Everybody Loves Our Town

by Mark Yarm

  JOHNNY BACOLAS I found out Layne was on heroin after the Van Halen tour in ’91. He told me that he had an issue and he couldn’t stop. He told me that the first time he did it, he was exhausted and feeling like shit. Someone—I don’t want to say who—brought him some heroin because they couldn’t find any coke. And Layne tried it, and he said that was the first time he really thanked God. He literally looked up to the sky and said, “Thank you for this feeling.”

  DAMON STEWART Right after the release of Facelift, Layne and I became roommates in Seattle. I had started working for Sony Records at the time, doing a regional A&R job, and with them being signed to a Sony label, it was a little bit awkward for both us. The Sony people were trying to use me as eyes and ears to report back—is he doin’ drugs? It wasn’t a blatant thing, but it was definitely implied a couple of times that they wanted to know how he was. I can understand that to a degree, but we were pals, and I wasn’t gonna play a tattletale game.

  He was usin’. There was no question about that. Him and his girlfriend Demri both lived with me at the time. They were very discreet about it. There was one time I found a spoon, and it was obvious what it had been used for. I adored the both of them, but we definitely had plenty of conversations that were like, “Look, it’s not fair for me to say what’s right or wrong for you guys …” But I got to the point where I was like, “I can’t have this goin’ on here and be wonderin’ if you guys are gonna wake up or not.”

  KELLY CURTIS Susan and I managed Alice in Chains together for a bit, but I quit right when it was all happening for them. We had lost Andy to heroin, and there was a lot of that going on with Alice in Chains. I just had a little girl, and I remember Layne was holding her once and he nodded out. And I thought, I don’t want to do this anymore. 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.

  SUSAN SILVER Not that the others weren’t heavily into drugs, too, but Layne was clearly so deep—it was so dangerous—that all of our lives centered around how to aid him. It was never about, “How are we going to prop him up to get him on a tour?” I had this conversation with Layne over and over and over after the success of Facelift: “Your health is the most important thing. You need to get well. Stop this. You have enough money, you can go buy a cottage on the beach and be there with Demri”—who was also very artistic—“and you can go and create whatever art you want.”

  DAVE JERDEN During Dirt, recording vocals, Layne and I got into arguments. He’d come in loaded on heroin, and I told him I didn’t want him to sing on heroin. He could use heroin afterward, but when he sang he had to be somewhat together because he was singing all out of tune on heroin. I remember making a phone call to Layne and I told him, “Listen, I’m not trying to be mean, all I’m trying to do is get these vocals out of you.” We didn’t have any problems after that.

  Jerry and I got along fine. Jerry’s morale was good. Sean’s always great. At that point they were having problems with Mike Starr. Mike Starr had a song that he wanted on the album, and they didn’t wanna put it on the album. Layne sang on it, and Mike said Layne didn’t sing it right and Layne got really mad.

  MIKE STARR I wrote a song called “Fear the Voices.” We did record it, but they didn’t let it on the album because Jerry didn’t have nothin’ to do with the writing of the music. But they put it on the box set later, and it got some recognition and got played on the radio.

  DAVE JERDEN And Mike Starr used heroin within my studio one time. He was in the bathroom with Layne, and Layne said, “Stick out your arm,” and Layne hit him with heroin. Mike Starr was crawling through the lobby throwing up on the carpet. It was really sad.

  MIKE STARR I shot heroin once with Layne during the making of the song “Junkhead.” I stayed up all night—we were hanging out with two girls. It felt great, but I decided never to do it again.

  DAVE JERDEN Layne was worse off. He had a drug dealer that was hanging out with him the whole time while I was mixing the record. In fact, Layne came in to listen to it, and he brought his drug dealer with him. His drug dealer made some comment about the mix, what he wanted to have changed on the mix, and I blew up. I said, “Fuck you! Who are you?” And Layne told the guy to settle down and shut up. The drug dealer had some input on my mix.

  JERRY CANTRELL It’s a dark album, but it’s not meant to be a bummer. Those five songs on the second side, from “Junkhead” to “Angry Chair,” are in sequence because it tells a story. It starts out with a really young, naive attitude in “Junkhead,” like drugs are great, sex is great, rock and roll, yeah! Then as it progresses, there’s a little bit of realization of what it’s about … and that ain’t what it’s about.

