Alice in Chains

by David de Sola

  Toby Wright was called into Susan’s office for a conference call with Don Ienner and Michele Anthony. Wright was given an ultimatum, which he was to deliver to Layne: start showing up for work every day or production will shut down. “I had to have the conversation with Layne. I just remember I had to tell him if he didn’t step up to the plate and come in to the studio every day at a respectable time that I was being forced to go home and that this record wouldn’t see the light of day,” Wright said. Layne became “very emotional” and started crying.

  By the time the band finished, they had a dozen songs for Alice in Chains. Hofstedt and Wright don’t remember the exact number of songs that were tracked and recorded, but think it was between twenty and thirty. “They were writing in the studio. The things that Layne would feel, he would write. The tracks that he didn’t feel, he just passed on and went to the next one,” Wright said. He doesn’t know what—if anything—became of the extra songs, which were in instrumental form. “They went to Columbia, and they’re probably sitting in their vaults somewhere.” Wright doesn’t think any of these outtakes resurfaced on Jerry’s solo albums.

  Rocky Schenck photographed the three-legged dog for the album cover at a playground near downtown Los Angeles on August 23, 1995. The dog on the cover was “officially in memory of a dog which chased [Sean] during boyhood paper-route duty,” according to the Music Bank liner notes.

  “I did a casting for three-legged dogs for the shoot, and the band ended up choosing a fax of one of the submitted photos as the cover shot. Eventually, the photos we shot at the playground appeared in [the box set] Music Bank,” Schenck wrote.

  On September 24, Schenck flew up to Seattle to photograph the band and film what was originally intended to be a video press kit, which became something hilariously different: The Nona Tapes. Schenck called this “one of my absolute favorite experiences with Alice.” What began as a promo piece evolved into a Spinal Tap–style mockumentary showing how the band members spent their free time when they weren’t being rock stars. Schenck talked with each band member about how he wanted to be portrayed. Jerry is shown shoveling manure at a horse stable when he’s approached by an interviewer asking about the new Alice in Chains album. Jerry told Schenck’s producer Katherine Shaw he’s been working at the stable “since that music thing went sour a few years back” but that “Sony let us do another record, so I’m going back to that rock-and-roll thing.” Jerry also dressed in drag and played Nona Weissbaum, the title character, who is an aspiring journalist seeking Seattle rock stars for a story.

  While cruising around Seattle, Nona stumbles onto Sean, who is standing on a corner, and she forces him into the car. Appropriately enough for his comedic nature, Sean is shown in his downtime dressed in a Bozo the Clown–style costume and rubber nose. Sean was later filmed at a bar drinking shots in full clown gear.

  Mike told Nona he joined the band because they kidnapped his family and were holding his grandmother hostage until he did a few albums and tours with them. He is later shown at a hairdresser’s salon, with his hair in curling irons. He said since he read in a magazine that his band broke up, he stopped going to rehearsals and was running a hot dog cart on First Avenue.

  Then it was Layne’s turn. Nona’s car is parked in an alley when they see him going through a Dumpster. According to Schenck, this setup was Layne’s idea. It was also Layne’s idea to have his lip and mouth movements not match up to the responses to the interview questions. He would say one thing during the on-camera portion of the interview and later overdub the video with an audio recording to an entirely different question.

  There was a scary moment during filming in which a soundman almost died. They had spent several hours driving around in a convertible, with Schenck and his cinematographer in the front seat and the soundman in the trunk. When they stopped filming, Schenck noticed the soundman wasn’t responding to any of his questions. They opened the trunk and discovered he had passed out from inhaling carbon monoxide fumes.

  “We ended up in a bar, quite drunk and having a great time. By that time, it was just me and my camera and the band. Sean, still in his Bozo outfit, stumbled out of the bar with a piece of toilet paper strategically attached to his foot as I followed him out onto the street. The evening continued to get wilder, but I decided that we had enough film for the project and stopped shooting.”10

  On one of his trips to Seattle, Schenck went to Layne’s home with another band member and waited outside, but he never came out. As he was waiting, he wrote, “I experienced a variety of reactions and emotions—everything from frustration to anger to pity to compassion to empathy. The Layne I knew was such a complex conglomeration of diverse qualities, and I knew that if he had answered that door, I couldn’t have said or done anything that would have helped him or change the course of his life. He was determined to go down the road that he chose for himself, and nobody was going to change that.”

