I got on my knees, and I thanked God for feeling good.
—LAYNE STALEY
ALICE IN CHAINS GOT the nod to open for Van Halen’s North American tour from August 1991 to January 1992, with a few breaks scattered throughout. For Mike, it was the culmination of a high school dream. In his senior yearbook, he wrote that his goals were to become a rock star and tour with Van Halen. Seven years later, it was mission accomplished.
Former SATO guitarist Ken Kramer was sitting at home one night when he got a call from Mike, saying, “Dude! I can’t talk very long. I have this girl’s cell phone and I’m in the bathroom. We’re about to open for Van Halen! Man, I love you so much! I wanted to call you. I want you to be here—this is so great! I wanted to share it with you. I’m going to try and call everybody I know before she finds me!”1
Sammy Hagar claimed credit for getting Alice in Chains on the bill. “I picked this band,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “I said, ‘Let’s find a new cool band that needs exposure.’ I was watching MTV and saw the [‘Man in the Box’] video. Layne [Staley] is one of the great new singers today.”2
On September 5, both bands were on hand at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles for the MTV Video Music Awards, and both were nominees. Paul Rachman was with the band at the ceremony. He recalls seeing a red-carpet interview with Metallica being broadcast inside the venue. When they were asked who should win, they responded “Man in the Box.” When it was time to announce the winner for Best Metal/Hard Rock Video, Rachman, who was sitting a few rows behind the band, said, “I remember sitting there at the MTV Awards and they come up and it’s like, ‘A…,’ and I thought it was gonna be Alice in Chains, and it was Aerosmith. I was like, ‘Aw, shit.’”3
It was also during this tour that a dangerous new element would be added to the Alice in Chains mix, one that would have repercussions on everyone for years, in ways they probably couldn’t have imagined.
* * *
If there is a villain in this story, it would unquestionably be heroin. No biography of Alice in Chains could be considered credible without examining the consequential and ultimately destructive role of the drug in the band’s art and personal lives, particularly for Layne and Mike Starr.
No one knows exactly when or how heroin first appeared on the Seattle music scene, but the general estimate is that it happened at some point during the 1980s. “Sometime in 1982, as the music scene became bigger and a recession hit Seattle, we all noticed a huge influx of heroin and pills,” Duff McKagan wrote in his memoir. “Addiction suddenly skyrocketed within my circle of friends, and death by overdose became almost commonplace. I witnessed my first overdose when I was eighteen. I saw the first love of my life wither away because of smack and one of my bands imploded because of it. By the time I was twenty-three, two of my best friends had died from heroin overdoses.” He added, “In Seattle, heroin was fast becoming a staple in pretty much everyone’s diet—not just musicians. With beer in hand, I watched it take over the city during Ronald Reagan’s first term as president; as jobs disappeared, smack oozed into the vacuum left in people’s lives. Up to 1982, I heard about heroin but rarely saw it. Then suddenly I began to see a lot of older kids starting to use heroin openly. As more and more of my contemporaries lost their jobs, smack spread quickly. It would be everywhere by 1983.”4
Evan Sheeley said, “What was happening in Seattle, somehow during the early days of grunge, heroin entered the scene. Back in my days, when I was playing, it was pot, cocaine, alcohol. It was pretty much those three. [Acid and mushrooms were] previous to that. That was in the sixties and seventies. Later in the eighties, it was more about cocaine, alcohol, and pot. Somewhere along the line, in the mid- to later eighties, heroin crept into the scene somehow. Don’t know how, don’t know why, but, for whatever reason, it seems like that generation of musicians … certain ones unfortunately latched on to it.”
