Alice in Chains
Page 16
Both bands were in Louisville, Kentucky, for Thanksgiving and stayed in the same hotel, where they would be spending a day off. Coincidentally, Pantera was touring with Prong and Mind over Four, and they were staying at the same hotel. After eating their Thanksgiving meals, the bands and crew members had to wait until one o’clock for the hotel bar to open.
“Envision this: thirty to fifty rock guys, band and crew, standing outside the door of the bar waiting for it to open, and there’s this poor little girl thinking she’s going to be at the hotel bar and have a nice, easy day bartending because nobody’s going to be at the hotel for Thanksgiving, [and she] has got Prong, Pantera, Mind over Four, Alice in Chains, and Iggy Pop’s band and crew ready to watch football!” Shoaf said, laughing. “Within thirty minutes, she gave up and just put bottles up on the counter, with the money flowing.”
“We started drinking at one in the afternoon, and you can imagine as it went on into the night. We tore that hotel apart. They were like, ‘Please, leave. Everybody leave.’”
Around Halloween, the tour hit New York City, and Alice in Chains booked a headlining show at the Cat Club. In the audience that night was Paul Rachman, a music-video director who had worked with punk and hardcore bands during the 1980s. “I just fell in love with the band and the music,” Rachman said. The next day he called the woman in charge of commissioning music videos at Columbia Records and told her he wanted to work with them.
At that point, Rocky Schenck’s “We Die Young” video had been airing on MTV’s Headbangers Ball and 120 Minutes but hadn’t really caught on. The label was getting ready to release “Man in the Box” as the second single and offered Rachman the chance to do the video. Since it was Layne’s song, the label put him in touch with Layne, so the two of them could talk. Layne briefly touched base with Rachman by phone while on tour. They talked about not making it a typical live-performance video. Rachman told him to write down any specific ideas he had and send them via fax, in that era before cell phones and e-mail. Shortly after, Layne sent Rachman a fax consisting of a scribbled handwritten note, which read:
Rainy drippy barn.
Farm animals.
Baby with eyes sewn shut.
Rachman spent a few days listening to the song. “I came up with the idea of placing the band in this barn and creating this kind of dark mood, making it a sepia tone [with] some farm animals around them, [building] up towards the end where there’s this kind of rebirth character.”
In December 1990, the band traveled to Los Angeles to shoot the video for “Man in the Box.” With a budget of less than fifty thousand dollars, Rachman and the band met on a farm at Malibu State Park for the one-day shoot. Susan was there, and according to Rachman, she was excited.
Rachman said the band members were a bit tired because they had been touring, but overall they were nice and were having a great time. “The thing about working with young bands in terms of, like, it’s their first or second video is, if they like your idea, they trust you. And I really felt trusted and supported, and she really just wanted the band to look great and for this concept to work,” he recalled. They used only two cameras, one of which was a handheld filmed by Rachman himself. “I was watching [Layne’s] close-up take, and I was like, ‘Wow.’ I knew that was a winner. There was something about the shot where you could tell his eyes and the emotion in which he was singing the song just connected.”
Layne’s fax had specifically called for a baby with its eyes sewn shut, which Rachman said would have been impossible. He proposed an alternative. “I had this idea of this kind of rebirth. I thought that there was a dark mood around this barn and there were animals there. I just felt that … all of a sudden, towards the end, that this reaper—this guy in this cape—is kind of walking by, and could look pretty cool. And that could be the person with the eyes sewn shut. He’s kind of taking care of the animals, but he’s blind.”
In the role of the caretaker, Rachman chose the parking-lot attendant of a bar owned by a friend of his. “This guy ran the parking lot. Just had this kind of Jesus Christ look, and I cast him in actually two or three things I’ve done in the past.” The shoot went off without a hitch. Rachman spent the next two or three weeks producing and editing the video.
The Iggy Pop tour ended in Tijuana, Mexico, at a club called Iguana’s, a thousand-capacity venue fifteen minutes from San Diego described by the Los Angeles Times as “the set of ‘Jailhouse Rock’ as designed by Dante.”4 By the end of the night, Biro and Iggy Pop’s production manager had their hands “swollen from beating the shit out of people left and right.
