Alice in Chains

by David de Sola

  Starr told his biographer that he informed the other band members he was quitting and that his last performances would be the Brazil shows. According to the book, “Mike had initially made the formal decision he would leave the band. He firmly believed it would be only temporary. It became permanent.”8

  He told Mark Yarm that he was fired not only for scalping tickets on the Van Halen tour but also because Jerry was jealous of him for getting more attention from women, noting that he was in a magazine as “sexiest babe of the month.”9 Biro dismissed this claim. However, he did note, “My impression was it was almost like he felt the amount of blow jobs you get in one night represented fame to him.” He also speculated that Starr had a sexual addiction.

  Several years later on Celebrity Rehab and after, Starr said he was fired from the band and that he never would have quit. “When they asked me to leave the band, it broke my heart.” During a 2010 interview on Loveline, he said, “I don’t care about a band thing. I don’t care about them dismissing me from the band. I never quit the band, for one thing. I’m not a quitter.”10

  After the firing, the band said publicly that Mike had left of his own accord. An edition of the fan-club newsletter published in spring of 1993 reads, “For those of you who have not heard, Mike Starr is no longer with Alice in Chains. He decided all this touring stuff just wasn’t for him. We wish him all the best of success in all of his future endeavors, we’ll miss him.” A February 1994 Rolling Stone feature reads, “The rift with Starr occurred, Staley explains, as ‘just a difference in priorities. We wanted to continue intense touring and press, Mike was ready to go home.’” The biography on the band’s first official Web site—the now-defunct aliceinchains.net—reads, “Mike Starr reaches the top of the mountain, then retires.”11

  On January 22, 1993, the band took the stage to an audience of tens of thousands in Rio de Janeiro and performed a blistering hour-long set, firing on all cylinders. “I remember the last song. I think it was in Rio. I was in tears on the stage,” Biro said. “I couldn’t even see straight, I was so upset over it.” Starr later told Jason Buttino that he shot up before the show. “He said when he was playing ‘Would?’ he could barely move. His knees were shaking and his hands weren’t working the way he wanted them to, and he felt like he was going to collapse.” Although this doesn’t appear in the footage, Biro said Starr was crying onstage during the final songs. During the last instrument change, Biro hugged Starr, and they said that they loved each other, despite everything that was going on. Biro also told him to never give up. After it was over, without any public acknowledgment of what had just happened, the band left the stage. Five years after the band started out at the Music Bank, and unbeknownst to anyone on the outside at the time, the Rio de Janeiro audience had just seen Mike Starr’s final performance with Alice in Chains.12

  There were two red flags during the Brazil trip indicating how severe Starr’s heroin addiction had become. The first, according to what he told Aaron Woodruff, was when he was riding in a helicopter and had to throw up outside of it in midflight, possibly because he was going through withdrawals. This account was corroborated by Randy Biro, who was present. The second red flag was after the show, when he decided to shoot up with two of the most notorious addicts in the Seattle grunge scene and barely lived to tell the tale. According to Biro, when the bands got to Brazil, it was discovered that there was cocaine but no heroin. The solution they worked out was that Kurt Cobain would pay for the heroin, and Layne would pay for the plane to bring it down.

  “On the day they kicked me out, I was like, ‘[Kurt] Cobain, shoot me up,’ because we were playing with Nirvana and the [Red Hot] Chili Peppers down in South America.… Layne shot me up first a couple of times. Then Kurt shot me up, and then Layne shot me up after that same night, and I died, for like eleven minutes.…‘Dead for eleven minutes,’ Layne said. I woke up, I was all wet and I was in a different room. I was in the bathroom and Layne just punched me in the face, crying.”13

  * * *

  Mike Inez was born in San Fernando, California, into a very musical family, with relatives who played in church bands and “old Filipino folk bands.” He was delivered by his grandmother, a nurse at the hospital. After Mike and his mother were released from the hospital, Mike was brought to his grandmother’s house, where his uncle was living at the time and practicing in a Top 40 band with members of Earth, Wind & Fire. His grandmother got “really pissed off,” and told the band to stop rehearsing because the new baby was home. In Mike’s words, he went “from the hospital straight into a live-band situation.” Mike credited his parents with letting his musical interests blossom and his relatives for having places where he could practice his craft.

