Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [88]
KEN DEANS I’m talking to Atlantic and Island, and Nick is still at ASCAP. So as it starts to heat up, Kelly goes, “I’m going to shop the band.” Then it’s decided that Nick’s going to go to Columbia, and the band’s going to go with Nick. At this time, Kelly and I are separating; I did some things that probably weren’t smart, and Kelly did some things that I didn’t agree with. Around then, we had extra space in our office, and we offered Susan Silver a place to work out of.
The band was problematical from the start. And whether it was drug use, whether it was alcohol abuse—it was really all of the above—it just seemed like a time bomb waiting to happen. So Kelly had trepidation going forward with it. At that point, I approached Susan and said, “Kelly and I are done, but he’s going to fuck this thing up—he’s going to walk away from it—so you need to partner on this band with Kelly. They’ve got a chance and, yes, they’ve got their problems.”
SUSAN SILVER Ken gave me a cassette tape of some of the songs that Alice had done, and they were so catchy and so wonderful. I went to see them live and thought they were great fun and very energetic and entertaining and spent a little time with them and they were hilarious. In a matter of time, the fellow that they called their manager, who was a hairstylist-slash–coke dealer, took a second vacation to prison. Ken asked Kelly and I if we both wanted to work on the project together, so we said we’d give that a try.
MIKE STARR We had a manager, and one day Kelly and Susan sat us down and said, “Your manager is gonna get busted by the cops for selling coke.” I don’t know how they knew that, but they did. They said, “We’d like to manage you,” and so we thought about it, and we said yeah. Went over to our old manager’s house one night, and he opened up his safe and he had this acid from the ’60s. He gave it to us, and right when we were peaking we said, “Yeah, we’re gonna go with new management,” and we walked out. It must have been a bad trip for him.
KEN DEANS Overall, the guys were terrific human beings. The biggest problem was Mike Starr, who did anything he could for himself. This is a guy who would sell spots on the guest list, and get people to buy him drugs and beer because he was Mike Starr from Alice in Chains. You never knew what problem Mike was going to cause next. You knew what was up with Sean; if he got drunk, there was a chance that he might end up in jail. Jerry, you just had to keep him pacified because he would get frustrated with it all. Layne was doing his job and was one of the nicest guys you could ever deal with.
MIKE STARR And when we went with that management company, with Susan, Kelly, and Ken Deans, we started playing with Mother Love Bone and Soundgarden.
TIM BRANOM Alice in Chains played with Mother Love Bone August 1988 at the Central, and that was a really odd pairing because they weren’t the same type of bands. Yet they were growing together as friends. I think that started people meshing styles together.
MIKE STARR When I saw Jeff Ament in Mother Love Bone, I was like, Wow. They just looked different, man, wearing shorts over their long johns, with combat boots. I remember we started dressing like that. We started wearing Value Village clothes and not showering for a while. We were trying to have our big hair and everything at the beginning, and then Layne got dreadlocks. We just kind of molded into whatever they call grunge now.
KIM THAYIL When they were Alice N’ Chains, their first demo probably owed a little bit more to Poison than the huge monster they became. That really changed when they heard us. (Laughs.) Jerry Cantrell and I were at some show, I think it was DOA playing at a venue called the Hall of Fame in the U District. Jerry asked me how to play songs like “Nothing to