Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [189]
There was a Spin journalist on the road with them, and I lied to the reporter. At this point, the band had had such a dark reputation, and I don’t think we needed to add to that. I said something like there was horseplay around the bus after the show, and Mark slipped and cut his leg and poured whiskey on it and went to bed, and when he woke up his leg was swollen and he had blood poisoning. I made up some phenomenal story.
VAN CONNER There was a lot of debauchery on that tour. There’s an old Steinbeck story called “The Harness” about this guy who wears a back brace and his wife is sickly and once a year he goes to town and does all these crazy things at a brothel. (Laughs.) That always reminds me of touring. I’d come home, I had a kid, and things were fairly straight there. Alice in Chains were living the true rock-star cliché, excess life. They definitely had the rocker chicks around. Screaming Trees, at least my brother and I, are definitely not ladies’ men. We both have had long-term relationships, and we’re very nerdy.
JERRY CANTRELL We were like hog wild, man. Totally. We dove into everything. Knee deep.
DAVID DUET Layne and Demri had kind of an open relationship. In the position he was in, it’s probably the only way he could’ve had a lasting relationship. Layne was very true to Demri in his heart, but he related many, many wild touring adventures to me.
GARY LEE CONNER It was nice to go back to the hotel and get away from all that crap. I always hated having to go to the party after the show. That was the worst. I remember one night in Minneapolis, everybody was on the bus, either snorting coke or doing something, and I was just like, My God, this sucks!
SCOTT MCCULLUM I never was a heroin user. The harder stuff was done very on the down low. As far as cocaine and speed and stuff like that, I partook quite a bit. On the Alice in Chains U.S. tour, that would always happen in the back of the bus, or whatever hotel room we were staying at. Do some lines and talk bullshit. You got 16 hours until your next fuckin’ town, so you sit back there and drink and get kinda crazy.
MATT VAUGHAN Once Dirt started to take off, we started going from club shows to larger venues. It would go from a 400-seat club to a 3,000-seat venue. I recall there being more handlers halfway through the tour, and I remember going to Susan, “Why are there more people here?”
They were bodyguards. And I said, “The band’s not that popular yet that we need this.” And she said, “This bodyguard is to make sure Layne doesn’t go out at night and that nobody tries to pass him something.”
SCOTT MCCULLUM Layne had broken his leg at some point, and he was in a wheelchair for some of the shows. And then he got a cane. And this was significant, because Ben coveted what Layne had.
Layne sorta had this mystical rock persona, always wearing lots of jewelry and piercings and nail polish. And Ben started mimicking him on tour. Somebody pointed it out to me afterward, and I reflected on it: Yeah, all of the sudden, Ben did have a cane. All of the sudden, Ben was trying to be this vagabond, gypsy, mystical rock guy. He would shave his eyebrows. He’d paint his body with all these paints and swirls, and wear these really bizarre leather chaps.
MATT VAUGHAN It seemed very paradoxical because here you have Ben McMillan, who is regarded as one of the pioneers of our scene, imitating a newbie.
TOM NIEMEYER The cane? Ben wanted to have an excuse to have a limp, essentially. Actually, we gave him one by accident by the end of the tour. He was so drunk and on so many pills on the tour bus one night, and he wouldn’t shut up. He kept talking and talking about this girl that he met. It was gettin’ to