Bob Timmins, a drug counselor who was a heroin addict for sixteen years, worked with several Seattle musicians. He said the musicians he works with “are very successful, and it gives them a sense of power and control—that they’re immune and they can control their use,” and that denial makes them typical heroin addicts.5
Heroin use was on the rise in Seattle during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Heroin-related deaths increased from thirty-two in 1986 to fifty-nine in 1992, a rise of 84 percent. Heroin overdoses were at “record level” when 410 were reported at Harborview Medical Center in the first six months of 1993. However, according to a 1994 Seattle Times report, heroin use was also on the rise nationwide.6
Susan commented about heroin in the 1996 documentary Hype! “It’s just fucking heartbreaking to see how disillusioned people get, to where that escape is so sought after,” she observed. Even before heroin use had entered the Alice in Chains camp, Susan already had experience dealing with the drug because of her brother, Bruce, who was an addict.7
The event that should have had the most immediate relevance and deterrent impact on Alice in Chains and their contemporaries was Andrew Wood’s death in 1990. It didn’t.
One of the central questions of the Alice in Chains story is when, where, and how heroin entered the picture. Casual drug use had been part of the band’s recreational activities long before they signed a record deal. John Starr, Mike’s father and also a drug addict, told Mike’s biographer that it was Demri who introduced Layne to heroin: “The drugs came as a result of Layne’s connection with Demri. They did no drugs until they started touring. I loved her; her and I got along great. Mike and Layne and her had more fun than everybody else on the tour together. But she introduced Layne to heroin. Layne introduced Mike to heroin.”8
Demri’s mother, Kathleen Austin, does not dispute this claim, but she points out that she doesn’t know when or how Demri first used heroin, because her daughter never told her. “My daughter told me just about everything. My daughter told me things I didn’t want to know. But she never called me and said, ‘Hey, Mom, guess what? I used heroin last night.’ That’s something that most people don’t want other people to know.”
According to multiple sources, John Starr’s claim is accurate. Layne told Johnny Bacolas that he began using heroin during the Van Halen tour. According to Greg Prato, Bacolas said, “I asked him, ‘How did this happen?’ His exact words were, ‘Johnny, when [I] took that first hit, for the first time in my life, I got on my knees, and I thanked God for feeling good.’ From there, it just didn’t stop.”9
“He would go shoot up in his bedroom and he would come out; he would seem really relaxed and really at peace with everything,” Bacolas explained during an interview for the book. “A couple of times, I would say, ‘What’s it like? What do you feel?’ And he would just tell me, ‘Everything is really peaceful.’”
Bacolas asked Layne how his heroin use began. He recalls Layne telling him they ran out of cocaine, and Demri went out looking for more but came back with heroin instead. This, Bacolas says, is his best recollection as to when and how Layne first tried heroin, as told to him by Layne himself. Regarding Demri’s use, Bacolas said, “I think she was using at that point on and off. I don’t know how seriously she was using, but [she] was using enough to take it when someone gave it to her.”
Alice in Chains’s producer, Dave Jerden, offered some insight that might verify Bacolas’s account. He said unequivocally that Layne was not doing heroin when they worked on Facelift, an account corroborated by Ronnie Champagne. Asked to comment on the account provided by Bacolas, Jerden said, “That’s totally possible. I went to Arizona and saw them play with Van Halen. Layne was definitely acting different at that point. Layne did coke and he drank a lot, so I didn’t know if he was drunk or whatever, but he wasn’t the same. Layne was usually gregarious and cracking jokes all the time. I went to their tour bus and saw the band before the concert, and Layne was really quiet. I didn’t know what was up with him. He is the only one, besides later Mike Starr, of course. Jerry never did heroin; nei
ther did Sean.”
During this visit, Jerden jokingly asked Layne, “How does it feel to be famous?”
Layne answered him, seriously, “It’s freaking me out. People treat me like an object. I’m not a person anymore. I’m just a commodity to be sold. People don’t really know who I am. People grab things from me.”
“It [was] like he [wasn’t] having a conversation with me [but] was making a statement to the universe. He wasn’t being vitriolic about it, just really honest,” Jerden recalled. He compared what Layne was going through to Beatlemania.
Jerden also said he heard Demri had introduced Layne to heroin from a source close to the Jane’s Addiction camp—another band he had worked with.
Why Layne decided to try heroin after having been openly against it a few years earlier is not known. According to Nick Pollock, “Everybody’s got to live with their part in this life. Nobody should be hung up on a cross because of it. Layne made the choices that Layne made. Layne chose to do drugs. Layne chose to continue to do drugs to compensate for other things.”
