Alice in Chains

by David de Sola

  Not long after, Bacolas moved in with Layne. Although he moved in to help him clean up, any pretense of that went out the window once he was there. Layne set two conditions for living with him: no interventions and no listening to Alice in Chains. “I think the thinking was he wanted to be in control of it,” Bacolas said. “He definitely liked control. His attitude was ‘No one’s going to force me to do anything. Don’t open the door to anybody that wants to. I’m not down with that.’ To me, that’s more like, ‘I’m not ready to quit. Don’t even try and force me.’”

  * * *

  Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready had been drinking so much that the issue began to come up during band meetings. Pearl Jam performed three songs on the April 16, 1994, edition of Saturday Night Live, closing their set with “Daughter.” The next morning, Stone Gossard asked him, “What’d you think of ‘Daughter’?” McCready didn’t even remember playing the song—he had blacked out on a live, nationally televised program. McCready eventually checked in to the Hazelden clinic in Minnesota, where he met blues bassist John Baker Saunders.2

  John Baker Saunders, Jr., was the second of three children. His younger sister Henrietta described him as “the one who had the heart in the family.” He was a musician from an early age, according to his older brother Joseph, having sung in an Episcopal church choir and taken guitar lessons in fifth grade. He learned to play “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” on an acoustic guitar.3

  At the time, he was listening to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks. “I liked to listen to records, so I moved around to a lot of different places and music kind of gave me some kind of continuity,” Baker said during a 1995 interview for the EMP’s oral history project. Baker attended the Fay School in Southborough, Massachusetts, from seventh through ninth grades. He said, “I just didn’t do my homework, didn’t give a fuck about it, and I played my guitar and listened to the radio a lot, all night long.”

  His “one great memory” of boarding school was lying on his back with headphones on as he listened to Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” for the first time while looking at the sky. “I hadn’t really taken any drugs yet, but that was a heavy experience because I had been listening to John Wesley Harding for a long time—it’s one of my favorite albums by [Bob Dylan], and when I heard Hendrix doing that song, it was great.”

  During this period, Baker, his brother Joseph, and a friend saw Hendrix perform at Philharmonic Hall in New York City. According to Baker, “Hendrix came out, but he didn’t just come out, first all you heard were like noises coming from backstage as he like made noises with his guitar and he did that most of the night, he played ‘Wild Thing’ and some other things but it wasn’t like he ran through the hit songs on his album, he just started making noises, worked some songs into that and walked off making noises, too, and it went a little over my head.”4

  Joseph remembers that show well. In terms of its impact on Baker, he said, “[Baker] always was a creative musician. His rock was always anchored in the hardcore blues, much like the Rolling Stones. His gods were the black blues players. That’s where he got his inspiration. Hendrix’s foundation was that place, too.” He heard that after Baker moved to Seattle years later, he met Noel Redding, Hendrix’s original bassist.

  By high school, Baker switched to bass. When he was in tenth grade, the family moved to Kenilworth, a suburb of Chicago. As he got older, Henrietta said Baker “naturally would be protective of the vulnerable people,” and she felt he was always looking out for her. It was during this period he developed an interest in the Chicago blues scene. Baker and Joseph would go into the city and see Muddy Waters perform.

  Joseph doesn’t know exactly when or how Baker’s heroin use started but remembers he found out about it when Baker was still in high school, when he was roughly seventeen or eighteen years old. He noted the history of alcoholism in the family, so Baker might have had genetics working against him. What Joseph didn’t know at the time—Baker didn’t tell his family about this until well into adulthood—was that Baker had been sexually abused by a male neighbor when he was about eight years old. “I think that had something to do with his drug abuse,” Joseph said.

  Baker graduated from New Trier Township High School in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1973. He took a few courses at Oakton Community College but didn’t finish. He moved to Chicago and played with blues musicians at local venues. Baker struggled with substance abuse and efforts to get clean. At one point, he went out to San Francisco, where Joseph was in college, and took classes and enrolled in a recovery program. According to Joseph, “I got so that I could identify immediately if he was on heroin.”

