Alice in Chains Page 4

  Was it his impression that there was an ultimatum and Layne called it?

  “Something along those lines, yes, I do believe so.”

  “It was part of his life. It’s part of Nancy’s life. She’s got her viewpoint on what happened, Layne had his viewpoint on what happened, I have my viewpoint on what happened because I had been in their house during these occasions, and I think I described that well enough. I’ve also got my recollections on how it affected him, and what that was.”

  Pollock tried to get his parents to take Layne in, but this wasn’t an option because Pollock’s disabled sister required assistance, so his parents couldn’t have another person there.

  Jim Elmer agreed with Pollock’s assessment that there was an ultimatum, saying it was a culmination of discussions and arguments between Layne and both of his parents about his drug use. “We had several conversations,” Elmer recalled. “‘We don’t want drugs in the house. You’ve got two little sisters here, and this is going to be a drug-free house, and so if you want to continue taking drugs, then you can’t be here.’ So it didn’t happen just in one day, but Layne definitely knew what was expected of him in terms of the drug issue, and we just couldn’t bend on that for him.”

  At around the same time, Sleze moved out of the Bergstrom family basement. According to James Bergstrom, it was Layne’s idea for the band to get a room at a new rehearsal space in Ballard. He thinks the idea was to have a private space with greater freedom to practice, and to be in the scene with the other bands. But there was another issue. Mrs. Bergstrom is described by her son and others as a very religious woman. According to Bergstrom, “My mom prayed for all of us,” he said with a laugh. “She loved everybody.” Layne had a jacket with a pentagram on it, which he would take off and sneak in when he came to the house so as not to offend her.8 Nick Pollock agreed with Bergstrom’s explanation for the move, but also said Layne did not like that Bergstrom’s mother was unhappy about their music.

  Thus began Layne’s involvement with the Music Bank.

  PART II

  1984–1989

  When you find your sound is basically when all four of you

  are digging whatever the fuck you’re playing.

  —Jerry Cantrell

  I’m a star. It’s just nobody knows it yet.

  —Layne Staley

  A lot of bands back then, nobody had an identity yet. Everybody was searching.

  —Dave Hillis

  Chapter 3

  This town was so hungry for this idea.

  —SCOTT HUNT

  SCOTT HUNT WAS ATTENDING Idaho State University on a football scholarship. NCAA regulations forbid student athletes from holding a taxpaying job, so to get around this, Hunt traveled and performed with his band, Mirrors, in which he was the drummer. “We would travel through the summer and I’d make a butt-load of unreported cash as a musician, which saved my father a great deal of money,” Hunt said.

  Around 1983, Mirrors played a show in Twin Falls, Idaho, and stopped by a diner after the gig. The diner had a copy of The Rocket. “That was Seattle’s big music mag—at that point the only one—and to me it was like Rolling Stone.” He tore out the “Musicians Wanted” section and later placed an ad for himself. Hunt got a call from Paul Bostic, manager of a local band called Brat. Despite being in Idaho, Hunt convinced Bostic to mail him the band’s demo so he could try out. Hunt was offered the job and then asked himself the obvious question: “Now what?”

  If he accepted the job, he would have to quit his band, drop out of college, and move to Seattle. He spent the summer in the Seattle area, rehearsing with Brat at a warehouse, which had live electrical wires hanging from the ceiling, was infested with rats, and had no heating. Hunt had a ten-piece kit with nine cymbals. Every day he had to unload it from his truck, carry it up two flights of stairs, assemble it, play, and then break it down, carry it back downstairs, and load it on the truck. In that state of frustration, Hunt thought to himself, “This is horseshit. This is a major city. Why are we putting up with this?”

  Hunt accepted the Brat offer, got a job in construction, and began looking for warehouse space. He and his boss, a drywaller named Jake Bostic, the brother of Brat’s manager, were working for two Swedish land developers named Bengt Von Haartman and Gabriel Marian. Hunt found a forty-thousand-square-foot warehouse in Ballard and had an idea that he wanted to pitch to Von Haartman and Marian. He saved up money to place an ad announcing Round the Sound Studios, which described “24 Hr. Practice Rooms,” and listed his phone number to book rooms, which ran in the September 1984 edition of The Rocket.

