Alice in Chains

by David de Sola

  After the performance, Noble said, “Layne is just pumped up beyond belief, and he walks up to that guy we saw in the bathroom that bitched him out for peeing in the sink, and from a distance all I could see was Layne’s little finger going directly into the center of this guy’s chest as he’s bitching out this older guy, and this older guy is getting beet-red-in-the-face pissed off, and he’s towering over Layne.

  “Layne wasn’t a huge guy. So he gives him a couple of more taps on the chest and then storms off toward the front door, and this guy’s getting ready to follow him. Mike and Sean run up to the guy and they’re like, ‘Hey, don’t listen to him. He’s a little messed up. His girlfriend said you were cute and he’s just a little jealous. Just blow it off—he’s just a little guy,’ and basically talked the guy out of kicking Layne’s ass.” Noble thinks the show raised about eight hundred dollars for Buckner’s tombstone. A few years later, a brief mention was included in the Facelift liner notes: “In memory of Mike Buckner.”4

  * * *

  Color Tech, one of the Music Bank’s neighbors in the Ballard Building, went out of business, freeing up thousands of square feet of additional space. Unbeknownst to Scott Hunt at the time because his name was not on the Music Bank lease, the landlord approached Bengt Von Haartman and Gabriel Marian directly. On February 3, 1987, Marian and Von Haartman signed a thirty-one-month lease for a nearly fourteen-thousand-square-foot industrial space adjacent to the Music Bank. Under the terms of the agreement, Marian and Von Haartman would pay the landlord $3,447 in rent, and the property was to be used “only for recording and audio visual studios.” Without Hunt’s knowledge or consent, he said, his business partners “decided behind my back to rent the rest of the Ballard Building and turn it into a thirty-million-dollar … pot operation.”5 No one knew it at the time, but this was the beginning of the end of the Music Bank.

  On June 20, 1988, an anonymous informant called the Seattle Police Department’s narcotics office with a tip. The informant was very specific, telling Officer Mac Gordon about a possible marijuana-growing operation at a large commercial warehouse in Ballard, providing the specific address, and noting that the power consumption for the facility was “unusually high,” according to court documents. Scott Hunt found out from Von Haartman later on that the informant was a third business partner, who was a materials expert. Marian thought the third partner was making too much money and wanted to renegotiate the terms of their deal, and allegedly threatened him. The third partner wasn’t having any of it. He took his money and his wife and fled the country, but not before tipping off the cops.

  On the same day the police received the tip, Officer Mike Severance went to the warehouse and made his way up to the roof, where he noticed two vents—the exhaust from one of them emitting a “strong odor” of marijuana. Police later obtained power records for the businesses inside the warehouse from Seattle City Light. Records showed “an unusually high consumption of electricity,” Gordon wrote in an affidavit. There were two different addresses for the same building, each with a separate power meter. For the four-month period ending July 8, 1988, the two meters recorded a combined average consumption of 42,261 kilowatts per month. Put into perspective, this was “29 times higher than with the previous lessee.”6 Other power readings taken during the investigation showed similar spikes in power usage.7

  Gordon contacted the Seattle office of the Drug Enforcement Agency and asked them for information on Marian and Von Haartman. The DEA search turned up a cocaine charge from 1972 in Berkeley, California, for Marian, and a pending investigation of Von Haartman by the DEA for drug conspiracy. All this evidence was cited in Gordon’s application for a search warrant on July 20, 1988. The request was approved and signed by Judge R. Joseph Wesley at 9:05 P.M. on the same day.8

  Two hours later, a joint team consisting of several units from the Seattle Police Department served the warrant at the two registered addresses at the warehouse. According to a police report, “Plainclothes and uniform officers entered [the Music Bank] after receiving no response. Inside the business, numerous people were milling around the video area and the studio areas. Officers took all of the occupants into temporary custody and began searching through the maze of studios that exist within the business.”9

  Darrell Vernon was the employee on duty the night of the raid. “All of the sudden, all of these people come busting through the door and the first few were plainclothes cops and there was these couple of guys in plainclothes waving guns at us. I thought we were getting robbed,” he recalled.

