Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

“I knew that it was the phone call I had thought about getting for years,” Jamie said. She called her mother back, who calmly told her, “Layne’s passed away.” Jamie flew up to Seattle the next day. “We were all obviously just incredibly sad and heartbroken, but also relieved. Because I think we all knew that Layne was suffering so much, to see him physically so sick and just not well. I would say that most of us all felt some relief, for sure, to know that he wasn’t suffering anymore,” Jamie recalled.

The consistent reaction to Layne’s death from friends and family was that although tragic, the outcome was not surprising. “When somebody’s in that position for years and years, you know what the end result is, so that was not a surprise. Was it still a shock? Of course it was, but it was something that you would expect,” Jim Elmer said.

Ken Elmer was at home when he got the call from Jim. “Dad called fairly quickly after it happened. I don’t think he wanted me to see it on the news. He was in shock, but it was one of those ‘We knew this day was coming’ type of shocks,” Ken said. He had not seen Layne since the late 1980s or early 1990s and was blown away. “Over the next twenty-four hours, it was, ‘What could I have done? What could we all have done?’”

“I loved him and will always love him,” Susan told Charles R. Cross. “He was like a brother to me. He was this little broken but gentle spirit. We did everything we could think of to help him choose life, but sadly the disease won instead.” Jerry and Sean told Cross they hadn’t spoken with Layne for at least two years.1

Mike Inez had just returned to his home in Big Bear Lake, California, from his former Ozzy Osbourne bandmate Randy Castillo’s funeral in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He got a phone call from Sean telling him Layne was dead. Mike was in disbelief.

“Are you sitting down? Layne’s gone.”

“Oh, my God, you’re kidding.”2

Johnny Bacolas got a call from Nancy Layne McCallum or Jim Elmer and spoke to both of them. “It’s going to be on the news very soon. Layne’s gone; he passed away,” he was told. Bacolas turned on his TV, and within twenty minutes it was breaking news.

James Bergstrom was driving across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge when he found out. He thinks he heard it on the radio or got a call from Johnny Bacolas. “It hurt deep, because that’s part of your childhood,” Bergstrom said. “We all knew the direction his life was headed. We’d pray for him, but still, when you hear that news, things go into reflection instantaneously. My mind just relapsed. I just remember for a long while that I just listened to his music, and that voice, every time I hear it my eyes well up, and tears would come out for a long time. They still do.”

Someone tried to contact Nick Pollock at his mother’s house. This person told his mother what happened, and she immediately got in touch with her son before he found out through the media. “I was devastated by that news and was not in a good state upon hearing the news. Probably for a number of hours I was extremely distraught. And so it was good to hear it from her. It was good to hear it from my mom instead of getting it from the news, because I don’t want to fall apart when I’m at work or school or whatever I was doing at the time,” Pollock said.

Toby Wright and his wife were halfway to the Burbank Airport, en route to Seattle to record Layne’s vocals. He got a call from Susan saying Layne had passed away. They all cried. Wright told her he was already on his way, and she told him to come for the memorial service. “Spacey”—the song Layne was supposed to sing vocals for—did not make the cut for Welcome or any subsequent Taproot release, although the band has performed it live in its original instrumental form.3

Dave Jerden heard about Layne’s death on the news and started getting phone calls and e-mails. “I was crushed, of course—I still am. I felt terrible. All I heard about was in the news. It was just a really sad thing. The world lost a major talent. That’s what heroin does. That’s the reason I hate drug dealers—[Layne’s dealer] who came in and told me to change the mix. He didn’t get that mix changed, but he changed Layne, that fucker. That guy should die.”

Randy Biro was in a San Diego–area prison watching the news when a story was read, with words to the effect of “Rock star dies of heroin overdose,” without identifying Layne. Biro’s initial reaction was “Oh God, no. Please don’t let it be him.”

“When they came back and they said it was him, I almost passed out. It was probably one of the saddest moments of my life, just looking back at it right now. I remember where I was sitting,” Biro recalled. “I knew he had been dead for a while, but at the time, I’m sitting in prison. You can’t cry over it or anything. So I never got to let it go, never had the opportunity.”