Alice in Chains Read online

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  Gypsy Rose had three managers who concluded Graue wasn’t right for the band, for reasons Branom still doesn’t know. In retrospect, Branom called the decision to fire him a mistake. Gypsy Rose was in the market for a new guitar player.

  Branom went to a party at Vinnie Chas’s home in Tacoma, where he met Jerry, who was staying there and asked Branom to listen to some demos he had recorded. Branom described the recordings as sounding like Boston because of the guitar harmonies. He told Gersema about Jerry and arranged for an audition at some point in July 1987. Jerry got the job. For a brief period, the band’s lineup featured half of the future Alice in Chains. Branom described the band’s sound as Dokken with Ronnie James Dio–style vocals. After getting the job, Jerry moved into the basement of Gersema’s mother’s home in the Des Moines area of Seattle.

  Jerry didn’t last very long in Gypsy Rose—about three or four weeks. Branom said neither he nor Mike Starr were involved in the decision to dismiss Jerry. By process of elimination, this means the decision to fire Jerry was Gersema’s. To make things worse, Jerry had also lost his place to live.

  Although Branom disputes Jerry’s explanations for why he was dismissed from the band, he acknowledges Jerry had a legitimate reason to be upset about it. He also disputes Jerry’s comments putting the whole Gypsy Rose episode on him. “People think because I’m the singer that I’m the boss of the band, but it wasn’t really that way,” Branom explained. “I got kicked out [of Gypsy Rose]—I mean physically beat up, like I might die because of it.”

  Mike Starr didn’t fare much better. He was dating a girl who had drawn the attention of Mike Gersema. According to Branom, the two Mikes, Tony Avalon—Jerry’s replacement—and the girl had gone out to a club, where there was a huge argument between the two Mikes, which culminated in Mike Starr’s leaving the band. “Both Mikes were fighting over this girl. Because basically it was Mike Starr’s girlfriend, but Mike Gersema wanted her, and she started going to him. So, unfortunately, that was the end of that. I didn’t have any say in it. It was just done,” Branom explained. Jerry never played a show or recorded any material with Gypsy Rose, and Mike played bass on about twenty recordings and in one show before he left the band. The most consequential event of this brief but turbulent period was that Jerry met Mike Starr.

  According to Jerry, the first time he met Layne was in the summer of 1987, after the Tacoma Little Theatre show and after Gypsy Rose. The timing of the events in Jerry’s life at the time suggests it is likely he met Layne in August of that year. According to Nick Pollock, “I remember we talked on the phone, and he wanted to hang out with us. So I had him come up, and he stayed overnight at my parents’ house, because I was still living at home.

  “He and I went to a party and met Layne at the party—something like that. Then I came up and said, ‘Hey, Layne, this is Jerry. Jerry, this is Layne Staley,’ and that’s how they met.”

  “I met Jerry at a party, just out of the blue,” Layne said years later. “I didn’t think he was the coolest guy in the world or anything. He had no family in the area, so he’s kind of struggling, didn’t have any money or a place to stay or anything. And me being completely drunk, just offered a total stranger a place to stay and clothes and food and musical instruments. I think two days later he moved his stuff up into the rehearsal room that I was working [out of].”23

  Jerry eventually moved into the Music Bank at Layne’s invitation, although his bandmates weren’t exactly thrilled about it. According to Johnny Bacolas, “Layne brought it to us, and we were like, ‘Well…’ I think all of us were a little bit hesitant at first. He wasn’t a total stranger; we knew him. But we didn’t want somebody crowding our space really, and with all his suitcases and socks and shoes in our jam room.”

  At around the same time, Alice ’N Chains was beginning to drift apart. Pollock described it as an amicable split. “It was never anything any of us had against each other, or anything like that. There was no fight, nothing about that,” he recalled. “I can say for me that I knew where things were going to go with Layne, and I knew that he wasn’t going to stop [using drugs], and I knew that I couldn’t go there with him and that I needed some distance. Part of it really broke my heart to do that because he and I were such close friends.”