  “They had no idea it was a rehearsal studio. They were saying things like, ‘What are all these little rooms full of drums?’ and stuff, like they had no idea where they were. I’m saying, ‘This is a rehearsal studio. This is a business. I’m the employee on duty.’ There was a black cop pointing the gun at me saying, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’”

  Dean Noble had just finished rehearsing with his band and was getting ready to leave the building with his bassist, who needed a ride to the bar where he worked. The room was “like a sweatbox,” and Noble was wearing nothing but a pair of Adidas shorts. He had his car keys and a small amount of marijuana on him when the door flew open and fifteen to twenty armed police officers stormed into the building, pointing guns, yelling, “Stand against the wall!”

  In a case of impeccably bad timing, Noble said Layne “had just walked around the corner and was getting ready to head out with a couple of strippers, and they were obviously coked out because they just started bitching up one side and down the other ‘These pigs,’ to the point where Layne actually told them to shut up because they were making it worse than what it needed to be,” he recalled. “It wasn’t uncommon for him to have strippers. They weren’t naked walking around, but you knew that they were strippers.”

  As the manager for the Music Bank, David Ballenger had to deal with the police directly. They wanted access to all the rooms. Ballenger got the keys from Darrell Vernon. “So the guy took me with the keys and had a gun at my back and said, ‘Dave, you understand that we can shoot you, legally shoot you, if you cause us any problem,’” Ballenger recalled.

  “You won’t have any problem with me,” he responded.

  Ballenger went room by room, unlocking every door for the police to see. When he got to the Alice in Chains room, Jerry was in for a wakeup call. “I believe it was Jerry that was sleeping on the couch, woke up, pots strewn across his coffee table, things like that. He thought he was getting busted, but they just wanted to see what was in all the rooms.”

  Steve Alley, a graphic artist who had designed logos and flyers for several local bands including Alice in Chains, was in the band’s room partying with Mike. “He heard a commotion coming from the hallway, leaned out, comes back in and shuts the door, and says, ‘It’s the cops, man! It’s the feds!’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, right. Bullshit. Whatever,’” Alley recalled. “So I lean myself out the door just to prove him wrong, and sure enough there’s a dude running down the hallway with a blue jacket on and a German shepherd.” Alley closed and locked the door, and he and Mike hurriedly finished the cocaine they had in the room before police came to their door. When they came in, they were rounded up and put in a line in the hallway with musicians from other bands, with their hands against the wall. Alley saw Layne walking up the hallway—“not detained”—with two officers following him. “He was holding court and they were laughing about something,” Alley said. Layne walked up to the crowd standing in the hallway, looked around, and said, “Hey—where the fuck’s Geraldo?” This was presumably a reference to Geraldo Rivera, possibly to his infamous The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults special. However, Alley noted, “He had a string of shows where he was ‘embedded with the police,’ but all of the episodes were pretty hyperdramatic and cheesy.”

  The band had plans the following day to record another demo to send out to record companies. All of their gear was packed up and ready to go when, in Jerry’s words, “The Seattle SWAT team comes down a
nd takes over the whole place! It turns out the party scene that was the Music Bank—we’d been living next door to a fucking forest of pot. I can’t remember how many times we’d been like, ‘Man, we need some weed,’ and it’s right through the wall.” At the time, the police had a lockdown on everything in the building, including the band’s gear. Jerry spent the next several hours trying to convince the police that there were no drugs there and pleading with them to not confiscate the band’s gear the night before the recording session.

  While Jerry was working his charm offensive, Layne, Mike, and Sean got into Steve Alley’s car—a 1974 Ford Mustang II—and drove to a nearby 7-Eleven. Layne walked into the store and ran out a few minutes later carrying two cases of beer. He dove headfirst through the window and into the passenger-side front seat and, with his legs still sticking out, yelled, “Floor it!” They returned to the Music Bank, where they handed out beers to people standing outside waiting to get back in.

