Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Acknowledgments

There were two basic guiding principles I had while I was researching and writing this book. The first: the idea that Alice in Chains didn’t happen in a vacuum by themselves. There were people there every step of the way who helped them become the band that they are today. The same can be said of this book—while the reporting and writing are mine, I certainly would not have been able to get to this point on my own.

The second guiding principle: no one person had all the pieces of the puzzle to tell this story. Filmmaker James Cameron described history as “a kind of consensus hallucination.” Human memory is a curious thing when revisiting the past, especially with the passage of time, the ending of relationships, or the use of mind-altering substances. I sought out as many different sources as possible to obtain independent verification of events that, in some cases, happened decades ago. This was especially important in reporting about the people who are deceased and cannot speak for themselves. It is also necessary to accept that there are some things that may never be known, because many of the people in the story have passed away.

One of my explicit goals was to maximize the accuracy not only of the facts but also of the timing and sequencing of events, which was not easy, because in many instances people did not know the dates. When no dates or other evidence were available, I made the best educated guess that I could as to when and where to place a particular event in the text. As the author, I am ultimately responsible for the content of the book. Any errors within are my fault and will be corrected in future editions.

I would like to thank the many people who made this book possible. First and foremost, my agent, Anthony Mattero, at Foundry Literary + Media, as well as Rob Kirkpatrick, Jennifer Letwack, and everyone at St. Martin’s Press who took a chance on a first-time author and saw the potential in this story and who were unwavering in their efforts to make this book a reality. I could not have made it across the finish line without their guidance and support.

Thanks to Jamie, Jim, and Ken Elmer for providing the family’s perspective and insights into Layne’s life that only they could.

Thanks to Gayle Starr for putting me in touch with several of Mike’s friends, as well as for providing me with a DVD of Mike’s memorial service. Thanks to Steve Alley, Aaron Woodruff, Jason Buttino, Evan Sheeley, and Jeff Gilbert for their accounts of Mike’s life before, during, and after Alice in Chains. The Facebook pages for SATO and Mike Starr were also excellent sources of stories, photos, articles, and audio and video recordings.

The quotes that are attributed to the band members and Susan Silver are from previously published materials or from sources with direct knowledge of a person, event, or subject. I have made every effort to portray their views and experiences as fairly and accurately as possible.

Thanks to Kathleen Austin for her wealth of insight and stories about Demri and Layne that only a mother could know. I’d also like to give my profoundest thanks to Karie Pfeiffer-Simmons, who, in addition to being a good interview, put me in touch with many of Demri’s friends from her middle and high school days in Arlington, as well as Chris Schulberg, Nanci Hubbard-Mills, Damon Burns, and Demri’s former teacher Lyle Forde. Thanks to Chris for taking me on a tour of Demri’s old stomping grounds in Arlington. Thanks to Russell for his account of Demri during the summer of 1996, a few months before her death.

My sincerest thanks to the many public information and archives officials who dealt with my numerous records requests expeditiously and with the utmost professionalism: Rodger Stephenson and Elizabeth Mash at the Seattle Police Department; Colin Jones at the King County Medical Examiner’s Office; Candee Allred at the Salt Lake City Police Department; Kathy Kunkel at the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office; Jacquie Thornton at the office for the Harris County District Clerk; Barbara Lester and Ann West of the Harris County Sheriff’s Office; and the staff at the National Archives office in Seattle.

I’d also like to thank the staff at the Seattle Public Library and the Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington for giving me access to their wealth of records in hard copy, digital, and microfilm formats. Their old copies of The Rocket were a gold mine of source material, as were old archives of local newspapers and genealogical research tools. Thanks to the staff and students at the Lauinger Library at Georgetown University for providing such a great place to work—both as a graduate student and as an author. I spent many hours at Lauinger Library writing and rewriting this book as it came together over the course of three years.

