Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

A lunch was arranged with Susan at the China Grill restaurant in New York City to discuss the story and lay out ground rules. Representing Rolling Stone were Wiederhorn, Mohrer, and Sid Holt, the managing editor. The lunch meeting gave Susan an opportunity to raise her concerns and ask any questions about the story. Most of the conversation focused on logistics—when and where the band members would be available for interviews while Wiederhorn was in Seattle. “It was kind of making sure we would have enough material to write a full-fledged cover story, and it wasn’t going to be an hour and a half in a conference room,” Wiederhorn said. One factor working in Wiederhorn’s favor was that the band had read and liked his review of Alice in Chains. He flew to Seattle in late November or early December, where he spent three days getting material for the story.

“One day it was sort of the ‘get to know you’ day, and we wanted to do something kind of quirky,” Wiederhorn recalled. Sean suggested playing Whirlyball—a game that combines elements of basketball, bumper cars, and lacrosse. Wiederhorn and the band went to an Italian restaurant after the game for the first formal Q&A. Wiederhorn noticed when Layne came back from the bathroom, he had not put his gloves back on, exposing “red, round puncture marks from the wrist to the knuckles of his left hand.”12

Wiederhorn spent several hours interviewing the band members as a group and individually. Sean drove Wiederhorn to Jerry’s house outside Seattle for their one-on-one interview. Along the way, Wiederhorn and Sean smoked a joint. Sean was open about the tensions that led to the withdrawal from the Metallica tour and the breakup in the summer of 1994. “Sean struck me as a guy who was sticking up for his bandmates. If I asked him any questions—I did ask him questions about the inability to tour or the frustrations of dealing with chemical dependencies or whatnot—he said, ‘Hey, none of us are perfect. None of us were free from blame in any of those departments,’” Wiederhorn said. “It was clear why they couldn’t tour, but they didn’t talk about it in specific terms and didn’t express any resentments toward Layne.”

Wiederhorn asked Layne about his heroin addiction, which he wouldn’t acknowledge was still a problem. Layne gave a candid assessment of his drug use: “I wrote about drugs, and I didn’t think I was being unsafe or careless by writing about them. Here’s how my thinking pattern went: When I tried drugs, they were fucking great, and they worked for me for years, and now they’re turning against me—and now I’m walking through hell, and this sucks. I didn’t want my fans to think that heroin was cool. But then I’ve had fans come up to me and give me the thumbs-up, telling me they’re high. That’s exactly what I didn’t want to happen.”13

Wiederhorn worked on the story over Christmas break. Rolling Stone sent a photographer to shoot the band. In the days and weeks after his trip to Seattle, Wiederhorn repeatedly contacted the band’s management and record label to set up a phone call with Layne to ask a few follow-up questions. Both management and the record label repeatedly assured Wiederhorn that Layne would call him, but it seemed the call would never come.

Wiederhorn was in bed when the phone rang at three or four o’clock in the morning. Wiederhorn groggily reached over and picked up. A familiar voice spoke. “Hey, this is Layne.” Then, possibly realizing the three-hour time difference between Seattle and New York, he asked, “Oh, did I wake you?”

“Um … yeah. It’s four in the morning,” Wiederhorn responded.

“Oh, that’s cool, man. Let’s just do it tomorrow. Go back to sleep. I’m getting ready to do what you were doing anyway.”

Wiederhorn doubted that. He had Layne on the phone and wanted to finish the interview. “No, no, let’s just finish this up now. It’s cool.”

“No, no, it’s fine, man. I’m so sorry I woke you up. Really, I’ll call you tomorrow,” Layne said, and hung up the phone. Wiederhorn never heard from him again.

“I’m sure he had been hounded on his end to make that phone call,” Wiederhorn said. “I don’t know if he made it solely, intentionally figuring I wouldn’t be able to do an interview at that time and that was his out, or he didn’t have any concept of what time it was and just saw a note perhaps on his desk to make the call and just started the phone call with me.”

The magazine hit newsstands in late January or early February 1996. Aside from the mentioning of the puncture marks on Layne’s hand, there wasn’t anything particularly controversial about the article. The magazine cover was a different matter.