Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [261]
NANCY WILSON I saw them in Seattle, the last show of their whole tour. It was incredible. All these incredible versions, different versions of songs, different grooves on songs, big long jams. Pretty much every person during the whole show sang every lyric to every song. And every time Eddie would glance over or look over to our section, every arm went up. Afterwards, I went backstage and Eddie came up to me and was having a million feelings, you could tell, ’cause it was the end of the whole tour, the “life and death tour.” I said, “I just got so emotional during your show. That was maybe the best show I’ve ever seen.” I saw tears come into his eyes and he was like, “Yeah, I know,” and gave me this big hug. It meant so much to him that the night was so good.
KURT DANIELSON TAD did a Midwestern leg of the Alice in Chains tour in ’93; they were dates making up shows that had been canceled in the past due to Layne’s drug problems. Layne was on his best behavior because he had been in rehab recently and he was clean and he wanted to stay that way. They had a bodyguard with him at all times who was supposed to help him. But I saw Layne on other occasions, around ’96, ’97, when he was definitely way back into being a junkie. Not only that, but smoking a lot of crack. I can remember one time in particular, at another musician’s apartment—and by this time I was also doing heroin, and that’s why I was there.
The coffee table was covered with a mound of used needles that were glazed with blood. It was sad, really sad, because next to that there was a mound of charred Chore Boys—that’s the steel wool that you get if you want to smoke crack, you put that in a glass pipe. And on the couch were rosettes of crumpled tissue paper stained with blood. The couch cushion was uncomfortable, and when you lifted it up to look what was there, you found a gun. A pistol. And there was a street guy sitting in a corner, he was from somewhere else. He was completely destitute, a full-on junkie, just hanging out with his idols. And then in the bathroom, you would find the walls splattered with blood. Suddenly you find yourself in a Burroughs novel that Bukowski had a hand in.
I was hanging out there for a few hours and talking to Layne. We shared some reminiscences about the tour. And the rest of it was drug talk, anecdotes, and puns. He was good at making puns and he was punning on the name Yasmine Bleeth at the time. I forget exactly what it was. But his mind wasn’t working quite right, and what seemed like an ingenious pun to him was not quite so funny. What it indicated to me was sort of the mental depletion caused not so much by heroin but by the crack. The crack is what fucks with your head and really causes lasting damage. That was an insight that showed me what could happen if you follow that path long enough, but I was just starting, so it didn’t deter me whatsoever.
PATTY SCHEMEL I always hoped to see Layne at a meeting. I really liked him a lot. The last time I saw him was probably in ’95. It’s funny because we were both at the dealer’s house, and we were talking and he said, “Do you want to go get some coffee?” I thought it was the weirdest thing because the last thing I wanted to do was something normal like get coffee. I was like, “No, doing this is just fine with me,” sitting here in this dope dealer’s house. But I liked that: Let’s be normal for a second.
JAMES BURDYSHAW Demri had started lookin’ kinda ragged for a young person. I knew she was really into dope deep at that point, and one time I saw her on the bus and she pulled up her shirt and showed me her scar from when she was on the hospital table and they had to massage her heart back to life. She almost died from doing a speedball. A month after I saw her on the bus, she was dead.