Alice in Chains

by David de Sola

  In the summer of 1986, Layne and the recently graduated Nick Pollock had jobs at Lanks Industries, a factory based in Kirkland that made radiation-containment devices and equipment. In Pollock’s words, “It was hourly punch-a-clock. It was like a sweatshop type of deal. They had all kinds of people coming from a jail work-release type of deal, and people who just didn’t speak any English,” whom he suspected were illegal immigrants.

  Working at Lanks was never meant to be a long-term job for Layne or Pollock. In the fall, Pollock was scheduled to start school at Cornish College of the Arts to double major in classical composition and guitar. Neither Pollock nor Layne took their jobs very seriously. “We would spend our time on lunch breaks going out and pounding down a twelve-pack of beer. We were smoking pot. It wasn’t the most responsible thing.

  “If we didn’t get fired from the damn place, we certainly quit.”

  Layne had gotten his job through future Sleze bassist Morgen Gallagher. According to Gallagher, Layne took acid on the job every day for about six weeks, until he ran out.

  * * *

  Ken Elmer was approached to be part of a horn section for the song “Lip Lock Rock.” Bergstrom told him, “We’ve got this song. It’s kind of a glam rock song, so we want to do this little trumpet and thing at the end to kind of take the song out, and we want you to do a saxophone thing—something crazy and wild.”

  Elmer, an all-state saxophonist, agreed and brought along three trumpet players to London Bridge Studios to record their parts. When they arrived, Bergstrom pulled Elmer aside.

  “It’s really a privilege to be on a rock and roll album,” he said.

  “Huh?” Elmer didn’t get what he was hinting at.

  “We gotta pay for time.”

  Elmer paid Bergstrom eighty dollars out of his own pocket to play on the demo. “I don’t know how he ever talked me into that one,” he said, laughing. “I really should develop a backbone in my life sometime.”

  The horn section would reunite for a show at the University of Washington’s Kane Hall, where, for the first and only time, they would perform their parts live with the band. They arrived on campus early to set up. Someone found a driver’s license with a photo that looked like Elmer, so they took it to a store and had Elmer buy beer, since everyone was underage. Elmer didn’t drink, but he said the trumpet players got “a little bit wasted.”

  “I remember [one trumpet player] came out in his underwear for the trumpet part, with a beer bottle in his underwear. We came out, and he just did that song, and it was toward the end of the thing. It was really neat, but they were getting some notoriety. They are playing this thousand-seat auditorium and actually sound pretty freaking good.”

  In August 1986, Sleze and Branom finished recording tracks for the demo. Not long after this, the living situation and working relationship with bassist Mike Mitchell was beginning to deteriorate. Mitchell, then in his midtwenties and a few years older than his bandmates, lived in an apartment that was part of a triplex-style house in the University District with his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Lisa Ahern Rammell, who went by the nickname Leigh in those days. At some point while Mike and Leigh were broken up, Layne had moved into a closet in Mitchell’s apartment, because when the couple got back together, Layne was living there. The closet was big enough for a single bed and had a chest of drawers and its own window.

  Layne’s living arrangement was a source of amusement because of the double entendre involved. “We used to give him so much crap about coming out of the closet in the morning. He’d come out rubbing his eyes, ‘Oh, Layne’s coming out of the closet again,’” Ahern Rammell recalled. Her car at the time was a 1969 Pontiac GTO Judge. When Layne wanted to look cool, he would borrow her car. She rode in Layne’s car many times and saw him squirt people with his windshield wipers the same way James Bergstrom did.

  Morgen Gallagher recalls that he moved into Mitchell’s place after Layne had already been living there for a few months. They lived near an expressway off-ramp and had Big Wheel races down the ramp when there was little or no traffic in the early hours of the morning.

  “One night they got drunk enough they thought it was a grand idea to go for a walk, and they came back bloodied, skinned-up,” Ahern Rammell recalled. “They’re laughing their asses off and I’ve got them all sat down like little kids putting Band-Aids on their elbows and washing off their boo-boos. They had stolen Big Wheels and taken them up on the express lane off-ramp and ridden them all the way down the off-ramp and down the road until they wiped out. They did that a couple times, and the last wipeout was so bad they decided they were done.”

