Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

He went to rehab several times at Hazelden. While living in Minneapolis, he played with a local blues group named Lamont Cranston. Although Baker was a drug addict, he attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings because it “was the only program that worked to keep him sober,” Joseph said. He never told anyone he was a heroin addict. He told his brother that the people at Narcotics Anonymous meetings were just trying to network and sell drugs to each other but that “the old alcoholics were the guys who really had figured it out.”

When they first met, McCready remembers Baker—who would have been thirty-nine or forty years old at the time—had a bumper sticker on his car that read WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS A FAILURE TO GIVE A SHIT!, which he called “completely hilarious” but also “an insight into a dark, intelligent, and irreverent mind.” The initial spark for Mad Season was in Hazelden. “We had talked about doing a project together while we were there, we kicked around the idea.”5

Baker took McCready to AA meetings, Joseph said, adding that “they were supporting each other trying to develop a sober lifestyle.” At some point after this, Baker went out to Seattle with McCready and traveled with him on a few Pearl Jam tours. After relocating to Seattle, McCready took Baker to Bass Northwest, Evan Sheeley’s specialty bass store near Pioneer Square, to buy whatever gear and instruments he wanted. McCready picked up the bill. “It was a nice thing for Mike to do. Of course, at the time, Pearl Jam had definitely done well for themselves, so Mike was able to spend the money without thinking about it,” Sheeley said.

McCready contacted Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin, telling him he wanted to form a band. Martin accepted the invitation because the Trees were inactive. McCready said he began calling Layne while still in rehab to see if he was interested in working together.6

McCready had an agenda. It was his hope that playing with sober musicians would encourage Layne to clean up. “I was under the mistaken theory I could help him out,” McCready told Charles R. Cross after Layne’s death. “I wanted to lead by example.”7

Around this same period, Johnny Bacolas had moved in with Layne, and they started getting phone calls from McCready, who said he had songs he wanted to run by Layne. McCready eventually just started showing up at their place, calling Bacolas in advance.

“Layne’s asleep right now,” Bacolas would respond.

“I’ll hang out until he wakes up.”

McCready would hang out in the living room, waiting for Layne to wake up, which was typically at around four or five o’clock in the afternoon. Layne would stay up all night and go to sleep at seven or eight o’clock in the morning. Bacolas would make a pot of coffee as they waited for Layne to wake up. When Layne was finally up and about, McCready would start talking to him, pick up a guitar, and play him a riff.

In time, McCready started bringing Baker over. “Baker would just sleep. He would come over to the house almost every day because he just lived about a block away. He would come over, and we would make a pot of coffee. He’d drink like half the pot,” Bacolas said. Within a few minutes, Baker would be passed out on the couch, snoring. Layne was not happy about the slumbering visitor. “Dude, next time Baker comes over, we got to have a rule where he can’t just sit here and sleep all the time because I have to tiptoe around the house all the time and it pisses me off,” he said.

According to McCready, “The band came together after we had jammed together two or three times and decided to do a gig. We did a show at the Crocodile Café, just making up shit as we went along.”8 Mad Season played their first show at the Crocodile Café on October 12, 1994.9 For that performance, they used the name the Gacy Bunch, a reference to the serial killer John Wayne Gacy and the TV show The Brady Bunch. According to a bootleg recording of the show, the set consisted of early versions of songs that would appear on Above, in instrumental form or without fully developed lyrics, and an instrumental cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).”10

McCready floated the idea of putting together a demo, but Layne raised the stakes and said, “Forget doing a demo, let’s do an album.” At the same time, McCready realized the negative connotations of having a name like the Gacy Bunch. “That was a joke that was funny for about five minutes, and when the sixth minute hit, it wasn’t funny anymore,” McCready explained.11 When the name change became necessary, they settled on Mad Season. “A lot of hallucinogenic mushrooms grow in the area around Surrey, England, where we mixed the first Pearl Jam album, and the people there call the time when they come up the ‘Mad Season’ because people are wandering around mad, picking mushrooms, half out of their minds,” McCready explained. “That term has always stuck in my mind, and I relate that to my past years, the seasons of drinking and drug abuse.”12