Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

According to Hofstedt, Layne’s drug use was not affecting his performance in the studio. “When he was ready to sing, he was ready to sing. And he took very little time to get the vocals.” Wright concurs, “When it was game time, he worked. It might have taken him a while to get there, but he got there.” However, it was obvious he had a problem. Hofstedt said, “It seemed apparent to me he was using, because when you go to lock yourself in the bathroom for a while, it’s not because you really like the bathroom.”

For “Grind,” Wright distorted Layne’s vocals on the master tape by having him sing through a Turner Crystal microphone from 1932 that he bought at a pawnshop for ten dollars. The song was Jerry’s angry response to the rumors of the time. Layne had found out through the Internet that he was dead or had AIDS. There were rumors he had had fingers or limbs amputated because of his drug use. Gillian Gaar, an editor at The Rocket, speculated that some of the rumors got started from people who saw Layne out and about, made assumptions, said something, and the stories spread. “You could see someone saying, ‘God, he was so wasted, he looked like the kinda guy that would have AIDS,’ and so then a person hears that and says, ‘Oh, he has AIDS,’” Gaar said. “So then it might just be a misperception and then a mishearing.”7

Layne and Toby Wright were in the studio at 6:00 A.M. when Don Ienner and Michele Anthony called from New York to congratulate Layne: Above had been certified gold. Then they turned on the pressure: they told Layne he had nine days to finish the record. “At that point, we had taken a lot of time. I don’t remember the amount of time, but we had taken a lot of time,” Wright said. “It might have been feeling like it was excessive, but in the interim there were a lot of things, a lot of drama happened, a lot of stuff stopping us from working every day and so forth.” Layne wrote this incident into the lyrics of “Sludge Factory”: “Call me up congratulations ain’t the real why / There’s no pressure besides brilliance let’s say by day nine / Corporate ignorance lets me control time / By the way, by the way.”

“That song is about them,” Wright said. “He was a little pissed off that they told him that he had nine days to finish this record, so he subsequently wrote about that.”

Layne had finished recording the scratch vocals for “Again” when he called Wright and Hofstedt into the control room. They listened and noticed the song ended with a “Toot, toot!” backing vocal over the final bars.

“That’s funny. You don’t plan on using those, right?” Wright asked, according to Hofstedt’s recollection.

“Yeah, I do. Those are going to be on the record,” Layne responded.

“Toby’s like, ‘Really?’” Hofstedt recalled. “I got the impression he wasn’t terribly thrilled with that idea. But I think Layne just sorta—when he saw his reaction, I got the impression that he decided like, ‘Oh, you don’t like it, huh? Well, guess what? It’s going to be on the record now!’”

Wright confirmed Hofstedt’s account but doesn’t think Layne left the “Toot, toot!” backing vocals in to annoy him. “I don’t know if he was that full of animosity at that point,” he said, laughing. “I was questioning that because I was expecting something completely different. It’s hard to say what his attitude was then, but I do remember, ‘That’s the chorus, dude? Really?’ ‘Yep, that’s it.’ ‘Okay, cool.’ And we went with it and that was the end of the conversation. It stands as it is today.”

For the beginning of “God Am,” Layne recorded himself doing a crack hit from a bong. “He thought it was kind of funny and apropos to the song that he included that in the intro,” Wright said. In all the years they knew each other, this was the only time Wright saw Layne use drugs. Layne was known to be a fan of the band Tool. The studio version of the Tool song “Intolerance” begins with a similar sound, which some have speculated to be a bong hit. Whether Layne meant the opening of “God Am” to be an homage to that, Wright doesn’t know.8

For Sam Hofstedt’s birthday, some of the studio employees went to an erotic bakery and bought him a cake shaped like a naked woman. After eating a few pieces, Hofstedt left the cake out in the lounge for anyone to eat. “I swear to God, it was in there for like a month, and it looked the same as it did a month later. There was a couple of pieces cut out of it after the first day or two, and then it just sat there.”

While this was going on, Layne was working on “Nothin’ Song.” Hofstedt had the impression Layne was tired of writing lyrics and was saying whatever came off the top of his head. One of the lyrics in the song was, “Back inside, Sam, throw away your cake.” Wright agreed with Hofstedt’s assessment. “He was probably pretty tapped out by that point. He was probably just picking stuff out and making it work.”