Asked if the band had broken up, he said, “We haven’t gone public and said that we’ve broken up, because how do you call something like that over? You never want to shut that door. I love those guys, and hopefully we’ll be able to do something again, but it won’t be for a while.” He declined to answer questions about Layne’s health.13

Rocky Schenck directed the music video for “My Song,” which was shot on location in Los Angeles on June 6 and 7, 1998. “I can remember the record company being very upset with me about the concept, telling me that it ‘would never play on MTV,’” Schenck wrote. Jerry supported Schenck throughout the project, and it was filmed as planned. There is a second version of the video, which is “a bit racier” than the edited version that aired on MTV.14

To support the album, Jerry put together a live band consisting of Sean; former Queensrÿche guitarist Chris DeGarmo; Old Lady Litterbug bassist Nick Rhinehart; and the former Fishbone keyboardist Chris Dowd. The group landed an opening slot for Metallica’s U.S. tour, which ran from June through September 1998.15 Jerry would often close shows with a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage” and “Eclipse,” the last two songs on The Dark Side of the Moon.16

In August 1998, Dave Jerden, Bryan Carlstrom, and Annette Cisneros were working on the Offspring’s Americana album at Jerden’s El Dorado studio. Jerden got a call: Alice in Chains wanted to record two new songs with Layne for Music Bank, their upcoming box set. With the exception of Mike Inez, it would be a reunion of the band and production team that made Dirt six years earlier.

Because the Offspring had booked studio time and had all their gear set up, the only time Alice in Chains could come in was the weekend of August 22–23. The Offspring agreed to let Alice in Chains use the studio. The fact both bands were signed to Columbia Records probably helped make that happen. For Jerden, it was a no-brainer. “We gotta do this,” he told his engineer, Bryan Carlstrom. Carlstrom was tired from working long hours and initially did not want to do it, until Jerden convinced him otherwise. “I basically told him, ‘You have to do it.’ It’s the only time in my life where I ever said that to Bryan.”

Jerden was under the impression the band was going to be there the entire weekend, based on what he heard from his manager, who had talked to Susan. His plan was to record a song a day—basic tracks, overdubs, and mixing. Because Carlstrom was burned out, Jerden was prepared to mix the songs himself.

Early in the morning of Saturday, August 22, Cisneros, the assistant engineer, and Elan Trujillo, the runner and studio assistant, came in and thoroughly documented all the levels and settings on the Offspring’s gear and the control-room equipment before they could take everything down and set up for Alice in Chains. Trujillo was excited. He had moved back to Los Angeles specifically to work with Dave Jerden, in large part because of Jerden’s work with Jane’s Addiction and Alice in Chains. Two years later, he had the opportunity to work with Alice in Chains. “I had to contain myself as best I could, because I was, like, freaking out. For me, this young kid, and, like, one of my favorite bands of all time is gonna come in. Like, I’m gonna be able to work with these guys? This is it! This was the culmination of the whole deal,” Trujillo said, the enthusiasm still evident in his voice years later.

The production team was ready to work by ten o’clock in the morning. Sean’s drum tech, Jimmy Shoaf, and Jerry’s guitar tech, Darrell Peters, were the first to arrive, and they set up all the gear. That day also happened to be Layne’s thirty-first birthday. When Trujillo found out, he told Cisneros they should get him a cake. She agreed and gave him money to buy a cake and candles.

Jerry, Sean, and Mike arrived in the late morning or early afternoon. Sean got all his parts down in about four takes, Shoaf recalled. Mike recorded his bass parts, and then Jerry recorded his rhythm-guitar parts and some overdubs. Cisneros had her camera and took several photos during the session.

There was a sense of excitement before Layne arrived. Accounts vary as to the exact time he got there, but it was late—possibly as late as 3:00 A.M., according to Jerden. When he finally arrived, the change in his physical appearance was striking even from his final live performances two years earlier, let alone from 1992, when Jerden, Carlstrom, and Cisneros had last seen him. He had grown his hair down past his shoulders, in its natural brownish-blond color. He was wearing a white cap and eyeglasses. He had a dark gray shirt and a blue Dallas Cowboys jacket. He was wearing a necklace or chain that had what appeared to be a pipe hanging from the end. He was also carrying a black leather satchel.17

“Layne showed up at the studio, and I didn’t recognize him. He looked like an eighty-year-old man. He didn’t have any teeth. I was shocked, to say the least,” Carlstrom recalled.

