Alice in Chains

by David de Sola

  Demri’s interests and ambitions at the time were in the arts. “I know that she wanted to be in acting and I know that she wanted to be an actress and be in movies,” Pfeiffer-Simmons said. “She had to be in the limelight.” Lyle Forde, Demri’s high school choir teacher, said, “She really did love music and the performing arts. She definitely had the bent toward the performing arts, and was very social. Some students, they don’t really go up and talk to teachers. They kind of hang with their friends. She was social with other students and their teachers. She was a competent singer, but I think she also was a dancer.”

  When she was about fifteen or sixteen, Demri was one of three hundred prospective students to audition for twenty-five openings at a performing arts school in Jacksonville, Florida. Though the odds were against her, she was admitted. She came home for Christmas break after a few months, and, in her mother’s words, “She blew it.” She had fallen in love with a young man back home, left the school, and moved back to Washington.

  A few months before meeting Layne, Demri went to a mall to audition in front of an audience for a singing part in a musical called Cinderella Rock. “She starts this song and then she stops and says, ‘Obviously, you can all tell that I can’t sing,’” Austin said. “Then she just played the crowd—it was amazing.” There were three or four agents at the audition, who were impressed enough that they gave her their business cards.

  There are two stories of how Layne and Demri met. Although there are a few slight differences in the two versions, they do not necessarily contradict each other.

  According to Kathleen Austin, “She met Layne in 1989. She was working at the mall, and there was a girl working in the store with her, and the girl invited her to a party. And the girl was from the Seattle area. Dem told me later that on the way to this party, the girl turned and looked at her and said, ‘I just made the biggest mistake of my life.’ And Demri said, ‘What?’ And she said, ‘Bringing you to this party. I know my boyfriend’s going to fall in love with you.’ That was Layne, and the rest is history,” she said. “I think it was love at first sight.”

  The only detail that can be corrected in this account is the date. Evidence shows that they met in 1988. Demri’s signature appears several times in the guest sign-in notebook kept at the Music Bank, which closed its doors for good in February or March 1989. There are also photos of her and Layne together in Randy Hauser’s Polaroid collection from this early period in the band’s history.12

  The other story of how they met comes from Layne’s friend Sally Pricer Portillo, who says she was the one who introduced them. Pricer Portillo was at a party the first time she met Demri. Pricer Portillo isn’t certain, but she thinks Demri knew about her friendship with Layne. “My feeling on it—I mean, I can’t say for sure—is that she knew that we palled around together: I was always with him, he was always with me, I was always at Music Bank.” Demri asked her, “Tell me a little bit about Layne. Will you introduce me to Layne?”

  Another time, Pricer Portillo and Demri were out in Pioneer Square, when Demri asked, “Will you please invite me to this party, because I know he’s gonna be there, and I want to hang out.” Pricer Portillo agreed to bring her along. At the time, Layne was twenty-one or had just turned twenty-one. Demri would have been eighteen or nineteen—too young to get into bars, as Pricer Portillo recalled. Based on Layne’s age and birth date of August 22, this would have happened in the late summer or early fall of 1988, but Demri may have already been in the picture before that. Regarding the women Layne had been with or dated before, Pricer Portillo says, “No one ever was serious until it came to Demri, and then when it came to Demri, it was all about Demri, which I was happy about because that got rid of some of the riffraff.”

  Not long after, Demri asked Austin to come to her apartment north of Seattle and give two friends—Layne and Sean—a ride into the city. This was the first time Austin met Layne. “I knew they were hanging out,” Austin recalled. “Layne was very respectful. I don’t think I formed a first impression at the time. These were two guys who I picked up that are burned out. They’ve probably been partying all night long. They get in my car, and we drive to Seattle. They tell me where to go, and I let them out.” Demri saw Layne’s talent immediately and did not hesitate to say so. “Mom, Layne’s going to be a star,” she told Austin.

