by Mark Yarm
GARY LEE CONNER We knew that we needed to get off Epic, because it wasn’t really helping us much. They had advanced us $1 million. We negotiate with them, and they sent us a letter saying, “You are off Epic. You owe us a million dollars for those records, but forget about it. If you sell records, it’ll go against it, otherwise …” So basically, we got away with a million dollars from Epic, even though I never saw a damn thing for it, except for several kinda bad videos and two pretty good records.
We mostly stopped doing stuff in ’96, though we played a few other shows after that. Mark would nosedive, then get up, then nosedive again.
BARRETT MARTIN It took a while for Mark to get sober, and he finally did. He went to rehab, actually at Courtney’s urging, so I have to give her some credit for that.
COURTNEY LOVE I love Lanegan. To this day, I love Lanegan. Love Lanegan. LOVE him! I’ve never met a creature more noble and quiet and seriously cool than Mark Lanegan. I sent Dylan and Mark to rehab, but I separated them. I had to make a calculation, which is a little vicious of me, about which one I thought had the best chances of succeeding, so I sent Dylan to the really hardcore one, Cri-Help, and I sent Mark to Los Encinos. Mark got better.
MARK LANEGAN I mean, there was a time when I thought I didn’t have any choice in the matter, when I spent almost a year in various “situations”: jail, rehab, halfway house. And just through the sheer fact that I wasn’t able to get outside, so to speak—and also because I really just did not want to live that way any longer—for me it wasn’t hard. It was the end of a nightmare that had lasted for years and years. I had always hoped that I would be able to stop, but I never was able to. Eventually, I was. A lot of that had to do with changing my way of thinking on a great many things; again, some battles you just have to give up. I was pretty stubborn, I thought I could do a lot of things myself. Nobody likes to believe that they need anybody’s help in anything, and the smarter you are—and I’m not smart—or the tougher you are—and at times I thought I was pretty tough—the more trouble you have. The smartest guys I ever met are not around anymore, because they thought they could think their way out of an unthinkable situation, and the tough guys have to just be beaten up repeatedly, and some guys just never do make it out.
GARY LEE CONNER By the time we played our last-ever show, which was the opening of that Experience Music Project in Seattle in 2000, Mark was cleaned up and doing pretty good. The main thing I remember about the EMP show: $65,000. That’s how much we got paid. That was the most we ever made. It was a good show. We got Josh Homme from Kyuss to play with us again; he’d played keyboard and guitar with us when we toured for Dust, and that was a nice addition.
Mark didn’t even tell us this was going to be our last show. I remember sitting in the dressing room and he was telling someone else it was going to be our last show. Nobody was that surprised, because we’d spent the last two years trying to get on another label. We’d done two demos on our own and another one with some big-time producer. Nobody seemed interested.
JACK IRONS I got worn out touring. I have the whole sensitivity, bipolar thing that I live with. My wife and I, we had another child. I just couldn’t keep up with everything. That was a slippery slope for me at the time. I fell down.
It’s an anxiety disorder. You’re having irrational anxieties—like your life’s being threatened. You can’t get onstage in front of 30,000 people and play your best for two or three hours that way. When I was in the midst of it, I was always looking to figure out what the cause was, but the reality is that it was my own body chemistry. That’s the imbalance part. I stopped sleeping during the Australia tour of ’98. We had a big American tour coming up in the summer and I just realized I wasn’t going to make it. I had to make a choice for my health and my longevity and my family versus my career and, honestly, there was no way around it.
That was a very traumatic time and I think it was hard for all of us. It wasn’t anything personal. There’s no doubt that Matt Cameron proved to be a very worthy addition to the band and deservedly is there. How do I say it? It all happened exactly as it should have. Years later, my life’s a lot easier. I definitely might find myself in a situation that has me doing some touring someday. There’s absolutely no comparison between the place I was at when I had to leave and where I’m at now. It’s like being on fire versus being a little bit warm.