Trujillo had a similar reaction. “When Layne came in, we were all really shocked because Layne definitely didn’t look like how he used to look. He had obviously been really affected by his substance abuse at that point, because he had atrophy in his legs. He looked like an old man. He had no teeth. It was really sad; I was really heartbroken.” Although Layne was “obviously high,” Jimmy Shoaf said there were flashes of the Layne of old. “I think the first thing he did was grab my ass. Layne was still inside that shell. The humor and his wit were in there.”

Trujillo also noted how Layne could appear out of it, then be focused seconds later. They had ordered baked potatoes, and people wanted butter. Trujillo put the butter in the microwave to defrost it when Layne, who was sitting in the kitchen lounge seemingly not paying attention, said to him, “You better be careful, man. That’s got tinfoil on it. That’ll be dangerous in the microwave.” Layne also talked to Trujillo about video games—there was a Sony PlayStation in the studio lounge, and Layne was giving him tips for how to get ahead in certain games.

They set Layne up in a control room so he could listen to the rough tracks and work on lyrics. Trujillo was tasked with keeping an eye on him and helping him. Shortly after, Layne went to the bathroom and stayed there for a long time. He eventually went back to the control room, where he found the minifridge stocked with sodas. Layne took out a bottle of root beer. Cisneros and Trujillo saw him sitting on a couch in the control room having nodded off, the root beer spilled on the floor. Trujillo cleaned it up.

Offspring drummer Ron Welty had his V drums set up in the control room so that he could practice or develop his parts. V drums are a small electronic drum kit that can be programmed with different sound effects from a memory bank. Layne started playing around with the kit. Trujillo showed him how to change and program the different sounds. Layne went nuts when he discovered he could program cartoon effects for the different pads.

“That’s what he really liked—the cartoon sounds,” Trujillo said. “He just got a kick out of that. He was just scrolling through the bank sounds on the little brain of the V drums and just trying everything. He fucking loved it. He was like, ‘This is great. I want to get one of these. Where do these come from?’” The other members of Alice in Chains and their crew were watching this, happy to see Layne happy and having fun. Shortly after, they brought out the cake and sang “Happy Birthday” and gave him a birthday card that they had all signed. Cisneros took a picture of Layne on the drum set as he was about to blow out the candles.

While Layne was playing around, he showed no indication of being ready to work. Eventually, Layne said he wanted to do everything—write lyrics and track his vocals—that night. By that point, it was almost five o’clock in the morning, and everyone was exhausted, some having been in the studio for almost twenty hours. Jerden, under the impression they still had the next day to work, met with the band and decided to call it a night, telling them Carlstrom was tired and they’d come back and finish on Sunday.

At that point, Layne said he had to go back to Seattle to attend his sister’s wedding, but Jerry tersely cut him off. According to Jerden, he said, “Laaaaaayne,” in an exasperated tone of voice. “[Layne] turned into this little kid that had been reprimanded severely by his parents. It probably didn’t sound like anything, but I’ll tell you it was one of the strangest things I ever saw, how Jerry just wasn’t putting up with Layne’s bullshit anymore, and Layne, who had such a strong personality, had completely turned into this nothing.”

“He wasn’t crying, but he looked like he was about to cry. He reverted to about a four-year-old boy,” Jerden explained. “Layne acted like he was afraid, terrified of Jerry. He just sat there and froze up. I don’t remember him saying another thing that night. Jerry totally understood me. He was cool with the fact that we had to stop, and he didn’t argue with me at all. Jerry did not argue; the rest of the band did not argue. He knew that I’d been told that I had Layne until Sunday—and that bullshit of him saying, all of the sudden, he has to go to a wedding?

“So I blew up, and I said [to Layne], ‘Listen, I’m not here to be your friend. I have a job to do,’” Jerden said. Trujillo thinks Layne may have thought Jerden was mad at him, possibly from memories of the blowup during the Dirt sessions when Jerden confronted him about his drug use.

Jerden was skeptical, thinking Layne was using the wedding as an excuse so he could go back to Seattle to get drugs. Whatever his intentions were, evidence shows Jerden’s skepticism was accurate. According to public records from the King County Recorder’s Office, Liz Elmer and her fiancé, Greg Coats, applied for a marriage license on May 26, 1998; were married on June 1; and filed the marriage certificate on June 11—more than two months before this recording session. According to Layne’s other sister, Jamie Elmer, “They got married just at the justice of the peace, and they had their two best friends there. Nobody else was there.”

