Grunge Is Dead

by Greg Prato

  SEAN KINNEY: That was a really big turning point — it made sense, because things were looking pretty bleak. That was a nice pick-me-up. It was like, “Cool, we’re moving forward and we’re moving on. We’re still here and shit’s getting better.”

  Inside Layne and Yanni’s apartment (L-R: Layne Staley, John Baker Saunders, Mike McCready)

  YANNI “JOHNNY” BACOLAS: Right after they recorded Jar of Flies, [Layne] was really hitting a wall. We went camping on one of those weekends in that period — he was trying to kick heroin. He asked me if I would move in with him, and I guess help him out, which ultimately, I just ended up enabling him. Made it a lot easier for him to do what he did. So we lived together in the mid ’90s. I was smoking weed — I wasn’t doing anything like he was doing. That’s why he trusted me, I think.

  NANCY LAYNE McCALLUM: Layne bought his own home, a condo, in 1994. He was very proud of that, and thrilled to have his own space. He could stretch out all of his wonderful projects. He didn’t stop writing poetry. His drawings were exhibited in a Seattle gallery. He was experimenting with Sculpey Clay, which comes in many colors — including his favorite “glow-in-the-dark.” He was doing one-stop shopping at Fred Meyer. He could go there and get his favorite coconut ice cream bars, clothes, arts and crafts supplies. He experimented with the craft kits for stained glass, designed a few faces for clock kits, and did some animated characters and jewelry from clay. He had his kitty, Sadie, and he liked to order out. He had every cleaning supply known to man, on the face of the earth, because he was very conscientious about having his home clean.

  MIKE INEZ: There was one poignant moment for me. We were doing rehearsals at the Moore Theatre, and we were getting ready to go out with Metallica on a couple of dates — a stadium tour. It became real apparent that we couldn’t do this. It felt like the wrong thing to do. So we pulled the plug on it. I don’t want to say what went on in the meeting, but when I was walking away from the Moore Theatre down the alley, it was raining. I turned around, and saw Layne walking down by himself, down the alley. When I look back on it now, it’s the moment for me that everything turned around. I went, “Hmm, we’re not healthy.”

  NANCY LAYNE McCALLUM: Layne had taken me to the Grammys in 1994, and he was in horribly rough shape. I know that he was praying that would be the year they would win. He would have been so thrilled to have his mom there. They had been nominated five times. He expected this would be the year. I know it was a huge disappointment to lose.

  YANNI “JOHNNY” BACOLAS: The Mad Season thing came about when Mike McCready went to Hazelden to get clean and sober. His roommate was a guy named John Baker Saunders. He told Baker, “Come back to Seattle with me — I’ll make sure you have a place to stay. We’ll start this band, stay busy, and support each other.” They came back to Seattle, and McCready started calling our house. Layne didn’t answer the phone very often or answer the door, so I would answer the phone and we would talk. I would talk to Layne, and say, “Hey, man, McCready is calling — he’s a good guy and he wants to talk to you. He’s sober.” McCready is one guy that comes to mind that really tried hard to help Layne. He would fly in these counselors from Hazelden — a guy named Lowell, who Layne loved. Layne really listened to and looked up to this guy. McCready would bring this guy in, and kind of give Layne “the surprise attack.”

  Layne actually went to Hazelden during this process, and bailed midway through, or a couple of days into it. McCready would keep coming over to the house — he would bring Baker over, make a couple pots of coffee, and just hang out. Layne would wake up and talk to them, and the next thing you know, McCready is playing these ideas on a guitar in the house. Dragged Layne down to Bad Animals Studio — that’s where they recorded [1995’s Above]. I would drive him to the sessions every night, because it was only a minute from our house — we lived on Queen Anne. A month and a half, two months later, they finished a record. He would come in the house at four in the morning, turn the stereo on, and hit the speakers which were in my bedroom — just to wake me up so I could hear the new tracks that he had laid down. He always wanted that pat on the back or “Hey, great job” thing. I would come out of my room all sleepy or dreary, listen to it, and say, “Fuck, this sounds killer!” And he would just be on cloud nine. That’s what made him happy — creating music.