  DAVE JERDEN I was a little concerned we were making an album glorifying drug use. The take I got from people around me was I wasn’t glorifying drugs, I was making a record that was showing the horrors of drugs. The band talked to me about where a lot of the songs came from. “Rooster” was about Jerry Cantrell’s dad.

  MARK PELLINGTON The “Rooster” video was awesome. I heard the song and thought, Wow, this is really epic in terms of its flow and its arc, very cinematic. Jerry was in the process of really trying to heal with his dad. I spoke to Jerry and was like, “Let’s go to Oklahoma. Let’s make this as personal as you can. I want your dad to be in it.”

  JERRY CANTRELL [“Rooster”] was all my perceptions of his experiences [in Vietnam]. The first time I ever heard him talk about it was when we made the video and he did a 45-minute interview with Mark Pellington, and I was amazed he did it. He was totally cool, totally calm, accepted it all, and had a good time doing it. It even brought him to the point of tears. It was beautiful.

  MARK PELLINGTON When we shot the performance part, Layne was pretty high. I remember Layne wanted to wear this cowboy hat. I was like, “I don’t know about the hat.” It felt inappropriate for the song; we were shooting them in front of projections of this Vietnam stuff. His eyes were really fucked up, he was totally pinned. It was like, “Wow, guys, he’s really fucked-up looking. What do you want to do about this?” Oh, this sweet guy, I knew it wouldn’t have been very flattering for him.

  So I just put him in sunglasses: “Instead of the hat, how about you wear these?” I said, “God, you look like a badass in these sunglasses. Let’s go with this.” And it was like, “All right, let’s go. Let’s get a couple of takes.” So it was not without its challenges.

  TOM NIEMEYER We did the entire U.S. and Canada with Alice in Chains. The first time was what they called the “shitty cities” tour, when they were warming up for their Dirt album tour. Touring with them was absolutely over-the-top: part Spial Tap, part Disneyland for adults. Porno party at the fuckin’ Playboy Mansion. Jimi Hendrix, as big as Janis Joplin. All colors, all shapes, all sizes, all temperatures, all the time.

  If you were with those guys on that tour, it could make the most mundane thing, like us walking from here to there, one of the most memorable experiences of your life. And the whole time there’s every chemical possible flying through the air, falling out of pockets, landing in your hand, accidentally going inside you somehow.

  TIM PAUL (Gruntruck bassist) There were a lot of pranks. It was the Dirt tour, so we found a hardware store that was open late and bought these five-pound bags of potting soil and doused Alice in Chains with them right as they were going on. Looking back, it was maybe ill-advised because the poor guys had to play a show with dirt down their throats.

  SCOTT MCCULLUM Oh, my God, Gruntruck and Alice in Chains were a perfect fit. We started off doing a “shitty cities” tour, basically all of these shitty little towns in the Northwest, in 1992. One time, we were up in Butte, Montana. Jerry’s a big outdoorsman, so we went fishing together and caught a bunch of brown trout. We took ’em back to the next show, probably at Missoula, and went to this frat-boy party afterward. Jerry and I walk in with this bag of fish, looking at all these frat boys and girls, and we’re like, “Where’s your
kitchen?” We just went into the kitchen and started cooking up these fucking trout without even knowing whose house it was.

  TOM NIEMEYER You think you’re invincible when you’re on a tour like that. And for the most part, you are; if you get caught at something, there seems to be somebody there to help get you out of it. I broke a sink completely apart in a club bathroom for some reason. Well, the reason was Jägermeister and coke. The sink had to be broken, and I shattered it into a million pieces.

  SCOTT MCCULLUM Sean had a little bit of a destructive streak in him whenever he got to a certain point. I heard some stories about televisions going out of windows—very rock-and-roll stuff that got them kicked out of hotels.