  Austin was skeptical, although she didn’t say it out loud. “I’ve known a lot of musicians who were going to be stars, and just a few who actually made it.” She humored her daughter: “‘Well, that’d be nice,’ ‘I hope he is,’ things like that.” The first time Austin ever saw Layne perform was at the Pain in the Grass concert at Seattle Center in 1990. Austin brought along Demri’s brothers—who were sixteen, ten, and eight at the time—and they wound up becoming part of the show. “Layne took them up onstage, and they were so thrilled.”

  “They loved their sister and they loved Layne. These boys were little—he’s giving them piggyback rides, they’re playing. Layne was a funny guy. He was a sweetheart.”

  “The two of them together, before drugs, were always laughing. They were always happy,” Austin says of this period. “They’d go to clubs. They would go see their friends.”

  According to Darrell Vernon, there was a joke going around the Music Bank at about the time they started dating—that Layne had found the woman of his dreams with the body of a twelve-year-old boy, a reference to Demri’s small stature. According to her mother, Demri was barely five feet tall and never weighed more than a hundred pounds. Though they didn’t have much in terms of money or possessions, both of them were generous. During Thanksgiving of 1988, David Ballenger said several girls showed up and brought Layne a huge dinner, but that nobody had brought him anything. Layne and Demri shared their dinner with him. On another occasion, Ballenger asked Layne to take him shopping for nice clothes, because Layne was a good dresser. Layne took him to a mall in Bellevue, where Ballenger spent about five hundred dollars. He still has the Capezio shoes and Armani clothes from that shopping spree. Ballenger had a folding metal chair in his office at the Music Bank, which Layne decorated with Jackson Pollock–style splotches of paint. Ballenger was annoyed that it took so long to dry, but he still has the chair.

  Jamie Elmer, who was about ten years old at the time, visited the band at their rehearsal room. “I remember sitting on the couch with the girlfriends or the wannabe girlfriends at the time and watching them practice. I mean, it was fun for me. I was the little tagalong sister that got to see a whole world most people my age didn’t get to see,” she said. “I remember [Jerry, Mike, and Sean] being like older brothers to me in the best sense of the term. They were taking me under their wing, and I never felt like I was a bother. They were always cool with me hanging out or watching, and were always really nice to me. Growing up, to me it felt like they were extended family. They felt like … siblings that were part of our family.”

  * * *

  The punk rock band Cat Butt moved into the Music Bank in the summer of 1987. It was a transitional period for the band, since two of their members returned to their main band, the U-Men. After several personnel changes, front man David Duet and guitarist James Burdyshaw decided to revive Cat Butt with new members and do it full-time. They met Layne early in their time at the Music Bank because of his job there.

  “Layne was just so enthusiastic and interested in who you were. It was like, ‘Hey, cool! You guys got a band! What’s the name? Cat Butt—that’s really funny! All right! Oh, man, we should do a show sometime!’ Then he’d say things to you: ‘Do you need anything? ’Cause I can get you anything you need. You need pot? I can get you pot. You want some acid? I can do that. Whatever you want. Want me to go on a beer run for you?’” Burdyshaw recalled.

  “It’s like he just was eager to please, just wanted to be your friend so bad. I thought that was real endearing about him. I didn’t think it was phony. I thought he was just like this metal kid who was nice, whereas a lot of time the metal guys were to
o cool for school, and they wouldn’t talk to you because you were in the punk band.” They also met Demri, who, after being told of their band’s name, lifted up her shirt, pushed her abs and belly button together, and said, “Look, I can make a cat’s butt!”

  Soon after meeting Layne, they were introduced to Jerry, Mike, and Sean. “When we started practicing there, they got real curious about us and they wanted to know about us. And to be honest with you, my whole attitude was like, ‘They’re really nice guys, but, Jesus Christ, I don’t want to hook up with these guys. They’re like Lynnwood rockers.’ It wasn’t that I didn’t think they were nice people. I just thought that their music was dumb.

  “We didn’t want to be mean to them. They were so nice it was impossible. I sort of figured we could be friends with them at the Music Bank, but there was no way we were going to have anything to do with them outside the Music Bank.”