  He went to rehab several times at Hazelden. While living in Minneapolis, he played with a local blues group named Lamont Cranston. Although Baker was a drug addict, he attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings because it “was the only program that worked to keep him sober,” Joseph said. He never told anyone he was a heroin addict. He told his brother that the people at Narcotics Anonymous meetings were just trying to network and sell drugs to each other but that “the old alcoholics were the guys who really had figured it out.”

  When they first met, McCready remembers Baker—who would have been thirty-nine or forty years old at the time—had a bumper sticker on his car that read WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS A FAILURE TO GIVE A SHIT!, which he called “completely hilarious” but also “an insight into a dark, intelligent, and irreverent mind.” The initial spark for Mad Season was in Hazelden. “We had talked about doing a project together while we were there, we kicked around the idea.”5

  Baker took McCready to AA meetings, Joseph said, adding that “they were supporting each other trying to develop a sober lifestyle.” At some point after this, Baker went out to Seattle with McCready and traveled with him on a few Pearl Jam tours. After relocating to Seattle, McCready took Baker to Bass Northwest, Evan Sheeley’s specialty bass store near Pioneer Square, to buy whatever gear and instruments he wanted. McCready picked up the bill. “It was a nice thing for Mike to do. Of course, at the time, Pearl Jam had definitely done well for themselves, so Mike was able to spend the money without thinking about it,” Sheeley said.

  McCready contacted Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin, telling him he wanted to form a band. Martin accepted the invitation because the Trees were inactive. McCready said he began calling Layne while still in rehab to see if he was interested in working together.6

  McCready had an agenda. It was his hope that playing with sober musicians would encourage Layne to clean up. “I was under the mistaken theory I could help him out,” McCready told Charles R. Cross after Layne’s death. “I wanted to lead by example.”7

  Around this same period, Johnny Bacolas had moved in with Layne, and they started getting phone calls from McCready, who said he had songs he wanted to run by Layne. McCready eventually just started showing up at their place, calling Bacolas in advance.

  “Layne’s asleep right now,” Bacolas would respond.

  “I’ll hang out until he wakes up.”

  McCready would hang out in the living room, waiting for Layne to wake up, which was typically at around four or five o’clock in the afternoon. Layne would stay up all night and go to sleep at seven or eight o’clock in the morning. Bacolas would make a pot of coffee as they waited for Layne to wake up. When Layne was finally up and about, McCready would start talking to him, pick up a guitar, and play him a riff.

  In time, McCready started bringing Baker over. “Baker would just sleep. He would come over to the house almost every day because he just lived about a block away. He would come over, and we would make a pot of coffee. He’d drink like half the pot,” Bacolas said. Within a few minutes, Baker would be passed out on the couch, snoring. Layne was not happy about the slumbering visitor. “Dude, next time Baker comes over, we got to have a rule where he can’t just sit here and sleep all the time because I have to tiptoe around the house all the time and it pisses me off,” h
e said.

  According to McCready, “The band came together after we had jammed together two or three times and decided to do a gig. We did a show at the Crocodile Café, just making up shit as we went along.”8 Mad Season played their first show at the Crocodile Café on October 12, 1994.9 For that performance, they used the name the Gacy Bunch, a reference to the serial killer John Wayne Gacy and the TV show The Brady Bunch. According to a bootleg recording of the show, the set consisted of early versions of songs that would appear on Above, in instrumental form or without fully developed lyrics, and an instrumental cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).”10

  McCready floated the idea of putting together a demo, but Layne raised the stakes and said, “Forget doing a demo, let’s do an album.” At the same time, McCready realized the negative connotations of having a name like the Gacy Bunch. “That was a joke that was funny for about five minutes, and when the sixth minute hit, it wasn’t funny anymore,” McCready explained.11 When the name change became necessary, they settled on Mad Season. “A lot of hallucinogenic mushrooms grow in the area around Surrey, England, where we mixed the first Pearl Jam album, and the people there call the time when they come up the ‘Mad Season’ because people are wandering around mad, picking mushrooms, half out of their minds,” McCready explained. “That term has always stuck in my mind, and I relate that to my past years, the seasons of drinking and drug abuse.”12

  Krisha Augerot, who was working for Pearl Jam manager Kelly Curtis at the time, was assigned to oversee the Mad Season project. As far as she knew, it was “definitely a side project,” with no plans to do anything bigger than play shows around Seattle.

