Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

After making formal introductions, Saunders admitted it was his music. They discovered they both had common ties to the same general area on the north side of Chicago and several common interests. At the time, Gallagher had left his law firm to work from home while raising his firstborn daughter, Rachel, so his wife could continue her career as a scientist. Saunders and Gallagher began spending a lot of time together. “He was just a really sweet guy, just a really nice guy,” is how Gallagher described him. “Kind of introverted, a … very sensitive person, very intelligent, and a great sense of humor, really funny, really sarcastic, very dry sense of humor, and loved to laugh.” Gallagher and Saunders would often take Rachel to the beach. Baker would occasionally go to Gallagher’s house and would “eat a jar of candy in about ten minutes, and then leave.”

When Saunders told him about his background and the different bands he had played with, Gallagher didn’t have a clue who any of them were. “I think he liked the fact that I wasn’t a fan or that I wasn’t really very familiar with his work,” Gallagher said. Occasionally, he would be over at Saunders’s home and ask him to play, and he would improvise something. Gallagher didn’t listen to Above until about a year after he met Saunders.

Although Gallagher wasn’t privy to all the details of Saunders’s personal life, he did know he would hang out with musician friends in Seattle. Saunders mentioned visiting Layne, although these visits may have taken place before he met Gallagher. He would jokingly tell Gallagher that he was proud of his self-control and willingness to stay sober despite being around drugs at Layne’s home. “There’s a big pile of heroin sitting right in front of me and I didn’t even try and steal it,” he told Gallagher. Gallagher added, “That’s how well he thought he was doing in rehab that he could just … It could be sitting right in front of him, and he wouldn’t use it.”

Eventually, Layne stopped answering the door and wouldn’t let Saunders in. He was worried about Layne, Gallagher said, but at the same time would respect people’s privacy. “If that was Layne’s position and what he wanted to do, I think he would just say, ‘Hey, that’s his decision,’ and just respect it.”

After the success of Above, Saunders had some money and was eager to continue working on Mad Season. When it came time to do a follow-up album in 1996, Saunders, McCready, and Martin wrote and recorded instrumental tracks for seventeen songs. The idea was to continue what they had done on the first album, but there was a significant problem: Layne and Mark Lanegan never showed up to the studio. According to Krisha Augerot, “I think he [Layne] was pretty much MIA at that point. During the second Mad Season album, Layne couldn’t even come in and sing, he was so fucked up.”

McCready’s initial plan was to have Lanegan take over as singer and rename the band Disinformation, but, according to Martin, Lanegan never showed up.1 With Mad Season in suspended animation, Saunders began to feel a strain on his finances. According to his brother, he had received a $50,000 advance for the second Mad Season album but, because it was never finished, the label began withholding his royalties from Above to recover the advance money.

Saunders eventually joined the Seattle band the Walkabouts. In 1997, the Walkabouts did two European tours. The band was performing at a festival in Belgium in September, where a Belgian graduate student named Kim De Baere was in the audience. The two met and hit it off, and she traveled with him for about a week on that tour, which led to a long-distance relationship.

A few months later, Saunders invited her to visit him in Seattle for two weeks during the Christmas holidays, after which she had to go back to school. He visited her in the spring of 1998, and, after finishing her exams, she visited him in Seattle from June until nearly October—the maximum length of time she could stay on a tourist visa. She still had to write her dissertation, so she went back to Belgium and made arrangements to get a student visa that would allow her to stay in the country longer; she returned in November. He took her to Chicago, where his mother lived. He took her to venues he had performed and places where he used to buy heroin. Saunders had told her he was a recovering heroin addict, and De Baere never saw him use any. However, around Christmas, she made him quit the pills he was taking. She doesn’t know what they were but said he went through withdrawals. She also said he had been fired from the Walkabouts but did not know why.