  KRISHA AUGEROT: In the liner notes [of Above], he said something about, “I’ll always remember that summer,” which was the summer — whatever year it was — where we all went to the beach and went to barbeques. That really fresh, youthful time that we all had before it was all about drugs. He mentioned a few names in there — I think he mentions my name, Demri, and another girl named Fabiola, who was really good friends with the two of them. I know that meant a lot to him — that whole time period.

  YANNI “JOHNNY” BACOLAS: [Bacolas’ band, Second Coming] ended up playing a show with [Mad Season] on New Year’s Eve — it was ’95 going into ’96 at rkcndy. The first show they did was the Crocodile, the second show was at rkcndy with us, the third show I believe was the Moore Theatre. And I think they did one more Crocodile show. And that was it — as far as I know. During that time period, he did probably fifteen to twenty shows with [Second Coming] — he was late every single time. It was exciting — for me to share a stage with him again … was great. He wouldn’t move a whole lot but he dominated that crowd, just by his presence. He did a song called “It’s Coming After,” which he recorded with us on our first record [1995’s L.O.V.Evil].

  He would come to some of our gigs, because we were doing a cover band as well — to finance Second Coming. He would come out to some of those shows on the outskirts of Seattle, hop onstage, and sing “Would?” or “Man in the Box” with us. He would usually pull up with my dad. My dad was a big Greek guy — looked like Paul Sorvino, like he belonged in the Mafia. He would show up with my dad and another one of my dad’s buddies — total mafioso looking guy. They would be in suits like his two security bodyguards. Picture Layne walking with Paul Sorvino and Robert DeNiro into a club. Layne would be in a suit also. The crowd would go crazy.

  MARK ARM: Pearl Jam did this satellite radio thing — they did that twice and we played both of them. Mad Season played one, and I remember Layne coming in — he had his hair up in this knob off the top of his head. He was so thin, and greenish-grey. I had a hard time looking at him. I didn’t even have the guts to go talk to him. The whole thing made me squeamish, and reminded me of my own bad times. Even if I did talk to him, I don’t know what I would have said. Seeing him so far down the line on this trajectory that he had set for himself made me queasy. It seemed to me like once he discovered heroin, he decided he was going to fully embrace it. Based on the songs on Dirt, he just jumped in. There was no turning back. It was unfortunate and pathetic. That was the myth he made for himself, and he was living it out. The reference to him in “Into Yer Shtik” is about that. Once he created his persona of a wasted rock star, he had to follow it to its ugly conclusion.

  KURT BLOCH: When the first Alice in Chains record came out, we were like, “Sellouts! You suck!” But by the time the second Alice in Chains record came out, I was like, “This is pretty cool.” Their third album was great.

  NANCY LAYNE McCALLUM: I was in Mexico when Alice in Chains came out in 1995. What were my thoughts? That Layne’s life was in jeopardy, and that none of that other stuff really mattered.

  SUSAN SILVER: Really painful putting it together. It took eight or nine months — hours and hours of waiting for Layne to come out of the bathroom. Days of waiting for him to show up at the studio. And through all those last years, he and I were really close. I kept telling him, “You don’t have to do this. You have enough money to go and have a quiet life if that’s what you want,” with his longtime girlfriend, Demri. “Just go and do what makes you happy — don’t do this if this is what’s perpetuating your addiction.” I didn’t understand that it wasn’t the music that was making him take drugs, he had a disease, and it was getting
worse. But I was always saying, “What do you want to do? We can stop.” “I don’t want to stop,” he’d say. “I want to keep going” — in terms of music, I’m not talking about drugs. He wanted to keep creating and recording. It was a really painful session because it took so long. It was so horrifying to see him in that condition. Yet, when he was cognizant, he was the sweetest, bright-eyed guy you’d ever want to meet. To be in a meeting with him, and have him fall asleep in front of you was gut wrenching. As the timeline will show — we stopped. We stopped many times to say, “This isn’t going to work. We can’t keep doing this, even if he says he wants to. It’s just tearing everybody to shreds.”

