Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [185]
COURTNEY LOVE My memory can be really addled, but I remember for some reason Eric Clapton is onstage, he is playing “Tears in Heaven” about his little son that has fallen out of a window, and I shoved Kurt into Eddie and I shoved Eddie into Kurt, and then I laughed, just chuckled, because it was genius. I loved it. They slow-danced. It was cute.
EDDIE VEDDER We were slow-dancing on a gym floor as though it was a seventh-grade dance.… Who led? That’s a good question. That’s the thing, no one led.
AMY FINNERTY It was such a sweet, sweet, sweet moment because it signified the end of this feud. I remember Janet and I actually jumping up and down and going, “YAY! They made up!” Everything was fine after that.
DAVE GROHL Yeah, some kind of fucking summit. It was so ridiculous; it had blown so out of proportion. I remember the two of them smiling and hugging each other—(sarcastically) and then, all of a sudden, Seattle was okay!
DAVE JERDEN The first Alice in Chains record was like a party, and the second record was just all work. We started the record the day the L.A. riots started. It was crazy; we had to shut down production for a week because they had a curfew on the whole city.
JERRY CANTRELL I was actually in a store buying some beer when some guys came in and started looting the place. I also got stuck in traffic and saw people pulling other people out of their cars and beating the crap out of them. That was some pretty scary shit to have to go through, and it definitely affected the overall feel of the album.
DAVE JERDEN Layne was living down in the marina, and during the curfew he was driving from the marina downtown to score is what I heard.
DAVID DUET Before I left Seattle, Alice in Chains was having their big Bumbershoot show and Facelift was out. I would stay with Layne and Demri sometimes, and I had laid on their floor kicking for a couple of days. They were freaked out by it all and didn’t understand it. Then I went back to Houston, where I was working at a nightclub, and the phone rang in the office. This was probably ’91. It was Layne and Demri and they had to find me to tell me they started doing dope and how wonderful it was, and right then I knew they were goners. You can just tell when you talk to certain people, especially females. You can tell when they’re lifers. Very seldom been wrong.
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