  Toward the end of Alice ’N Chains’s run, Johnny Bacolas and James Bergstrom invited a Seattle musician named Ron Holt to check out their band. Holt had known them from several years earlier. He had moved to Los Angeles but came back about a year later.

  “When I met them, their songs were really horrible. Layne didn’t know anything about song crafting. He didn’t know anything about dynamics. He was really just shouting against the music. Their songs did have some structure, but they didn’t have any songs yet.”

  Holt thought “Party People,” one of his earliest compositions, might be a good fit for them. He played it for them, and they liked it. Holt was appreciative that they wanted to play his song. He explained the guitar, bass, and drum parts to Pollock, Bacolas, and Bergstrom. When it came time for Layne’s vocals, Holt pulled Layne out into the hallway, because he couldn’t hear him in the jam room. According to Holt, Layne was “still green” at this point, and he didn’t want to embarrass him.

  While standing in the corridor, Holt told the other guys to start playing, at which point Layne started to scream with the music. Holt cut him off and walked him through it. Layne sang it back, and Holt could see he got it. He was impressed by Layne’s vocal talents.

  “At the time, they were still just all energy. They wanted to do it—they had all the enthusiasm, and they had all the energy, but they just didn’t know exactly how to do it. I’m not saying that ‘Party People’ or any of the stuff I gave them was great, but they were structured and they were more than what they were doing at the time, and they dug the song. When they played it, they got a pretty good response,” Holt recalled.

  For a brief period, according to Bergstrom, there was talk of possibly having Jerry join as a second guitar player. The closest this ever came to happening was when Jerry joined them onstage to play guitar on “Party People” during a show at the Backstage in Ballard in the late summer or fall of 1987, the only time they ever did that. This show was one of the band’s last.

  With the demise of Alice ’N Chains, Layne and Bergstrom were drawn to Holt’s music. Bergstrom described the band as “pretty ahead of its time, semi-industrial, kind of hard funk, heavyish rock combination.” Holt noted how their sound deviated from the hard rock norms of the time. “Synthesizers and electronic is not something that a heavy metal band would have anything to do with. It was looked [at] as faggy, new-wave bullshit.” Holt compared the material to Ministry, who may have already released The Land of Rape and Honey by that point.

  By late 1987 Jerry decided to form a new band. Layne, remembering his encounter with Sean at Alki Beach a few years earlier, still had the piece of paper on which Sean had written his girlfriend’s phone number. Jerry called the number, spoke with Melinda Starr, and ultimately set up a meeting with Sean. Sean and Melinda went to the Music Bank and listened to Jerry’s demos. At that point, Jerry mentioned that they would need a bass player to jam with and had someone in mind. “I jammed with this guy Mike Starr a year or so ago, and he seemed like kind of a cool dude.”

  “That’s weird, because this is his sister,” Sean said as he pointed at Melinda, “and I’ve been in bands with Mike on and off since we were eleven or twelve or something.” Sean called Mike, and within a day or two he came to the Music Bank, borrowed some gear, and jammed with Sean and Jerry for the first time.

  Layne would jam with Jerry’s new band. During their second or third rehearsal, they were playing a cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Hanky Panky”—an idea credited to Mike—when a local promoter walking the hallways of the Music Bank overheard. He was looking for bands for a show he was putting together at Kane Hall.

  “Hey, what’s the name of the ba
nd? Can you play?” the promoter asked.

  “We didn’t really have a band, but we were like, ‘Yeah, totally,’” Sean recalled.

  “Can you play a half hour, forty minutes?”

  “Sure, we’ve got a bunch of songs.” In reality, Sean later explained, “We didn’t have any of the songs or anything, so we lied and said we could, and then we got a gig.”

  They liked Layne and wanted him to join full-time. There was one problem—Layne didn’t want to commit because he was already working with Bergstrom and Holt. Ultimately, Jerry said, they worked out a short-term solution: Layne would sing with Jerry’s band, in exchange for Jerry playing guitar in Layne’s band.24 This is the beginning of Alice in Chains.

