Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Rolling Stone put Layne on the cover by himself. The photo shows a bearded Layne looking directly at the camera, with his sunglasses mounted high on his brow near the hairline. The caption on the left side read, “The Needle & the Damage Done: Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley,” a reference to Neil Young’s song of the same name about heroin.

Layne and Demri were shopping in a Seattle grocery store when they saw the issue on the stands. “Layne nearly collapsed” after seeing it, Kathleen Austin said. Demri told Austin that Layne had made a point of telling Rolling Stone, “This needs to be about the band, not about me.” According to Austin, Layne was promised by the magazine that the article would be about the entire band, not just him. “When he saw this, ‘The Needle & the Damage Done’ on the cover of Rolling Stone, his knees buckled, not for himself but for his family and his sister, the people that loved him. This really hurt him.”

The other thing that hurt him, Austin said, was the feeling he was being singled out as the addict in Alice in Chains, while his bandmates had their own issues. “They were all fucked up on something—every single one of them.”

Needless to say, the band and Susan were not happy about it. Wiederhorn was dismayed when he saw the cover. He had nothing to do with it in terms of photo selection or the caption and doesn’t know who was responsible for those decisions. “It does to a certain extent work for the story, but it’s very tabloidish and not usually the high road that Rolling Stone takes with its editorial decisions. ‘To Hell and Back,’ which is what they used as the tagline for the piece, to me made much more sense. But clearly it was an attention grabber.” He says, “I contacted [Susan] to apologize about the headline. I wanted to let her know I had nothing to do with … any decisions that were made in the Art Department or in the Editorial Department as far as headlines, cutlines, even final edits of the piece.”

“Well, you hardly represented two of the band members. That’s not Alice in Chains,” she told him, noting that Mike was barely mentioned and Sean was quoted only a few times. Wiederhorn pointed out the article had been cut down. “I wanted to assure her that my intentions had been purely honorable. I was very dismayed that there wasn’t a full band shot. She asked me a little bit about why I chose to address what I address in the piece as far as the drugs went. I explained that you can’t deal with this band without confronting that issue; it would be just a puff piece. I had an obligation to write about what the band was motivated by, what the band was dealing with, what some of the demons were.”

Chapter 21

This is the last time we’re gonna see these guys together onstage.

SUSAN SILVER

JERRY FILMED A BRIEF cameo for Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire, in which he played a copy-store clerk inspired by the title character’s memo. “That’s how you become great, man. You hang your balls out there,” he tells Tom Cruise. The scene was shot at a Kinko’s on Sunset Boulevard in March 1996.

Alex Coletti was a producer at MTV who had been involved with the Unplugged series since its launch in 1989. Seven years later, Coletti and the network had plenty of episodes of Unplugged under their belt, and a commensurate amount of experience. Pearl Jam and Nirvana had already filmed their episodes a few years earlier, demonstrating the viability of grunge in an acoustic format. “They have the songs, they have the depth, they have the emotion where, when you strip it down, you really find something there. There was just something going on,” Coletti said. “There were other grunge bands, but the three that did it—Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Alice—they were the right three from that era. And there was just no denying that this band was going to shine, that Layne’s voice and those songs were going to shine through.”

According to Coletti, it was MTV who approached the band. The negotiations would have been handled by Rick Krim, who was the show’s talent booker. Rehearsals began in Seattle, although it wasn’t without complications. Sean told Greg Prato, “It became more apparent that unless things seriously change, we can’t go out and play to our potential—at this level. We can’t even get through a fucking week and a half without drama and scary shit going on. That’s about right when I mentally started preparing, like, ‘It’s done.’ Same thing with MTV Unplugged—they kept asking if we’d do it. Up to the moment, it was just a nail-biter. Barely any rehearsing at all, guys not showing up—the same shit. Rolled out there and everything worked.”1 Asked about Sean’s comments, Coletti said, “Clearly there was more going on behind the scenes than I was aware of.”