“I’ve seen pictures of my sister and her husband, Greg, in the court. And it’s with her best friend and Greg’s friend. But it was the four of them, and I’m pretty darn sure that Layne wasn’t there.” There was a wedding party in mid-June that “Layne very well may have planned on coming to but didn’t make it to, because that’s just sometimes what would happen. So, to his credit, he may have definitely been trying to get there for a wedding party, or that was his plan. But I don’t remember him there.” Jim Elmer, Ken Elmer, and Kathleen Austin also attended the party. All three of them said Layne was not there.

At that point, the band members left. Jerden tried to book a studio in Seattle for Layne’s convenience to record his vocals, but by that point Layne didn’t want to work with him anymore. Susan was furious. “Susan Silver called me up and reads me the fucking riot act. She says my career was based on Alice in Chains, which is totally bullshit. I’ve worked with a lot of famous people before that. I had a lot of hit records that I produced before,” Jerden recalled. Rolling Stone got wind of the episode and wrote a story about it.18

Toby Wright got a call from Layne and Kevan Wilkins, asking if he would be willing to finish the project. He booked time at Robert Lang Studios to record the vocals and mix them with the material from the session with Jerden. Wright said, “At that point, Jerry and Layne weren’t getting along at all. So I had one guy in, and I would have another guy in after he was done. Those two songs required a lot of ProTools editing. That was one of the first times Alice was ever even on ProTools. Because Layne would do something; he’d go home. Jerry would come in. I’d change it for him; he’d go home. Layne would come in and hear what we did, and he’d change it again. So it was a lot of digital manipulation,” Wright said. Recording Layne’s vocals was difficult because of the loss of his teeth, which resulted in a lisp that affected his speech and singing ability. Consequently, they tried to stay away from lyrics that accentuated his lisp. “It was kind of hard to do that, because it shows up pretty much everywhere on those tracks. But it was easy for me, because Layne and I got along really well. So I didn’t have any problem with him at all. It was just a matter of getting him into the studio, having him sit down and get creative.”

“Get Born Again” and “Died” were the last songs Layne recorded with Alice in Chains.

In the late summer or early fall of 1998, songwriter/producer Matt Serletic and Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello were putting together a supergroup called the Class of ’99 to record a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” for director Robert Rodriguez’s forthcoming sci-fi/horror flick The Faculty. “My thought was, How do you take a quintessentially English track—from production to the English schoolkids to everything about it, the dark English thing—and make, like, a dark American version of it?” Serletic said.

They decided they wanted the rhythm section from Jane’s Addiction—Martyn LeNoble on bass and Stephen Perkins on drums—with Serletic on keyboards. The four musicians met at Conway Studios in Los Angeles to record their parts. Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor assisted with some of the keyboard programming. Sony sent a crew to the studio to film the recording of the song. As far as Serletic knew at the time, the footage was for a documentary about the making of the song, but it would ultimately be used for a music video.

They still didn’t have a singer, so Morello and Serletic were asking themselves, “Who can sing this?” A few names were floated, including Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine. “What about Layne Staley?”

Serletic doesn’t recall who exactly proposed Layne but thinks it might have been Morello. Everyone in the band was a fan of his, and, in Serletic’s words, “It was kind of an instant yes if he’s up for it, if he can do it.”

Serletic contacted Sony Records to act as a conduit between them and Layne and relay his proposal. Serletic eventually heard that Layne wanted to do it. By this point, the band was up against a tight deadline and had only about three days to finish the song, which was still missing Layne’s lead vocals and the children’s choir vocals. Serletic went to Seattle to record Layne on a Friday, bringing with him an engineer and a ProTools editor. Layne was supposed to arrive at the studio at nine o’clock—supposed to. He thinks Layne finally showed up at around one in the morning, brought to the studio by Todd Shuss, one of Susan’s employees.

“This is the first time I’ve ever met Layne. I didn’t know what to expect, but he looked rough,” Serletic recalled. “At this point, he had lost most of his teeth. He was incredibly shy. It was kind of a shock to see him.”

