Alice in Chains Page 9

  “We’re in it for the money and fame,” Sean added. “And anyone who says they’re not, they’re lying.”

  Mike said he was in it for the women.

  Besides the feature, the article includes a detailed account of that first show at Kane Hall. The set list included “Can’t Have You Blues,” “Killing Yourself,” “King of the Cats,” and “Some Girls,” during which Jerry split his pants.

  They played a cover of the Hanoi Rocks song “Taxi Driver,” which Layne dedicated to Razzle—the Hanoi Rocks drummer who was killed in a car accident in 1984. Nick Pollock joined them onstage for “Queen of the Rodeo.” They also did “Suffragette City,” during which the band brought more than twenty people onstage for the song.

  The idea for the “Suffragette City” cover can be traced back to the final days of the original Diamond Lie in Tacoma. “I said, ‘We need to do that cover,’” Diamond Lie singer Scott Nutter recalled. “We never ended up doing it. We broke up right before we started learning it.” Nutter later saw Alice in Chains perform it at the Grand Central Tavern in downtown Seattle.6

  A few months later, Bendel helped put together a submission packet for the band to send out to record labels. The packet—which includes a photocopied band photo, biography, and letter from Bendel to Columbia Records—is now part of the Experience Music Project’s collection. The letter, dated May 17, 1988, and addressed to Brett Hartman, an A&R representative at Columbia Records in Los Angeles, reads in part:

  Enclosed, finally, is Diamond Lie’s tape, picture, and their bios. More quality pictures can be sent to you if you’d like, but for the time being the band is broke and a photo-copy is the best we can do. We hope you like the tape. Please see what you can do so we can get these boys out of Seattle!

  The band biography reads:

  From the heart of Seattle and the Ballard Music Bank comes a band to reckon with: DIAMOND LIE. The band has been together in Seattle now for about six months, and has left a favorable impression on most of Seattle’s music enthusiasts. Their sleazy, bluesy, in-your-face, tough rock n’ roll is unable to be matched by any other band in Seattle. They bring new life to their cover tunes and put new hope in our local music scene with their originals. DIAMOND LIE’s live performances are overwhelming with the electrifying music and the raw attraction of the band. They’ve already taken Seattle by storm and have created a devoted following; keep an ear out in YOUR town for DIAMOND LIE!7

  This packet is probably the band’s first submission in an effort to get a record deal with Columbia. When asked about it, Ken Deans—who would briefly comanage Alice in Chains later on—said he had never heard of it and that the mailing didn’t lead to anything.

  * * *

  Randy Hauser had been involved in the Northwest music scene in management, promotion, or production capacities off and on since high school. According to court documents filed by Hauser and his attorney in 1991, he was arrested and charged with cocaine distribution in federal court in 1977. In addition to dealing, he had a cocaine addiction. In the summer of 1979, he walked into another person’s deal and was arrested. He pled guilty in federal court to conspiracy to distribute cocaine, for which he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, to be served concurrently with the 1977 conviction. He was paroled in 1985.8

  In 1986, he was back in Seattle and decided to enroll in a local beauty school. While a student there, he met Melinda Starr, with whom he developed a friendship. After finishing the program, Hauser kept in touch with her and would occasionally see her.

  “She was just amazing, and I got a little tired of hearing her talk about her boyfriend’s band,” he recalled about a conversation that took place in early 1988. (Her boyfriend at the time was Sean.) At the time, Hauser was involved with all-age dances and managed or booked thirty acts, mainly local bands that would never make it. He booked bands to play at small venues in the Seattle area: Patterson’s West, the Federal Way Skate King, and the Kent Skate King. The venue owners allowed him to do it because Hauser assumed responsibility for security and insurance.

  Hauser estimates he would see between three and six bands play live each night and would often get two or three cassettes. One day at Melinda Starr’s beauty shop, she handed him a cassette of her boyfriend’s band and asked him to listen to it. He took it home and threw it in the box with the others.