  Subsequently Mitchell was dismissed from the band and Gallagher joined as his replacement. Mitchell’s dismissal forced Layne and Gallagher to move out of his house. Marianne Condiff, who wanted to manage Sleze, let them stay in her studio apartment in West Seattle for several months.

  The timing of Mitchell’s departure was especially bad because it happened a day or so before Sleze was scheduled to shoot the scene for Father Rock. Gallagher took Mitchell’s spot in the band for the movie. Over the course of a Friday and Saturday in September 1986, Byrd shot the Father Rock scenes with Sleze at the Richmond Beach Congregational Church. Sleze brought along about fifty extras for the shoot. The actor playing the lead role in the movie had to take off for a few hours because he was working as a stripper and had to jump out of a cake.

  Byrd was annoyed when he found out Layne was drinking hard liquor in the church bathroom before the performance. Byrd filmed Sleze in the church, which took about three hours. Layne lip-synched as the band performed two songs: “Fat Girls” and “Over the Edge.” Byrd wrapped up the shoot and had everyone come back the next day.

  Layne had a small cameo with spoken lines in the script. According to Byrd, he told the actress to call him Candy, which wasn’t in Byrd’s original script. There was an attractive girl sitting in the front row. Byrd later discovered Layne went home with her that night. There was trouble with the extras: one or more of them vandalized the church’s vending machine and caused ten thousand dollars’ worth of damage to the organ pipes. Byrd’s parents had homeowner’s insurance, which paid for the damages as a goodwill gesture.

  Byrd was originally set on using “Fat Girls” but later changed his mind and used “In for Trouble,” a song by Tim Branom’s band Gypsy Rose, which played over the footage of Sleze performing “Over the Edge” in the final cut. The movie, which aired on local cable in Seattle, wasn’t released until 1989. By that point, Sleze had broken up and Layne was in Alice in Chains. The last time Byrd saw Layne was in the mid-1990s, backstage after a Second Coming show—Johnny Bacolas and James Bergstrom’s band that Byrd was working with at the time.

  “I hadn’t seen him in years. It was really cool to sit down and talk. I remember he had a firm handshake, and he looked muscular. He’d been working out, and he looked good,” he recalled. One of the first things Layne said to him was, “Hey, I saw Father Rock…”

  “Oh my God! Where did you see that?”

  “Someone had a copy of it.”

  “What’d you think?”

  “I liked it but it was corny.”

  At some point during this period, Layne and Chrissy Chacos were introduced by Chrissy’s sister and started dating. Both Layne and his mother told Chacos she was his first serious girlfriend. Chacos, a Seattle native who had moved to Minneapolis where she became part of the local music scene while Prince was filming Purple Rain, had moved back to Seattle. While in Minnesota, she was a fan of Apollonia Kotero, the female lead in the movie. Somehow she wound up getting two pairs of Prince’s pants and a purple outfit—pants, jacket, and white ruffled shirt—similar to the one he wore on the album cover and movie poster.

  Her initial impression of Layne: “Layne was awesome. Layne was a total comedian. He was always in a good mood.” They would go out to see local bands or hang out at the Music Bank.

  After several months of crashing at Marianne
Condiff’s place, Layne and Gallagher had worn out their welcome. She got fed up because they did not help pay the rent. According to Gallagher, “We would tell Marianne that we were going out job hunting, and we’d go down to the Rainier Brewery and just sit in that sample room and drink half the day.”

  They would take the free tour of the brewery, which ended at the sample room, which had a three-beer limit. Layne and Gallagher would leave and come back and take the tour two or three times a day. How did they get by at this point? “Basically, we were taken care of by people. People wanted us to hang out with them. They paid for everything, pretty much,” Gallagher said. “We were acting like rock stars, and we were being paid to do it, so we just kept on doing it.”

  In other words, they had no incentive to get a real job. The two moved into the band’s rehearsal room at the Music Bank. Eventually, Johnny Bacolas rejoined the band as a bassist and replaced Gallagher.