  According to Schenck, all four band members could have been actors if they wanted to. He mentioned this idea to a few casting director friends, but nothing ever became of it. He also directed the video for “Grind,” which was shot at Hollywood National Studios on October 8–9, 1995, with the animated sequences filmed from October 11–21. “This was not an easy shoot. Layne was not in great shape during this period, and it was difficult to get him to come to the set to film his scenes. But, again, when he finally showed up, he was mesmerizing and unforgettable. This would be the last time I would see him.”

  * * *

  Alice in Chains was released on November 3, 1995, and, like its predecessor, it debuted in the number 1 position on the Billboard charts. Rolling Stone’s associate editor, Jon Wiederhorn, gave the album four stars in his review for the magazine.11 Not long after his review of the album, Wiederhorn was approached by Keith Mohrer, then the editor in chief of the magazine, and asked if he wanted to write a cover story about Alice in Chains, an assignment Wiederhorn accepted.

  A lunch was arranged with Susan at the China Grill restaurant in New York City to discuss the story and lay out ground rules. Representing Rolling Stone were Wiederhorn, Mohrer, and Sid Holt, the managing editor. The lunch meeting gave Susan an opportunity to raise her concerns and ask any questions about the story. Most of the conversation focused on logistics—when and where the band members would be available for interviews while Wiederhorn was in Seattle. “It was kind of making sure we would have enough material to write a full-fledged cover story, and it wasn’t going to be an hour and a half in a conference room,” Wiederhorn said. One factor working in Wiederhorn’s favor was that the band had read and liked his review of Alice in Chains. He flew to Seattle in late November or early December, where he spent three days getting material for the story.

  “One day it was sort of the ‘get to know you’ day, and we wanted to do something kind of quirky,” Wiederhorn recalled. Sean suggested playing Whirlyball—a game that combines elements of basketball, bumper cars, and lacrosse. Wiederhorn and the band went to an Italian restaurant after the game for the first formal Q&A. Wiederhorn noticed when Layne came back from the bathroom, he had not put his gloves back on, exposing “red, round puncture marks from the wrist to the knuckles of his left hand.”12

  Wiederhorn spent several hours interviewing the band members as a group and individually. Sean drove Wiederhorn to Jerry’s house outside Seattle for their one-on-one interview. Along the way, Wiederhorn and Sean smoked a joint. Sean was open about the tensions that led to the withdrawal from the Metallica tour and the breakup in the summer of 1994. “Sean struck me as a guy who was sticking up for his bandmates. If I asked him any questions—I did ask him questions about the inability to tour or the frustrations of dealing with chemical dependencies or whatnot—he said, ‘Hey, none of us are perfect. None of us were free from blame in any of those departments,’” Wiederhorn said. “It was clear why they couldn’t tour, but they didn’t talk about it in specific terms and didn’t express any resentments toward Layne.”r />
  Wiederhorn asked Layne about his heroin addiction, which he wouldn’t acknowledge was still a problem. Layne gave a candid assessment of his drug use: “I wrote about drugs, and I didn’t think I was being unsafe or careless by writing about them. Here’s how my thinking pattern went: When I tried drugs, they were fucking great, and they worked for me for years, and now they’re turning against me—and now I’m walking through hell, and this sucks. I didn’t want my fans to think that heroin was cool. But then I’ve had fans come up to me and give me the thumbs-up, telling me they’re high. That’s exactly what I didn’t want to happen.”13

  Wiederhorn worked on the story over Christmas break. Rolling Stone sent a photographer to shoot the band. In the days and weeks after his trip to Seattle, Wiederhorn repeatedly contacted the band’s management and record label to set up a phone call with Layne to ask a few follow-up questions. Both management and the record label repeatedly assured Wiederhorn that Layne would call him, but it seemed the call would never come.