  MIKE INEZ: That was a really dark time. I look at the album cover — it was very grey, and I think that’s where we were at. Layne was going through the depths of his heroin addiction. It was really tough watching that, and it permeated into everything we did. Not to throw rocks at glass houses — we were all pretty fucked-up at the time, but not in that way though. We weren’t that miserable, it seemed. I just really feel bad for the guy. I wish I could change the world for everybody who’s in that place. That was definitely one of the hardest records I’ve ever had to work on. But some great stuff came out of it — “Heaven Beside You,” [and] we got a Grammy nomination. We were still touching people.

  JERRY CANTRELL: That was another number one record. That record took a long time to make, because we were all at a bad space. Things had really taken a turn for us. I was not in a good space, and Layne wasn’t either. Still, I think it’s one of the great records that we put out. That’s a career move I wouldn’t recommend repeating for anybody — stop touring with two number one records back-to-back [laughs].

  KRISHA AUGEROT: Unfortunately, he got sucked into the rock star world, and it didn’t work out, because Layne was a junkie. It was so sad, because they worked so hard — really unfair. Jerry just couldn’t snap out of it — he was doing a lot of drugs as well. I think he’s prone to depression. He’s a Pisces, like me and Kurt Cobain — he can get really introverted and stay there. I don’t know if it’s feeling sorry for himself, or what, but I do the same thing — you get where you just want to be alone. He goes to a dark place — I think that a lot of his songs came from there. He moved to Los Angeles, went downhill, and came out of it somehow. I’ve seen him since then, and he’s clean and sober, which is great.

  NANCY LAYNE McCALLUM: If you’ve ever loved an addict that relapses, you trust your love for them, but you never trust the power of that drug on their brain chemistry. You never trust the treatment center if they don’t address relapse. I once asked a treatment center counselor on family day, “What about relapse? What have these patients been taught about it, and what, as a family, should we do?” The counselor looked at me and said, “Oh, our students never relapse.” I knew that we had wasted our time and money … my heart just sank. I felt so horrible for Layne, because here I was, his logical, practical, upfront mom, who had asked the question that nobody wanted to ask. I felt as though with all the parents, loved ones, and family surrounding these young people, they would give us a phone number or a counselor we could call, in case we were worried. I was so blind and naive. In a way, it was like the drugs had a spokesperson right there in that room, and it was the counselor. It was sickening.

  When Layne went to Hazelden, had he stayed longer and spent a couple of years in the recovery lifestyle, and been able to build long-term friends and sponsors, I believe Layne would have had a chance. Kurt Cobain said it would take three years for him to have a solid new start, and I believe he was correct. But Layne became addicted to drugs when he was quite young, and he never really learned mature problem solving. He just didn’t have the wisdom you get over a period of years. Some of the people around Layne were wonderful, sweet-hearted, and professional, and truly had his interests at heart. A young person who is drug addicted can’t help bumping up against sleazy people in the entertainment industry — not necessarily the professionals, but others on down the line. You can’t stay clean and sober without clean and sober people around you, without “a bodyguard mentality.” Layne would’ve had to have been superhuman. Nobody expected him to be that. It takes walking away for a long period of time with the support of the music industry — i.e., had he stayed at Hazelden. Layne told me, “Mom, I have a contract I have to fulfill. There are over forty people on the payroll, and they all count on me being out there.” That’s where he was coming from, that he had a responsibility to the contract and his people. We need a Humane Society for Musicians.

  SUSAN SILVER: The very last time they had played, I left the hotel in the morning to fly back to Seattle from Kansas City. The guys were going to the airport on the bus — it was after the KISS shows. I got the call when I landed that they couldn’t revive Layne, and he ended up in a hospital in Kansas City.