  He started out on clarinet and saxophone in fourth or fifth grade. One of the first songs he learned was the Commodores’ “I’m Easy” on piano. By junior high school, he was getting into hard rock and heavy metal. He grew up in the late 1970s in Pasadena, just as Van Halen was taking off. By high school, he knew he was going to be a musician for a living. He was in the marching band in high school and at Pasadena City College but was also involved in rock bands. Around the time he was twenty-two, he was rehearsing with his band when an employee at the rehearsal space told him he had tried out for Ozzy Osbourne’s band and encouraged him to do the same. Mike’s reaction: “I’ll never fucking get that gig!”

  When Mike arrived at the audition, his attitude was, “I’m just happy I’m going to get to jam with the man!” He learned the songs by listening to other people playing them through the wall. When it was his turn, he wasn’t nervous because he had no expectation of getting the job. As he was in his car about to leave, he saw Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne in the rearview mirror, walking toward him. They asked him to come back the next day, because he was one of the top five.

  By the next day, the finalists had been narrowed down to three. Even then, Mike still wasn’t expecting to get the job. About a week later, he auditioned for the job again. The plan was for the new bass player to go to Europe and play with Ozzy Osbourne at Wembley Arena. Mike was at his grandfather’s house when he got the phone call from Osbourne. He beat two hundred bassists for the job. In Mike’s words, “I went from playing the Coconut Teaser [a club in Los Angeles] to living in a castle with Ozzy Osbourne in one week and playing Wembley. It was an amazing experience.” He also worked on Osbourne’s No More Tears album.14

  According to Mike, he and his new Alice in Chains bandmates spent his first day in London smoking “killer hash.” The band rented out a room at a rehearsal studio, where, for the next two days, they gave Inez a crash course in the Alice in Chains catalog. Biro was impressed—he thought Inez knew the songs better than Starr did. The band began a two-month European tour with the Screaming Trees.15

  During the February 8 show in Stockholm, Sweden, there was a skinhead in the audience making Nazi salutes and beating people up. According to Randy Biro, “He was doing that thrashing in a circle, just elbowing people in the face, just punching people out.” Bootleg video of the concert shows that after “It Ain’t Like That,” Layne spoke to the audience, saying, “We love you fucking Swedish people.” He then walked over to the edge of the stage and knelt down to talk to a security guard. He pointed the skinhead out and invited him to the stage.

  “Come on up onstage. Come on, man. Come join the band—have a good time.”

  According to Biro, the skinhead was incredulous, pointing at himself and asking, “Me?”

  “Everyone’s looking at him going, ‘Why the fuck is Layne being nice to this douchebag?’” Biro recalled. “The local security’s looking at him—‘What the fuck’s going on?’”

  Layne walked to the edge of the stage and squatted, repeatedly motioning with his hands for the skinhead to come up. He took him by the hand and pulled him up onstage. As soon as he got up, Layne punched the skinhead in the face twice, who fell back into the audience, which was roaring with approval. Security hustled him away. Layne went bac
k to the microphone and said, “Fucking Nazis die!”16

  After the show, the band was hearing rumors that, in Biro’s words, “the shit’s gonna hit the fan”—meaning local police might be involved. Layne and his security guard John Sampson went to the tour bus to get on the ferry to Finland and wait for the others to leave the country.17

  The band and crew were about to check out of their Stockholm hotel when they saw police officers waiting in the lobby. The skinhead had called the police, who went to the hotel looking for Layne and seized the band and crew members’ passports so they couldn’t leave the country. When they discovered Layne wasn’t there, officers hurried to the ferry, pulled him off, and arrested him. According to Biro, the skinhead’s brother, who was also at the concert, went to the police and told them his brother had been picking on people at the show and Layne helped stop him. At that point, Biro said, “the police congratulated us and let us go.