Susan was also struck by the change in his appearance. “I hadn’t seen him maybe since I went to his apartment to tell him that his girlfriend died,” she recalled years later. “I wouldn’t have recognized him. He looked different—he didn’t look like himself anymore. But he had the same sparkling wit. Looking at him, thinking, ‘My God, he’s physically changed,’ and just as sweet, just as funny—quoting lines off silly Nick at Nite TV shows.”19

According to Serletic, “He heads up to the lounge upstairs and has a bag of cheeseburgers from McDonald’s. He’s in the lounge, sitting in the corner, really timid. I say hello. He’s chewing his cheeseburger. He really doesn’t engage much, but basically he sits there for about two hours. So now it’s like two or three o’clock in the morning, something like that, when he finally comes out of his shell after I talked to him for a minute. We kind of just small-talked. ‘Oh my God, he’s a great vocalist. I’m excited to work with him,’ anything to make him comfortable.”

Layne didn’t want anybody else around for the session. Complicating things from Layne’s perspective, according to Serletic, was that this was one of the first times he would be working with people he hadn’t worked with in the past. Serletic and his team tried to make it as comfortable as possible for him, and he finally came down to sing at three or four o’clock in the morning. Serletic had his engineer hide under the console to work the preamp and microphone levels as he ran ProTools, “to kind of make it more of a one-on-one direct experience so he didn’t feel like he was being watched and being judged.”

Serletic said, “You can only know what you know about the voice you’re so familiar with from radio and albums and so on. It was still there, but at first especially, it was very papery, kind of a whisper, a ghost of himself. It got stronger as he got comfortable with the track and got his headphone mixes right.”

As was Layne’s trademark, they stacked his vocals. “We stacked it up; we did the harmonies underneath. When you start doing those harmonies, that’s when that great Alice in Chains sound starts really emerging,” Serletic said. It took him a while to get his vocals warmed up, but once he did, he nailed his takes. “Once he got past that, he was in control. I wasn’t having to direct him. He was like, ‘Hey, let me do a double,’ ‘Okay, let me try a harmony now.’ He knew how he liked to approach vocals, and he was still very much cognizant enough to be a pro.”

Layne’s lisp was apparent, so Serletic had to redo some of the material where the letter s was especially pronounced. “I think even on the final, we did some significant s removal on a couple of things to make it not jump out of the track.” They finished at around 4:30 in the morning. “He seemed fairly excited about it. He had settled into a little more of a comfort zone. He liked the track. He seemed to be excited being part of it. Sad to say, he got paid to be on the record, so there might have been a financial concern as well, to make some money. But I think he was pleased from what I could tell by the time we finished,” Serletic said. For Layne’s scenes in the music video, Sony/Columbia used file footage from Mad Season’s Live at the Moore.

As soon as the session was over, Serletic went straight to the airport because the children’s choir was recording their vocals in Los Angeles a few hours later. While on the way, Serletic called Don Ienner, president of Columbia Records, telling him, “You’ve got to help this guy.” In Serletic’s words, “You could tell he was not in good shape.”

According to Serletic, Ienner’s response was “‘We’ve tried. We have. We put him on the corporate jet several times to rehab.’ I’ll always remember this: he said something to me to the effect of ‘You can’t help people if they don’t want to help themselves.’”

In retrospect, Serletic said, “I think there’s a ghostly quality to the final vocal that he delivered that I think is really haunting and moving in its own right. From a production standpoint, he was a guy that had lost all his teeth; he was not in good shape. It was really sad.”

Asked years later about working with Layne on the Class of ’99, Morello tweeted, “Mostly sad. He was not well bless him.” There are two things worth noting about this session: first, this was probably Layne’s last studio recording—it’s unclear whether this session or the Music Bank sessions happened first; and second, it was the last time Susan saw him.20

After the Metallica tour, Jerry scheduled a U.S. headlining tour that would run through October, ending with a Halloween homecoming performance at the Showbox in Seattle.21 Layne went to the show but kept a low profile. According to Jimmy Shoaf, Layne watched the performance from backstage and possibly from the audience. He did not perform. During the after-show party, Layne, Shoaf, and a third person posed for a picture together, which surfaced on the Internet several years later. This is one of the last photos of Layne known to exist. That night was the last time Shoaf saw Layne.22

On July 19, 1999, Jerry, Sean, and Mike were scheduled to appear on the nationally syndicated radio show Rockline to promote their greatest hits compilation and box set. Jerry and Mike were in the studio, while Sean was participating by phone from Albany, New York. There was a surprise twist midway through. Layne, who was listening from home, called in the middle of the show and stuck around for the duration of the program.