  Besides Layne, the person Burdyshaw had the closest relationship with was Jerry, although for very different reasons. “Jerry was cool with hanging out, but he wanted to learn about you. He wanted to learn about your influences. He liked picking your brain.”

  “He was very complimentary and asked me about my guitar sound. He liked to talk shop a lot. I probably had the most interesting conversations with Jerry just about music in general, because Jerry seemed to know more about stuff. Even though they were playing rock music, he knew about Bowie, he knew a lot about the history of rock and roll, so we could talk about the stuff I was into, like the Who and that kind of thing. He didn’t know a lot about punk music, but he sure wanted to. He was really curious.”

  Burdyshaw credits Jerry for reinventing and developing what would eventually become the Alice in Chains sound. Of Cat Butt’s influence on Alice in Chains during this crucial early period, Burdyshaw said, “It seemed like Cat Butt was one of the catalysts for them to be like, ‘Hey, these guys are doing something different than what we’ve been doing. Let’s get in their circle.’ And then, I don’t think it was necessarily calculated, but I think they just found us fascinating and they wanted to be a part of our world and they invited us to be a part of theirs.”

  Burdyshaw won’t take credit for being an influence, because he said they were picking the brains of every band they could get near. Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil said he was at a show and ran into Jerry, who asked him about the songs “Beyond the Wheel” and “Nothing to Say”—specifically, if the songs had a different tuning. Thayil explained to him the concept of dropped-D tuning—a popular tuning among hard rock and metal musicians in which the low E string on the guitar is tuned down a whole step to D, giving it a heavier sound. According to Thayil, “Alice in Chains became a different band almost overnight!” (Jerry disputes this claim, saying he first learned it from Van Halen’s “Unchained.”13)

  Thayil wasn’t the only one to notice the change. Grant Alden, managing editor of The Rocket, said, “There were a series of bands who saw what was working and began to try to do that. I think Alice in Chains was one of them. It doesn’t mean they were without talent, but it meant in some ways that they were without heart or without soul.” His dislike of the band got to the point that he made an effort to deny them coverage in the pages of his publication.14

  Former Diamond Lie singer Scott Nutter ran into Layne in Seattle during the band’s early days, and they talked about Jerry, “lead singer to lead singer.” As Nutter recalled, Layne referred to Jerry as a “pisser,” and the two talked about how temperamental he was. The gist of Layne’s comments was, “‘Was it worth it to put up with him in order to have the writing and the guitar?’ He said they loved the guy, but that at times he was very difficult to deal with.”

  Chapter 7

  Hey—where the fuck’s Geraldo?

  —LAYNE STALEY

  THE SUMMER OF 1988 was an eventful one for Alice in Chains and the Music Bank, for good and bad reasons. On June 1, Iron Maiden was performing at the Seattle Center Coliseum with Guns n’ Roses as the opening act. Jerry went to the show and handed Axl Rose a copy of the band’s demo, who immediately threw it away as he was leaving.1

  David Ballenger got into a huge argument with Mike Buckner, one of his employees, because Buckner wanted to work more hours, but Ballenger didn’t have any to give. Buckner held up a beer bottle, acting like he was going to smash it against Ballenger’s face.

  Ballenger was furious. “I got in my truck and I drove full blast for ninety miles, and I ran through the American-Canadian border. I go, ‘Goddamn! I’m in Canada!’” He turned around in the parking lot to drive back to Seattle, and American border authorities found three joints concealed in his boot. They seized his truck, and Ballenger had to take a bus back to Ballard.

  Besides not getting enough work hours, Buckner had health issues. According to Ballenger, “He had this disease in his legs and his feet that would just drive him crazy. Layne and all of us, we took him to the hospital. We thought we wouldn’t see him back, and three or four days later he popped back in and it was all in remission.” According to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, Buckner suffered from a “severe bee sting allergy” and had “scars on ankle due to bee sting allergy.”2

  Buckner could be very funny, and he found a comedic sparring partner in Layne on at least one occasion. Ballenger recalls one time he, Buckner, and Layne were sitting in the office and Layne started doing his Popeye impression. “He could do a very great Popeye voice, and this would be all X-rated,” he said. Buckner played off that and assumed the role of Olive Oyl. “They’d break into some shtick where basically Popeye was butt-fucking Olive Oyl, and everybody would just be rolling on the floor laughing.” Layne was generally a popular guy at the Music Bank, but according to Ballenger, Buckner once caught another musician with a knife at the door, angrily looking for Layne.

