Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

“He walks over to my car, and he had the bottom of a can, and obviously had been cooking heroin in it there in that little indentation of the building, and he didn’t recognize me. He didn’t even know that he was standing in front of the studio that he had once been recording a record at. He didn’t even know where he was. It was a sad time.”

Mike, for whatever reason, still held a grudge against Randy Biro. A few years after his dismissal from the band, when both of them were living in Los Angeles, Mike called him. In that conversation, Biro said, Mike was “yelling and screaming, fucking high as a kite, blaming me for him being kicked out of the band. He said I manipulated everybody into doing that … I didn’t have that much power. That was insane.”

According to Aaron Woodruff, the only member of Alice in Chains Mike kept in touch with after his dismissal was Layne. He had a difficult time adjusting to life after Alice in Chains. Besides his escalating drug addiction, people who knew Mike generally tend to agree he never got over not being in the band. He would introduce himself as Mike Starr from Alice in Chains, even though he had been out of the band for years.

Mike was hired to play bass for Sun Red Sun, the new band started by the former singer of Black Sabbath, Ray Gillen. Jason Buttino said he was “almost one hundred percent sure” that gig was set up for him by Susan. Besides personnel issues within the band, Gillen had developed AIDS and was unable to finish recording his vocals. He died on December 3, 1993. He was thirty-two years old.1

Mike checked in to the Lakeside-Milam Recovery Center in Kirkland, Washington, where he met another patient named Jason Buttino while they were roommates going through detox. Buttino had no idea who Mike was and didn’t figure it out until he started hearing rumors that the bassist for Alice in Chains was there. “I just thought he was another rocker dude, just like me, and just a normal person.” Mike began feeling uncomfortable with the attention and left the facility within a day of the rumors starting to circulate. Buttino hit it off with John Starr and, later on, with Mike and Gayle. Buttino and Mike began hanging out and became friends.

According to Woodruff, when Mike was sober, he was fine, a nice guy. But when he was on drugs, he became a completely different person. “[When] Mike was on pills he wasn’t himself—not real selfish but self-absorbed, and he was all about just getting high and doing whatever he did.”

On April 12, 1994, Mike was arrested for attempting to steal luggage at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston and for possession of marijuana and “possession of dangerous drugs,” identified as Valium. According to the police report, “Witnesses noticed suspect taking bags from an airport baggage area and taking items out of them, placing them into another bag, and switching baggage claim tickets on the bags.” Mike, who was high at the time, later told Woodruff the airline had lost his luggage. He told Buttino he thought he was opening his own bag. According to court records, he served ninety days in Harris County Jail.2

Mike moved in with Buttino during the mid-1990s. He wasn’t writing music at the time and was deep into heroin addiction. Buttino estimated Mike was using between two and five grams a day, spending an average of about five hundred dollars a day. Mike was aware he made a mistake trying it in the first place. One time, after Mike and Buttino had gotten heroin, Mike shot up and nodded off. Buttino was about to shoot up when Mike came to, took the syringe out of his hand, and squirted it on the ground. He started crying and told Buttino, “You’ll never do heroin. I’m never going to let you do it. I wish I never started it. I wish I’d never touched it.”

At some point during this period, Mike mentioned an interest in writing a book telling his story, a coffee table–style book that would be titled Unchained. In July 1998, Mike met John Brandon, a journalist with local television and print experience. After the release of the Music Bank box set in 1999, Mike asked Brandon to help him produce a music video for “Fear the Voices” using material from Mike’s private collection of twenty-five videotapes he made while in the band. The video was sent to the band, their management, and their record label but never saw the light of day. While working on the video, Mike asked Brandon if he would write the book. For the project, Brandon interviewed Mike, his family, and a few of his friends.

Published in 2001, Unchained: The Story of Mike Starr and His Rise and Fall in Alice in Chains has several inaccuracies in the text. There are two in particular that deserve correction.