Thanks to the many producers and engineers who worked with Sleze/Alice ’N Chains, Alice in Chains, Mad Season, and Jerry Cantrell over the years—Peter Barnes, Tim Branom, Bryan Carlstrom, Ronnie Champagne, Annette Cisneros, Dave Hillis, Sam Hofstedt, Dave Jerden, Jonathan Plum, Elan Trujillo, and Toby Wright—who were critical in explaining how the bands developed their sound and how their records were made. I’d like to praise Annette Cisneros for sharing with me her production calendar from the Dirt sessions in 1992, as well as her photos from the Music Bank session in 1998. I was fortunate to interview Bryan Carlstrom extensively about his role in making the Facelift and Dirt records before his passing in January 2013. My sincerest condolences to his friends and family for their loss.

While researching this book, I had hoped to interview Rick Parashar, only to discover that he had a strict policy of not giving interviews. He passed away in August 2014 as this book was in final edits. When he and his brother Raj cofounded London Bridge Studios in 1985, they created a place where many young up-and-coming local musicians could hone their craft and record their material, including Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell in their respective pre–Alice in Chains bands. The list of bands that recorded at London Bridge from the late 1980s through mid-1990s reads like a who’s who of the era. As if this weren’t enough, Parashar’s formidable producing talents were critical for many of these bands: Alice in Chains’s demo that got them signed to Columbia Records, as well as Sap, “Would?,” and the Dirt demo; Blind Melon’s debut album; the Temple of the Dog album; and his best-known work—Pearl Jam’s Ten. It is not hyperbole to say the Seattle grunge scene would not have been what it became without Rick Parashar. My condolences to his family and friends.

Tim Branom was a wealth of information about the Music Bank and the days of Sleze, Alice ’N Chains, Gypsy Rose, and Diamond Lie. His research and personal archive from the period are the source for many of the dates for events in the story. His network of contacts was also instrumental in getting me in touch with several sources.

David Ballenger, Scott Hunt, and Darrell Vernon were encyclopedic sources of knowledge about the history, day-to-day operations, staff, and bands at the Music Bank. I’m extremely grateful to David for letting me spend some time with him in Dallas going through his records from his days running the Music Bank. His spiral-bound notebook, which guests had to sign when visiting the Music Bank, also helped confirm accounts from other sources that Demri had been to the building and thus helped date her relationship with Layne.

James Burdyshaw was a great source in his own right about the Music Bank and the early days of Alice in Chains, and he was invaluable in helping me track down other sources.

Thanks to the surviving members of Sleze/Alice ’N Chains—Johnny Bacolas, James Bergstrom, Morgen Gallagher, Byron Hansen, Nick Pollock, and Ed Semanate—who provided crucial perspectives and insights into this formative period of Layne’s life and career. I’d especially like to thank Nick Pollock for his photos from the 1985–1989 era, which included some truly historic finds. Thanks to Ron Holt and James Bergstrom for shedding light on the short-lived 40 Years of Hate project. Thanks to Paul Plumis of the Shoreline School District for taking me on a tour of the old Shorewood High School building, where Layne did his first public performance as a lead singer with Sleze in February 1985, shortly before its scheduled demolition in the summer of 2013. Thanks to the staff at Meadowdale High School in Lynnwood who helped me review Layne’s old yearbooks and provided me with the dates he was enrolled there. Thanks to Rick Throm for sharing his stories of Layne as a student and employee.

Thanks to Matt Muasau, Bobby Nesbitt, and Scott Nutter for their memories of and insights into Diamond Lie and Jerry Cantrell’s life in Tacoma before he moved to Seattle. I’d also like to thank Bobby Nesbitt for the band publicity shots that he provided.

Thanks to Randy Hauser, who, in addition to being the first to discover Alice in Chains, provided insights about the band’s early days when he was their manager and showed me his priceless collection of Polaroids from this period.

Thanks to Lori Barbero, Randy Biro, Martin Feveyear, Maureen Herman, Jimmy Shoaf, and Aaron Woodruff for their stories of Alice in Chains on tour.

