Alice in Chains

by David de Sola

  Regarding Demri, Barbero recalled, “[Layne] really adored her. I mean, he wasn’t a shit talker. Some guys in bands are just like ‘Rawr…’ and they pretend their girlfriend’s a drag, so if anything happened with another girl it would be cool because he didn’t really like his girlfriend anyway. From what I gather, he really adored her at this point.” Layne also spoke about the recently departed Mike Starr. “Whenever he spoke about him, he was sad about whatever happened,” Barbero said. “He had a really good heart, and I know he was really sad about whatever went down and why he wasn’t in the band anymore.”

  Layne had a bodyguard and personal chaperone named Val who he was always trying to get away from. According to Herman, she didn’t think Val knew about the contents of their dressing room, so Layne would hide out there. He got along with Babes in Toyland singer/guitarist Kat Bjelland, and the two began hanging out on the tour—as drug buddies and possibly an occasional tryst.

  “Kat was, in some ways, his style of a girl except she was a gross version of what he liked. She was very much like a fucked-up version of Demri,” Randy Biro said.

  “Kat and he seemed to really hit it off and get along and that ended up turning into a relationship during the tour. And I do remember Val throwing Kat into a tub of water once because, at one point, they did kind of connect the dots of [Layne] getting into trouble by hanging out with us and/or Kat more specifically,” Herman said.

  There is a disagreement on whether or not Layne and Bjelland were hooking up. According to Herman, “I wasn’t in the room with them to watch them have sex or anything like that, but I find it extremely hard to believe that there was not a relationship going on there. It’s just not possible.” Barbero thinks they weren’t: “They didn’t disappear that much that I ever thought anything was really going on. I think they were more drug buddies.”

  At some point during the tour whatever relationship existed between Layne and Bjelland went south. “It was clear that there was rejection going on, and Kat doesn’t take rejection well. Some of her best songs cover that territory,” Herman said. According to Herman, Bjelland decided to cope by doing heroin and overdosed on the bus after their show in San Francisco. This happened within the first week of the tour.25 Entertainment Weekly was in town to do a photo shoot with Babes in Toyland. Because Bjelland was unavailable, they shot Barbero and Herman and ultimately used a photo of Herman for the magazine cover.

  There was at least one other incident, which Barbero thinks happened after Bjelland’s overdose. At one show, she wanted to hitch a ride on Layne’s tour bus, and he said no. She did not take it well. “He was just like, ‘No, you’re going crazy,’ and she jumped on their bus, and as it was going, jumped on the front and tore off their windshield wiper blade in a rage,” Barbero said. “She’s a real spoiled brat, and she didn’t get what she wanted, so she causes chaos.”

  It got to the point that the Alice in Chains crew started running interference to keep Bjelland away from Layne. “That whole overdose thing—I think she tried to guilt Layne, and he just said, ‘Well, it’s not my responsibility to look after her.’ He felt bad about it, but you can’t. It wasn’t his fault. He never felt like he was at fault for any of it,” Biro said.

  Layne briefly dated an African American girl that Biro thinks he met on the tour. When Speech, the lead singer of Arrested Development, got wind of the relationship, he told Layne, “Okay, you’re not all that bad. I can talk to you now.” Biro, who was there with Layne when this happened, said, “We’re looking at each other, going, ‘Wow, that’s weird.’” He doesn’t remember her name or how they met but described her as “a really nice, sweet girl.”

  Besides Layne, Lori Barbero bonded with Mike over their mutual Filipino heritage. She also hit it off with Sean and eventually met his Steve alter ego. On a night off from the tour, several musicians went to a bar and did karaoke. “We took over the stage, and we all just started playing, and we did this superjam, and that was the night where they were like, ‘Lori, can you take care of Steve?’ And for some reason I don’t know, everyone always thinks that the woman needs to take care of the guy, so I did, and he was actually really pleasant with me.” They had warned her he could be difficult to keep under control, but she did it.

  “He seriously did not know any of his bandmates. He didn’t know Alice in Chains. He didn’t know how to play drums. He didn’t know anything. You could talk to him, and he was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and he’d look at you like you’re fucking crazy.”