  TOM NIEMEYER Somewhere, probably outside Bozeman, Montana, there were about 30 people inside this hotel room having fun, watching TV, drinking beers, and the cops come to the door with the front-desk clerk saying, “It’s time to quiet things down.” Somebody had the door open this much, saying, “No, everything’s fine in here. Sorry, we’ll quiet it down.” And Sean’s trying to get the door open to yell at the cops, and three or four people had their hands over Sean’s mouth, holding him back from saying what he wanted to say.

  Once the cops left, it was time for people to leave. I wanted to stay—it was my room—but Sean didn’t want me to, so he literally dragged me by the feet down the hall to his room, into the lair of the minotaur or whatever, and on the way there, I’m looking up. He had a beer in one hand and he’s filling up the lights, they’re sconces, on the walls. He’s filling those up with beer, and they’re all popping. I don’t remember much after that.

  SCOTT MCCULLUM Alice in Chains asked Gruntruck to join another tour, with the Screaming Trees. So we flew into Fort Lauderdale, and met them there. The Screaming Trees weren’t there yet. I remember walkin’ into that room and seeing those four Alice in Chains guys in a booth, and it was like we were fuckin’ little giddy kids. We ran over, and they were gettin’ up, and we were all hugging each other. It was like this great family reunion.

  This is when I got into hard alcohol and Jägermeister. That same day, Sean grabs me, like, “Hey, good to see ya. Let’s do some Jäger!” Goes over to the bartender, and goes, “I want 12 Jäger shots.” We proceeded to down six shots each right there in the first five minutes. We get done drinkin’ that, and then Layne bought me a Jack Coke. “I’ve never had a Jack Coke before.” Boy, was that a mistake. Jack Coke was my drink for a while.

  MATT VAUGHAN So we set off on tour, starting off just as drinkin’ buddies again, and within a week it was very obvious this wasn’t gonna be just a drinkin’ buddy tour. The party reached a level that was not anything I had seen before and some of the guys in Gruntruck hadn’t seen before. There was a lot of speed, you knew there was heroin out there. It was just nasty. And Screaming Trees was on the tour, too, so you have the Lanegan element.

  KIM WHITE The Screaming Trees got offered the Alice in Chains tour, and I thought it was a terrible idea. Honestly, I thought, You’re going to put an alcoholic on the road with a junkie, and when the tour is over you’re going to have two junkies. I said that to the label and they were like, “Nonsense.” Alice in Chains were huge, and they’re like, “You’re going to be playing huge arenas, you’re going to sell a lot of records,” and I was like, “Yeah, but at what expense?”

  BARRETT MARTIN That tour was the biggest mistake that we made as a band. We had an entire world tour being booked where we were headlining, and we would have really put ourselves on the map as this big headlining band. But the people at Sony decided that we should tour together because we were both Sony bands. But we were gonna have to open for Alice in Chains, which was ridiculous because we actually were a larger draw than Alice in Chains. They wanted us to open for Alice in Chains and give them street cred and let everybody know that Alice in Chains was a Seattle band, too.

  And on top of that, Mark and Layne really got heavily into heroin on that tour, and that was kind of the beginning of the end.

  TOM NIEMEYER Lanegan had a tendency to wander off. One night, they told me to go into the club and get the guy, ’cause nobody else could get him to come out in time for the buses to leave.

  He told me, “Tommy, come with me. Into the night.”

  And I was like, “Whaaat?”

  And he goes, “Look at that!” And we were looking at the skyline from the club we were at. I was like, “But we gotta go, dude.” I got him as far as the bus. But he wouldn’t get on. He just said, “I have a ride, and I’ll meet you there.”

  MATT VAUGHAN There was a lot of testosterone, masculinity on that tour. You had Lanegan, you had Ben McMillan, Scott McCullum. There were a lot of fights. I remember Lanegan fighting with Mark Nafacy, the soundman. It was after the show, and Lanegan and him were bitching about something. And before you know it, Lanegan rips his jacket off, he throws it at me, and they just started whalin’ on each other. Lanegan won the fight. He wasn’t afraid. It was so out of control, you couldn’t stop it.

  And then Lanegan walked off into the hills, and no one saw him for a week and they were basically off the tour until Seattle dates came around. I remember MTV News: “Mark Lanegan is in the hospital, has a stomach flu.” That wasn’t the case at all—he was missing. No one could find him. From what I heard, he ended up meeting some girl and stayed with her.