  About a month later, Nick Loft—at the time, an A&R man for Atlantic Records—was staying at Hauser’s home. He was going through the tapes in the box to gauge the potential of each band. He would listen to the first four bars of a song, and if he didn’t like it, would make a game show–esque buzzer noise and eject the tape. Hauser stepped out of the room while Loft was going through the tapes. Eventually, Hauser noticed Loft had listened to the first song on one cassette all the way through and was beginning to listen to the second.

  “Who are these guys?” Loft asked him.

  Hauser checked the tape and saw it was blank—no label with the name of the band or a contact person. “If my life depended on it, I had no idea where that tape came from,” he recalled. Loft made a copy of the anonymous demo and returned to Los Angeles. Within a few days, Loft called asking about the tape.

  “Jesus,” he told Hauser, “I went into the office and put that on the intercom system. Everybody’s calling my office wondering, ‘Who is this? What kind of music is it?’”

  Hauser still had no idea who the band was, and he was trying to figure it out. “I’m on the edge. I know I’ve got an act,” he said.

  A few days or possibly a few weeks later, Hauser went to see Melinda Starr. When he got to the shop, she asked him, “Did you listen to my boyfriend’s tape?”

  He put two and two together, matching the unnamed tape with Melinda’s boyfriend’s band. He named a few songs from the tape, which she confirmed was her boyfriend’s band.

  “Okay, where do I find these guys?” he asked her.

  “They’re practicing at the Music Bank.”

  He arranged a meeting with the band, during which they would perform for him. When he arrived, his initial impression of them was, “Four more lowlife rejects you’ve never seen in your life.” He said they had been banned from several venues, including the OK Hotel, the Vogue, and the Grand Central Tavern. During a performance at a VFW, Layne had thrown a milk shake into the crowd, effectively blacklisting the band. Sean had allegedly punched the owner of another club. Hauser was able to get the bans lifted at these venues by cosigning for the band.

  Hauser sat on the couch as he watched the band perform their five-song set. “My exact thoughts were, ‘What the fuck do I do now?’” Hauser said. “I’m sitting in front of what I know is the real deal, and I have no idea. I’d never been there.”

  Hauser and the band went outside and sat under the Ballard Bridge and began talking about the future. Hauser was direct. “I’d love to work with you guys. I’d love to manage you,” he told them. They were excited, but one member expressed skepticism. “Well, what are your plans for us?” Layne asked. “What do you do?”

  “You kind of got me off guard ’cause I’ve never been here,” Hauser responded. “What I’m going to do is promote the hell out of you, get a demo done, and when you guys get big enough, I’ll hand you off to one of the big LA agencies that knows what to do.”

  His response was good enough for Layne, and Hauser became their manager. “That was honestly the only thing I could think of to say, which is probably what I would have had to do,” Hauser recalled. He acknowledged he didn’t know what he was doing—in his words, he was “feeling my way out”—and the idea might have been naive in retrospect. At the time, Hauser said the band was two months behind on rent for their rehearsal room and about to get kicked out. Hauser picked up the seven hundred dollars in back rent. (David Ballenger said Hauser never paid him but acknowledges it is possible Hauser paid one of his employees.)

  The first thing Hauser did as their manager was call Nick Loft in Los Angeles, telling him he had found t
he band. Loft returned to Seattle, went to the Music Bank to meet the band, and saw them perform. Loft went back to Los Angeles to rave about the band he had discovered. On his next visit, according to Hauser, Loft wanted to sign the band but couldn’t, because he had already signed two other bands. Hauser decided to reach out to two figures from the local music scene with experience and connections in management and the music industry.

  * * *

  Kelly Curtis was a veteran of the Seattle music scene, having dropped out of high school in the 1970s to work as a roadie for Heart.9 By the mid-1980s, he and his business partner Ken Deans had been working as managers and promoters for several years. Their partnership began after both had moved to Los Angeles in 1984 and started managing a band named Maurice and the Cliches. Deans moved back to Seattle in December 1986, and Curtis followed suit the following year, moving in with Deans. The two started Mark Alan Productions—the name being a combination of both their middle names—which produced concerts and corporate events. They would eventually rent out office space to another local manager named Susan Silver, who had been a figure on the local music scene since the early 1980s.

