Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

“I’m just thinking about all the good stuff, and there was a lot of it. We created some really amazing music together. That will always continue to live. We’re in the process of playing that, and still living that. That part is always alive, and Mike was a big part of that. We were a bunch of rat kids, man. We kind of bonded together; we lived under a wharf at the Music Bank. We ran keys—Layne and I ran keys for TV dinners. Mike and Sean and I, we’d go to 7-Elevens at four o’clock in the morning to get the old dried-up food to eat. We relied on each other and we were a family. Gayle gave us a place to live, and we lived in that house for a long time. John lived with us for a while. Mel was part of the family. He was a good man. He had a good soul. He had a big heart. I heard a very good friend of mine, who’s not here anymore, say that the best that we can hope for is to be human, and Mike most certainly was that. He was my friend. I love him and I’ll miss him.”22

Chapter 29

There’s a history not to be forgotten, and there’s a history about to be made.

SUSAN SILVER

BECAUSE LAYNE DIED WITHOUT a will, was not married, and had no children, his biological parents had to go to court to be named coadministrators of his estate. According to a court document, Layne’s assets were valued “in the approximate amount of over $500,000” and his liabilities at “less than $100,000.”1 There are no publicly available estimates for the current value of the estate twelve years after Layne’s death.

The process of going through Layne’s apartment and taking inventory of his personal effects was not easy. Because of health concerns surrounding the drug paraphernalia found in the apartment and Layne’s hepatitis C diagnosis, a special cleaning crew was hired to sanitize the entire apartment so they could start packing up Layne’s things.

Mike Korjenek, an employee at a waterproofing company that had previously done work in Layne’s building, was hired to do some work in Layne’s apartment less than a week after his death. When Korjenek and his colleague walked into the apartment—knowing the identity of the previous owner—they noticed the carpeting had been changed and all the furniture had been removed.

“It was pretty much empty, and it looked like there had been some work done already on the interior,” Korjenek recalled. As he was working, the apartment was already being shown to potential buyers. “One of the realtors, a woman realtor, turned to me and in so many words she said, ‘Don’t mention anything about that rock star dying here.’”

After his death, it was discovered that Layne had several storage units broken into, with personal effects missing or stolen. Among the items taken and later recovered: Layne’s artwork, which the estate found itself in the frustrating position of having to buy back from someone who thought “Layne would want them to have it”; his Harley Davidson motorcycle, which was driven for fifty miles on two flat tires and displayed in someone’s living room; and items from his car, which was also extensively vandalized. After hearing of his death, the Lynnwood Police Department contacted their Seattle counterparts to inform them they had Layne’s MTV Video Music Award in their evidence room. Also taken but not yet recovered as of this writing were Layne’s journals.2

Susan later said, “I had been through an incident in 2002 with another client who had been a very serious drug addict who had a lot of his belongings in different storage lockers that were broken into. And at one point, a box of his belongings made its way to the hands of some guy that tried to extort $50,000 for himself and his bandmates for this box of belongings, and that was a terrible feeling.”3

Some of the items might be missing for reasons other than theft. Layne was very generous, according to multiple sources. An example: several years earlier, he had given Ron Holt handwritten lyrics and artwork, items that Holt has since lost. There is a market for Layne Staley memorabilia, and it is potentially very lucrative. According to Darren Julien, president and CEO of Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills, the lyrics and art could be worth several thousand dollars each. Depending on their content, his journals could be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Layne’s original artwork for the cover of Above, along with the corresponding handwritten letters from Layne to the record label, sold at Christie’s for more than ten thousand dollars.4

*   *   *