  Another personal and professional milestone happened at some point in the second half of 1986 when Layne cowrote “Queen of the Rodeo” with local musician Jet Silver. Tim Branom remembers being there with Layne and Silver as they were writing the song. “They were sitting at the piano, and I was there with them at the Music Bank. It was about two or three o’clock in the morning and they were just completing that song, and it was pretty funny,” he said.

  Morgen Gallagher has a slightly different recollection of the writing of the song and how Layne came across it. “It was a gift from Jet Silver and that was for Layne’s birthday. And it was just the first verse and then the chorus. And then me and Layne wrote the second verse. It’s a good song, and then we just took and finished it up.

  “Jet had first played it for [Layne] and then gave it to him. It was for a birthday present up at Jet’s house in West Seattle, when we were living with Marianne maybe four or five blocks from him, so we saw him quite often.

  “Whenever we were over at his house we just played some stuff, and Layne heard it and just fell in love with it and kept on raving about it. So Jet says, ‘Fine, it’s yours then.’”

  Nick Pollock said of the song, “We played that one in the old Alice ’N Chains a lot. It was a big crowd-pleaser because it was such a ridiculous song.

  “I would say we’re playing it by, I don’t know, early ’87. It seems to be a big part of that band any way you look at it. I think it may have correlated with when we did the name change. I can’t remember. But it was such a big show hit, I just remember playing it at every show.”

  * * *

  One of the more curious elements of the Alice in Chains history is that none of the members of the first or second version of the band came up with the name. Credit for the name goes to Russ Klatt, front man for the band Slaughter Haus 5.

  In the fall or winter of 1986, Johnny Bacolas was at a party and ran into Klatt. The two started a conversation about changing Sleze’s name. Layne and Bacolas had designed backstage passes. One pass said something to the effect of “Sleze: Welcome to Wonderland Tour.”2 The conversation shifted to Alice in Wonderland and evolved into Alice in Bondage. Eventually, Klatt said three fateful words: Alice in Chains.

  “From what I remember, I got to basically give [credit for the name] to Russ, because I remember him saying the name, and I went, ‘Wow, that’s got a nice ring to it!’” Bacolas said. But there was a problem, or more specifically four problems: the band members’ mothers.

  “I had a sense of humor about the name Sleze. But when he came home and said they were changing the name to [Alice in Chains], I was not happy,” Layne’s mother told Greg Prato years later. Nancy and Layne butted heads about it, each with strong views. They didn’t talk much for the next two weeks. Nancy explains: “I was concerned, and also offended. How could my child possibly choose a name like ‘[Alice in Chains]’?”3

  Bacolas’s and Bergstrom’s mothers didn’t like the name, either. “If they thought there was any connotation to bondage or a woman in chains, we would have had issues,” Bacolas said, pointing out their parents paid for their rehearsal space and studio costs. “Instead of taking the car away, they’d take the practice room away, or they’d take the studio-recording money away.”

  The compromise solution was making the band’s name “Alice ’N Chains,” which made it sound more like “Alice and Chains.” Even though Guns n’ Roses released Appetite for Destruction on July 21, 1987, the decision to use the apostrophe-N combination in their name had nothing to do with the up-and-coming Los Angeles quintet. The name change happened well before Guns n’ Roses became a household name. “I don’t think that [Guns n’ Roses] was in our thought process. I think we were just being slick,” Bacolas said.

  However, this possibility cannot be entirely ruled out. There was a poor-quality recording of Guns n’ Roses circulating at the Music Bank at some point before Appetite for Destruction was released. “We were like, ‘Who the hell are these guys?’” said Hit and Run drummer Dean Noble. “We were trying to figure out how they could even be considered a great band, because it sounded like shit.” But once Appetite for Destruction was out, Layne was a fan, David Ballenger recalled.

  The name change happened at some point in late 1986 and was briefly mentioned in the Metal Rap section of the June 1987 edition of The Rocket. It reads, “Glam popsters SLEZE have changed their name to ALICE N’ CHAINS.”4 This is possibly the first reference in any publication to the new band name, or to any version of the Alice in Chains name.