  Curtis and Deans would often go to the Grand Central Bakery for lunch. Deans knew the cashier, former Green River guitarist Stone Gossard. One day Gossard gave Deans a copy of the demo made by his new band, Mother Love Bone, which Deans described as “terribly recorded, but [having] some really great songs.” He liked it enough to take it to Curtis, and he tried to convince him they should go back to managing, an idea Curtis was initially against.

  They split the company, with Curtis managing the band and Deans producing concerts. At some point during the spring or summer of 1988, Randy Hauser walked in with a proposition. “Hey, I’ve heard about you guys. I’ve got a band that I’m working with that I want you to check out,” he told Deans. The two of them went out to lunch to discuss it. “He starts talking about it, and Randy really wanted to do something, and I think he saw this as an opportunity to maybe change his life,” Deans recalled. It was his impression this band was more than just a business opportunity for Hauser. “He truly believed in the band. It wasn’t just that he thought, ‘Hey, here’s some guys. Maybe I can get them a record deal and make some money and stop doing what I do and get legitimate.’ He was a fan and passionate, and he was smart enough to know that he couldn’t do it by himself because he didn’t have the connections.”

  According to Hauser, Deans told him that Curtis and Susan had already passed on the band. Hauser also alleges they called the band losers. Deans has no recollection of this, but does recall Curtis referring to Jerry as the band’s biggest asset, because he was the main songwriter. Deans agreed to comanage the band with Hauser.

  There are differing accounts of when and how the decision to change the band’s name came about. Ken Deans said he went to the Music Bank for a meeting. At the time, he recalled they were still undecided about whether to stick with Diamond Lie or switch to one of several possible spellings of Alice in Chains. “I remember one night Randy made up a bunch of T-shirts, and we decided that it looked cooler on T-shirts that said ‘Alice in Chains,’ and then … they decided to [use] that [name],” Deans said.

  Hauser has a different recollection of how the name change came about, although he does admit that Diamond Lie T-shirts were made. According to him, when Nick Loft came back from Los Angeles, he told them, “Diamond Lie is not going to work. We’ve got to change the name.” Hauser knew what a big deal a name change was and would not have suggested it on his own. However, when the head of A&R at Atlantic Records told them to do it, they all got on board.

  According to Hauser, they started thinking about names. “The conversation kind of fluttered a little bit, and I go, ‘What do you guys think about instead of Alice ’N Chains, Alice in Chains?’” At the time, there was an Alice ’N Chains banner furled against the back wall—presumably a remnant of Layne’s previous incarnation of the band. Hauser unfurled the banner, paintbrush in hand, and added an i to the name, which now read ALICE IN CHAINS, and showed it to the band. “Within seconds, everybody was on board. It was that easy.”

  Mike told Mark Yarm that it was his idea to put the i back in, so it wouldn’t sound like Guns n’ Roses. Layne contacted his former bandmates and asked for permission to use the name. Nick Pollock recalled not being particularly thrilled about it at the time and thinking that he should come up with a different name, but ultimately both he and James Bergstrom gave Layne their blessing to use the name.10

  They played their first show as Alice in Chains some time later. Tim Branom has evidence that the name change happened that summer. On July 14, Diamond Lie and Branom’s band Gypsy Rose were on the same bill, opening for the band Helix. It was the first time the two bands had met since Jerry and Mike had been dismissed from Gypsy Rose almost a year earlier.

  On his blog, Branom later wrote, “In anticipation of the show, some band members thought a band feud could spark controversy and therefore bring even more people to the show by generating more publicity. Unfortunately, the issues were too close at hand, and the feud was a bit too real. The show was a tremendous success, but both bands watched closely to see how the ex–band members and replacements were doing. Gypsy Rose created more outrageous stage antics and thought they had left their mark on Seattle. But Diamond Lie had record-label representatives wanting to sign them, and it escalated their career. Diamond Lie would now be called Alice in Chains for their next show, eleven days later.” He added, “The bitterness of record labels passing on Gypsy Rose would only add fuel to the fire created by drug abuse and jealousy of Alice in Chains’s sudden success. The attitude was ‘How could two guys that used to be in our band do better than us?’” If Branom’s account is correct, that means Diamond Lie played their first show as Alice in Chains on July 25, 1988.11

  Besides committing to Alice in Chains full-time and being in a band that was beginning to make a name for itself, Layne had another significant event take place that spring: meeting Demri Parrott.