Asked about the possibility of the band regrouping to record new material besides the two new songs, there was a bit of a disconnect. Jerry said, “We’ll let you know.” Layne responded, “Okay,” without hesitation.

“Layne, what’s your attitude toward that? Are you ready to record?” the host, Bob Coburn, asked.

“Sure, I’d do it anytime.”

A caller asked, “I want to know who Alice is and how does she like being in chains?”

Jerry deferred the question to Layne, noting he had never asked that question. “That story is basically a bunch of drunken guys who had plans to start a death metal band who dressed in drag. The band never was formed, and so I took the name,” Layne said. There is no evidence of Layne ever making plans to start a death metal band with anyone, according to his former Alice ’N Chains bandmates Johnny Bacolas and James Bergstrom. “No, we were never going to start a death metal band. Probably him trying to sound cool instead of saying he was in a glam band,” Bacolas wrote in an e-mail. There is photographic evidence of at least one early Alice in Chains show where the four founding members took the stage wearing what Mike Starr described as “bad 70s dresses.”23 Only Layne would know how and why he turned all of this into a story about a death metal band that dressed in drag.

Layne’s sense of humor was firing on all cylinders. A female caller asked, “Out of all your CDs and songs, what do each of you consider your most successful work?”

“No, baby,” Layne interjected. “What do you consider my most successful work?” The other band members and host Bob Coburn were cracking up.24 This was the last interview Layne ever did.

At some point in the late 1990s or early 2000s, Layne made a rare social appearance at a party at Ann Wilson’s home. In the Wilsons’ memoir Kicking and Dreaming, she wrote, “He wasn’t quite the recluse he would become in the months before he died in 2002, but it was still rare enough to see him that his presence was the talk of the party.”

After the other guests had left, it was just Layne and Wilson, and Wilson decided she wanted to go for a swim. Layne followed her to her pool but did not jump in. He sat in a lounge chair looking at the sky and drinking a beer while Wilson was swimming. He told her that as a kid, he had excelled at swimming and diving. “I loved to dive into water,” he told her, adding that it was a whole “different world.”

“Suddenly, a huge meteor went over us,” Wilson wrote. “It looked like a bright piece of burning coal, and for a second it lit up Layne’s face. He looked young again, like a kid who loved nothing better than to dive into water. In that moment, there was nothing dark in his life.”

“Did you see that?” Layne asked with great excitement, according to Wilson’s recollection. “How close do you think that was to us, Ann? Do you think that almost hit us, Ann? How lucky are we to have seen that?”

“It was really beautiful,” Wilson said.

“Do you have any idea … how rare it is for a meteor that big, and that bright, to come that close to us? We are really, really lucky people, Ann. You and me.”

That was the last time she saw Layne.25

By late 1999, Susan was in what she called “my own private hell” dealing with her husband’s addiction. She was also undergoing fertility treatments and eventually got pregnant. Jerry had new management and was dealing with his own addiction issues during this period. During this period of inactivity, there was a major milestone in Susan’s life. On June 28, 2000, she gave birth to a daughter, Lillian Jean Cornell, the couple’s first and only child.26

About a week after the end of the Boggy Depot tour, Jerry started writing material for a follow-up album. “In ’98, I locked myself in my house, went out of my mind and wrote 25 songs. I rarely bathed during that period of writing, I sent out for food, I didn’t really venture out of my house in three or four months. It was a hell of an experience,” Jerry said in his official biography for Roadrunner Records.27

Degradation Trip was originally conceived as a double album, with potentially as many as thirty songs for a triple album—Jerry had been given a copy of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass.28 He put together a backing band consisting of the former bassist for Suicidal Tendencies, Rob Trujillo, and the former drummer for Faith No More, Mike Bordin. At the time, both of them were the rhythm section for Ozzy Osbourne’s band.

Nearly a year after the Music Bank recording session, Jerry decided to work with Jerden again for Degradation Trip. According to Jerden, Jerry and his band arrived at the studio, set up their gear, and tested levels on the first day. By that point, it was getting late, and Jerden said, “We’ll come back tomorrow. We’ll start fresh, and we’ll start recording.” When Jerden came back the next morning, they were still there, having recorded as many as seventeen songs overnight.