  At 7:00 P.M. on the night of June 18, 1988, Seattle police officers were dispatched to a wooded area near Lake Washington Boulevard after a passerby saw Buckner “lying in the woods with a rifle.” As they approached the area on foot, they heard a gunshot. After trying to coax Buckner to drop the weapon and come out, they heard a second shot. The area was cordoned off, and a K-9 unit was brought in to search for Buckner. According to the medical examiner’s office, “He was found shortly lying supine with a Springfield Model 15, .22 Cal. bolt-action rifle (no visible serial number) on his chest with the barrel pointed towards his head.” Buckner was brought to Harborview Medical Center at about 9:30 P.M. to treat a self-inflicted gunshot wound, where he died about twenty-two hours later. He was forty years old.

  Regarding his possible motive, Buckner’s girlfriend later told the medical examiner’s office that the two of them had had an argument before the incident and that Buckner “stated that he had made a prior attempt by pistol. Apparently, something was bothering him lately.”3

  Shortly after, Ballenger said he and other Music Bank employees made arrangements for the burial. “We didn’t have any money and got one of them common burial sites. We all went there one day on the cheap and buried our friend.” Not long after Buckner’s death, Alice in Chains and Hit and Run were scheduled to perform together at a benefit show held at the Pickwick Tavern in West Seattle, according to Hit and Run’s drummer, Dean Noble. The plan was for any proceeds to go toward paying the costs of Buckner’s headstone.

  The bar was packed that night, Noble recalled. Before the show, Layne and Noble were in the men’s room smoking a joint. Layne had to pee, but all the urinals were taken, so he used the sink. One of the regulars at the bar got livid, Noble said. Layne was apologetic. “Hey, I had to go really bad. All the urinals were taken. I had no choice. I just had to go.” The man stormed out of the bathroom. Layne and Noble kept smoking.

  Noble returned to his bandmates’ table inside the tavern. They were under twenty-one, so none of them could order alcohol. Mike sat down at their table and started chatting. He asked them how they were doing, and then, “Gosh, where’s your beer? Let’s get a couple of pitch
ers here.”

  “We’re like, ‘Hell, yeah!’ because we’re eighteen,” Noble said. Mike asked the barmaid for two pitchers of beer. She came back a few minutes later and asked for money. “We’re expecting Mike to pay because we don’t have any money. We’re eighteen—shit, we can barely afford drumsticks and strings! And he looks at us like, ‘Well, you guys gotta pay for it.’ We’re like, ‘We don’t have any money.’”

  Mike tried to smooth-talk and flirt with the barmaid so she would give them the pitchers, but she wasn’t having it. “She ended up yanking the pitchers of beer and bringing them back to the bar, and he kind of looked dismayed that it didn’t work, because he wanted beer just as much as us.”

  Hit and Run went onstage first. The bar provided a community drum set, which the two bands had to share. The throne on which the drummer sat consisted of two milk crates stacked on top of each other held together by a seal, which wasn’t the most stable arrangement.

  Hit and Run was finishing their set with a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” when, during the drum solo at the end of the song, Noble noticed the seal holding the crates together had snapped. To prevent himself from falling, Noble stood up and finished the rest of the song without missing a beat. “My bandmates are looking back at me thinking I’m just getting into it, and truth be told, I was trying not to fall on my ass,” he said.

  Alice in Chains took the stage. They closed their set with “Suffragette City.” At the end of the song, Sean, possibly feeling the need to match or top Noble’s performance, “stands up and goes full-on the Who on that drum set, kicks them off the stage, starts pounding the shit out of them, and they were just flying everywhere. The crowd is going nuts,” Noble recalled.