  “Layne was a really good person about bullies because he had been bullied when he was a kid,” Biro explained. “He wasn’t a good-looking guy and everything, so he got picked on quite a bit as a youngster, and he seemed to remember that. And when he got into a powerful position, he paid people back or he helped out the people that were weak, like he was at one point.”

  When the tour hit Paris, the crew discovered the venue had a decibel limit regulating the noise levels. The band was warned about it ahead of time, but they—minus Layne—went to sound check. Mike and Sean tested their gear and were told it was already too loud, all this before the PA and monitors were even turned on. At that point, they looked at each other and left, calling off the show. According to Biro, Layne stayed at the hotel so they could say he was sick and have a legal excuse to cancel the show.

  The band came back from Europe in mid-March 1993. Shortly after their return, they did a quick headlining U.S. tour with Circus of Power and Masters of Reality. Mike’s first studio experience with Alice in Chains was when they recorded two songs in April 1993, “What the Hell Have I” and “A Little Bitter” for the soundtrack of the movie Last Action Hero. Stuart Hallerman, owner of Avast! Studios, recorded some demos with Alice in Chains and hosted them for rehearsals while they wrote the songs. There were signs of Layne’s drug problem during these sessions.18

  Producer and engineer Toby Wright was friends with Nick Terzo, who asked if he would be interested in working with the band on the songs, an offer he accepted.

  Riki Rachtman interviewed Layne and Mike on Headbangers Ball during this period and asked whether there was a “big difference” having Mike Inez in the studio as they worked on new songs.

  “No, not really,” Layne responded, laughing.

  Mike added, “I don’t want to be in this band, and they won’t let me quit. These guys are crazy, man. They’re holding my family hostage.”

  Layne jokingly replied, “You’re contractually obligated, so stick with it, big guy.”19

  The Alice in Chains Fan Club newsletter noted, “As of now, Mike Inez of Ozzy’s band has been filling in the bass position. Things have been grooving so well, it looks like Mr. Inez may just become a member of the Chains gang. We’ll keep you posted.” The band returned to Europe for a series of dates opening for Metallica, after which they would return to the United States to play Lollapalooza.20

  Rocky Schenck traveled to Seattle to direct the video for “What the Hell Have I,” which was shot on June 13. “Layne and Jerry particularly enjoyed creating the sequences where their faces were projected live onto their own faces and each other’s faces.” Jerry was responsible for the oversize masks surrounding the band. This was also Schenck’s first time meeting Mike, whom he liked right away.

  * * *

  During the summer of 1993, Alice in Chains would be the second-to-last band on the main stage of Lollapalooza. The tour kicked off on June 18 and would perform across North America until early August.21 Layne was trying to stay clean, according to Randy Biro, so he got his own bus with a recording studio in the back lounge and a security guard traveling with him at all times. According to multiple sources, Layne relapsed, using alcohol and drugs on the tour.

  Johnny Bacolas and James Bergstrom went to the Portland show. “Johnny and I sat on the side of the stage by the manager watching them, and it was a fabulous show,” Bergstrom recalled. “We just hung out with Layne and had so much fun—you know, it was like we were kids again. I think he struggled being away: the grind of the road and the whole lifestyle … Obviously with his addiction, it was just fostering sadness and unhappiness.”

  Nick Pollock went to another Lollapalooza show, accompanied by one of Layne’s ex-girlfriends. “We went on his bus and he showed us a bunch of his artwork, which was very dark and introspective at that time, in some cases kind of odd,” he recalled. “I don’t know how to really qualify that more than it was odd. I think that he was in a pretty dark place.”

  Pollock added, “Here’s Layne, who’s kind of an alien in his own skin, showing us, ‘Here, I’ve been doing this artwork and I did these photo things.’ I think they were with Demri and stuff like that. They were just like, ‘Wow, where the hell is he?’ But it wasn’t obvious by looking at them that he’s got all the drug problems and that stuff.”