  Wiederhorn was in bed when the phone rang at three or four o’clock in the morning. Wiederhorn groggily reached over and picked up. A familiar voice spoke. “Hey, this is Layne.” Then, possibly realizing the three-hour time difference between Seattle and New York, he asked, “Oh, did I wake you?”

  “Um … yeah. It’s four in the morning,” Wiederhorn responded.

  “Oh, that’s cool, man. Let’s just do it tomorrow. Go back to sleep. I’m getting ready to do what you were doing anyway.”

  Wiederhorn doubted that. He had Layne on the phone and wanted to finish the interview. “No, no, let’s just finish this up now. It’s cool.”

  “No, no, it’s fine, man. I’m so sorry I woke you up. Really, I’ll call you tomorrow,” Layne said, and hung up the phone. Wiederhorn never heard from him again.

  “I’m sure he had been hounded on his end to make that phone call,” Wiederhorn said. “I don’t know if he made it solely, intentionally figuring I wouldn’t be able to do an interview at that time and that was his out, or he didn’t have any concept of what time it was and just saw a note perhaps on his desk to make the call and just started the phone call with me.”

  The magazine hit newsstands in late January or early February 1996. Aside from the mentioning of the puncture marks on Layne’s hand, there wasn’t anything particularly controversial about the article. The magazine cover was a different matter.

  Rolling Stone put Layne on the cover by himself. The photo shows a bearded Layne looking directly at the camera, with his sunglasses mounted high on his brow near the hairline. The caption on the left side read, “The Needle & the Damage Done: Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley,” a reference to Neil Young’s song of the same name about heroin.

  Layne and Demri were shopping in a Seattle grocery store when they saw the issue on the stands. “Layne nearly collapsed” after seeing it, Kathleen Austin said. Demri told Austin that Layne had made a point of telling Rolling Stone, “This needs to be about the band, not about me.” According to Austin, Layne was promised by the magazine that the article would be about the entire band, not just him. “When he saw this, ‘The Needle & the Damage Done’ on the cover of Rolling Stone, his knees buckled, not for himself but for his family and his sister, the people that loved him. This really hurt him.”

  The other thing that hurt him, Austin said, was the feeling he was being singled out as the addict in Alice in Chains, while his bandmates had their own issues. “They were all fucked up on something—every single one of them.”

  Needless to say, the band and Susan were not happy about it. Wiederhorn was dismayed when he saw the cover. He had nothing to do with it in terms of photo selection or the caption and doesn’t know who was responsible for those decisions. “It does to a certain extent work for the story, but it’s very tabloidish and not usually the high road that Rolling Stone takes with its editorial decisions. ‘To Hell and Back,’ which is what they used as the tagline for the piece, to me made much more sense. But clearly it was an attention grabber.” He says, “I contacted [Susan] to apologize about the headline. I wanted to let her know I had nothing to do with … any decisions that were made in the Art Department or in the Editorial Department as far as headlines, cutlines, even final edits of the piece.”

  “Well, you hardly represented two of the band members. That’s not Alice in Chains,” she told him, noting that Mike was barely mentioned and Sean was quoted only a few times. Wiederhorn pointed out the article had been cut down. “I wanted to assure her that my intentions had been purely honorable. I was very dismayed that there wasn’t a full band shot. She asked me a little bit about why I chose to address what I address in the piece as far as the drugs went. I explained that you can’t deal with this band without confronting that issue; it would be just a puff piece. I had an obligation to write about what the band was motivated by, what the band was dealing with, what some of the demons were.”

  Chapter 21

  This is the last time we’re gonna see these guys together onstage.

  —SUSAN SILVER

  JERRY FILMED A BRIEF cameo for Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire, in which he played a copy-store clerk inspired by the title character’s memo. “That’s how you become great, man. You hang your balls out there,” he tells Tom Cruise. The scene was shot at a Kinko’s on Sunset Boulevard in March 1996.

  Alex Coletti was a producer at MTV who had been involved with the Unplugged series since its launch in 1989. Seven years later, Coletti and the network had plenty of episodes of Unplugged under their belt, and a commensurate amount of experience. Pearl Jam and Nirvana had already filmed their episodes a few years earlier, demonstrating the viability of grunge in an acoustic format. “They have the songs, they have the depth, they have the emotion where, when you strip it down, you really find something there. There was just something going on,” Coletti said. “There were other grunge bands, but the three that did it—Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Alice—they were the right three from that era. And there was just no denying that this band was going to shine, that Layne’s voice and those songs were going to shine through.”