  Mike had brought Chuck, his golden retriever, along for the tour. Chuck had his own laminate VIP pass with a smiling dog face on it, which a girl stole and used to get backstage.26 During one show, Layne, Jerry, and Sean went onstage during Primus’s set in the middle of “My Name Is Mud” dressed up wearing Les Claypool–style hats and playing bass guitars while emulating Claypool’s style of performing during the song’s signature bass riff. Claypool apparently returned the favor when he took to the stage dancing in a chicken costume while Alice in Chains was performing “Rooster.” Jerry threw a bottle at him before he ran offstage.27

  In retrospect, Jerry said, “Lollapalooza was probably the funnest tour I’ve ever done, and it’s probably the funnest tour I’ve ever seen because there was so much interaction between the bands, with the exception of Arrested Development. Everybody was playing—we were playing with each other, doing it onstage. It was great.” Mike called it “one of those tours where lifelong friendships were made.”28

  * * *

  Alice in Chains went back to the studio in September to write and record an EP of new material, which is covered in the next chapter. That fall, the band returned overseas for another European tour and their first tour of Australia and Japan. The band was checking into their hotel in the Roppongi district of Tokyo when Layne; his security guard, John; and Todd Shuss, another crew member, came running in. There was a forklift or tractor-type vehicle parked outside on the sidewalk with the keys in the ignition, so Layne decided to take it for a spin. “Layne started [it] up and started driving down the sidewalk, and he tore a sign off a building or something like that, and then the police showed up and [Layne and others] took off,” Biro said, describing what he and everyone else found out afterward. Police came looking for what witnesses described as a tourist-looking white male who had ducked into a hotel.29

  When the tour hit Australia, the itinerary was four or five shows in a row in different cities, which presented a logistical challenge. According to Biro, Australian shows end at one o’clock in the morning. Lobby call to leave for the next city was at 6:00 A.M. After three or four shows, Layne was exhausted, and fatigue was beginning to affect his voice. The tour manager insisted the show had to go on. According to Biro, “Kevan Wilkins, the road manager, he sat there and he guilted [Layne]. I think that’s when his hatred for Wilkins really kicked in, and he’d guilt him. I actually sat there and listened to him say, ‘You’ve got to play the show. Think of all the kids that went out and bought tickets just to see you. Are you gonna deny them that?’”

  One other episode Biro remembered from the 1992–93 period while the band was touring in support of Dirt—although he doesn’t recall which tour—was what he thinks was the only time they had to cancel a show in the middle of a performance. “Layne was too screwed up,” Biro said. Susan asked him to go onstage and tell the audience the show was over.

  “There’s no fucking way I’m doing that.”

  “I pay you. Go fucking do it now.”

  As he recalls, “It was bad. People were really pissed off. They were playing, and Layne was singing, and he’d put down the mic and walk offstage and go to the bathroom and start getting high, like in the middle of a song. I don’t know what was going on with him.” Ultimately, 1993 was the last year Layne would do any major touring.

  * * *

  There were two other events that year worth noting. Heart was working on their Desire Walks On album, which featured a cover
of Bob Dylan’s “Ring Them Bells.” The Wilsons wanted a male voice to harmonize with on that song. Chris Cornell got the initial nod and recorded the track, but Cornell’s record label wouldn’t give them permission to release it.

  At that point, Ann Wilson called Layne, and he agreed to do it. Nancy Wilson recalled that she and Ann were like, “This will be great! Let’s have a moment!” Layne came to the studio and, self-conscious when recording, as usual, didn’t want anyone else there.

  “He was like, ‘Oh no, you can’t be in the control room when I’m singing. You have to go away.’ He was too shy to be singing where Ann Wilson might be listening,” Nancy Wilson said. “We went out to dinner or something and came back, and he didn’t want to be there when we heard it, so he left. He was just like that.” The engineer later mixed Layne’s take with the Wilsons’ vocals and—in Ann’s words—it sounded “perfect.”

  Ann Wilson noticed the toll Layne’s drug use had taken on him. “You could see that day, though, that his struggles with drug addiction had taken away part of Layne,” she wrote. “He had become smaller and smaller, inside and out, even hunched over. He was little to start with, but when I gave him a hug, I was afraid I might break his bones.