  In comparing what he saw to Layne’s artwork for the Mad Season album, Pollock described it thus: “That would be more stylized things that are evocative of what I was talking about. But he had things where he actually had photographs of himself that were very gaunt, that had a certain sort of bondage-ish type of feel to it. It was just strange.”

  They went to the soundboard to watch the other bands perform, and they talked. According to Pollock, “He loosened up. We got back to like we were kids. He was dealing with the weight of his musical career and everything that was going on with that, the weight of his drug situation, and I think that emotionally in a lot of ways, just the weight of a lot of things from his past that he never could deal with, that he was still dealing with and trying to blot out with drugs.”

  The former singer of Cat Butt, David Duet, was living in Texas when he got a call from Layne, telling him he would be in town and giving him a list of drugs and alcohol to bring for him. Duet was excited to see his old friend when he got on the bus, ready to give him the bag of stuff. Layne cut him off—Duet later found out he was on Layne’s personal sober bus and that his stepfather and manager were there. Duet left before the bag could be confiscated and made arrangements to meet with Layne fifteen minutes later.22

  Jim Elmer—who traveled to three Lollapalooza shows in Washington State and Texas that summer—did not recall this but did not dispute the account. He also noted, “Layne was very, very careful of not being public with family on his addiction. I don’t know if that’s true or not, or if I was oblivious, but he put up a good shield. There was no doubt he had a problem, and we all agree on that. But in terms of how he handled that and so forth, he was very discreet, I thought, toward the family.”

  There were issues with one of the people traveling on the tour as part of the Village, which was described by the Fort Lauderdale–based Sun-Sentinel newspaper as “a place Lollapalooza is creating to be a surreal world where art, music and politics collide.”23 This person was discovered to have been providing Layne with heroin. He was warned repeatedly to stay away from the band and Layne. It got to the point where Biro thinks his wife at the time—who was an assistant tour manager—may have threatened to have the guy arrested and ordered him to never come backstage again. (Biro got married during the tour, and Layne lent him and his wife his private bus while the tour was traveling from Orlando, Florida, to New Orleans, where the wedding was to take place. Layne traveled on the band bus for this leg of the trip.)

  The musicians on the tour hit it off with each other for the most part, leading to many onstage collaborations: Jerry would perform with Fishbone; members of Fishbone would perform with Alice in Chains; and Layne would sing with Front 242 or Tool. Layne became friends with Tom Morello, the guita
rist for Rage Against the Machine. Morello would later recall how the two of them would be laughing pretty hard while arguing about which of them was more metal. Layne also became close friends with Babes in Toyland—a three-piece female punk rock band from Minneapolis.24

  According to the band’s bassist, Maureen Herman, Babes in Toyland had one of the most popular dressing rooms on that tour. “It seemed like everybody on the tour had these healthy riders, like, ‘No alcohol, we’re only bringing in fruit juice, we only have really healthy food,’ and our rider was not that way. Our rider was full of really fun junk food and cool stuff and tequila, vodka, and Jack Daniel’s and lots of beer, and so everybody was always coming to our dressing room because their fucking dressing rooms didn’t have rock-and-roll accoutrements, and Layne was one of those people who was attracted to our dressing room.”

  Drummer Lori Barbero had a similar recollection. “I think seriously it was the very first night. Layne came to our backstage room, and he was like, ‘Hey,’ and just became our friend immediately, and that was kind of his tree house, as I like to say—where he hung out pretty much all the time. Every day he’d come and hang out with us.”

  Susan would come in asking if they had seen Layne, and Barbero or someone else would confirm he was hanging out with them. Eventually, it got to the point that Susan went to the Babes in Toyland dressing room when she had to find him. “He hung out in our room all the time. I don’t really know why. Maybe he just liked to be around ladies. Or just to get away from his own crew that he had to be around all the time, but he just really liked hanging out with us, and we just had a lot of fun.”