  Johnny Bacolas and Nick Pollock didn’t know their name change had been mentioned in The Rocket until they were interviewed for this book twenty-four years later, and both of them say they didn’t contact the paper. It’s possible that Layne might have done it. However, James Bergstrom says he may have been responsible. “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know if I want to change the name.’ But we thought it was a cool-sounding name. I remember actually calling The Rocket and asking them for their opinion,” he recalls.

  The response from the girl at The Rocket who took his phone call?

  “Hate it. Don’t like it.”

  Chapter 5

  Jerry knew exactly what he wanted to do.

  —BOBBY NESBITT

  THE FINAL MIXES OF the Sleze demo were done at Triad Studios in January 1987. Although band members have said that the demo cost approximately $1,600, Branom said the real costs were higher, noting that both he and Thad Byrd had put money into the project. The demo was released that same month. Only about a hundred cassette copies were made, which band members gave mostly to friends and family. Tim Branom gave Jeff Gilbert a copy, which was played on KCMU. Branom didn’t get a copy for himself at the time—he wound up having to buy one on eBay several years later.

  Gilbert had a very positive impression of the band from the demo and seeing them live, calling them “unusually talented, for being a brand-new band. They had polish, where other people were still [not] ripe,” he recalled. “What struck me is just how good they were even just as a brand-new band. Like, where did these guys get these skills? It wasn’t just that the musicianship was just freakin’ solid, but it was their skill in arranging and actually writing a song.”

  Mace guitarist Dave Hillis saw the band perform at Ballard High School. “There was probably like a hundred people, maybe more, maybe a little less. I just remember they definitely had girls, like seventy-five percent of it was girls, all glammed up,” he said. “What attracted me to hanging out with them is that’s where the girls were—even in their rehearsal studios, there would be girls. I met one of my girlfriends going to an Alice ’N Chains rehearsal.”

  “They were kinda taking a lead off of Poison, before Poison made it, but we had all heard in LA, the Sunset Strip, how Poison was really doing everything they could, from flyering excessively to having gimmicks onstage, confetti. It was a very good-time party atmosphere. They were going in that direction, Sunset Strip kinda thing—plastic confetti, lights, I think maybe a water gun shooting people, any kind of little gimmick they coul
d to make it like this big party atmosphere. The complete opposite of what they ended up being—later Alice, where they’re more brooding. I can tell you a lot of bands back then … nobody had an identity yet. Everybody was searching.”

  During their shows, they would walk out to the theme from the movie The Stripper while tossing out roses to the girls in the audience. The onstage gimmicks were often their interpretations or parodies of things they had seen elsewhere. In between songs after a designated cue, a friend would come out onstage and hold up a mirror where any of the band members could primp. This was a parody of a scene in Purple Rain, where Morris Day had a member of his entourage do the same thing. Sometimes Layne would go offstage and come back on riding a Big Wheel, which had a paper sign taped to the front that read THE LAYNEMOBILE—a spoof of Judas Priest front man Rob Halford, who rode a motorcycle onstage. Lisa Ahern Rammell remembers seeing Layne do it and laughing herself “sick,” because of her memory of the Big Wheel race. The Laynemobile wound up in Tim Branom’s grandmother’s garage and was later donated to Goodwill.

  Layne’s wardrobe often consisted of items borrowed from Lisa Ahern Rammell, who also provided fashion tips. “They would wear my pink and black spandex pants. I had a huge collection of belts and lace gloves and tank tops and necklaces and scarves. And I was a hairdresser, so I did their hair, taught them how to do their makeup. And they looked like Poison out there, a bunch of beautiful boys with hair out to here, and that slowly morphed into the grunge thing,” she recalled. To get a sense of how thin he was, during the period when Layne was wearing her pants, she had a twenty-four-inch waist. Chrissy Chacos lent Layne the purple outfit belonging to Prince that she had acquired in Minnesota. According to her, he wore it onstage during his last show with Sleze, but she never got it back.