  As the night progressed and the officers hit it off with the band, Alice in Chains was the only band allowed to remove their gear, after the police had thoroughly inspected it to make sure there was nothing in it. The band members stacked everything outside the front door, and ultimately had to sleep under the stars, some of them sleeping on top of their cases “so nobody would steal it,” others “in Layne Staley’s old VW Dasher which hadn’t moved for years.” Jerry called Ken Deans, who went to the Music Bank with a van the next morning to pick them up and get all their gear for the recording sessions.10

  Eventually, everyone at the Music Bank at the time of the raid was allowed to leave the building, but Ballenger, Vernon, and Barry Oswald—the other employee on duty that night—had to stay in the office in the company of two police officers. Vernon recalls sitting around the office with Oswald and the two officers watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A young police officer gave them money to go out and buy sandwiches and a six-pack of beer for himself and his colleague.11

  As for what the police were looking for, and eventually found, Ballenger said, “Further down, the warehouse was a big, huge, long complex. And there was a solid wall between us and the rest of the complex, and that’s where the big pot-growing operation was. [It was] unbeknownst to me and everybody that they had extended the lease and started [this] operation.

  “They were getting all the electricity from their supply room, which was on the Music Bank side. I had a key to it, and surprisingly that key would be missing all the time off that ring, because Bengt or Gabriel came through every three months, ‘Oh, we’re gonna fix this or that, Dave. You’re gonna get cheaper water now,’ or something like that. I’d be, ‘Oh, okay.’”

  It is worth noting that, although police questioned David Ballenger and Scott Hunt, in the hundreds of pages of police and court records there is no evidence or allegation that any of the employees or bands at the Music Bank had knowledge of or involvement in the marijuana operation. Ballenger told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “This is a clean place. I keep it clean … No one likes this kind of thing going on in the neighborhood.”12

  Scott Hunt saw local news coverage of the raid. Hunt was stunned as he heard the details. He got in his car and went straight to the Music Bank, after which he was questioned by police. “They wanted to know my life story, so I had to go downtown with the one-way glass,” Hunt said. “So I told them everything that they needed to know and they were convinced beyond reasonable doubt that I had nothing to do with it, so they let me go.” Though he was never charged with anything, Hunt was dismayed by what the drug raid would mean for the Music Bank, specifically the loss of income and any chance of recovering his loan.

  The Seattle Police Department estimated the operation was capable of growing $30 million a year in crops—calculated at a potential output of 10,000 plants per year valued at about $3,000 each. According to a document, authorities seized 28 boxes of marijuana plants, weighing a combined 448 pounds (204 kilograms).13

  According to an article in the Ballard Tribune, the Seattle Police Department turned the case over to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle because of the amount of marijuana involved. “It’s a very complicated case and you want to take your time in cases like this,” the Seattle Police Department’s Ed Joiner told the paper. “We want to indict as many people as possible in this, so time is not a factor.”14

  * * *

  The band went to London Bridge Studios to make a twenty-four-track rerecording of the “Treehouse Tape” and to record some new material. This was the demo the band would shop around to the record labels. Hauser financed the sessions, which took place over the course of approximately one week and were produced by Rick and Raj Parashar. “We got off hours, and Rick and Raj worked with me because I promised them that I would come in later when we were recording and do full price,” Hauser said. He estimated the cost of the demo at about seven thousand dollars. They were able to get it so cheap because they would come in during overnight hours and work until five or six o’clock in the morning. If they had recorded at full price during regular hours, it would have cost Hauser twenty thousand dollars, which he couldn’t afford.15

  * * *

  Some time after the raid, the band moved out of the Music Bank and into a house near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport that they rented from Bob Jeffries, Gayle Starr’s boyfriend at the time. Though money and resources were scarce, somehow they managed to pay their rent. The house had four bedrooms—three upstairs that were occupied by Layne, Mike, and Sean, and one downstairs that was occupied by Jerry to minimize any possible damage in case his waterbed leaked. Layne cut a hole in the floor of his bedroom, which was directly above the rec room where the band jammed, so he could hear the music from his room.