  Chapter 6

  Ha! We’re not rock stars! We’re in Seattle!

  —SEAN KINNEY

  LAYNE INVITED JERRY to spend Christmas of 1987—the first since his mother’s death—with him and his family. Layne had approached his parents about it, telling them about his friend who was “kind of homeless” and didn’t have a family. “We made sure that Jerry had some gifts and some clothes, because he didn’t have a whole lot,” Jim Elmer recalled. “We bought him an army coat and a couple of other things that were kind of trendy at the time, and Layne got that as well.”

  This was the first time Layne’s family met Jerry. Jim Elmer’s initial impressions at the time: “You could tell these guys were buddies, and Jerry was very respectful—he was not loud or boisterous or too into himself or whatnot. He was very pleasant and certainly liked—in the outset, he really liked being there, and so he wasn’t rambunctious or anything.”

  At the beginning of 1988, Jerry and Layne were pulling double duty between the then-nascent Alice in Chains and 40 Years of Hate—with Layne singing and Jerry playing guitar in both bands. For a brief time, Alice in Chains went by the names Mothra and Fuck. Jerry credited Sean for coming up with the name Fuck. “We weren’t getting work anyway, so we thought it wouldn’t hurt us,” Layne said.1

  They made stickers that said FUCK (THE BAND) and put them on condoms to pass around as a gimmick. The novelty and shock value of the name was offset by its detrimental effect on publicity, problematic for any new band when print and broadcast media can’t print or say the band’s name.2 Years later, a FUCK (THE BAND) sticker can still be seen on one of Jerry’s guitars, but the letter F has either worn away or been deliberately removed. But this name didn’t work out, and the band became Diamond Lie after Jerry got permission to use the name from his former bandmates.

  The lineup for 40 Years of Hate consisted of Layne on vocals, Jerry on guitar, James Bergstrom on acoustic drums, Dave Martin on electronic drums, and Ron Holt on bass. They had about a dozen songs they would perform at rehearsals, but recordings exist for only seven or eight of them. Holt, who was traveling back and forth between Seattle and Los Angeles, recorded several songs during a series of sessions at the Music Bank and his home in Edmonds, Washington. The earliest four-track master, which Holt thinks was recorded in the fall of 1987, was titled “1988 Full of Pain, Full of Hate.”

  Around this time, another Holt composition titled “It’s Coming After” was recorded. The song had great meaning to Layne. Bergstrom called it “a song Layne was crazy about,” adding, “He loved it. It had a David Bowie–esque kind of … It was the most industrial song of the group. It isn’t necessarily industrial, it just had some elements of that for that time.” At the time, Holt was in a band in Los Angeles with Faster Pussycat singer Taime Downe. He originally wrote “It’s Coming After” with Downe’s voice in mind. “[Faster Pussycat] just got signed, and I thought, ‘This would be something that would look good on them,’” Holt said. One day Holt read Layne the lyric, “I’m gonna stretch your skin across her frame and paint it…”

  “So what happens to the rest of that part?” Layne asked.

  “I don’t know, but that’s where I wanted to go.”

  After a few days, Layne decided he wanted the song for himself. The next time he saw Holt, he told him, “I got it.”

  “But there’s some things…” Holt interjected.

  “I got this one.”

  “It was weird for him to be that confident with me. It was weird for him to throw down the gauntlet on it,” Holt recalled with a laugh. “He explained to me what he did, and I was like, ‘Oh my fucking God.’ It’s the swagger,” he said, referring to Layne’s vocal performance on the song.

  “It’s too bad it wasn’t released at the time, because it would have been huge. If it had come out in 1987 when Layne and I first did it, it would have been huge, because the swagger and the sense of dark core that he gives it. That was his particular genius, where I started to go, ‘Oh, wow. Maybe I need to give him more freedom and not stick around so much.’” The song was released on Second Coming’s L.O.V.Evil album in 1994. Several years later, Layne told Holt in one of their final conversations that it was one of his favorite songs to sing, ever.