  After the ad was published, Hunt would come home and find fifteen to twenty messages on his answering machine every night, to the point that the tape was full. “This town was so hungry for this idea,” Hunt said. He wrote down the names of everyone willing to commit three hundred to five hundred dollars, calculated the numbers, and drafted a business proposal. He estimated that renting the warehouse at twenty-one cents per square foot from a private landowner and then rerenting it at $1.60 would bring in twelve thousand dollars a month in revenues. Hunt offered to split the profits with Von Haartman and Marian fifty-fifty but needed them to sign the property lease and to provide a small team of employees to build and maintain the place. Von Haartman and Marian did their due diligence and ultimately agreed to it.

  Hunt had to put in his own money to get the project going. His father passed away in January 1984, leaving his mother a sum of money from his insurance policy. She decided each of their children would receive $20,000 as a down payment for a home or to finish college. Hunt pitched his idea to her, and she lent him the money, which he immediately used to buy the doors, walls, studs, wires, and carpeting. Hunt also made Jake Bostic, Von Haartman, and Marian sign a promissory note agreeing to pay his mother $750 a month to repay the loan.

  On September 25, 1984, Von Haartman, Marian, and Marian’s wife signed a five-year lease for the property, which would begin on October 1. Under the terms of the lease, they would pay the Rosen Investment Company $2,700 a month in rent. The premises were to be “used and occupied only for recording and audio visual studios.”1 The name had to be changed from Round the Sound Studios to the Music Bank about a year and a half later after Hunt, Marian, and Von Haartman decided to get rid of Bostic. Because of that, and the fact they had to rewrite the promissory note, they had to change the name of the partnership as well. Hunt suggested the name Music Bank.

  Hunt and Jake Bostic, along with a framing crew, an electrician, and a laborer, worked to get Round the Sound Studios up and running—aiming to build a room a day. They came very close to that goal. By Hunt’s calculations, they built fifty-two rooms in sixty days. On opening day, every room was rented out, and Hunt had a waiting list of twenty-five bands wanting to get in.

  Besides himself, Hunt credits Bostic as a cofounder of the Music Bank. “This was me and Jake’s baby completely. The other guys were just silent partners that were willing to put their name on a piece of land.”

  One day in late 1985, an eighteen-year-old who had long spiky hair with a blue streak and was wearing pink jeans walked into Hunt’s office. “I’m Layne from Sleze and I’m looking for a job.”

  “Well, Layne, I’m not hiring,” Hunt responded.

  Layne continued, “I was in here the other night and I noticed you had this guy that was mopping the back hallway between rooms thirty-six and forty-two. Can you rent that?”

  “That’s our fucking broom closet.”

  “I don’t care,” Layne responded. “Could I set up a little drum set in there?”

  Hunt thought about Layne’s proposition. The small room was not designed for the purpose Layne had in mind. Hunt described it as “barely big enough to hold a small drum set.” He had been looking for more space and figured that if he relocated the cleaning supplies to the back office and rented out the closet, it would bring an extra $150 a month in revenue.

  Johnny Bacolas said of this first ro
om, “It could barely fit four of us. It was me, Nick, James, and Layne. And then that room was just too small. It would just kill us in the summer.”

  On their first day in the room, they had left their door slightly open. A member of the punk band The Accüsed stuck his hand inside the doorway and gave them the middle finger. Layne got mad and decided that couldn’t go unanswered. He found a piece of dog poop and placed it in front of the door to The Accüsed’s room while they were practicing. They later found out one of the band members stepped on it.

  Sleze practiced in the closet until a better room opened up. Hunt put Layne at the top of the waiting list, so they upgraded as soon as one became available. Layne continued pestering Hunt for a job, but he wouldn’t actually work there until about a year later.

  * * *

  After repaying slightly more than half of Hunt’s twenty-thousand-dollar loan from his mother, Von Haartman and Marian stopped paying it. According to Hunt, the reasons for this were that “It was starting not to be profitable. Our rent had gone up. We had been classified as a commercial zone.”

