Alice in Chains

by David de Sola

  Ken Elmer was in the car with Layne when Layne mentioned in an almost offhand manner, “Oh, by the way, I sold everything and I got a microphone.” Layne and Ken shared a large downstairs room, each with his own waterbed. Until that day, their beds had shared the space with Layne’s drum kit, which had been replaced by microphones and a PA system. “The drums were always a part of the family for years, and he would always be a drummer. And then one day I came over for visitation, and all the drum stuff is gone. And there’s these big speakers and an amplifier and like two microphones. I’m like, ‘Dude, what did you do?’”

  “Oh, I sold everything. I’m gonna be a singer.”

  Ken was flabbergasted. “I’m like, ‘You can’t freaking sing!’” he recalled years later, laughing pretty hard. “I’m like, ‘You suck!’”

  “No, this is what we’re gonna do now.”

  Ken had no idea where his decision to sing came from. During subsequent visits, Layne and Ken would transcribe lyrics to songs by Twisted Sister, the Scorpions, and Van Halen and then sing over the songs. This lasted for about a year at most. “The funny part of it is, I really didn’t think he had a good voice.”

  * * *

  Though they went to schools in different districts, Ken remembers Layne had little interest in academics growing up. “He was a very intelligent guy. He just didn’t have time for certain structures that society told him he had to be a part of. He would say, ‘Screw that. Why?’ And later in life, I kind of respected him for that.”

  Regarding his grade school years, Layne said, “I hated school. I wasn’t very popular and I wasn’t big into sports. I liked woodworking and skateboarding.”14

  According to Jim, Layne began dabbling in drugs and alcohol at some point during his teenage years. “He was running around with the wrong crowd and coming home from school later. He was doing something. We knew that; we could smell it.” He doesn’t remember smelling marijuana on his clothes, but he did smell alcohol. He never found evidence of drugs or drug paraphernalia while Layne was living at the house during this period.

  During one of Ken’s weekend visits, he and Layne—who was a teenager at the time—went to a neighbor’s house one night to watch Friday the 13th on HBO. Someone had brought marijuana, and everyone there that night except Ken smoked it.

  Layne once tried Dexatrim, a weight-loss drug that was available over the counter at the time. According to Ken, “It speeds up your metabolism massively. I think that the thing was when we were kids, we were told if you take a bunch of that stuff, it hits you like speed. I mean it makes you super high. I just remember him experimenting with that at least once that I knew of.” Ken does not know the extent of Layne’s drug use during this period, but does not think the Friday the 13th episode meant he was regularly smoking marijuana. Nancy told The Seattle Times, “He got in trouble doing things kids do. He dabbled in trying drugs, about the age thirteen or fourteen. Then his junior and senior years he stayed drug-free, and he was the happiest then.”15 Ken has no recollection of Layne’s doing any hard drugs at this point but said he was drinking.

  Layne began his freshman year at Meadowdale High School in Lynnwood on September 8, 1981, according to a record shown by a school source. When he was a student, he was one of the shortest boys in his class. “In his junior year he had pretty much lost interest in school—he’d been picked on because he was small, so he was really through with the scene,” Nancy said. She gave Layne the option of dropping out. Around the same time, Layne went through a growth spurt and went from being one of the shortest boys to being six feet tall—a height he had always wanted to be. He told his mother, “The girls have started to notice me,” and decided to stay in school.16

  According to Jim, “He did get picked on when he was at that younger age because of his size. He certainly started to dabble around. It took him a while to grow, but when he did, he did. Then things started to change.”

  “I can remember when he was in a situation where he was getting picked on [at] school. A couple of times, it ended a little more dramatic than just getting picked on. He got in a couple of fights and so forth. He started to change and got more interested in the drug culture and music and so forth. He definitely had some options.”

