Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Mace guitarist Dave Hillis saw the band perform at Ballard High School. “There was probably like a hundred people, maybe more, maybe a little less. I just remember they definitely had girls, like seventy-five percent of it was girls, all glammed up,” he said. “What attracted me to hanging out with them is that’s where the girls were—even in their rehearsal studios, there would be girls. I met one of my girlfriends going to an Alice ’N Chains rehearsal.”

“They were kinda taking a lead off of Poison, before Poison made it, but we had all heard in LA, the Sunset Strip, how Poison was really doing everything they could, from flyering excessively to having gimmicks onstage, confetti. It was a very good-time party atmosphere. They were going in that direction, Sunset Strip kinda thing—plastic confetti, lights, I think maybe a water gun shooting people, any kind of little gimmick they could to make it like this big party atmosphere. The complete opposite of what they ended up being—later Alice, where they’re more brooding. I can tell you a lot of bands back then … nobody had an identity yet. Everybody was searching.”

During their shows, they would walk out to the theme from the movie The Stripper while tossing out roses to the girls in the audience. The onstage gimmicks were often their interpretations or parodies of things they had seen elsewhere. In between songs after a designated cue, a friend would come out onstage and hold up a mirror where any of the band members could primp. This was a parody of a scene in Purple Rain, where Morris Day had a member of his entourage do the same thing. Sometimes Layne would go offstage and come back on riding a Big Wheel, which had a paper sign taped to the front that read THE LAYNEMOBILE—a spoof of Judas Priest front man Rob Halford, who rode a motorcycle onstage. Lisa Ahern Rammell remembers seeing Layne do it and laughing herself “sick,” because of her memory of the Big Wheel race. The Laynemobile wound up in Tim Branom’s grandmother’s garage and was later donated to Goodwill.

Layne’s wardrobe often consisted of items borrowed from Lisa Ahern Rammell, who also provided fashion tips. “They would wear my pink and black spandex pants. I had a huge collection of belts and lace gloves and tank tops and necklaces and scarves. And I was a hairdresser, so I did their hair, taught them how to do their makeup. And they looked like Poison out there, a bunch of beautiful boys with hair out to here, and that slowly morphed into the grunge thing,” she recalled. To get a sense of how thin he was, during the period when Layne was wearing her pants, she had a twenty-four-inch waist. Chrissy Chacos lent Layne the purple outfit belonging to Prince that she had acquired in Minnesota. According to her, he wore it onstage during his last show with Sleze, but she never got it back.

According to James Bergstrom, they would have band meetings at the Denny’s in Ballard, where over breakfast they would plan their stage moves. Johnny Bacolas compared their planning to a Las Vegas production.1

Jeff Gilbert’s day job at the time was working at a silk-screen shop called Silver Screen Graphics, where he got a design for an Alice ’N Chains T-shirt, consisting of the band’s logo and a photo of the four members. “It looked like Poison’s first album cover—four guys with pouffed-up hair. They had kind of a badass logo that they just kind of wrapped around.” Gilbert made the T-shirts, which would come back to haunt Layne a few years later.

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According to David Ballenger, it was at some point in early 1987 that he began taking over the day-to-day operations of running the Music Bank from Scott Hunt. Nick Pollock had a job there, running the keys and letting people in and out of the building, but Ballenger decided to fire him after seeing him drinking on the job. Pollock said he never really had a job there, only that he helped out occasionally. Layne eventually convinced Ballenger to give him Pollock’s job, which, according to Tim Branom, paid four dollars an hour in credit toward room rent. “No money ever changed hands,” Ballenger said.

Ballenger and Layne became friends. At one point, during conversations about his biological father, Layne said to him, “I wish you were my dad.” “We had long talks about his dad, not that he didn’t care for his dad, but he thought his dad was never around for him,” Ballenger said. Layne invited him to his parents’ home, where he met the family.

“Is Layne being a good boy?” his mother asked Ballenger.

“Oh, yeah. Layne’s being a real good boy.”

After she was out of earshot, he said to Layne, “You owe me for that.”