It may be easy to blame Demri, but doing so would absolve Layne of any personal responsibility for his decision. It should be noted that even before he was successful, Layne had a drug problem—having used marijuana, cocaine, mushrooms, and acid, at least. It was serious enough for his previous bandmates to organize their own private intervention. On the other hand, Kathleen Austin noted, “People who love Demri blamed Layne for her addiction. That’s what people do when you love somebody and they’re hanging with somebody else and they’re doing bad things. You don’t blame that person. You say, ‘Oh, it’s their friends,’ ‘Oh, he’s running with a bad group of people.’”
* * *
Although nobody noticed at first, Mike had been putting names on the guest list, but it wasn’t until later that the band and crew figured out why. “We did notice that at one point, ‘Man, he’s got a lot of fucking relatives,’” Randy Biro said. “Mike was putting names on the guest list every night. And he’d fill out raffle tickets for the spot and scalp them.” Van Halen’s security people caught Mike scalping tickets outside a venue. According to multiple sources, Mike had been caught trading or selling backstage passes, spots on the Alice in Chains guest list, or tickets in exchange for drugs or money on multiple occasions.10 This issue was likely a contributing factor in the decision to fire him in early 1993.
Mike told Mark Yarm he did it to get drugs for Layne.11 Biro disputes this account. “Demri would come up to me and say, ‘I guarantee I can find dope in this arena.’ I was [like], ‘Bullshit.’ We’d be out in the middle of some fucking cowpoke little town somewhere, and she walked into this arena, and she would find some heroin and bring the person backstage.” He added, “Layne never needed anybody to hunt down drugs for him. People came to us. Especially Van Halen; we were starting to get recognized. That was a big [turning] point, and people were starting to come to us.”
It should also be noted that not everything that happened on the Van Halen tour was bad. According to Shoaf, Eddie Van Halen spent a lot of time hanging out on the Alice in Chains bus and became good friends with Jerry, a friendship that continues to the present day. In Jerry’s words, “He hung out in our room more than he hung with his own band.”
At one point, Jerry expressed an interest in buying one of Eddie Van Halen’s guitars and amplifiers, a proposition Van Halen refused. After the tour was over, Jerry went to Kelly Curtis’s house, where he was still living in the basement. Curtis asked him to move out the garageful of amplifiers and guitars Van Halen sent over as gifts.12 Michael Anthony gave Mike several of his Spector basses that he wasn’t using, along with some Mesa Boogie amp heads.
There was a prank war between the two bands. Van Halen pulled four pranks on Alice in Chains during one set, consisting of strips of upward-facing duct tape placed all over the stage, a group of ugly strippers who stayed onstage for a song, one of their techs in a Little Bo Peep outfit with live sheep, and, during the set-closing “Man in the Box,” the Van Halen crew came out and started breaking down their gear while they were still playing the song. “They left Sean with a kick and snare, left me with one cab. They just unplugged Mike Starr. And that was all in one set!” Jerry said.
Alice in Chains was determined to have the last laugh. “Van Halen used to do this signature walk across the stage, and at the time they had these skimpy panties that they would sell to the chicks in the audience. Really skimpy panties,” Jerry said. “So we took some of these panties and put them on—of course they weren’t big enough [to] keep our junk in, so we had to turn them around with the butt parts in front to keep our stuff together—and put on some combat boots, and we made ourselves up as strippers and did that Van Halen signature walk across the stage behind them, and they didn’t know it was happening, except for Alex.” He adds, “There’s a great photo of it, taken right as Eddie turns around and realizes what’s going on, and he’s totally losing it. He’s one of those guys who never fucks up. I’ve seen him play in so many different states, and he’s always on, but hearing him miss a couple notes while getting a laugh out of us was great.” A photo of this is on the Internet.13
The band’s ambitions for Facelift were fairly low to begin with. “When Alice in Chains packed out the Central Tavern two nights in a row, that’s when I was completely satisfied,” Layne told MTV. “That’s when my dreams came true. In Seattle, I was a rock star. Record companies started coming around, but I had never even thought about that. It was enough for me to be a star in Seattle.”14 By September 1991, the band’s hard work had paid off. Thirteen months after its release, Facelift was certified gold for selling in excess of five hundred thousand copies—the first Seattle grunge band to reach that milestone. That bar would be matched and significantly raised after Pearl Jam and Nirvana released their landmark Ten and Nevermind albums on August 27 and September 24 of the same year.15
Once the money started coming in, the band members were modest in terms of what they did with it, buying homes and cars. According to Ken Deans, “The most nuts [thing] Sean ever did was he bought a Porsche. And he bought a couple of nice Harley motorcycles. Jerry bought a really nice truck. He bought a Dodge pickup truck, [his] Oklahoma roots coming through. Nobody bought a Ferrari. They all live in fairly modest homes today. It’s not like they really ever did the giant rock star thing.” According to Aaron Woodruff, the first thing Mike bought was a Nissan 300ZX, paying $36,000 cash.