  According to Ken, “I’m not going to say that he always hated being around people, but he wasn’t an overly gregarious person. So I don’t think just that he was short, it was a little bit of his nature, his personality, as well.” He also noted with a slight laugh that “Layne was not a big stud with the ladies. He kept to himself a lot. He didn’t have a lot of girlfriends growing up.”

  When Layne was about fifteen, he and Nancy were having an argument. The car was packed for a weekend family trip and Layne didn’t want to go. Jim recalled, “They were having words and things started to escalate. Nancy had mentioned to me, ‘Why don’t you do something?’ I was prepared to just leave and let things cool down. She says, ‘You’re not protecting me.’ Calling his mother names and that type of thing—I’m caught in the middle between her getting verbally abused and so forth.

  “I got out of the car [and] went to see Layne, who was on the front steps. I took him around to the backyard and I spanked him.” That was the first and only time he ever did this. “He was not going to give in. It shows the resolve of that kid. I did push him against the side of the house, and he was not going to show any defeat or anything else. Of course, I felt bad, and I think he felt bad.” Jim and Layne talked about the incident a few years later and apologized to each other.

  The family left for the weekend, leaving Layne alone at the house. When they came back, there was a smell of Lysol. “That’s not how we left the house. It was clean, but not spotless. This house was spotless,” he recalled. “Nancy and I looked at each other and said, ‘We’re going to be calm, going to see what happened, what he tells us.’”

  Layne approached them visibly shaken and crying. He and his friends who lived next door had gone out to a 7-Eleven to get food. A comment was made that Layne’s parents were out of town, and word got around that there was an open house, so a party was organized. One of the neighbors called the police. Jim found out later on that when the police showed up, there were at least a hundred people at the house.

  “Layne came to us and confessed. He was just so remorseful that things were so out of control. It was meaningful because he and the two neighbor boys were going from room to room, constantly keeping people out of closets, looking for stuff and so forth. Once the police got there, got everybody scared away, those boys spent the next two days cleaning that house. It was a telling point in his life where it scared him, in terms of being out of control. He had mentioned that because there were so many people, and he couldn’t do anything about it.

  “We didn’t chastise him or anything. He learned his own lesson. But that was telling to us all.”

  At about the same age, Layne ran away from home for the first time. He was staying with a friend two houses away for a few days before the mother called Layne’s parents and asked, “Would you come get your son?”

  They refused to pick him up and told her to send Layne home.

  The second incident happened about six months later. Layne had taken off for a day. It was dark and rainy that night, and his parents got a call from the Lynnwood Police Department, informing them that Layne was at the station and asking them to pick him up. He had not been arrested or detained for anything, according to Jim.

  “Nancy and I kind of looked at each other. We [have] got [to draw] a line of responsibility.” Jim’s personal inclination was to pick him up. After talking about it, Jim and Nancy decided to teach Layne a lesson.

  “Well, he walked down there. He can walk home,” they told the police officer.

  “He may not want to do that.”

  “Well, you can bring him home or you can tell him. We’ve made it real clear, he knows where his home is. Just tell him his dinner is waiting and his waterbed is ready.”

  Layne walke
d home, ate his dinner, and went to bed. He never ran away again. “Here we were having another dispute, a child running away. I think both Nancy and I would agree it was the best thing to do,” Jim said. “The point of contention was you can’t just have your way in the family, of running away, and having everything brought back to you in terms of we’ll come pick you up, we’ll take care of you. It’s all about you, Layne. It’s drawing some boundaries—you’ve got some responsibility.”

  Jamie’s earliest memory of Layne, probably from around this period when she was about five years old, is of him making potato chips in the kitchen. She also remembers him practicing the trumpet and drums.

  At some point during this period, he worked as a busboy and dishwasher at an Italian restaurant close to his home. According to Jim, Layne would do whatever odd job they gave him, but he doesn’t think Layne had any skill or focus at the time to work as a waiter or cook.

  When Ken visited on weekends, he and Layne would go to their room and sing along to songs all day. For Ken, it was just fun. For Layne, Ken said, “It was like, ‘I’m training for what I want to do.’ And I think that’s why he got his head on straight a little bit.