“Anyone that was getting onstage—at first we were stopping people. Then it reached the point where we were just cracking people in the face. Like, someone would get onstage, you’d punch ’em in the face. Someone else, punch ’em in the face.”
According to Biro and Shoaf, everyone went shopping in Tijuana. “We went down Revolutionary Boulevard, bought switchblades and lots of drugs. And then we had it all stuffed in our pants,” Biro said. Iguana’s was a few blocks from the border, so they walked back across.
* * *
Josh Taft, a filmmaker, had been around the Seattle music scene, having grown up with Stone Gossard. It was through Gossard that he met Alice in Chains. On December 22, 1990, Alice in Chains was set to play a homecoming show at the Moore Theatre. In an event as memorable and arguably more significant than the headliners, the then-unknown Mookie Blaylock would be the opening act. At the end of their set, Chris Cornell took the stage and joined the band to perform songs from the Temple of the Dog album.5
Taft was there with a camera crew filming the Alice in Chains performance for a home-video release. He had a budget of fourteen to sixteen thousand dollars, which he described as “extraordinarily low for six cameras live.” Put into perspective, it was nearly a third of the budget for the “Man in the Box” video. Taft suggested shooting in black-and-white film. “Of all the bands that were coming out of here, I think it made the most sense visually to [do] something super stripped-down and kind of tough-looking and simple,” he explained. “I think it really kind of shifted perspective, and especially that night because it was one of those shows that kind of, I think, stands alone unto itself in people’s memory. It’s sort of a time when it all was about to turn.”
Jerry’s guitar that he used for the show—which he referred to as his baby—featured a picture of a topless woman that he had laminated onto the body of the instrument. Producer Lisanne Dutton told Thad Byrd later on that the single biggest expense in making that video was blurring out the image on Jerry’s guitar. Taft said, “Back then that was actually pretty high tech to blur a handheld shot. It took a lot of technology.”
SPIN chose Alice in Chains as one of the bands to watch in 1991. According to The Seattle Times write-up of the issue, “Writer Daina Darzin says ‘the band’s clearly being groomed as Columbia Records’ next big thing,’ and notes that the last two bands that got that treatment were Faith No More and Living Colour. The piece also has guitarist Jerry Cantrell confessing ‘we were all on coke, high as hell’ the first time big labels came to town to check out the band. But Darzin adds, ‘Alice in Chains cleaned up its act a while back.’ Drummer Sean Kinney says his father, a policeman, is a big fan of the band—‘He’s a really cool guy’—and Cantrell explains why so many of the group’s tunes deal with doom and depression: ‘We’re all outcasts.’”6
For New Year’s Eve, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Mookie Blaylock went to “an old-fashioned hootenanny at the Seattle-area ranch of writer-director Cameron Crowe and his wife, Heart’s Nancy Wilson.” According to Nancy Wilson, they sat around with acoustic instruments playing covers or making up new songs. She had a mechanical elephant windup toy, a gift from Chris Cornell. The next afternoon, she found a note from Jerry that read, “Look at the elephant.” In Wilson’s words, “Apparently Jerry had been fixating on it overnight, and in the morning he was feeding champagne to the horses.”7
Chapter 12
Let’s just try something different.
—RICK KRIM
PAUL RACHMAN HANDED in his first cut of the “Man in the Box” video to the band for approval at the beginning of 1991. “They loved it,” he said. “We made a couple of adjustments, like we added a couple of close-ups of Layne and made sure the whole band was evenly represented, and that was it. There were no creative differences of any sort.” The final cut was released at some point in January 1991.