  There was a problem when they moved in: one of the toilets had clogged the plumbing for the entire house. They set up a portable toilet in the backyard while doing the necessary repairs themselves, which took about a month. Their next-door neighbors, an elderly couple, offered to let them use their guest bathroom as a short-term solution, an offer that was accepted. Coincidentally, the woman’s name was Alice. They told her that they named the band after her, presumably to get on her good side and so she wouldn’t complain about the loud music. On Sundays, the band went to Gayle Starr’s house, where she would cook them dinner with enough leftovers that would feed them through Wednesday. They would survive until the following Sunday on a diet of pizza, beer, and whatever food girls would bring over.

  On August 11, 1988, Alice in Chains was part of a four-band bill performing at the Kent Skate King—a local roller rink—organized by Hauser’s company Standing Room Only Productions.16 Layne had shaped his hair into a Mohawk. One of the people there was Diana Wilmar, a news photographer and editor at KING 5, a Seattle affiliate of NBC News. She had heard about the local music scene and wanted to do a story about “a wannabe famous band.” After the show, she talked to Alice in Chains. “They were just a ton of fun, and they played off each other. They were really funny. Like one guy would start a sentence, and somebody else would finish it.” As they told her their story—about how they all lived together in a house, with one car for the four of them, Wilmar began thinking about these details as visual elements for a story. The band agreed to do it. Wilmar pitched it to the station and brought KING 5 news photographer George Stark and reporter/producer Jack Hamann on board to help write and shoot it.

  The KING 5 crew filmed the band hanging out at their house and at the Music Bank, taking showers at Susan Silver’s house and getting ready for a show, and during a performance at the Vogue. Another time, they went with the band to Fishermen’s Terminal, where the band had a job unloading fishing ships that Randy Hauser had gotten them so they could cover the rent on their rehearsal room. “My memory of it was that after ten minutes they’re like, ‘Fuck this, there’s no way I’m gonna do this work. Are you shitting me?’ It’s hard, it’s smelly, and we never ended up really getting any video out of it because they were like, ‘I ai
n’t doing this. I’ll find some other way to make money,’” Hamann said. He interviewed all four members. It was his impression everybody except Layne was playing to the camera. “When this was done, there was very little role model for [reality television], and so clearly Sean, Mike, and to a lesser extent Jerry had a consciousness that the cameras are there and ‘we’ve gotta be good TV.’ From Layne a lot of it was, ‘I don’t give a shit—take my picture.’ He said a few things, but a lot of it was like, ‘I’m about my music and that’s what I’m here for, and if you guys wanna take my picture, that’s fine.’”

  After they finished filming, Wilmar had to go to South Korea to assist with coverage of the Olympics. Hamann and Stark worked on the story while she was away, getting her feedback from abroad as the script came together. The finished story was unconventional for two reasons: first, it would run longer than five minutes; and second, there was no voice-over narration. They used sound from interviews with the band members to move the story along. It aired on October 14, 1988. Stark would later win the National Press Photographers Association National Award for Editing for his work on it. Hamann ran into Jerry after Facelift was released. “I don’t know if we would’ve gotten in the door with CBS if we hadn’t had that video, if you guys hadn’t done that for us,” Jerry told him. “I can’t thank you enough.”

  * * *

  Layne turned twenty-one on August 22, 1988. His bandmates and David Ballenger took him to a strip club to celebrate the occasion. On the milestone nature of the age, specifically the ability to buy alcohol and go to strip clubs, Ballenger told him, “Now you get to legally do what you’ve been doing for years.” Also at some point during this period, Ballenger recalls Layne and Jerry coming back from a night out in Seattle with their first tattoos—skull-shaped designs on their upper left and right arms respectively.