Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

“Nah, this is my home now,” Jerry responded. Muasau started picking him up at his house and helping him move some of his things out. As Jerry was spending more time at Muasau’s house, his sister, Cheri, would pick him up so he could see their mother. Jerry told Rolling Stone that after tensions had been brewing between him and his relatives as his mother’s health was deteriorating, he was kicked out of the house. Jerry moved out at some point before his mother’s death.15

“Me and my mom said our good-byes a while ago,” he told Muasau.

“Well, don’t you want to be there for her?”

“No, me and my mom said our good-byes already.”

On April 11, 1987, Gloria Jean Cantrell died of complications from pancreatic cancer. She was forty-three years old. According to her obituary in the Tacoma News Tribune, she was an administrative assistant for the Clover Park School District and “was active in many sports … she loved music and was a beautiful seamstress.”16 Jerry’s bandmates went to the memorial service to support him. “I felt really bad for him. I know it hit him really hard. I felt really honored that he invited us to be there as his friends, because I know it meant a lot to him and it meant a lot to us to be there and put our hands on him, let him know it was going to be okay. It was a pretty deep moment for all of us,” Nesbitt said.

About three weeks later, Jerry went to see Alice ’N Chains perform at the Tacoma Little Theatre, at what Nick Pollock thinks would have been one of the band’s final shows. After the show, Pollock went out to talk to people and to try and pick up girls by inviting them to an after party. Pollock would play the crucial role of introducing Layne and Jerry to each other later that summer.

“I met Jerry in the back. He came up and introduced himself to me. We traded numbers. He was really polite and kind and complimentary,” Pollock recalled. He described Jerry as “a very mannered, polite fella with very whitish-blond hair, all pouffed up because that’s the way we all wore our hair and stuff, glamlike. Nice guy, wearing cowboy boots, tight jeans, a long trench coat that was kind of a military type, T-shirt—dressing like everybody dressed, I think, at the time. And he was a cool guy.”

According to Nutter, the death of Jerry’s mother was the beginning of the end of Diamond Lie, because of the profound impact it had on his personality and his music.

“His grandmother died and then his mom died, and he basically went into, as anybody would, a sort of depression. He just changed [into] a completely different person after that,” Nutter explained. “What he did was, he wrote the songs, and he handed them to us on a tape, and, ‘These are the songs; learn them.’” Nutter empathized with him. “I would think if something like that happened, you’d want to be able to control something in your life.”

Jerry also had a strong sense of foresight in terms of the musical landscape. “He said what he thought the next thing would be. That’s his genius, I would say,” Nutter explained. “When he came to us, he says, ‘You know what’s going on is this band called Poison coming up, blah, blah, blah.’ That’s right before they hit it big, so we started doing that. And then right when his mother died, he said, ‘Hey, there’s this band called Guns n’ Roses. They’re coming up.’ Nobody knew of them yet, but he knew of them. He said people were wearing streetwear, like jeans and T-shirts or whatever as opposed to the glam leg-wear. We were like, ‘That’s crazy. That’s just too out there. We’re supposed to have a show, wear costumes like KISS or whatever.’

“I think it was the look. He said, ‘The singer from Guns n’ Roses sounds like a male Janis Joplin.’ And he said that he was more into the way they looked as opposed to the way they sounded, though the sound was appealing to him, too.”

Nesbitt said there was also a change in Jerry’s music. “I think when his mom died, it completely changed his songwriting. His songwriting completely went in a whole different direction. It wasn’t ‘Let’s party, have some drinks, screw girls.’ It was more reality, I guess you could say. It changed. And that’s when his whole look and everything changed.”

Diamond Lie did at least one show with Jerry after his mother’s death, shortly before his move to Seattle. According to a Ticketmaster ad in the June 1987 edition of The Rocket, Diamond Lie was on the bill for the Capital Rock-Off set to take place at St. Martin’s Pavilion in Lacey on the Fourth of July, with proceeds benefiting the Crisis Clinic of Thurston and Mason Counties. Also on the bill were Heir Apparent, Hammerhead, and Slaughter Haus 5. This would be another chance encounter that would foreshadow Jerry’s future, because his band would be competing against Russ Klatt’s, who had coined the name Alice in Chains a few months earlier.