Biro had run out of heroin and had someone bring some for him to the show. Layne had brought along his own precooked supply, which he carried in an old glass pill bottle covered by a cork top. According to Biro, “He hadn’t done enough where he was nodding off and drooling, but I was there right before he went on, and he did shoot up some dope before he went on. But he didn’t do a lot and he had enough, and at no point during the show did I see him run down to the bathroom or anything.”
When the band started the show—opening with “Nutshell”—Biro turned around and was in tears. He looked around and saw Susan and Michele Anthony in tears as well.
Layne blew the lyrics during several takes of “Sludge Factory.” Toby Wright speculated he might have been nervous singing that song because Ienner and Anthony—the subjects of part of the song—were sitting in front of him at the time. “I don’t remember exactly how many takes we did, but we did a lot,” Wright said.
Mike played the main riff of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” as the band was about to play “Sludge Factory.” The members of Metallica were in the audience, and one or more of them had recently cut their hair, inspiring Mike to write on his bass, “Friends don’t let friends get friends haircuts.” Later in the show, as the band prepared to perform “Angry Chair,” Jerry played the opening guitar riff of Metallica’s “Battery” and then switched to a cover of the song “Gloom, Despair and Agony on Me,” from the Hee Haw variety show.
Biro said that between songs “there was a lot of clowning around with the audience,” adding, “It was funny. Once the show started, it was regular Alice in Chains, but an intimate thing.” The band members would insult Biro during these interludes, referring to him as “a fucking Frenchman” or “a fucking frog from Montreal,” and Biro was yelling right back at them. Initially, the audience thought these barbs were serious. “Then, they started making jokes with the audience and just had a really good connection with the audience in that show.”
Coletti called Sean “the unsung hero of that Unplugged, because the thing about Unplugged, especially with rock bands, is you live or die by the drummer. If the drummer gets it and tempers his playing, then everyone can kind of play at a lower volume and play acoustically. When the drummer just plays like a rock show, everyone turns up their monitors, and then what’s meant to be this pretty, acoustic thing just sounds like shitty electric guitars.”
MTV sent the band the first cut of the show about two weeks later, since they had final approval. Layne didn’t like it, so Wright was given the task of reviewing the material. “When the video was finally cut together, Layne despised it. He didn’t want it coming out at all. They felt that they edited him into the worst light possible, so he asked me if I would edit it. So I ended up editing it, just picking the shots and redoing it, subsequently sending him copies of that along with the audio and boom! There it is,” Wright explained. The problem was “they would cut to him doing certain things during songs I remember, and he just didn’t like the way they cut it together and he was looking for something to show him in a more positive way, away from the stigma of whatever was going on in his personal life.
“He was always paying attention, but he looked like he was falling asleep at certain points or he’d nod out, and then all of the sudden his part would come up and boom! He’d be there. But they’d show him just sitting there with his eyes closed for several bars of the music and then they wouldn’t show him when it was his time to sing—they’d cut to Jerry or cut to Mike or cut somewhere else, and it just looked like he was sleeping through the whole thing during certain songs.” Wright provided suggested changes in the form of specific notes and time codes of what he wanted fixed, and MTV complied. The show aired on May 28, 1996, and the album was released on July 17, debuting at number 3 on the Billboard chart.2
* * *
Ken Deans got a call from Susan asking for help getting the band back together and preparing them for a tour with KISS, which had reunited with the four original members. Jerry and Sean were excited—Sean especially, because he had been in the KISS Army growing up. Layne kept saying he didn’t want to do it, after which the band had pretty much given up on the idea. Layne eventually changed his mind and agreed to do the tour.3
According to Deans, the band rented out the Moore Theatre for three weeks of rehearsals. “It was really challenging,” Deans said. “Mike Inez would show up around three or four o’clock in the afternoon. He and I would hang out. And then Sean would show up, and then Jerry would show up, and then Layne would show up around nine o’clock, maybe they’d go through a couple of songs, and then take off.” Deans estimates he spent as much as eight hours a day waiting around for people to show up. “By this time, it was becoming pretty evident that both Layne and Jerry were having some problems, not Jerry so much at that time, but Layne was definitely starting to. You could see that his years of drug use were starting to affect him.”
“I hadn’t seen [Layne] for a while until I saw him at the rehearsals. There was a part of him that was gone at that point.”
Susan was coping with the situation “as good as she could,” Deans recalled. “I remember thinking this tour wasn’t going to last that long or go that far. It was really kind of gut-wrenching for me to come back and work with the guys.”
During a backstage interview with MTV News, Sean was asked about his fondest memories of KISS as a kid, showing off his memorabilia from the 1970s.
“How old were you, where were you when you got that?”
“These were in Seattle. I was around ten, probably,” he answered, flipping through more memorabilia. “And then my seventy-nines, and look, I got that from a stagehand,” he said, pointing to a vintage backstage pass from that tour.
“Don’t ask him what he had to do for that,” Jerry interjected.