  According to Coletti, it was MTV who approached the band. The negotiations would have been handled by Rick Krim, who was the show’s talent booker. Rehearsals began in Seattle, although it wasn’t without complications. Sean told Greg Prato, “It became more apparent that unless things seriously change, we can’t go out and play to our potential—at this level. We can’t even get through a fucking week and a half without drama and scary shit going on. That’s about right when I mentally started preparing, like, ‘It’s done.’ Same thing with MTV Unplugged—they kept asking if we’d do it. Up to the moment, it was just a nail-biter. Barely any rehearsing at all, guys not showing up—the same shit. Rolled out there and everything worked.”1 Asked about Sean’s comments, Coletti said, “Clearly there was more going on behind the scenes than I was aware of.”

  According to Coletti, one factor working in the band’s favor was that they weren’t touring. “If you’re on tour playing arenas and big rock venues every night, to unplug when you’re in that headspace is really hard, to kind of turn it down. But coming from kind of a resting period, they were able to approach it as they were rehearsing this one thing. It wasn’t an add-on to a busy schedule.” A few weeks before the show, Coletti flew to Seattle to meet with the band at their rehearsal space to check on how they were adjusting to the parameters of the show—from instruments and gear to stage positioning.

  The band brought in Scott Olson, who had played with Heart, as a second guitarist. Things were looking good from what Coletti saw. Layne energetically walked into the room eating a bucket of chicken and greeted him. “Hey, man!” His hands, covered by fingerless gloves, were greasy from eating the chicken. Rather than shake hands, he gave Coletti an elbow bump. In retrospect, Coletti said of this visit, “I do remember going, ‘Oh, cool. Layne’s in awesome form.’ And then when I heard him sing, it was … already a home run—this was a slam du
nk.”

  The band traveled to New York City in early April to prepare for the show, which was scheduled for April 10, 1996, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Toby Wright got tapped to produce and sat in during rehearsals at Sony Studios, which, in his words, “went great.”

  The show was to take place at what at the time was known as the Majestic Theater, a venue whose appearance reflected the music that would be performed there for the series. An art director had renovated it to intentionally look “kind of decrepit,” Coletti said. “The stagehands told me they shot bullet holes into the upstage walls to create the cracks. But all the flaking paint was beautifully hand-painted and done on purpose. You have this bowl shape, the semicircle amphitheater, and it was perfect for Unplugged. Out of all the bands we’ve done there, it was most perfect for Alice. It had this old-theater feel to it, it had a sense of history, a little sense of gloom to it, just enough moodiness, and it was art-directed beautifully.”

  Coletti also got a last-minute request for lava lamps to decorate the stage, which wound up adding a visual element he hadn’t anticipated. “I was getting them so late. Apparently lava lamps need to be heated and turned on for quite a while before they do what they’re meant to do. So if you watch the show, they’re kind of sluggish and not at full potential. So the lava lamps themselves were kind of grungy and just barely moving around. It was kind of fitting, but we didn’t do it on purpose.”

  Because Layne had dyed his hair pink, the lighting director tried to match the background to that. As the band was doing sound check and camera rehearsal, the lighting palette was chosen based on each song the lighting director was hearing them play. The fact that the band had a specific set list for that show and provided it to MTV ahead of time helped prepare the lighting.

  Coletti would be responsible for producing the televised performance, splitting his time between the production truck outside and the floor, while Wright would be responsible for producing the audio, working from inside the truck and letting the band know what sounded good and what needed to be redone. There was an unforeseen preshow complication: Jerry had eaten a hot dog and gotten food poisoning. A wastebasket was placed next to his stool onstage in case he felt sick during the show. “They were expecting [the performance] to be problematic. Everyone was planning on it being a big clusterfuck,” Biro said. “Because of Layne, because of the shape the band was in, especially when we got there. Jerry was throwing up the whole time. Layne and I were going through withdrawals. It was a really ugly situation.”