  “We were pulling a lot of power. Our power rates went up. A lot of money stuff changed and they decided, ‘This is a promissory note, punk. Why don’t you start paying your mom back out of your money—out of your share?’” Hunt, Von Haartman, and Marian wound up kicking Bostic out, but, because his was the main name on the paperwork, Von Haartman and Marian tried pinning the responsibility for the Hunt loan on Bostic. Hunt, however, refused to renegotiate the original agreement. Complicating matters was that Von Haartman and Marian were the signers on the lease. “They decided to go to war with me, because they didn’t want to make the payment anymore.”

  At that point, Hunt approached David Ballenger to take over the day-to-day operations of the Music Bank. “I said, ‘I’m at war with my partners now, because they don’t want to pay my family money back anymore. So I need you to kind of help me run things. This may turn into an ugly fucking deal here.’”

  Ballenger had secretly been living in a room, paying rent with his unemployment benefits. Hunt was fine with him doing that and began giving him hours. Ballenger eventually moved into Hunt’s band’s former room and began running keys.

  By that point, things had gotten ugly between the Hunt family and Von Haartman and Marian, with the Hunts filing a lawsuit over the unpaid balance of the loan. “In a day, they came and threw Scott out. Scott thought he would be back in two weeks. It was near violence, the experience. They put him up against the wall, up off of his feet,” Ballenger said. “He thought he’d be back in a few, he was like, ‘Dude, I’ll be back and we’ll own it completely in two weeks.’ It didn’t happen. The lawsuit just went on continuously, and so somebody had to run the place.”

  Beyond the loan issue, Hunt said there were other reasons they wanted him out. Hunt wanted to expand the Music Bank into the rest of the Ballard Building, which was being rented out to two other businesses. Hunt alleged his business partners wanted him out so they could set up a massive marijuana-growing operation.

  Ultimately, the Music Bank was an incubator for the Seattle music scene, with dozens of bands having passed through its doors during the years it was in operation. During this period, Sleze made plans to go in the recording studio.

  Chapter 4

  We’re the biggest hair band in Seattle!

  —JAMES BERGSTROM

  BY LATE 1985 OR EARLY 1986, Sleze felt confident enough to record a demo. According to Tim Branom, James Bergstrom approached him to ask for help. “I was older and a little more experienced at the time, and I was kind of an upcoming producer in the area.” Branom and Sleze began working on preproduction of the material in January 1986.

  Branom said they worked on the material for about three months, “until the songs were right.” Of the band’s overall creative process, Bergstrom said, “It varied. On those demo tapes, I wrote all of ‘Lip Lock Rock’—lyrics and music. Nick wrote all of ‘Over the Edge’—lyrics and music. ‘Fat Girls’—I wrote all of the music, and I think Jim Sheppard might have written the lyrics to that. But I’d say all the other songs were a collaboration, where maybe I came up with an original riff and Layne would write a lot of lyrics.”

  When they started recording in the spring of 1986, they worked on “Fat Girls” and “Lip Lock Rock,” with Mike Mitchell on bass. The instrumental tracks were recorded at the Music Bank, while Layne’s vocals were recorded at Branom’s house in Richmond Beach.

  “I worked with Layne for months on his vocals. I was able to afford to go to maestro David Kyle for lessons, but Layne wasn’t, so he would come a few times a week to my house, and we would go over the cassette tapes of my vocal warm-ups, and I would make sure that he was practicing. I knew the only way he would do it was if I was standing right in front of him.

  “I made copies of my vocal-lesson tapes for him so he could practice at home. After [he had done] this for about six months, the notes just flowed out effortlessly.” In addition to developing his vocals, Layne had a financial incentive to practice: “It would save money in the studio.”

  Later on, Layne did study under David Kyle, whose impressive roster of former students includes Geoff Tate of Queensrÿche, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, Ann Wilson of Heart, and Ronny Munroe of Metal Church. Robert Lunte, a student and protégé of Kyle who now runs the Vocalist Studio in Seattle, remembers seeing a promo head shot of Layne “in full glam regalia” when he was a student at Kyle’s studio, where Kyle kept head shots of all his students. Kyle, who passed away in 2004, told Lunte that Layne had been one of his students.1

  Thad Byrd, who would later direct Sleze for a scene in his movie Father Rock and occasionally hung out with the band, said, “Layne was very proud of the fact his vocal coach was the same one as Geoff Tate’s.