  SEAN KINNEY: They had asked us for a long time to go out and do those things. Me and Jerry especially [wanted to do it] — I was in the KISS Army and they were bringing back the original lineup. Layne kept saying, “I don’t want to do it.” We gave up on it — we didn’t hear about it for a while. They must have asked again, and he said, “I’ll do it.” We rolled out there, and 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. 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. Right then is when I knew, “OK, if we never do anything again, I’m good with this. I’d rather leave on a high point instead of throwing drug paraphernalia into a garbage can in an airport, while I’m jumping on a plane, hoping to not get arrested.” That’s when I started to distance myself from it, and just preparing for the worst. Which, it inevitably happened.

  JERRY CANTRELL: We kind of broke apart — we had been living together for years, and we started to think about having our own lives. Got girlfriends, moved into houses — shit like that, that regular people do.

  MIKE INEZ: We will be brothers for life. I don’t think it was ever about saying, “We’re going to break up,” or “Jerry’s going to do a solo record.” It just wasn’t healthy for us at that time. It wasn’t like Alice in Chains was one of those bands that had a big blowup. Nobody was sleeping with another guy’s wife. We just realized it wasn’t healthy. But we still talked all the time — to this day, I talk to Jerry and Sean almost daily.

  SEAN KINNEY: It was never anger/animosity shit, it was just a long, drawn out process. It all sums up real easy — too many drugs.

  JERRY CANTRELL: We all drifted apart into our own worlds. We kept in contact, and there was always talk of something that would maybe happen again. There’s a tension created of having two number one records and not being able to do anything about it — but that wasn’t all Layne’s fault either. He’s the one that paid the ultimate price for what we were all fucking around with.

  KRISHA AUGEROT: No one could help [Layne] — everyone was done trying, and kind of gave up on him. There’s nothing anyone could have done — he just went off and hid in his crazy apartment.

  MICHELLE AHERN-CRANE: My aunt was “the queen of the metal scene” in the ’80s, and Layne had a huge walk-in closet — [it] was his rental room at her place. [Alice in Chains] were total rockers then — I was really into the punk scene, and thought they were sort of ridiculous. She was always trying to put me and Layne together, and I remember thinking it was cheesy, because he had long golden blond hair, and he wore makeup and spandex. I thought he was ju
st such a fag, y’know?

  It was a weird thing — I had a dream about him [one] night, and my phone rang in the morning. My aunt woke me up. She said, “Guess who I saw last night?” And I said, “Layne.” She’s like, “I did, and he thought the girl I was with was you. He came running up, and gave me and my girlfriend a big hug, and then realized it wasn’t you.” I walked out of my apartment, and he drove past me — he was a passenger in a car. The only thing I recognized was his eyes — he had big blue eyes — because his hair had grown out and was mousey brown. We made eye contact, the car pulled over, and his mom was driving. He got out — he looked terrible. His hands were all wrapped in Ace bandages, with fingerless leather gloves over the bandages. He was holding this little kitten that his mom was helping him take to the vet. He jumped out of the car, and I was taken aback — it was shocking to see him looking like that. He shook his head like, “Come to the other end of the car away from my mom.” He’s like, “Hey, I was wondering — are you in the program?” He meant AA. I was like, “No, but I know a lot of people who are. I could hook you up with someone.” He took my number, and started calling me. It turns out that he only lived a few blocks away.

  So I started going over to his house — I was curious, I felt sorry for him. We went and saw a few shows together, and mostly he wanted to hang out, and watch movies — because he was a wreck. The first couple of times I came over, he was like, “One day I would like to have a family — this is what’s going on now, but I’m not always going to be like this.” A couple of times he disappeared and I was concerned, because we talked every day for a while. One time I didn’t get a hold of him for a couple of days, and he called and said he was out in the woods with somebody, calling from a pay phone. He didn’t say it, but I could tell he was trying to detox.