  “Because he had a focus. He had a goal. He had something that gave him some drive. School didn’t give it to him. He was never overly interested in girls in that way at a young age, and this kind of gave him a push. I think that’s just as much a key as whether he was six feet or not.” In switching from drums to singing, Layne may have found something he was passionate about that he could develop, but it was an encounter and a chance suggestion by Ken that would ultimately change the direction of Layne’s life.

  Chapter 2

  Fuck, yeah! This is what a lead singer should look like!

  —JOHNNY BACOLAS

  JAMES BERGSTROM WAS WALKING between classes at Shorewood High School one day in 1984 when he ran into Ken Elmer, a friend from the marching band. Ken knew that Bergstrom’s band, Sleze, was looking for a singer, and he had somebody in mind for them.

  “Hey, my stepbrother Layne plays drums but he wants to be a singer. You should give him a call,” Elmer told him. After the initial pitch, Elmer said under his breath, “I think he kind of sucks, so it’s not my fault—if you can’t do it, then that’s fine.”

  Not long after, Ken went over to Jim and Nancy’s home and told Layne about the position. Layne’s mother recalled that conversation to journalist Greg Prato:

  “Layne, there are a couple of guys over at Shorewood High School looking for a singer,” Ken told him.

  “Well, I’m not a singer,” Layne responded.

  “Why don’t you try out anyhow?”1

  An audition was eventually set up. Bergstrom told Sleze guitarist Johnny Bacolas about the new singer they would be trying out. Bacolas liked what he was hearing—that he was thin and was peroxiding his hair. The first person who came to mind was Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil, a band that Bacolas and the other members of Sleze were huge fans of.

  The tryout took place at Bergstrom’s parents’ house in Richmond Beach, where Sleze had their jam room in the basement. They were young—still in early high school and still learning how to play their instruments and playing covers. Tim Branom—a musician who would later produce one of Sleze’s demos—described the band: “They had a Mötley Crüe but punk influence, something [that] today would be only described as an angry Seattle vibe but as a glam band with black lipstick and black fingernails. This was very radical for them to do, especially since their parents were very straight and churchgoing people.”

  The members of Sleze had no expectations before the audition. “[We] didn’t know what we were going to get. Just, we knew that he was really getting into singing, and that he had bleached-blond hair, and that was good enough,” Bacolas recalled. When he arrived, the others noticed his tall stature, soft-spoken demeanor, and that he was very much dressed for the part.

  “He came to our jam room and was really shy, real timid,” Bacolas said. “And just as we expected, we were like, ‘Fuck, yeah! This is what a lead singer should look like!’”

  Ed Semanate, the other founding guitarist for Sleze, recalls that his most vivid memory of Layne during that first introduction was that he had band names like “Ozzy” or “Mötley Crüe” written on his pants in bleach.

  The four surviving band members are all fairly certain that the first song they performed with Layne was a cover of Mötley Crüe’s “Looks That Kill,” although Bacolas and Bergstrom won’t entirely rule out the possibility it may have been W.A.S.P.’s “L.O.V.E. Machine.”

  “At the top of our list for sure was Mötley Crüe. That was the band we would want to be,” Byron Hansen said. The other members immediately knew they were onto something.

  “I can tell you if it was ‘Looks That Kill,’ when he got to the part ‘Now she’s a cool cool black,’ he could actually hit those notes. We were like, ‘Oh my God! This is awesome!’” Bergstrom recalled with a laugh. “So you had that feeling, ‘Here’s this kid. He’s got a great-sounding voice. He’s cool. He could sing on key. And he also had good range and he was soulful, though he was just a raw beginner.’ So we knew we had something special, and we were like in heaven from then. We became a band.”

  Hansen agreed. “We were totally like, ‘Wow! This guy can sing like Vince Neil! He’s like a little Vince Neil!’ We just thought it was awesome.”