Layne told the story of how, after getting his first credit card, he maxed it out the first three months during shopping sprees at Toys “R” Us. In the same interview, he also said, “After I got my first gold record, my friend came over and pulled out a couple lines of blow, and I pulled the gold record off the wall, because that was a dream of mine. If I ever got a gold record, I was going to do my first line of coke on that.”16
While it is possible he did cocaine off his gold record, his claim that it was the first time he tried it was an outright lie. Multiple sources have said on the record that Layne was using cocaine as early as the mid-1980s.17
As the money started coming in, Jim Elmer said Layne worked with an accountant to keep track of his finances, developed a budget, and paid his credit card through a trust account. Elmer described Layne and his accountant as “conservative” in terms of managing and spending his money. In terms of his personal expenses, Elmer said that once he had money, Layne bought a car and video games and, later on, a condo.
Chapter 14
Can we get her to do the “Barracuda” song?
—SEAN KINNEY
IN THE FALL OF 1991, the band booked recording time at London Bridge Studios, where they would be working with Rick Parashar as producer. Sap emerged from the demo commissioned by Cameron Crowe for Singles. Although “Would?” was already booked for the movie, what to do with the rest of the material was in question. “We had all this acoustic stuff, and we’re thinking, ‘What the fuck can we do with this? We’re a hard rock/metal band.
’ We figured people might not dig it, also,” Jerry recalled.1 According to the Music Bank liner notes, the title came to Sean during a dream in which the EP’s title was announced at a press conference. “In deference to déjà vu, the name stuck.”2
Assistant engineers Dave Hillis and Jonathan Plum both credited Rick Parashar for helping Layne and Jerry develop their vocal harmonies, possibly as far back as the original 1988 demo that helped get the band signed. “Doing so many records on the other side of the glass with Rick, part of his whole production style and technique is to sit down with the singers at the piano and help write harmonies. I think he did some of that with Temple of the Dog as well. That’s just part of almost any record that he works on. That’s definitely one of his strong points, one of the main aspects of hiring him as a producer that he’s known for,” Hillis said, who also worked with Parashar on Pearl Jam’s Ten album. “There wasn’t a time that I worked with him that he didn’t do that. It was always part of his production style to really work the vocals, comp vocal-track takes together, then build on them from that, come up with harmony ideas, sit at the piano, do harmony parts, or sing them over the top back to him.”
According to Hillis, Parashar ran a tight ship at the studio. “When Rick was there, it was all business. There were a couple of parties we had at London Bridge with the Alice guys involved, but it was not during a recording session. If there was any type of drug use during some of the other, like the Dirt demos and whatnot, that was Layne sneaking off in the bathroom or something like that. When we were working on the record, there was no partying.”
Jonathan Plum was a twenty-year-old student at Central Washington University who had been working as an engineer with other bands when, through mutual connections, he found out that Rick Parashar was looking for an assistant engineer. He applied and was accepted for the position, which started as a three-month unpaid internship. “It was like sixteen hours a day, every day, and then the salary was terrible, but I was working with Alice in Chains,” he said.
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