  “I had seen some of Alice’s first shows when Layne was luminous onstage, whiter than white, as if he was lit from within. It was like he didn’t have a body when he was performing.

  “As the years went on, he shifted, and by ‘Ring Them Bells,’ his light was flickering.”30

  The other event, arguably more consequential in terms of the band’s career and future, was the dissolution of Susan’s business partnership with Kelly Curtis. There are differing accounts for why they split. Curtis told Mark Yarm he quit right as Alice in Chains was taking off because, having lived through the trauma of losing Andrew Wood to heroin, he didn’t want to go through that again with Layne. There was an incident during which Layne was holding Curtis’s daughter when he nodded off. “He was a great guy—all those guys were great—but there was a dark cloud over them, and it really affected me. I hated it,” Curtis said.31

  Curtis’s former business partner, Ken Deans, did not disagree with his account, noting, “At that point, it was becoming very obvious that Kelly was going to be hugely successful with Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam didn’t have any of those trappings that Mother Love Bone did, or Alice in Chains … And I can believe that Kelly didn’t want to deal with that.”

  Krisha Augerot, Curtis’s assistant at the time, had a similar recollection. “When I was working with Kelly, it was the very beginning of Pearl Jam. He was also comanaging Alice in Chains with Susan and comanaging Kristen Barry with Susan. When they split ways, Alice in Chains, I think, wanted more attention. I think they felt like Susan had Soundgarden [and] Kelly had Pearl Jam. Alice in Chains, although they were having success, maybe they didn’t feel like they were getting the attention they needed. They were like the stepchild kind of thing, so they wanted to go with one side or the other. It was really hard for Kelly to let that go, because Jerry Cantrell lived in his basement for a long time. They were like family.”

  In terms of the band’s relationship with Susan and Curtis, Augerot said it was “like having a pseudo-mom and dad with Kelly and Susan. I think Jerry was really close to Kelly. Clearly because they lived together and [Kelly] gave him so much support, Peggy [Curtis’s wife] gave him so much support. I think Susan was a very calming influence on those guys, really caring, really solid. I do remember it being really hard on Jerry, the Kelly-Susan split.”

  Randy Biro alleges the split was purely a business decision and that Curtis did not leave of his own accord. “Eventually [Alice in Chains] just fired him. The Pearl Jam thing—he just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Alice in Chains became managed a lot better once he was out.” He disputes Curtis’s explanation that he left because of drug issues. “Kelly Curtis is strictly money. It’s all about money. He didn’t leave. They fired him. They felt that he was not focusing on them at all, and him and Susan did not agree on the way to manage it. If I remember right, he gave the band an ultimatum.

  “I think the ultimatum was, ‘It was me or Susan. You can’t have both.’ And they said, ‘Okay. Bye.’ Which kind of threw him for a loop, because he said it in such a cocky way, thinking that it was just automatically going to go to him. And they just didn’t like it.”

  Chapter 18

  Funny thing about the songs—I don’t have any.

  —JERRY CANTRELL

  ALICE IN CHAINS WAS TOURING when Jerry called Toby Wright, asking if he would be interesting in recording an EP with them. “Absolutely,” Wright responded. “Can you send me any of the songs?”

  “We’re on our way home. By the time they get to you, we’ll already be done,” Jerry responded. “Meet us in Seattle.”

  Despite what Jerry had told Wright, no material had been written. According to Jerry, the band had planned to take a break and wanted to work on the songs together after they got back.1 Alice in Chains and Toby Wright went into London Bridge Studio on September 7, 1993, with little or no material prepared. As soon as everyone arrived, the band members began talking about their experiences on the road.

  “Wow, that’s awesome,” Wright said. “So you wrote a lot on the road?”

  “Uh … funny thing about the songs—I don’t have any,” was Jerry’s sheepish response. Everyone laughed.

  “Okay. What do you want to do for the next ten days?” Wright asked, referring to the fact that they had already booked studio time.

  “Is it okay if we just jam for the next ten days?” Jerry asked.