“I was young. I needed the money. That’s all I’m gonna say.”4
Alex Coletti went to the Detroit show on June 28. He had come to see KISS as a fan, having traveled with some friends. “We ran right down to the front of the stage for Alice and watched KISS from the soundboard. I thought they were great. I just thought I was so happy to see [Alice] onstage doing the rock show in front of that size crowd.” Smashing Pumpkins front man Billy Corgan was also there, and he would later recall, “I saw Alice in Chains at one of their final performances, opening for KISS at Tiger Stadium. They played outside in the sunshine, and they were awesome.” He described Layne as “a truly beautiful man. Gifted almost beyond compare. My fave singer of [the] 90s.”5 The Louisville, Kentucky, show on June 30 wasn’t significant because of anything that happened onstage, but because of who was in the audience—as had been the case so many times before. In this case, the audience included an Atlanta musician named William DuVall, whose own future with Alice in Chains was still a decade away.6
On July 3, 1996, Alice in Chains took the stage at the Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Missouri. “Howdy, Kansas City,” Layne said as the band kicked into “Again.” Susan was at the soundboard with Kevan Wilkins, the tour manager. As soon as the band went on, she looked over at Wilkins and said, “This is the last time we’re gonna see these guys together onstage, Kevan. I just feel it.”7 She was right.
After “Angry Chair,” Sean stepped up to Layne’s microphone and addressed the audience. “Okay, you guys, shut up for a minute. This is serious, really.” He cleared his throat and began singing the opening verse of “Beth,” the KISS ballad sung by the band’s drummer, Peter Criss. The audience was divided—Sean was cheered and booed immediately.
“What, you don’t like the song? Oh, I don’t have the makeup on, right? If I have big shoes and makeup, you love me, right? Well, fuck you, Kansas City!” he quipped before returning to his drum kit to perform “A Little Bitter.”
Layne addressed the crowd. “We got one more for you. We’ve been out a week; you’ve definitely been the coolest crowd. I’m not just saying that. We’ve got to do the mandatory crowd-pleaser now,” he said as the crowd bega
n cheering and the band started “Man in the Box.” After the song, the four members locked hands and took a group bow. Bootleg video shows the band in good form onstage. What nobody in the audience knew at the time was they had just witnessed Layne’s final public performance.8
Things took an ominous turn after the show when Layne overdosed. Susan was flying back to Seattle the next morning. After her plane landed, she got a phone call saying they couldn’t revive Layne and he wound up being admitted to a local hospital.9
“Those were the last shows we played in public. They went great—they were fun. It was nice being out there. It was only five or six shows, and by the end of the shows, the last one, it was cops, ambulances, and, ‘Get on the plane! Hide the drugs!’ The same shit was going on,” Sean said. In retrospect, following the success of Unplugged, he said, “Right then is when I knew, ‘OK, if we never do anything again, I’m good with this.”10
Chapter 22
I’ll be dead before I’m thirty.
—DEMRI PARROTT
LAYNE AND DEMRI CALLED off their engagement at some point during the period between 1991 and 1994. He briefly addressed the breakup during his interview with Jon Wiederhorn: “I can definitely say rock and roll was a huge factor in us breaking up. When you’re in a relationship, the girl usually instigates the big idea that you were joined at the hip. So when the fighting comes, it’s really painful.” Layne added, “This isn’t a dig on women … but I think women are so different chemically from men, and that makes it hard to sustain a relationship. They have periods, they go through horrible, awful emotional swings, and trying to be logical with a person that’s got a whole different logic running around in her brain is just impossible.
“When you’re in a relationship, the girl usually instigates this big truth that you were put on Earth to be together. And after being with a person a long time and being convinced that you’re soul mates, you can get really crushed if things eventually fall apart. When I broke up with my last real girlfriend, life was just dismal. I didn’t know how to live or what to do. And then I had to realize, ‘Okay, I got along for twenty years before I met her, and I had good times.’ But right now I’m alone, and I’m totally cool with it.”1
Although the relationship between Demri and the other band members was good in the beginning—according to her mother, Jerry once gave Demri a couple of parakeets for her birthday—there is evidence that some people within the Alice in Chains camp blamed Demri at least to some extent for Layne’s drug problems. On the other hand, people close to Demri blamed Layne for her drug problems. At one point, Randy Biro got a phone call from Mary Kohl asking him to go with her and Kevan Wilkins to a Seattle hotel where Layne and Demri were living. They told Biro they needed help bringing Layne to the airport and moving his luggage. Unbeknownst to Biro until they got there, Kohl and Wilkins were staging an intervention and were sending Layne to Hazelden.
“I wasn’t very pleased about that,” Biro said. “[Layne] looked at me, and I was looking at him, and he goes, ‘What the fuck are you staring at, asshole?’ And it was really uncomfortable, because I had no idea. I wasn’t part of that.” No one else was there for this intervention. “It was ridiculous because Demri was in the room with him, and this was at the point where everyone said Demri was Satan, and she wasn’t. They were trying to keep those two apart, like when they were on tour, like the only people that were allowed in their room was me because I wasn’t out to break them up. I had no interest in breaking them up because they were doing what they were doing. There was no one to blame for his drug addiction.”
