Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Things didn’t always go according to plan. During one performance, Muasau and Jerry were doing the KISS move where everyone is swaying back and forth in synch with one another. Jerry and Muasau got out of rhythm, and eventually each wound up doing the opposite of the other while about two feet apart. Muasau felt the headstock of his bass hit something solid, a feeling he compared to hitting a baseball.

It was Jerry’s head he’d hit, giving him a cut right above his eyebrow, which began to bleed. According to Muasau, “The crowd was like, ‘Yeah, go on, man, kill yourself for us!’” Someone put a bandage on the cut and stopped the bleeding, and Jerry was able to finish the set.

At another gig, the band was told there would be pyro. Before the set, they were told to pay attention to the markers placed on the stage, noting that Nutter, Muasau, and Jerry had to be standing on those markers at specific times in the show. During the start of the performance, the pyro went off, but Muasau wasn’t on his marker.

“The crowd was just … their eyes got really big, and I went, ‘Wow, what did I do?’ Then all of a sudden, all these sparks started falling all around me like snow. I had enough hair spray in my hair, and I had enough hair back then to where I would have exploded,” Muasau said. He, however, avoided disaster, where others—Michael Jackson and Metallica’s James Hetfield—suffered severe burns and had to be hospitalized.

Diamond Lie would typically practice five nights a week, with rehearsals lasting as long as three hours. They started playing shows in Tacoma and Seattle with the ultimate goal of getting a record deal. They got to the point where they were playing weekly gigs. At some time during this period, they became friends with a guy named Steve Frost, who would regularly come to their rehearsals. Frost had recently received money from an inheritance, and he gave Diamond Lie two thousand dollars to record a demo.

The band went into London Bridge Studios and recorded a four-song demo. “It came out really great. I was excited by it. We had the guitar player from a band called Perennial, Schuyler Duryee came out, and he kind of produced it for us, along with Rick and Raj Parashar,” Nesbitt recalled. “Perennial was a big deal. They had a song on [Seattle radio station KISW] that was in the [station’s] top ten. That was really probably my very first experience at being in a recording studio.”

Jerry was already thinking of public relations. “When I was hanging out with him, he was a charismatic person, and people are pretty naturally attracted to talk with him and hang out with him, and he knows what he’s doing,” Nesbitt recalled. “I never thought in a million years I would walk through Tacoma Mall wearing spandex with holes cut in my ass passing out cassette tapes and flyers and not getting my ass beat in. That’s exactly what we ended up doing. We walked through there. He just said, ‘Be confident; do what I do,’ and I did. I’m talking with full makeup and hair stacked three miles high.”

Muasau recalls a show where he was wearing a black leather outfit and Jerry was wearing a very tight white leather outfit. “Golly, man, aren’t you uncomfortable in that? It’s hot,” he asked. “Yeah, but I look good in this,” was Jerry’s response. That was when he knew Jerry was going to make it and be successful as a musician.

Nesbitt and Nutter both described Jerry as extremely close to his mother, and they recall her being very encouraging of him. “Just a cool mom. Really supportive of what Jerry wanted to do,” Nutter said.

“I remember his mom, and I know that he wanted to show his mom that he could do this. He was really adamant. I remember him one day telling her, ‘I’m going to become the best songwriter, and the best this and that, and you’re going to see it happen,’” Nesbitt recalled. “She was a really nice person, and she seemed to kind of light up around him.”

By the time he turned twenty-one, Jerry had been hit by two family tragedies within six months of each other. First, his grandmother, Dorothy Krumpos, a retired secretary and lifelong resident of the Tacoma and Eatonville area, died of cancer on October 9, 1986. Not long after her death, his mother said she had six months to live after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. “She and my grandmother both spent most of their time in the house in the medical bed doped up on morphine and wasting away daily,” Jerry said of this painful period. He coped with the situation by playing guitar ten to twelve hours a night.14

According to Nesbitt, Jerry kept his personal family turmoil to himself. “I found out she was sick right before she passed away.” This description is consistent with what Matt Muasau recalls. Jerry started coming over to his house regularly, where they would hang out and write music. Eventually, Muasau asked him, “Hey, man, don’t you got to go home?”