  * * *

  Demri Lara Parrott—she pronounced her surname Puh-row, not like the exotic bird—was born February 22, 1969, to Steven Parrott and Kathleen Austin, who were twenty-two and nineteen years old at the time and had met through mutual friends. Austin originally planned to name her Erin Lynn Austin, but after she and Parrott got married, the name changed. Her husband didn’t like the name Erin, but he did like Lara. Austin thought she had heard the name Demery somewhere and suggested it. He asked her to write it down, and she spelled it Demri, adding Lara next to it. Parrott liked it, and when Demri was born the next day, the name stuck.

  Years later, Demri would jokingly tell people that when her mother was in labor, the doctors had given her a shot of Demerol for the pain and she liked it so much, she named her daughter after it. Demri didn’t like her name at first, because people would mispronounce or mishear it. At the age of two, she had a strong enough sense of self to tell people her name and how to spell it.

  Demri could communicate and socialize beyond her years. As a three-year-old, Demri was tested by experts at the University of Washington, who told her parents she had the vocabulary of a high school senior, but her exceptional language skills weren’t always well received by adults or other children. When she was two, her grandmother had made her an angel costume for Halloween with a gold halo that went above her head. Kathleen Austin and her mother were taking Demri to her great-grandmother’s house so she could see Demri in her costume. During the car ride, Demri was tugging at the halo.

  “Demri, you’re going to mess up your hair, honey,” her grandmother told her.

  “But, Grandma, the goddamn halo won’t stay up.”

  Demri’s grandmother almost drove the car off the road.

  Demri’s parents’ marriage did not last long. Austin later married a Child Protective Services caseworker and gave birth to their son, Devin Remme, on June 20, 1974. That marriage ended in 1976, and Austin would later marry Dennis M
urphy, with whom she would have two children: Derek Murphy, born November 15, 1980, and David Murphy, born on June 12, 1982. According to her mother, Demri was closest to Devin and Derek—the oldest two of her siblings. Like Layne, Demri used her stepfather’s surname—going by Demri Murphy—while growing up but never legally changed her birth name.

  The family moved to Arlington, a town about an hour north of Seattle. When Demri was in grade school, her friend Nanci Hubbard-Mills says she was “boisterous, not afraid to speak her mind.” In an art class, the teacher had assigned them to make pumpkins and fruit out of clay. As a joke, Demri ignored the instructions and made a head with an arrow in it.

  In eighth grade, she ran for student body president. She won by a landslide—the teachers stopped counting the ballots after she was leading her closest competitor by more than three hundred votes. After a few months, she was removed from the position by the faculty because she had fallen behind on her schoolwork.

  Demri won a state prize for a project about alcohol and drugs. For source material, she approached her mother, who had been a practicing counselor working in the addiction field since 1976. Demri borrowed a display case from Austin’s office, which had fake samples of different types of drugs and a film. In retrospect, Austin said, “If anybody had ever told me that my daughter would become a heroin addict, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

  Hubbard-Mills remembers that exhibit, saying Demri had put it together for the cultural fair at the middle school. It was so well received that it was eventually shown at the high school. “This is when Demri was happy, would hang out for lunch. This is when she thought people doing drugs would die.” She and other friends from Arlington say Demri had tried marijuana and mushrooms by the time she was in high school.

  Karie Pfeiffer-Simmons met Demri when she was in fifth grade and Demri was a year ahead of her at Post Middle School, and the two became friends about a year later. “She was very outgoing, very well liked. Just petite, beautiful. She just lit up the room. She liked to be the class clown, get attention and joke around. She would sneak out through the windows of the classroom and skip class. She was always doing funny things or charming the teachers so that she would get good grades that way.”