Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [262]
TOM HANSEN Demri ended up getting endocarditis, which is an infection of the lining around your heart. It happens a lot to drug addicts. When Demri passed, Layne really took that hard. She was really sweet and really cool.
JOHNNY BACOLAS I recall many nights when I was living with Layne, Demri would come to the house and after I’d go to bed, she would just open my door, sit at the edge of my bed with a bag full of potato chips, chew really loud, and just talk. It didn’t matter if I was exhausted. She didn’t ask me, she didn’t care. “So anyways, yesterday I ran into so-and-so and blah blah blah. Did you hear this new record by this band?” And I loved it—I thought it was so cute. If a kitten’s in your bed clawing you, it’s a kitten, you know?
After I moved out from Layne’s, I didn’t have much contact with Demri. After she died, in ’96, it seemed like Layne went into a darker place. He moved to the U District, to a condo right above this tavern called the Blue Moon. The Blue Moon was kind of notorious, at least when I was a teenager, as the place to go buy drugs. That kind of clientele. And part of me wondered if he moved there because he didn’t have to drive anywhere and it was easy access. Then again, all the dealers would come to his house anyway, because, hey, he was Layne Staley. Once he moved to that place, I didn’t talk to him. I don’t think many people did, to be honest with you.
DAVE JERDEN I was making an Offspring record years later, in 1998, and they were planning a box-set record of Alice in Chains with some new songs. I stopped production on Offspring and got Alice in Chains into my studio. Layne didn’t show up until midnight or later, and the band had already been there cutting stuff. My engineer Bryan Carlstrom was so burned out, he said, “I can’t work anymore tonight.” So there was a big fight.
At that point, Jerry was in complete control of the band, and he yelled at Layne and said something to him like, “Shut up!” And the reaction from Layne was pretty bizarre. He turned into this little kid—he wasn’t like the Layne of old. Like he was being reprimanded by his mother or father.
MIKE INEZ At that point, we weren’t keeping a whole lot of contact with each other. We were all pretty scattered. That was a tough session. We were in Los Angeles, and I just remember wishing I was in Seattle. Why? Because the vibe is completely different in L.A. Especially during those times, with the people we were hanging out with, it was dark for us.
DAVE JERDEN That was a Friday night, and I had an understanding I had Layne till Sunday, and Layne all of a sudden says to me, “I have to be back in Seattle for a wedding.” They left and Susan called and completely dumped on me. She started yelling at me: “Your whole career was based on Alice in Chains!”
Rolling Stone called me up and wanted to know what the story was, and I gave them my side. The big thing that I said was during the making of Dirt I wasn’t there to be Layne’s friend, I was there to be his producer. And what I meant by that was I wasn’t there to enable him to use drugs—I was there to get him to sing, to make that record. And that got blown all out of proportion.
MIKE INEZ It wasn’t working, and the vibe that Dave created for us in the studio was not the vibe we needed at that time. We ended up going back to Toby.
TOBY WRIGHT When I came back to work with the band on the box set, it was all about getting some music done, so I was focused on that instead of anything that might be bad happening around them, to keep a positive influence and to keep creativity flowing.
The only time I actually used Pro Tools with the band was during the two new songs, because Jerry and Layne had gotten to a point where they wouldn’t go into a room together. There was something going on between them, I’m not sure exactly what it was. It was really none of my business. Layne would come in and sing, and then Jerry’d come in and listen to that and say, “Oh, that’s horrible.” Thank God for Pro Tools, because for me it was an editing nightmare.
SUSAN SILVER The last time I