BRETT ELIASON Jack was struggling personally, and he wasn’t on his game at all. He is a great musician, but he just didn’t have the energy to bring that night after night, and he’d get lost in the arrangements, and tempos were going up and down, and he just wasn’t capable of being the drummer that he is. Having Matt join reignited the band.
MATT CAMERON After Soundgarden, I was just questioning things, like, Did I do or say something wrong? Did I play something weird? I was working with John McBain on Wellwater Conspiracy and doing other sessions, but I always kind of thought that Chris was gonna go do a solo record and then we were gonna get back together. Then I was asked to tour with Pearl Jam in the summer of ’98.
KELLY CURTIS Matt said, “Sure, I’ll do it,” and the changeover was really nice. The hysteria started to go away. That was the first non-drama tour in our life.
MATT CAMERON I was a little noncommittal at first, but after that first tour, I realized Soundgarden wasn’t going to get back together—Chris seemed pretty happy doing what he was doing and I heard reports that he was into drugs. Pearl Jam was a lot less volatile than Soundgarden was. I felt like there was a more workmanlike professionalism with Pearl Jam, which I found refreshing. The fact that I knew all the Pearl Jam guys really well made the transition a lot easier. Things were going great.
I’d played Roskilde once before with Soundgarden, and it was a really cool festival. It was always one of the best-organized festivals, too. It’s in Denmark, where everyone is beautiful-looking and has good healthcare and nice teeth, and it’s just like, what a weird place for this freak accident to happen.
EDDIE VEDDER … Right before we went on that night, we got a phone call. Chris Cornell and his wife, Susan, had a daughter that day. And also a sound guy left a day early, ’cause he was going to have a child. It brought me to tears, I was so happy. We were walking out onstage that night with two new names in our heads. And in 45 minutes everything changed.
BRETT ELIASON I was mixing that Roskilde show. It was a stormy, really windy, rainy night. A lot of people, great big crowd. Outdoor shows with wind, they don’t ever go very well. It sounds like the P.A.’s being put through a flanger, wind is blowing everything all over the place. The crowd was crunching up, as they always did for the band. Apparently, the ground was uneven, it was very muddy, and people started to go down because of the side-to-side movement of the audience. The front crunch will crush you, but it doesn’t drop you. Going side to side you lose your footing and can get pulled under, and apparently that had happened to a bunch of kids.
STONE GOSSARD Well, this particular show, the barrier was 30 meters away; it was dark and raining. They’d been serving beer all day long. People fell down; the band had no idea.
BRETT ELIASON A security guard had seen a hole where a kid had been and was smart enough to react. He said something to our stage manager, who ran to our production manager, Dick Adams, and said, “I think we have a problem out there.” Dick ran straight onto the stage and told Ed in the middle of “Daughter.” Ed stopped the band and he asked this huge crowd to take a step back, and they did. He asked them to take another step back, and they did. And that’s when they saw a bunch of bodies on the ground.
I remember watching Ed drop to his knees. At that point, Dick corralled the band and got them offstage.
BILLBOARD (“Loss of Life Fails to Halt Festival; Nine Killed as Crowd Rushes Stage During Pearl Jam Set,” by Kai R. Lofthus, July 15, 2000) OSLO—Danish police have confirmed that the organizers of Denmark’s Roskilde Festival will not face prosecution following the death of nine concertgoers at the event June 30. A spok
esman for the authorities tells Billboard that they regard the tragedy as an accident and not a criminal case. The fans, aged between 17 and 26, died as a result of a crowd crush during Pearl Jam’s headline set. Another 30 people were hospitalized.
STONE GOSSARD We were part of an event that was disorganized on every level. Mostly I feel like we witnessed a car wreck. But on another level, we were involved. We played this show, and it happened. You can’t be there and not have some sense of being responsible. It’s just impossible. All of us spent two days in the hotel in Denmark crying and trying to understand what was going on.