  “I Don’t Care” is another song from this period, driven by a James Brown–esque horn part and funk-style bass line. Layne’s vocals sound somewhat similar to those of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler. “The Things You Do” is very different, more along the lines of Depeche Mode, with a darker, brooding feel to it. Layne would rerecord his vocals on this song several years later for the Despisley Brothers project with Jesse Holt, Ron’s brother.

  Besides “It’s Coming After,” the most significant recording is a song written by Holt called “Tribute.” According to him, it has a very similar opening guitar riff and melody to “Man in the Box.” Bergstrom confirmed this account, describing “Man in the Box” as “very influenced by ‘Tribute,’ and I mean that in a good way.” Holt never sued the band for songwriting credits or royalties after the release of Facelift, nor did he try to exploit his connection to Layne for personal gain. He also had not spoken publicly about his interactions with the band until being interviewed for this book. Also worth noting is the fact that the lyrics for “Man in the Box” were entirely Layne’s and that the song was credited to all four band members. As of this writing, Holt is in negotiations to sell these early recordings to Layne’s estate.

  At some point in early 1988, Holt went back to Los Angeles and didn’t return for at least nine months, although it wasn’t his intention to be gone for that long. After he left, Layne called him, asking, “What happened to you? Why did you split?” At around the same time, Jerry, Mike, and Sean wanted Layne to commit to Alice in Chains full-time. They thought it would only be a matter of time before he agreed. When waiting for him to come around didn’t work, they resorted to reverse psychology: they told Layne they were getting a new singer and began auditioning his replacements in Layne’s rehearsal room at the Music Bank.

  “We just brought in the shittiest guys we could find,” Jerry recalled years later. One of them was a redheaded male stripper.

  “The worst singers we could find … We’d bring them in and have them sing, and he’d be coming in and out and just [makes a cringing face], ‘Oh, God. What are you guys doing?’” Sean elaborated. “‘Oh, nothing. He wasn’t that bad.’” The others continued the act.

  Jerry: “‘He wasn’t too bad. I kind of liked that guy.’”

  Sean: “‘Yeah, he’s pretty cool.’ We kept purposely doing that, and after about three guys that were just so horrendous, he came in and he was like, ‘Okay, fuck that. I’m joining. Let’s just do this thing and I’ll quit the other bands.’”3

  It’s not clear which of the two events came first: Holt leaving Seattle or Jerry, Sean, and Mike holding mock auditions for a new lead singer. Regardless, by the beginning of 1988, the founding lineup for Alice in Chains—still known as Diamond Lie—was in place.

  The next step was to develop original material. They had the time, physical space, and incentive to hone their craft at the Music Bank. At some point not long after they formed, they borrowed a van belonging to the band Coffin Break to haul their instruments and gear to Issaquah,
where they recorded a demo in an eight-track studio in a tree house belonging to the producer PC Ring. On it were early original compositions (“I Can’t Have You Blues,” “Social Parasite,” and “Whatcha Gonna Do”) as well as covers of Layne’s “Queen of the Rodeo” and David Bowie’s “Suffragette City.” Later dubbed the “Treehouse Tape,” it would play a crucial role in the band’s early history.4

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  Diamond Lie played their first show at Kane Hall on January 15, 1988.5 Not long after this, the new Diamond Lie was featured in a City Heat story by journalist Jenny Bendel, who had seen the Kane Hall show. This was probably the first time the band was covered in the press. Bendel wrote, “Diamond Lie’s attitude is a refreshing one. Most other bands around walk around with this ‘we are rock stars’ attitude. Sean sums it up by saying, ‘Ha! We’re not rock stars! We’re in Seattle!’”

  “I feel really lucky to have been able to work with the quality of musicians whom I have because I love ’em all! We’re sticking together,” Jerry said.

  Sean added, “As long as I can play drums with a beer on my head, we’ll be together!”

  “Our stuff can hold up! I have the nastiest guitars in town!” Jerry said. “Our motto is, ‘We rock the deaf!’ Our music comes by instinct; we play the first thing that kicks in. If we’re not havin’ fun doin’ it, no one will have fun listenin’ to us.”