Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [85]
MIKE STARR I guess I had met Layne a couple years before, but I don’t remember it. I was on acid at the time. I was so high I couldn’t even dress myself, so I wore my bathrobe, with underwear on, and my sunglasses and my cowboy boots and rode on my Honda motorcycle to the beach. I heard Layne saying on a New York radio station one time, “When I met Mike Starr, he was on a Honda motorcycle in his bathrobe and his sunglasses. I said to myself right there, ‘That’s the kind of guy I want to be in a band with.’ ”
JERRY CANTRELL Layne was playin’ with another band, but he came in to jam with us after we’d been playin’ together.… He was just such a cool fuckin’ guy and his voice was just amazing, and we knew we wanted to be in a band with him right off the bat. So it was just a period of time of waitin’ him out. And then that didn’t seem to work, so we told him, “We’re gonna get a new singer,” and we started auditioning singers in his rehearsal room, and we just brought in the shittiest guys we could find. (Laughs.) We auditioned a redheaded male stripper who was just terrible, and that was it. And [Layne] was like, “Fuck it. I can’t let you guys play with these fuckin’ clowns. I’ll fuckin’ join the band.”
KEN DEANS I was approached by a guy named Randy Hauser. He was a convicted drug dealer that was on parole, and liked to hang out in the rock scene. He came to me and he goes, “Hey, here’s a band that I think is really special.” So he took me out to see Diamond Lie, and I agreed. They were definitely a full-on rock band. They were great players, they partied beyond their capacities, had sex with every woman that looked at them, and didn’t have a pot to piss in.
I talked to Randy and I said, “Look, we need to take these guys into the studio and make a demo so we can shop it.” Nick Terzo was there 10 minutes after me.
NICK TERZO (Columbia Records/Maverick Records A&R executive) I was hired by ASCAP [American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers] to be a membership rep, and the first trip I did was go up to Seattle. We came across something called the Music Bank, which had 50 or 60 rehearsal rooms, all full. It was kind of odd because I was thinking, Where did this come from? It was surreal to me, to see this much activity, this many rooms, a multitude of different genres. I was coming from L.A., thinking that’s the only music scene at the time.
MIKE STARR I was at the Music Bank all night, and it was after 2, and we had no beer left. And these two guys walked in with a case of beer. I was like, “Hey, where are you going with that beer?” And they go, “We’re going to see this band”—I don’t even remember the name of the band. I go, “They suck. Come into our room, and bring that beer.” And within 10 minutes, they were in our room with the beer and we were jamming, and we were playing good that night. One was Nick Terzo, from Columbia Records, and one was Ron Sobel from ASCAP.
NICK TERZO At the Music Bank, I went and saw a band play called Diamond Lie. The room was so small that the musicians had to stay in one room and their lead singer had to sing in the hallway because there just wasn’t room. It was a rough, crude situation, but I was pretty impressed with the lead singer. Just his voice. And he had a wicked sense of humor.
MIKE STARR We had a show at Kent Skate King, and we decided we needed a new name because we were getting pretty popular. Layne was like, “Well, I made up the name Alice N’ Chains for my old band.” I’m the one who came up with the idea to put the i in Alice in Chains, so it wasn’t like Guns N’ Roses.
NICK POLLOCK I remember James and I were at a show they played at Skate King.