Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [188]
SCOTT MCCULLUM Alice in Chains asked Gruntruck to join another tour, with the Screaming Trees. So we flew into Fort Lauderdale, and met them there. The Screaming Trees weren’t there yet. I remember walkin’ into that room and seeing those four Alice in Chains guys in a booth, and it was like we were fuckin’ little giddy kids. We ran over, and they were gettin’ up, and we were all hugging each other. It was like this great family reunion.
This is when I got into hard alcohol and Jägermeister. That same day, Sean grabs me, like, “Hey, good to see ya. Let’s do some Jäger!” Goes over to the bartender, and goes, “I want 12 Jäger shots.” We proceeded to down six shots each right there in the first five minutes. We get done drinkin’ that, and then Layne bought me a Jack Coke. “I’ve never had a Jack Coke before.” Boy, was that a mistake. Jack Coke was my drink for a while.
MATT VAUGHAN So we set off on tour, starting off just as drinkin’ buddies again, and within a week it was very obvious this wasn’t gonna be just a drinkin’ buddy tour. The party reached a level that was not anything I had seen before and some of the guys in Gruntruck hadn’t seen before. There was a lot of speed, you knew there was heroin out there. It was just nasty. And Screaming Trees was on the tour, too, so you have the Lanegan element.
KIM WHITE The Screaming Trees got offered the Alice in Chains tour, and I thought it was a terrible idea. Honestly, I thought, You’re going to put an alcoholic on the road with a junkie, and when the tour is over you’re going to have two junkies. I said that to the label and they were like, “Nonsense.” Alice in Chains were huge, and they’re like, “You’re going to be playing huge arenas, you’re going to sell a lot of records,” and I was like, “Yeah, but at what expense?”
BARRETT MARTIN That tour was the biggest mistake that we made as a band. We had an entire world tour being booked where we were headlining, and we would have really put ourselves on the map as this big headlining band. But the people at Sony decided that we should tour together because we were both Sony bands. But we were gonna have to open for Alice in Chains, which was ridiculous because we actually were a larger draw than Alice in Chains. They wanted us to open for Alice in Chains and give them street cred and let everybody know that Alice in Chains was a Seattle band, too.
And on top of that, Mark and Layne really got heavily into heroin on that tour, and that was kind of the beginning of the end.
TOM NIEMEYER Lanegan had a tendency to wander off. One night, they told me to go into the club and get the guy, ’cause nobody else could get him to come out in time for the buses to leave.
He told me, “Tommy, come with me. Into the night.”
And I was like, “Whaaat?”
And he goes, “Look at that!” And we were looking at the skyline from the club we were at. I was like, “But we gotta go, dude.” I got him as far as the bus. But he wouldn’t get on. He just said, “I have a ride, and I’ll meet you there.”
MATT VAUGHAN There was a lot of testosterone, masculinity on that tour. You had Lanegan, you had Ben McMillan, Scott McCullum. There were a lot of fights. I remember Lanegan fighting with Mark Nafacy, the soundman. It was after the show, and Lanegan and him were bitching about something. And before you know it, Lanegan rips his jacket off, he throws it at me, and they just started whalin’ on each other. Lanegan won the fight. He wasn’t afraid. It was so out of control, you couldn’t stop it.
And then Lanegan walked off into the hills, and no one saw him for a week and they were basically off the tour until Seattle dates came around. I remember MTV News: “Mark Lanegan is in the hospital, has a stomach flu.” That wasn’t the case at all—he was missing. No one could find him. From what I heard, he ended up meeting some girl and stayed with her.
KIM WHITE A couple