Biro explains, “He was in love with this girl. Now, by trying to break them up or trying to play a game with him, what he did was put up a wall. So, I go to this place, and I find out they’re doing this intervention. I’m going, ‘Holy shit.’ I was blown away. I had no idea. So I hang around long enough, they pack some bags, they’re checking him out of the hotel in an attempt to make sure Demri leaves, which was a load of shit in itself.”
Layne and Demri went to rehab together at least once, checking into the Exodus Recovery Center in Los Angeles—possibly the same clinic Kurt Cobain went AWOL from shortly before his death. Layne called Kathleen Austin one night, telling her, “I don’t know what to do. They give us so many drugs here. Demri’s higher in here than she’s ever been outside of here. Her blood pressure is so low, she can’t stand up without passing out.” From what Austin recalls, “He was really worried and this particular place, the way I understood it, is you go in there and they feed you a bunch of drugs, the ones you’ve taken and ones you haven’t, and then they detox you off of them.”
Although outside pressure may have influenced her, Demri instigated the breakup, according to what she told Randy Biro. “She stopped seeing him. She tried to get away from him, because she felt like she was going to ruin his life. He was in love with her.” He added, “Everybody that knew Layne was constantly blaming her for shit. Constantly. And people were trying to keep them apart all the time. So I was under the impression that she tried to get away from him to give him a chance to live life.”
The problem with this one-sided view is that it doesn’t take into account Layne’s history of drug use before he started using heroin, before Alice in Chains was even formed, before he and Demri met. Moreover, it completely absolves Layne of any personal responsibility for his problems.
“Heroin,” is Kathleen Austin’s response when asked why the engagement was called off. “You can’t do a relationship and drugs, too. Nobody can.”
She also clarified Layne’s “rock-and-roll” explanation: “As the band got famous and girls are sending Layne underwear in the mail and things like that, that really bothered her.” She said, “Layne and Demri, regardless of when they broke up—those are just words. They never stopped loving each other. They loved each other dearly.”
Demri was described by several sources as being very proud of her ability to get her drugs on her own, despite the fact that Layne was more than willing to provide for her. “At that point, Layne had, I’m guessing, a million or so dollars, if not more. Or at least he was worth quite a bit. And he would give her anything she wanted. He would give her everything he had to stop her from doing what she was doing. And she just [said], ‘No,’” Biro explained.
Perhaps because they had broken up, or possibly because Layne was touring and hadn’t given her money or drugs while he was away, or even because she didn’t want his help, Demri ultimately did whatever she had to to sustain her addiction.
Though Layne disliked interventions, he was involved in an intervention for Demri. Layne was in Europe when he got a phone call from Kathleen Austin informing him of the plan, possibly in 1993. He flew back to Seattle from Germany and was picked up at the airport by Austin and Demri. The plan was to go to Austin’s home north of Seattle, where the intervention would take place the following morning.
They stopped at a bar after leaving the airport. After Demri finished her drink, Austin said her drink tasted funny and asked Demri to taste it. Demri finished Austin’s drink as well. “The plan was to get her drunk, shut her up, and we’ll go from here. So that’s what happened, and we go up to my place, and we get up in the morning,” Austin said. The next morning, several of Demri’s friends and relatives had gathered in the living room downstairs, including her maternal grandparents, her brothers, and Layne. At some point that morning, Austin told Demri to lie down in her room, where she had disconnected the phone to avoid waking Demri up or tipping her off. When Demri came out to the living room, she knew exactly what was going on.
“You’re not fucking intervening on me, and I’m not going to fucking rehab,” she said, and went back upstairs. Ultimately, they talked her into coming back out to hear what everyone had to say. According to Austin, the most profound comment came from her son, Devin, who said, “You’re my sister and I love you and I don’t want you to die.”
Austin made plans to check her into one of three possible clinics,
to give Demri some choice in the process. She chose a clinic in Port Angeles, a city in Clallam County on the shores of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Known as the Lodge, it supposedly specialized in treating heroin addiction, Austin said. Demri was going through mood swings during the entire drive.
“She would say things like, ‘I’m fucking leaving as soon as I get there.’ ‘As soon as I get there, I’m going in the front door and out the back door.’ And I would respond with, ‘Well, Dem, you’re going to do what you’re going to do. My job is to get you there,’” Austin said. “I’d wink at Layne. Then she would say, ‘Well, I hope the food is good.’”
They checked her in, and Austin and Layne drove back to Seattle. They joked that Demri would somehow get back to Seattle before them. Austin dropped Layne off at his home at around midnight; then she got home about an hour later and went to bed.
One aspect of Demri’s personality, according to Austin, was her inability to handle guilt. In Austin’s words, “If she offended you, and you didn’t have a cell phone or anything, she would start calling your house, waiting for you to get home to apologize.” Because of her mood on the way to rehab, she felt guilty about it after checking in. Once admitted, she was supposed to be prohibited from receiving phone calls or any type of communication from the outside for a week.
Alice in Chains Page 29