On February 7, 1991, Alice in Chains began a brief West Coast tour, with Mookie Blaylock along as the opening act. Jerry said, “Things had happened for us, and we were on our way. These guys were starting again. We just wanted to give them as much support as they’d given us in the early days of our band.” One highlight: the two bands, each in their respective van, having food fights while driving eighty miles an hour on the I-5 freeway.1
During that tour, Alice in Chains had landed an opening slot at Ozzy Osbourne’s Children of the Night benefit in Long Beach, California, on February 8. The show was memorable for two reasons. At the end of the night, members of several bands got up onstage to jam a Rolling Stones cover. Mike was one of them, but had no idea how to play the song. “I was stage right, and I was teaching him how to play ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ by giving him these sign languages on how to play it—like, which way to go,” Randy Biro recalled.2
The second and ultimately more consequential reason for the significance of that show was that it was the first time then–Ozzy Osbourne bassist Mike Inez saw Alice in Chains, and he was impressed by what he saw and heard.3
Biro said crew members from both bands put together a band called Sexecutioner. “It was a joke band, because there was nobody at the shows. Mookie would play, and Sexecutioner would play, and Alice would play. And we’d take turns out in the audience to applaud the other band, ’cause there was nobody there. You talk to people now, and there were ten thousand people in these clubs.”
As Operation Desert Storm was winding down, Alice in Chains, along with Ann and Nancy Wilson, were the headliners of a daylong “concert for peace” at the Paramount Theatre on February 23. The show closed with a group-encore cover of Cat Stevens’s “Peace Train.”4
Alice in Chains was nominated for nine Northwest Area Music Association (NAMA) Northwest Music Awards that year during a ceremony on March 3 at the Moore Theatre. They won only one—Rock Recording, for Facelift. There were problems backstage that had nothing to do with the band but did affect them. The show started at approximately 7 P.M. according to The Seattle Times. It ran for a marathon five hours, with about 90 percent of the audience gone by the time the last award was presented at around midnight.
A third of the audience left during the intermission three hours into the show. Alice in Chains was supposed to perform immediately after the intermission, but according to Randy Biro, saxophonist Kenny G threw a tantrum and took that slot instead. Another third of the audience took off after his performance. According to The Seattle Times, “People kept drifting out until only a hard core remained for a short closing performance by Alice in Chains.”
“‘The sax star threw a tantrum,’ Alice lead singer Layne Staley told the crowd when the band finally took the stage,” reported Patrick MacDonald.5 Randy Biro has a different recollection: that Layne said words to the effect of “We’d like to thank you. And this one’s dedicated to Kenny G and his flesh flute.”
Mike’s friend Aaron Woodruff was stationed at U.S. Army Garrison Hohenfels in the heart of Bavaria when, shortly before Alice in Chains left for their first European tour, his mother sent him a cassette copy of Facelift—a gift from Mike. Sometime later, Woodruff’s mother called him to tell him Mike was in Europe and trying to get ahold of him. There was a desk with a phone at the entrance of the barracks. Woodruff was walking by the unattended desk one time when the phone started ringing. He picked up. It was Mike, calling from Amsterdam.
Woodruff arranged to get some time off to watch the Alice in Chains show at Nuremberg. At the time, they were opening for the Almighty and Megadeth, a tour lineup that began in March.6 “The first time I saw them, I was with them. I went backstage with them, on the bus with them, and then I went out in the audience when they were playing and watched them. I was blown away. The only thing I didn’t quite understand was why Mike kept spitting loogies out in the crowd,” Woodruff recalled. “I think somebody, some Germans, pissed him off or something.”
Woodruff brought a video camera to the show and shot footage of himself hanging out with Alice in Chains, which he has since posted on YouTube.7 The material is an interesting snapshot of the band on the cusp of fame. Mike Jordan, another of Mike’s childhood friends, spoke of traveling with the band during this early period. “I was there to see Mike realize his dream of making it big in the music industry. That will always be something I cherish. It was a blessing to be along for the ride [for] a couple of dates on the tour. The guys in the band always treated me like I was one of them, and it was really cool.”
* * *
Coming off the success of his first film, Say Anything, writer-director Cameron Crowe had been working on the script for Singles when Andrew Wood died in March 1990.8 The emotional reaction and coming together of the music community after Wood’s death had a profound impact on him and the script he was developing.9 Crowe approached Alice in Chains to ask for a song for the movie’s soundtrack. He wound up paying for much more than what he actually got.
