Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

“Hey, Layne wants to see you,” Shuss told Biro at the party.

“Great, where is he?”

“He’s right behind you.”

Biro turned around. “I’m looking past this really skinny, fucked-up-looking guy trying to see where Layne is, and it was Layne. I felt really awkward.

“He had a baseball cap on. He had glasses down to the end of his nose, and not very many teeth. It shocked me at first. It looked like death. It was gross.” Jim Elmer doesn’t know exactly when Layne’s tooth loss started but thinks it was around 1995 or 1996 and said it was a gradual process.

Layne invited Biro to check out his condo, which was around the corner from the bar. He described Layne as being very proud about his home. Layne had a massive rear-projection TV. “The fucking thing was huge. I’d never seen a TV that big. He had gotten it through the label some way, and all he did was sit there and get high and play video games all day.”

Biro, who was clean, asked, “Wow, have you got anything?”—referring to drugs.

“Yeah, but I’m not gonna give it to you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re clean. I’m not gonna be part of this. If you need to go do that, you do it somewhere else. I don’t want to be part of it. I don’t want you to end up like me again.” That was the last time Biro saw him.

*   *   *

With Alice in Chains on hiatus, Jerry called Toby Wright. “He was compiling songs for a while, and then he just called me up and asked if I would help out with a solo record, which I gladly did,” Wright said.

Jerry tapped Sean to play drums and a series of guest musicians to record parts, including Mike Inez, Fishbone’s Norwood Fisher, Pantera’s Rex Brown, and Primus’s Les Claypool.8 Three of the four members of Alice in Chains were appearing on this album, with the exception of Layne. “At that point, they weren’t really speaking for whatever reason. There was some kind of something going on. I don’t know the cause of it or why,” was Wright’s explanation for whether Jerry tried to get Layne onboard. Wright said there was more pressure on Jerry because, in addition to being the main songwriter and guitarist, he had to sing.

The album was titled Boggy Depot—a reference to the area of Oklahoma where Jerry’s father grew up. Rocky Schenck, Mary Mauer, and a crew traveled to Atoka, Oklahoma, on September 7, 1997, to shoot photos for the album. “Great trip, although all of us almost got arrested for smuggling liquor into a local restaurant in a dry county,” Schenck wrote. The cover shows Jerry covered in mud standing waist-deep in a branch of the Boggy River. Jerry made several trips to Oklahoma as he was writing the album and would drive his truck to the edge of the river at the location where the cover was shot.9

Jerry sent Rex Brown a tape with eleven songs he wanted him to play on. Brown agreed to do it, seeing it as an opportunity to expand his horizons and also to get away from some of the issues in Pantera. He went to Sausalito, California, to record his parts. According to Brown’s memoir, he was butting heads with Toby Wright during the making of the album. He also noted Jerry was dealing with his own addiction. He wrote, “Let’s just say I would go past his place from time to time and see his dog chained up with no food in the bowl for three fucking days, and that indicated to me that maybe something was seriously wrong.”10

By the time the album was finished, Wright said, “A lot of anxiety was pent up during the recording, about its outcome, its success rate, expectations, all that kind of stuff. And I think once it was done, mixed, [Jerry] approved everything, I think it was a great relief to him.” The album, originally scheduled for an October 1997 release, was delayed to the following spring.11

Boggy Depot was released April 7, 1998, reaching number 28 on the Billboard chart its first week.12 After the album’s release, Jerry made it clear that Alice in Chains was his priority, but would not give a definitive answer on the status of the band at the time. “It’s something I never really wanted to do, but the way things have played out, it’s like, why not?” he told Guitar World of his decision to do a solo album. “To be honest, I’d just be happy being the lead guitarist and singer for Alice in Chains. It’s always been my first love, and always will be, but the situation being what it is … we’ve been together for a long time, and right now it’s kinda played out. It’s time to let it be.” Asked if the band had broken up, he said, “We haven’t gone public and said that we’ve broken up, because how do you call something like that over? You never want to shut that door. I love those guys, and hopefully we’ll be able to do something again, but it won’t be for a while.” He declined to answer questions about Layne’s health.13