  The band went into Bad Animals Studios with Pearl Jam’s soundman, Brett Eliason, producing and engineering, with Sam Hofstedt assisting him. From what Hofstedt recalls, Layne was still working on his lyrics and vocal parts by the time it came to actually recording. “He would still go into the studio by himself, have no one else around at all. And he could operate the tape machine and just do a little experiment without feeling anybody was listening to him or watching him. And he would go in and just, like, work something out.” When Layne was actually recording his vocals, the only other person in the studio was Eliason, who told Mark Yarm:

  I produced, recorded, and mixed the Mad Season album. Layne was not healthy. Heavy, heavy drug use. Such a sweet guy, such an amazing talent. One of the best singers I’ve ever recorded. He could just stand out there and light it up. The problem was getting him there. We were in cahoots with his roommate, who’d help get Layne off the couch and point him in our direction.

  Layne would show up and he’d go back to the bathroom and be doing dope back there and you’d wait for hours before he was ready to come back out. He was pretty open about it. I asked him, “Why? Why are you doing this to yourself?” He said, “I’m either going to drink or I’m going to do dope, and drinking is harder on me.”13

  Hofstedt agreed with Eliason’s account. Hofstedt, who would work on the Alice in Chains album a year later, says Layne said something similar during the making of that album, words to the effect of “I’m gonna be on something. I drink a lot and I don’t like the way the drinking affects me.” He added, “I sort of recall him—I’m not certain of his exact words, but he didn’t like [that] drinking kind of made him doughy.”

  Layne was in the studio lounge reading a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. Barrett Martin read it a few years earlier and began talking with Layne about what it meant to be an artist and have a spiritual message.14 Layne put the book into song, making reference to Gibran’s work in the lyrics. This became “River of Deceit.”

  Despite Layne’s no-interventions rule, at some point McCready and Bacolas made plans to have Lowell—a counselor from Hazelden and friend of McCready’s—fly in from Minneapolis to come over and talk to Layne. Layne had previously met him, and according to Bacolas he “really respected him and just really liked the guy. [He was] someone Layne would actually listen to.” Layne agreed to check in to Hazelden, but he returned to Seattle after a few days. He startled Bacolas, who came home from a gig at two or three o’clock in the morning and, hearing noises from Layne’s room, thought a burglar had broken in. He walked in and saw Layne, then asked him what he was doing back.

  “I just came back. It wasn’t for me,” he responded.

  Nancy Layne McCallum alleged in a lawsuit that at one point in the mid-1990s, Layne told her he was “contemplating withdrawing from the band to address his health issues, but that Susan Silver, the band’s manager, was pushing back by reminding him that there were 40 people on the payroll counting on him to write and perform.”

  She further alleged in the lawsuit that “during an ‘intervention’ with Mr. Staley, Ms. McCallum questioned the need for her son to continue to write, perform and tour with the band: ‘Why couldn’t the band audition for a replacement lead singer?’ In response, Ms. Silver told Ms. McCallum, ‘Nancy, you don’t understand; Layne IS Alice in Chains.”15

  * * *

  In mid-September, Michelle Ahern-Crane invited Layne to her twenty-fifth birthday party, thinking he wouldn’t show up. About a dozen friends of hers, as well as her on-again, off-again ex-boyfriend, The Accüsed bassist Alex Sibbald, were at the rooftop bar of the Canlis Hotel in downtown Seattle. Ahern-Crane saw Johnny Bacolas walk into the bar. “Layne’s here. He’s downstairs in the bathroom. He’ll be up in a minute,” he told her.

