Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Krisha Augerot, who was working for Pearl Jam manager Kelly Curtis at the time, was assigned to oversee the Mad Season project. As far as she knew, it was “definitely a side project,” with no plans to do anything bigger than play shows around Seattle.

The band went into Bad Animals Studios with Pearl Jam’s soundman, Brett Eliason, producing and engineering, with Sam Hofstedt assisting him. From what Hofstedt recalls, Layne was still working on his lyrics and vocal parts by the time it came to actually recording. “He would still go into the studio by himself, have no one else around at all. And he could operate the tape machine and just do a little experiment without feeling anybody was listening to him or watching him. And he would go in and just, like, work something out.” When Layne was actually recording his vocals, the only other person in the studio was Eliason, who told Mark Yarm:

I produced, recorded, and mixed the Mad Season album. Layne was not healthy. Heavy, heavy drug use. Such a sweet guy, such an amazing talent. One of the best singers I’ve ever recorded. He could just stand out there and light it up. The problem was getting him there. We were in cahoots with his roommate, who’d help get Layne off the couch and point him in our direction.

Layne would show up and he’d go back to the bathroom and be doing dope back there and you’d wait for hours before he was ready to come back out. He was pretty open about it. I asked him, “Why? Why are you doing this to yourself?” He said, “I’m either going to drink or I’m going to do dope, and drinking is harder on me.”13

Hofstedt agreed with Eliason’s account. Hofstedt, who would work on the Alice in Chains album a year later, says Layne said something similar during the making of that album, words to the effect of “I’m gonna be on something. I drink a lot and I don’t like the way the drinking affects me.” He added, “I sort of recall him—I’m not certain of his exact words, but he didn’t like [that] drinking kind of made him doughy.”

Layne was in the studio lounge reading a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. Barrett Martin read it a few years earlier and began talking with Layne about what it meant to be an artist and have a spiritual message.14 Layne put the book into song, making reference to Gibran’s work in the lyrics. This became “River of Deceit.”

Despite Layne’s no-interventions rule, at some point McCready and Bacolas made plans to have Lowell—a counselor from Hazelden and friend of McCready’s—fly in from Minneapolis to come over and talk to Layne. Layne had previously met him, and according to Bacolas he “really respected him and just really liked the guy. [He was] someone Layne would actually listen to.” Layne agreed to check in to Hazelden, but he returned to Seattle after a few days. He startled Bacolas, who came home from a gig at two or three o’clock in the morning and, hearing noises from Layne’s room, thought a burglar had broken in. He walked in and saw Layne, then asked him what he was doing back.

“I just came back. It wasn’t for me,” he responded.

Nancy Layne McCallum alleged in a lawsuit that at one point in the mid-1990s, Layne told her he was “contemplating withdrawing from the band to address his health issues, but that Susan Silver, the band’s manager, was pushing back by reminding him that there were 40 people on the payroll counting on him to write and perform.”

She further alleged in the lawsuit that “during an ‘intervention’ with Mr. Staley, Ms. McCallum questioned the need for her son to continue to write, perform and tour with the band: ‘Why couldn’t the band audition for a replacement lead singer?’ In response, Ms. Silver told Ms. McCallum, ‘Nancy, you don’t understand; Layne IS Alice in Chains.”15

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In mid-September, Michelle Ahern-Crane invited Layne to her twenty-fifth birthday party, thinking he wouldn’t show up. About a dozen friends of hers, as well as her on-again, off-again ex-boyfriend, The Accüsed bassist Alex Sibbald, were at the rooftop bar of the Canlis Hotel in downtown Seattle. Ahern-Crane saw Johnny Bacolas walk into the bar. “Layne’s here. He’s downstairs in the bathroom. He’ll be up in a minute,” he told her.

Ahern-Crane knew this was not going to go well, with Layne or with Sibbald. “I’m like, ‘Oh, God … How am I going to explain this to my sort of ex-boyfriend that I’m still close with?’” She told Sibbald she didn’t think Layne would come when she invited him as Layne walked in wearing a lavender-colored suit with a Colonel Sanders–style string tie and a cane. He gave her a handwritten letter, in which he wished her a happy birthday and said that her birthday letter to him was his favorite gift: “I’ve never felt better or more accepted and loved by someone as I did by you in your letter, at that moment, and every time I read it, I feel that same wonderful moment,” he wrote.

When she finished the letter, it dawned on her—“Oh my God! He thinks we’re dating!”