  “I have a recollection of being at the Music Bank hanging out with those guys. They had just finished practice, and Layne personally telling me. He was all excited that day, because he had either come from a voice lesson … either that day or the day before.

  “He said, ‘You know what? Today, he [David Kyle] put Geoff Tate’s picture right in front of me, and he pointed at it and said, “Layne, someday that’s going to be you.”’ Layne was all excited about that. That’s the thing that kills me about what happened to Layne. I had never seen anyone want anything so bad. But he was always smiling, always happy, always upbeat, and always just really super excited.” Byrd thinks this conversation happened at some point in 1987.

  It is not known how Layne got started as a student of David Kyle’s and how he paid for it. Jim Elmer had never heard of Kyle, nor did he pay for Layne’s lessons. All this practice would pay off in the long term. Later on in his career, Layne was consistently described by producers and engineers who worked with him as very efficient during his recording sessions, often nailing his parts in one or two takes.

  All four members were well prepared by the time they went into the studio, having spent months working on the songs and performing them live. The demo was recorded at London Bridge Studios, a place Layne would come to know well in the years ahead. During one session, Layne and Nick Pollock were hanging out in the lobby, talking about how dedicated they were to their craft, how they would become big rock stars. At one point, Layne looked Pollock in the eye and said, “You know what? I’m a star. It’s just nobody knows it yet.”

  “He was very cocky, and he had that just cocksure rock thing down so well,” Pollock said. “He oozed it out of his pores.” At some point during this period, someone—presumably Layne himself—came up with the moniker “Layne the Legend.” According to Pollock, “He wasn’t too serious about it. It was more of a bravado thing that really caught on with people in and out of the band.”

  For all Layne’s cockiness, an incident during one of his earliest studio experiences demonstrates his insecurity. According to Branom, Layne was getting ready to record vocals when he asked for time to “work out the bugs” in his voice. He had been out la
te drinking and partying the night before. Branom thought they had muted his microphone in the control room, but unfortunately for Layne, that wasn’t the case. “We could hear him working out his bugs in the chorus, and his voice was cracking and everything. We were just dying laughing,” Branom said.

  Suspecting something was up, Layne kept asking, “Can you hear me?” which Branom and the others in the control room would deny. “We’re all just crying we’re laughing so hard,” Branom explained, and Layne had no idea why. This went on for about twenty minutes. By the time Layne figured it out, it was too late.

  According to Branom, singers have to deal with the fact that the voice “is affected by anything—the food you eat, what kind of emotions are going through you, how healthy you are at that point, how much sleep you did or did not get, how much you drank the night before, what time you got up. So all those factors come into play when you’re sitting there, three hundred dollars an hour, you know—it’s kind of embarrassing.” Producers and engineers who worked with Layne later on described him as being very self-conscious about people being present or watching him as he worked on his vocals. Asked about this, Branom said, “We might have traumatized him from doing that.”

  On June 4, 1986, Sleze threw a birthday party for Branom. Layne went to an erotic bakery in the University District neighborhood and bought him a cake in the anatomically correct shape of a woman, with breasts made of orange frosting.

  * * *

  Thad Byrd was a nineteen-year-old writer and director working on his first feature film, Father Rock, in May 1986. Byrd was looking for a band to appear in the movie and approached James Bergstrom, who told Byrd that Sleze was recording two songs for a demo. According to Byrd, Bergstrom’s sales pitch for why his band should appear in the movie was “‘We’re the biggest hair band in Seattle!’ but he’s saying it like, ‘Oh my God, I had to have them in my movie because they were the biggest hair band in Seattle. How could I even think of any other band?’” Byrd wrote Bergstrom a check for three hundred dollars, in exchange for which the band would appear in the movie and allow Byrd to use one of their songs. Byrd’s money went toward financing production of the demo.