Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Not long after, Bacolas moved in with Layne. Although he moved in to help him clean up, any pretense of that went out the window once he was there. Layne set two conditions for living with him: no interventions and no listening to Alice in Chains. “I think the thinking was he wanted to be in control of it,” Bacolas said. “He definitely liked control. His attitude was ‘No one’s going to force me to do anything. Don’t open the door to anybody that wants to. I’m not down with that.’ To me, that’s more like, ‘I’m not ready to quit. Don’t even try and force me.’”

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Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready had been drinking so much that the issue began to come up during band meetings. Pearl Jam performed three songs on the April 16, 1994, edition of Saturday Night Live, closing their set with “Daughter.” The next morning, Stone Gossard asked him, “What’d you think of ‘Daughter’?” McCready didn’t even remember playing the song—he had blacked out on a live, nationally televised program. McCready eventually checked in to the Hazelden clinic in Minnesota, where he met blues bassist John Baker Saunders.2

John Baker Saunders, Jr., was the second of three children. His younger sister Henrietta described him as “the one who had the heart in the family.” He was a musician from an early age, according to his older brother Joseph, having sung in an Episcopal church choir and taken guitar lessons in fifth grade. He learned to play “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” on an acoustic guitar.3

At the time, he was listening to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks. “I liked to listen to records, so I moved around to a lot of different places and music kind of gave me some kind of continuity,” Baker said during a 1995 interview for the EMP’s oral history project. Baker attended the Fay School in Southborough, Massachusetts, from seventh through ninth grades. He said, “I just didn’t do my homework, didn’t give a fuck about it, and I played my guitar and listened to the radio a lot, all night long.”

His “one great memory” of boarding school was lying on his back with headphones on as he listened to Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” for the first time while looking at the sky. “I hadn’t really taken any drugs yet, but that was a heavy experience because I had been listening to John Wesley Harding for a long time—it’s one of my favorite albums by [Bob Dylan], and when I heard Hendrix doing that song, it was great.”

During this period, Baker, his brother Joseph, and a friend saw Hendrix perform at Philharmonic Hall in New York City. According to Baker, “Hendrix came out, but he didn’t just come out, first all you heard were like noises coming from backstage as he like made noises with his guitar and he did that most of the night, he played ‘Wild Thing’ and some other things but it wasn’t like he ran through the hit songs on his album, he just started making noises, worked some songs into that and walked off making noises, too, and it went a little over my head.”4

Joseph remembers that show well. In terms of its impact on Baker, he said, “[Baker] always was a creative musician. His rock was always anchored in the hardcore blues, much like the Rolling Stones. His gods were the black blues players. That’s where he got his inspiration. Hendrix’s foundation was that place, too.” He heard that after Baker moved to Seattle years later, he met Noel Redding, Hendrix’s original bassist.

By high school, Baker switched to bass. When he was in tenth grade, the family moved to Kenilworth, a suburb of Chicago. As he got older, Henrietta said Baker “naturally would be protective of the vulnerable people,” and she felt he was always looking out for her. It was during this period he developed an interest in the Chicago blues scene. Baker and Joseph would go into the city and see Muddy Waters perform.

Joseph doesn’t know exactly when or how Baker’s heroin use started but remembers he found out about it when Baker was still in high school, when he was roughly seventeen or eighteen years old. He noted the history of alcoholism in the family, so Baker might have had genetics working against him. What Joseph didn’t know at the time—Baker didn’t tell his family about this until well into adulthood—was that Baker had been sexually abused by a male neighbor when he was about eight years old. “I think that had something to do with his drug abuse,” Joseph said.

Baker graduated from New Trier Township High School in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1973. He took a few courses at Oakton Community College but didn’t finish. He moved to Chicago and played with blues musicians at local venues. Baker struggled with substance abuse and efforts to get clean. At one point, he went out to San Francisco, where Joseph was in college, and took classes and enrolled in a recovery program. According to Joseph, “I got so that I could identify immediately if he was on heroin.”