“Cameron wanted a song, so we got him to pay for us to record ten songs,” Jerry told Greg Prato. “We gave him an inflated budget. We came up with ‘Would?’ for the movie, and we demoed a bunch of shit.” “Would?” was the band’s tribute to Andrew Wood, the music and lyrics credited to Jerry, with the song’s title presumably being a pun on Wood’s surname. Some of this material would appear on Sap and Dirt. One of the songs, “Lying Season,” didn’t make the cut for either release.10
On the night of April 17, 1991, Alice in Chains shot their scenes for Singles at a warehouse on a pier in downtown Seattle, which the film’s art department had outfitted to look like a club. “That part of it was really fun, just being in that movie. But playing that song over and over on that pier was murder,” Jerry said during a 1999 interview.11
Michelle Ahern-Crane, an extra for the shoot, said, “It was a cool shoot in that it was fun, but it was terrible in that it was outside and we were standing dressed in club wear.”
“I was freezing, and I knew the guys had a little backstage area and they had heaters. I was freezing and wanted to go back there and hang out because it was a shoot that started at six in the evening and went until six in the morning. I was too shy to assume it was okay for me to walk back there.”
The singer of the Derelicts, Duane Lance Bodenheimer, was also there. At one point, Layne walked up to him and said, “I need to talk to you.”
Bodenheimer had met Demri through mutual friends, and she made quite an impression on him. “She really just like blew me away. Beautiful, amazing girl. Good energy. Just amazing. I developed a little crush on her,” he recalled. “Demri and I started hanging out. She was a very sexual girl, and I tried to not do that because I knew who her boyfriend was, but it just happened one day. We had a relationship, and there were drugs involved. We were together a lot.”
Bodenheimer dates the beginning of his involvement with Demri to some point during 1990–91, after Alice in Chains started touring. While Layne was gone, Demri and Bodenheimer would hang out at another local musician’s home and do drugs, and they became close. “I fell
in love with her. I really cared for her and loved her.”
Not surprisingly, Layne didn’t like Bodenheimer at all and had his suspicions. One time he called Bodenheimer over to another local musician’s house and confronted him. “If you’re fucking my woman, why don’t you tell me?”
Bodenheimer denied it, because he wasn’t proud of it. He kept seeing Demri—mostly while Layne was touring, but occasionally when Layne was in town. Layne called him again, telling him he knew what was going on, and that—in Bodenheimer’s words—“it was out there, pretty much.”
“You could have told me the first time you were sleeping with my girlfriend,” Layne told him. “You’re not a good person. You’re a piece of shit.” For all his jealousy and anger, Layne was not a model of virtue and fidelity himself. Cat Butt’s singer, David Duet, said, “Layne and Demri had kind of an open relationship. In the position he was in, it’s probably the only way he could’ve had a lasting relationship. Layne was very true to Demri in his heart, but he related many, many wild touring adventures to me.”12 According to Bodenheimer, Demri was aware of Layne’s flings on tour. “She kind of said that they had that kind of relationship.”
“She would complain sometimes about she knew he was probably fucking other girls,” Bodenheimer said, but beyond that, she never said anything bad about him.
At one point, Bodenheimer went to Denver to visit his parents. Demri came down and stayed for about a week and a half. The next time Bodenheimer hung out with her in Seattle, “it was just kind of different.” She explained her feelings for Bodenheimer in a letter—which he has since lost—in which she wrote words to the effect that Layne was her white knight and Bodenheimer was her dark knight.
At the Singles shoot, Bodenheimer and Layne sat at a table, and Layne—presumably with long-built-up jealousies and frustrations finally reaching a boiling point—tore into him. “You’re a piece of shit. It should have been you that died instead of Andy Wood. I fucking hate you.” This comment was made with Layne knowing full well that Bodenheimer was a heroin user, and it came a little more than a year after Wood’s fatal overdose.