  KIM WHITE A couple of weeks into the tour, I got a phone call from Lanegan saying that he was in a Canadian hospital, on a cot in a hallway, with the number 134 above his head—meaning he wasn’t getting out of there for a while. It was around Mark’s birthday, and it was the first time that he had done heroin with Layne, and he got blood poisoning. Layne sang for the Trees that night.

  There was a Spin journalist on the road with them, and I lied to the reporter. At this point, the band had had such a dark reputation, and I don’t think we needed to add to that. I said something like there was horseplay around the bus after the show, and Mark slipped and cut his leg and poured whiskey on it and went to bed, and when he woke up his leg was swollen and he had blood poisoning. I made up some phenomenal story.

  VAN CONNER There was a lot of debauchery on that tour. There’s an old Steinbeck story called “The Harness” about this guy who wears a back brace and his wife is sickly and once a year he goes to town and does all these crazy things at a brothel. (Laughs.) That always reminds me of touring. I’d come home, I had a kid, and things were fairly straight there. Alice in Chains were living the true rock-star cliché, excess life. They definitely had the rocker chicks around. Screaming Trees, at least my brother and I, are definitely not ladies’ men. We both have had long-term relationships, and we’re very nerdy.

  JERRY CANTRELL We were like hog wild, man. Totally. We dove into everything. Knee deep.

  DAVID DUET Layne and Demri had kind of an open relationship. In the position he was in, it’s probably the only way he could’ve had a lasting relationship. Layne was very true to Demri in his heart, but he related many, many wild touring adventures to me.

  GARY LEE CONNER It was nice to go back to the hotel and get away from all that crap. I always hated having to go to the party after the show. That was the worst. I remember one night in Minneapolis, everybody was on the bus, either snorting coke or doing something, and I was just like, My God, this sucks!

  SCOTT MCCULLUM I never was a heroin user. The harder stuff was done very on the down low. As far as cocaine and speed and stuff like that, I partook quite a bit. On the Alice in Chains U.S. tour, that would always happen in the back of the bus, or whatever hotel room we were staying at. Do some lines and talk bullshit. You got 16 hours until your next fuckin’ town, so you sit back there and drink and get kinda crazy.

  MATT VAUGHAN Once Dirt started to take off, we started going from club shows to larger venues. It would go from a 400-seat club to a 3,000-seat venue. I recall there being more handlers halfway through the tour, and I remember going to Susan, “Why are there more people here?”

  They were bodyguar
ds. And I said, “The band’s not that popular yet that we need this.” And she said, “This bodyguard is to make sure Layne doesn’t go out at night and that nobody tries to pass him something.”

  SCOTT MCCULLUM Layne had broken his leg at some point, and he was in a wheelchair for some of the shows. And then he got a cane. And this was significant, because Ben coveted what Layne had.

  Layne sorta had this mystical rock persona, always wearing lots of jewelry and piercings and nail polish. And Ben started mimicking him on tour. Somebody pointed it out to me afterward, and I reflected on it: Yeah, all of the sudden, Ben did have a cane. All of the sudden, Ben was trying to be this vagabond, gypsy, mystical rock guy. He would shave his eyebrows. He’d paint his body with all these paints and swirls, and wear these really bizarre leather chaps.

  MATT VAUGHAN It seemed very paradoxical because here you have Ben McMillan, who is regarded as one of the pioneers of our scene, imitating a newbie.

  TOM NIEMEYER The cane? Ben wanted to have an excuse to have a limp, essentially. Actually, we gave him one by accident by the end of the tour. He was so drunk and on so many pills on the tour bus one night, and he wouldn’t shut up. He kept talking and talking about this girl that he met. It was gettin’ to be too much, and he wouldn’t take a bath and he was startin’ to smell and it was just terrible. So me and the rest of the band shoved him in the back lounge of the tour bus. He had grown to have the power of 50 men at this point, almost like he was on angel dust, and he didn’t wanna be crammed back there. He was tryin’ to get out and we accidentally slammed this big door, which slid out from the wall, right on his kneecap. So now he had this huge, swollen, bruised knee which made him limp for, I think, forever after that.