  “Yeah. Best band in the world, jamming? What bad could happen? I didn’t have anything better to do,” was Wright’s response.

  The writing, recording, and mixing process was quick. According to the liner notes, the album was written and recorded in the studio during a five-day period and mixed from September 17 through 22.2 Sessions for the seven-song EP, titled Jar of Flies, were grueling round-the-clock affairs, as long as fourteen to eighteen hours a day. Wright was coproducing and engineering himself, with help from Jonathan Plum as his assistant engineer. “I remember I would leave and they’d still be up. I would go home, get a few hours of sleep, and come back,” Plum said of those marathon sessions.

  Once an idea was fully worked out, the band members were very efficient recording their individual parts. “Some of those, once they got an arrangement down, it was one or two takes and they’re done. That being one of the most prolific and best-feeling bands, we got a great take, and that was the song,” Wright said.

  Plum remembers seeing Layne sitting on the couch in the lobby watching TV. One morning, Layne was watching cartoons and eating kids’ cereal out of the box with his hands. On the back of the box was a fill-in-the-blank game, which Layne completed with his own twist. “He filled it out, and it was totally disgusting, talking about putting things in your urethra. He cut it out and put it on the refrigerator,” Plum recalled.

  The band brought in a four-piece string section for “I Stay Away.” Wright asked Jerry if he wanted to chart out everything he wanted them to play into sheet music.

  “No, I’ll just tell them what to play,” Jerry responded. Dave Hillis, who worked at London Bridge at the time but did not work on Jar of Flies, remembers seeing Jerry go into the big room with a guitar in hand, sit down on a metal folding chair, and walk the other musicians through the song, explaining what he had in mind.

  “What I’ve learned from other sessions, you have a conductor and everything is written out musically-speaking on paper for them in notes, and usually there’s a lot of preproduction in that, meaning there’s a score and things written for them,” Hillis said. “I remember Jerry being fearless, as he usually is, very confident, and going out there with a guitar into the main room where the orchestra is sitting and showing them the parts on his guitar, what he was hearing, what he wanted, which is not something you normally do because orchestra musicians
usually don’t work that way.”

  Sean was messing around playing side-stick drumming, a technique consisting of hitting the rim of the snare drum with the side of the drumstick. Wright, who is not a fan of the technique, heard this and was not having it. “We eventually wound up with some bongos and some smaller drums set up over the high hat that we incorporated into that groove.” This became the opening for “No Excuses.” Jerry sang lead vocals and Layne harmonized on the verses, and then they would switch parts during the chorus.

  “Don’t Follow” would provide some of the most memorable moments of these recording sessions. Randy Biro; Jerry’s guitar tech, Darrell Peters; and Mike sang backing vocals for the second part of the song. A harmonica player was brought in. “They sent this guy up—he’s this older dude. He was a good player, but he would grunt when he was playing, these really weird kinda disgusting grunting noises,” Plum recalled.

  “I remember Jerry was just like, ‘What’s that noise?’ Toby would say, ‘Hey, that sounded great. Can you do it with less grunting noises?’ And the guy would say, ‘Oh yeah, yeah. Sorry about that.’ He would do it again, and he’d still make the same grunting noises.”

  After an hour of this, they realized it wasn’t going to work out. Eventually, David Atkinson was called in to play the part. “I remember the harmonica player was like a friend of Chris Cornell’s who came in, blazed around, had to comp it all together into what that performance is,” Wright said. Plum thinks he nailed it one take. Jerry sang the first half of the song; Layne did the second half. Plum had the impression Layne didn’t like the song for some reason, because, while he was recording his vocal, he added a little something extra that wasn’t part of Jerry’s original lyrics. After the “It hurts to care, I’m going down” lyric before the brief break leading into the second half of the song, Layne deadpanned, “How now, brown cow?”

  “It was on the recording for a long time, but when we mixed it, Jerry asked us to take it out,” Plum said, laughing. Wright doesn’t remember this but does not dispute Plum’s account. “It was Jerry’s concept of having him start out the song, Layne come in, and then we finish up [with a] two-sides-to-the-story type of thing, which I thought was a brilliant concept,” Wright said.