Thanks to the many journalists, editors, photographers, and publishers at The Rocket, The Seattle Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Seattle Weekly who provided real-time coverage of the music scene happening in their backyard. I would also like to give credit to the reporters and editors at Rolling Stone for their coverage of Alice in Chains over the years, which I have cited extensively. I would also like to give credit to Faceculture.com for their seven-part interview with Jerry Cantrell and Sean Kinney, which is one of the best firsthand accounts of the band’s history I’ve ever found, especially about the early days.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge other works about the grunge scene, all of which are worth reading or watching: Scot Barbour’s Malfunkshun: The Story of Andrew Wood, Charles R. Cross’s Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, Jacob McMurray’s Taking Punk to the Masses: From Nowhere to Nevermind, Pearl Jam’s Pearl Jam Twenty book and documentary, Greg Prato’s Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music, Doug Pray’s Hype! and Mark Yarm’s Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge. Justin Henderson’s Grunge Seattle is a fantastic guide to the key dates and places of the era, especially to someone like me, who approached this book as a complete outsider and who had never been to Seattle before.

I’m extremely grateful to Jacob McMurray for providing me with scans of the band’s 1988 submission packet, prepared by Jenny Bendel, as well as the transcript of the Experience Music Project’s 1995 interview with the late John Baker Saunders. Thanks to Joseph and Henrietta Saunders, who provided many details about Baker’s life story, as well as photos from his private collection. Thanks to Evan Sheeley, Dan Gallagher, and Kim De Baere for their insights into Baker’s final years.

Thanks to Toby Wright, Phil Lipscomb, and Stephen Richards for their accounts of Layne’s planned collaboration with Taproot, which was supposed to happen around the time of his death in April 2002.

Thanks to the many Alice in Chains fans who uploaded, scanned, or transcribed audio and video bootlegs, interviews, articles, and photos and put them on the Internet. There are too many to list individually, but the content was invaluable source material for the historical record. Thanks also to the Jane’s Addiction, KISS, Megadeth, Metallica, Ministry, Slayer, and Van Halen official and unofficial Web sites that helped to corroborate specific dates for Alice in Chains shows and tours.

Humberto Fernandez and Therissa A. Libby’s Heroin: Its History, Pharmacology, and Treatment was an invaluable reference in helping me understand the history and medical effects of the drug. Twelve years after Layne’s death, heroin addiction is still making news and claiming lives. While this book was being written, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cory Monteith, Peaches Geldof, and Dave Brockie died of heroin-related causes. During the same period, several news organizations have reported on the heroin epidemic in Vermont. History keeps repeating itself.

Thanks to my academic and professional mentors, under whom I honed my craft over the years: Mike Maltas, Pam Kelley, Robert Yoon, Sharona Schwartz, Phil Hirschkorn, Scott Bronstein, Adam Levine, Jim Barnett, Don Hecker, Henry Schuster, James Pomfret, John Ruwitch, the late George Marcopoulos, the late Gerald Gill, David Dow, Richard Reeves, Mike Chinoy, Matt Lait, Scott Glover, Bryce Nelson, David Edelstein, Jim Rabon, Daniel Byman, Paul Pillar, Celina Realuyo, Thomas McNaugher, and Michael Dennis. It is from them that I learned the mix of journalistic narrative married with academic discipline that made this book what it is. Thanks to the many colleagues at CNN, 60 Minutes, and Reuters—managers, reporters, photojournalists, editors, producers, assignment-desk editors, technicians, production assistants, news assistants, interns, and others—who I had the pleasure of working with over the years. I could not think of a better group of people to be with in the news trenches on a daily basis. Working with you all was an education and a privilege, for which I am forever grateful. I could not have written this book without having learned on the job from all of you.

Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank my friends, as well as the de Sola, Magaña, and Castrillo families for their unconditional love and support before and during this project.