  Although Layne’s voice was still in a raw, undeveloped form and he was only singing covers at this point, it was impossible to compare his sound with that of singers in the past or his contemporaries.

  “He didn’t strike me as ‘Oh, this guy is a [Jim] Morrison wannabe,’ or ‘Oh, this guy is a Robert Plant wannabe,’ or an Ozzy wannabe. Layne had his own thing, and I think that’s what was the most appealing about him,” Bacolas said. “He had a very distinctive voice. I didn’t want another Morrison or another Rob Halford. We weren’t looking for that. I don’t know what we were looking for. We just kind of—we just found it.”

  At one point, Layne asked Bergstrom for permission to play his drum kit. Bergstrom agreed, and Layne started playing the beginning of Mötley Crüe’s “Red Hot.” Bergstrom was impressed. “Man, you gotta show me that!”

  The decision was a no-brainer—Layne got the job on the spot. Ken Elmer ran into Bergstrom not long after. “He just comes running down the hall, ‘Dude, your brother is fucking awesome!’ I mean, he’s swearing and he’s screaming and he’s like, ‘It’s perfect.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, I thought for sure you guys would hate him. I think he kind of sucks,’” he recalled.

  The band rehearsed several times a week, gradually expanding their repertoire and playing ability. At one point, Semanate told Layne he needed a digital delay—a device that creates an echo effect on vocals. Layne and Semanate went to a local music store and bought one. The delay eventually became part of Layne’s singing style.

  Bergstrom would often hang out with Layne or spend the night at his house. He remembers staying up late at night watching The Exorcist or plugging in his PA unit so he could practice his singing or experiment with it. “He’d plug it all in and practice. He’d practice singing to like ‘Metal Thrashing Mad’ by Anthrax. He practiced ‘Rod of Iron’ by Lizzy Borden, all these different songs. He was fascinated with his digital delay at first.”

  Layne began his senior year at Meadowdale High School in the fall of 1984. A review of the school yearbooks from 1981 to 1985 found only three photos of him: a portrait photo from his sophomore year in 1982–83, a group photo of the industrial woodworking class of 1984–85, and the senior-class group photo. In the two latter photos, his platinum-blond hair made him stick out. There were no portrait photos of him during his freshman, junior, and senior years.

  * * *

  It was Rick Throm’s first year teaching the industrial woodworking course. “He didn’t seem to have a lot of friends in the class. He was kind of a loner, but he listened to what you said, and he did what you said, and he se
emed to really enjoy it,” were Throm’s impressions of Layne. Throm liked Layne enough to hire him at his cabinet shop after school for minimum wage.

  “He was really willing to learn, but he sometimes felt that he got kind of the short end of the deal in our shop because he was the low man on the totem pole.”

  An example: Throm asked Layne to paint a storage shed at his shop. After spending several hours on it over the course of two days, Layne approached Throm, saying, “Mr. Throm, I think I’d like to be building cabinets more than painting this storage shed.”

  “Well, everybody has to start somewhere, Layne, and we’ve all painted, we’ve all done this and that, and that’s what you have to do right now,” Throm responded. Consequently, Layne wrote on his hour sheet “Painted fucking storage shed” in protest.

  Another time, Throm asked him, “Layne, what do you think you want to do in your life?”

  “[Be] a rock star,” he responded.

  “Rock star? I want to be a fishing guy, but, look it, I’m in here working. How do you think you’re going to be a rock star?”

  “I’m going to win this Battle of the Bands, and that has a recording contract with it.”

  “So you think you can win the Battle of the Bands?”

  “Oh, yeah. We’re good enough to win the Battle of the Bands.”

  “Okay, well, what kind of music do you play, Layne?”

  “You don’t know it.”

  “Turn on the radio and let’s listen to the station that has some of that music.”

  “It’s not on the station.”

  “Oh my God, Layne! You want to be a rock star; you want to play music that isn’t even on a radio station. Maybe you better rethink this thing.”