  Ahern-Crane knew this was not going to go well, with Layne or with Sibbald. “I’m like, ‘Oh, God … How am I going to explain this to my sort of ex-boyfriend that I’m still close with?’” She told Sibbald she didn’t think Layne would come when she invited him as Layne walked in wearing a lavender-colored suit with a Colonel Sanders–style string tie and a cane. He gave her a handwritten letter, in which he wished her a happy birthday and said that her birthday letter to him was his favorite gift: “I’ve never felt better or more accepted and loved by someone as I did by you in your letter, at that moment, and every time I read it, I feel that same wonderful moment,” he wrote.

  When she finished the letter, it dawned on her—“Oh my God! He thinks we’re dating!”

  “I wanted to like him, but I don’t know if he’s got HIV; I don’t know what the deal is. I’m not going to get involved with that. But I guess that I was hoping foolishly that I could make a difference and inspire some sobriety or something and then maybe I would have tried dating him if he had cleaned up, because I was definitely fond of him. He thought we were, and then on my birthday he realized we were not.”

  Ahern-Crane vaguely remembers writing the letter for Layne’s birthday, which would have been about three weeks before. She described it as “an inspirational note” in which she said she could see he was a sweet person deep down inside, and wouldn’t it be great if that person came out more. She also recalls writing that she felt he was special, and because of that he shouldn’t squander it. “I guess this meant a lot to him at the time because I think at this point no one was saying anything superpositive to him and meaning it. Or maybe it meant something to him (as he said it did in his birthday letter back to me later) because I was typically so reserved and emotionally cool—it may have been refreshing to him that I said ANYTHING positive about my feelings or perception of him,” she wrote in an e-mail.

  Layne walked in, saw what was going on and that she was with Sibbald, and, according to Ahern-Crane, “His face kind of fell.” She excused herself to talk to Layne and try to make him feel welcome. Coming to the party was “totally humiliating for him, and I felt so bad and it was just a terrible thing. He got his feelings hurt.” Layne and Bacolas took off shortly after. Bacolas vaguely recalls going to this party but doesn’t remember any specific details. He did not dispute Ahern-Crane’s account.

  Within a day or two after the party, Ahern-Crane went over to Layne’s apartment to pick up some things she had left. It was a bad sign when Layne wouldn’t let her inside. He brought her
things to the door, and they spoke on the porch. Ahern-Crane didn’t mention the party. She decided to address his drug use.

  “I think it’s really strange how you could clearly have a problem, and your friends and all these people that are kind of hanging around, no one talks about it. You’re in trouble. You clearly have a problem, you’re clearly in trouble. None of your so-called friends want to talk about it and it makes me really sad.”

  Layne got defensive. Ahern-Crane described his response as “snotty,” and recounts that he said words to the effect of “If I make you sad, maybe you shouldn’t see me.” She got her stuff and left. Looking back on it years later, she wrote, “The fact of the matter is, that last day, when I said his drug use was sad to watch, he interpreted that as my disapproval of him. Or he thought it meant I didn’t like him.”

  Mad Season closed out 1994 with a headlining show at RKCNDY on New Year’s Eve, with Second Coming opening for them. On January 8, 1995, Eddie Vedder hosted “Self Pollution Radio,” a series of live performances and interviews with Seattle musicians that took place in the basement of his house and was broadcast live by a satellite truck parked outside. Mad Season was on the bill and performed “Lifeless Dead” and “I Don’t Know Anything.”16

  During this 1994–95 period, Layne would often join Second Coming onstage at local gigs to sing vocals on “It’s Coming After,” with Bacolas estimating the count at fifteen to twenty shows.17 According to James Bergstrom, all this happened in the weeks and months after Alice in Chains pulled out of their touring commitments because of an unidentified band member’s health issues. The explanation given for the tour cancellation indicated “that Layne was in deep water with his addiction, unhealthy and out of it,” Bergstrom said. Not long after this, Layne took the stage with Second Coming during a show at Under the Rail. MTV News obtained a video of the performance, and Kurt Loder did a story about it. The fact that Layne was performing around Seattle without Alice in Chains raised questions about the reason for the tour cancellation. “There was some controversy in the Alice camp. It was kind of a contradiction with what the press release said,” Bergstrom said.