“What the fuck is going on, Jerry?”

Jerry played him some of the material, and Jerden didn’t like it. “It was horrible. It was all out of time, the songs went on for, like, I don’t know how long. They were like really bad jam sessions,” he said. “We got to do this right. You and I both worked together before.”

“No, I like it.”

At that point, Jerden said, “Jerry, this isn’t going to work,” and effectively ended his role in the project. With Jerden having bailed out, his manager—who also owned the studio—called Elan Trujillo and gave him explicit instructions not to do or record anything with Jerry. Trujillo knew something had gone down but was not privy to specifics. At one point, he was alone in the control room with Jerry in the studio, saying, “Come on! Let’s fucking record this, man! Roll the tape, dude!” Though it pained him because he very much wanted to, Elan had to tell Jerry he couldn’t do it on his boss’s orders. Jerry was furious and stormed out of the studio. Jerry later said, “I started with Dave Jerden. I worked with him for one day, and then I fired him!”29

In retrospect, Jerden said if Jerry liked the material so much, he should have been producing it himself, which is what happened. He also said they have since patched things up. “Jerry and I have discussed it since then and there’s no hard feelings. I will never say anything bad about Jerry Cantrell. Jerry Cantrell is a great guy.”

The making of Degradation Trip wouldn’t get any easier. Jerry left Columbia Records in the middle of production. “After we realized it wasn’t going to be on Columbia, we just settled accounts and walked away and called it a good ten years,” Jerry said. In order to settle accounts, Jerry mortgaged his house to reimburse Columbia for money already spent and used the rest to finance the album. He signed with Roadrunner Records. Label executives complimented Jerry on his ambitious idea but said they didn’t think the market would be receptive to double albums. The decision was made to trim down Degradation Trip into a single album’s worth of material.

“It was difficult to make it one album,” Jerry said. “But I was on a new label, and I’d already been through a year of trying to find a fucking company that wanted to put it out. Nobody wanted to do it. So I made a compromise, which was to put it out as a single album first, with the promise that, at some point, it would be released as I intended it.” Lyrically, Jerry described the material as “what I was going through with Alice coming to a stop, looking at a situation where I had to move on, and not really being happy about it.” The album was scheduled for release on June 25, 2002.30

According to sources, Layne had at least four different dealers who supplied him with drugs at one point or another, although not necessarily all of them at the same time. Of these four, only one—Tom Hansen, former guitarist of the Fartz—has admitted it on the record. In his memoir American Junkie, he wrote of going over to Layne’s home to bring him drugs in July 1997. Of Layne and Demri, he wrote, “She’d always wanted him to quit, and he’d always wanted her to quit, and neither of them had ever been able to.” After getting high on heroin and crack, Layne decided to take a spin on his motorcycle, with Hansen along for the ride. He drove to Bad Animals Studio, where they went into a sound booth and Layne put on Above.31

While it is not known if Layne tried to kick drugs during his later years, that didn’t stop others from trying to help him. Mark Lanegan went to Layne’s apartment to try and talk to him. Krist Novoselic would go over and leave food for him.32

Nancy Layne McCallum contacted drug counselor Bob Forrest and asked if he and Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante—both recovering heroin addicts—would be willing to talk to Layne, a request they agreed to.

“Layne’s got an odd sense of humor,” McCallum told Forrest. “I told him John [Frusciante] had gangrene once. He said, ‘In his arm? That’s terrible, Mom. John’s a guitar player. He needs his hands and arms. Me? I’m just a singer. I can get by without them.’ I know he was joking, but I don’t like to hear stuff like that. Can you try to talk some sense into him?”

Forrest and Frusciante met with Layne at his condo. According to Forrest, “His mind worked but he was a million miles away.” He was playing a video game the entire time they were talking.

“Hey, Layne. What’s going on?” Forrest asked.

“Nothing. I know why you’re here,” Layne said.

“Your mom’s worried, man. You don’t look too good.” Of Layne’s appearance, Forrest wrote in his memoir, “His skin took on the look of bleached vellum, his weight dropped below ninety pounds … He had entered the end stage of the game.”

“I’m okay, though. Really,” Layne insisted as he pretended to listen. The two of them eventually left.

“I don’t think he’ll come out of this,” Forrest told Frusciante.

“It’s his life, man,” Frusciante replied.33