NANCY WILSON I got a call in the afternoon from Kelly, who was freaking out, and he told me everything that happened firsthand—how they saw people being hauled off the stage right in front of them that were already dead. We were crying on the phone together because rock and roll is not supposed to be a war zone.
KELLY CURTIS The reason those people died was that no one could get word out what was happening. It was just chaos. There was a lot of Danish press that said we were inciting moshing. It wasn’t during a crazy part of the set; it was during “Daughter.”
EDDIE VEDDER The intensity of the whole event starts to seem surreal, and you want it to be real. So you sit there with it, and you cough it up and redigest it. You still want to pay respect to the people who were there or the people who died and their families. Respect for the people who cared about you. A friend of an Australian guy named Anthony Hurley asked if I would write something for the funeral. That was just hands-down the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do—not really knowing what was appropriate, not knowing how the family or friends felt; maybe I’m the last person they’d like to hear from. But it meant a lot to them, and it really helped me. I think it also helped the rest of the guys. Hurley had three younger siblings, and they said he really cared about our band, and that’s why he was in the front. And that he was actually doing something he loved during his last minutes. His sister and a friend of his—who was with Anthony that night—came to Seattle and saw our last two shows. And that was nice, spending time with them.…
JEFF AMENT Some of us thought maybe we should cancel the [North American] tour. I felt if we cancel, what are we running from? It made us deal with it every day on some level, and that was the most positive thing we could do. The shows were all reserved-seating, which made it a lot easier. At first, it was hard to look at the crowd. A couple of kids I saw at Roskilde, they’re burned in my memory forever. Sometimes, when you’re looking at a crowd, you can’t help but see those faces.
The Vegas show on the U.S. tour was pretty heavy. That afternoon was the first time we’d played the Mother Love Bone song “Crown of Thorns.” Kelly and Susan Silver and my parents are there, my whole family, and all of a sudden, playing that song, it was the first time I properly reflected on what we’d gone through and what a journey it’s been. And that moment was reflected in a purely positive way, feeling blessed, happy to still be playing music.
NANCY WILSON I saw them in Seattle, the last show of their whole tour. It was incredible. All these incredible versions, different versions of songs, different grooves on songs, big long jams. Pretty much every person during the whole show sang every lyric to every song. And every time Eddie would glance over or look over to our section, every arm went up. Afterwards, I went backstage and Eddie came up to me and was having a million feelings, you could tell, ’cause it was the end of the whole tour, the “life and death tour.” I said, “I just got so emotional during your show. That was maybe the best show I’ve ever seen.” I saw tears come into his eyes and he was like, “Yeah, I know,” and gave me this big hug. It meant so much to him that the night was so good.
KURT DANIELSON TAD did a Midwestern leg of the Alice in Chains tour in ’93; they were dates making up shows that had been canceled in the past due to Layne’s drug problems. Layne was on his best behavior because he had been in rehab recently and he was clean and he wanted to stay that way. They had a bodyguard with him at all times who was supposed to help him. But I saw Layne on other occasions, around ’96, ’97, when he was definitely way back into being a junkie. Not only that, but smoking a lot of crack. I can remember one time in particular, at another musician’s apartment—and by this time I was also doing heroin, and that’s why I was there.
The coffee table was covered with a mound of used needles that were glazed with blood. It was sad, really sad, because next to that there was a mound of charred Chore Boys—that’s the steel wool that you get if you want to smoke crack, you put that in a glass pipe. And on the couch were rosettes of crumpled tissue paper stained with blood. The couch cushion was uncomfortable, and when you lifted it up to look what was there, you found a gun. A pistol. And there was a street guy sitting in a corner, he was from somewhere else. He was completely destitute, a full-on junkie, just hanging out with his idols. And then in the bathroom, you would find the walls splattered with blood. Suddenly you find yourself in a Burroughs novel that Bukowski had a hand in.
I was hanging out there for a few hours and talking to Layne. We shared some reminiscences about the tour. And the rest of it was drug talk, anecdotes, and puns. He was good at making puns and he was punning on the name Yasmine Bleeth at the time. I forget exactly what it was. But his mind wasn’t working quite right, and what seemed like an ingenious pun to him was not quite so funny. What it indicated to me was sort of the mental depletion caused not so much by heroin but by the crack. The crack is what fucks with your head and really causes lasting damage. That was an insight that showed me what could happen if you follow that path long enough, but I was just starting, so it didn’t deter me whatsoever.
PATTY SCHEMEL I always hoped to see Layne at a meeting. I really liked him a lot. The last time I saw him was probably in ’95. It’s funny because we were both at the dealer’s house, and we were talking and he said, “Do you want to go get some coffee?” I thought it was the weirdest thing because the last thing I wanted to do was something normal like get coffee. I was like, “No, doing this is just fine with me,” sitting here in this dope dealer’s house. But I liked that: Let’s be normal for a second.
JAMES BURDYSHAW Demri had started lookin’ kinda ragged for a young person. I knew she was really into dope deep at that point, and one time I saw her on the bus and she pulled up her shirt and showed me her scar from when she was on the hospital table and they had to massage her heart back to life. She almost died from doing a speedball. A month after I saw her on the bus, she was dead.
TOM HANSEN Demri ended up getting endocarditis, which is an infection of the lining around your heart. It happens a lot to drug addicts. When Demri passed, Layne really took that hard. She was really sweet and really cool.
JOHNNY BACOLAS I recall many nights when I was living with Layne, Demri would come to the house and after I’d go to bed, she would just open my door, sit at the edge of my bed with a bag full of potato chips, chew really loud, and just talk. It didn’t matter if I was exhausted. She didn’t ask me, she didn’t care. “So anyways, yesterday I ran into so-and-so and blah blah blah. Did you hear this new record by this band?” And I loved it—I thought it was so cute. If a kitten’s in your bed clawing you, it’s a kitten, you know?
After I moved out from Layne’s, I didn’t have much contact with Demri. After she died, in ’96, it seemed like Layne went into a darker place. He moved to the U District, to a condo right above this tavern called the Blue Moon. The Blue Moon was kind of notorious, at least when I was a teenager, as the place to go buy drugs. That kind of clientele. And part of me wondered if he moved there because he didn’t have to drive anywhere and it was easy access. Then again, all the dealers would come to his house anyway, because, hey, he was Layne Staley. Once he moved to that place, I didn’t talk to him. I don’t think many people did, to be honest with you.
DAVE JERDEN I was making an Offspring record years later, in 1998, and they were planning a box-set record of Alice in Chains with some new songs. I stopped production
on Offspring and got Alice in Chains into my studio. Layne didn’t show up until midnight or later, and the band had already been there cutting stuff. My engineer Bryan Carlstrom was so burned out, he said, “I can’t work anymore tonight.” So there was a big fight.
At that point, Jerry was in complete control of the band, and he yelled at Layne and said something to him like, “Shut up!” And the reaction from Layne was pretty bizarre. He turned into this little kid—he wasn’t like the Layne of old. Like he was being reprimanded by his mother or father.
MIKE INEZ At that point, we weren’t keeping a whole lot of contact with each other. We were all pretty scattered. That was a tough session. We were in Los Angeles, and I just remember wishing I was in Seattle. Why? Because the vibe is completely different in L.A. Especially during those times, with the people we were hanging out with, it was dark for us.
DAVE JERDEN That was a Friday night, and I had an understanding I had Layne till Sunday, and Layne all of a sudden says to me, “I have to be back in Seattle for a wedding.” They left and Susan called and completely dumped on me. She started yelling at me: “Your whole career was based on Alice in Chains!”
Rolling Stone called me up and wanted to know what the story was, and I gave them my side. The big thing that I said was during the making of Dirt I wasn’t there to be Layne’s friend, I was there to be his producer. And what I meant by that was I wasn’t there to enable him to use drugs—I was there to get him to sing, to make that record. And that got blown all out of proportion.