Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

His response was good enough for Layne, and Hauser became their manager. “That was honestly the only thing I could think of to say, which is probably what I would have had to do,” Hauser recalled. He acknowledged he didn’t know what he was doing—in his words, he was “feeling my way out”—and the idea might have been naive in retrospect. At the time, Hauser said the band was two months behind on rent for their rehearsal room and about to get kicked out. Hauser picked up the seven hundred dollars in back rent. (David Ballenger said Hauser never paid him but acknowledges it is possible Hauser paid one of his employees.)

The first thing Hauser did as their manager was call Nick Loft in Los Angeles, telling him he had found the band. Loft returned to Seattle, went to the Music Bank to meet the band, and saw them perform. Loft went back to Los Angeles to rave about the band he had discovered. On his next visit, according to Hauser, Loft wanted to sign the band but couldn’t, because he had already signed two other bands. Hauser decided to reach out to two figures from the local music scene with experience and connections in management and the music industry.

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Kelly Curtis was a veteran of the Seattle music scene, having dropped out of high school in the 1970s to work as a roadie for Heart.9 By the mid-1980s, he and his business partner Ken Deans had been working as managers and promoters for several years. Their partnership began after both had moved to Los Angeles in 1984 and started managing a band named Maurice and the Cliches. Deans moved back to Seattle in December 1986, and Curtis followed suit the following year, moving in with Deans. The two started Mark Alan Productions—the name being a combination of both their middle names—which produced concerts and corporate events. They would eventually rent out office space to another local manager named Susan Silver, who had been a figure on the local music scene since the early 1980s.

Curtis and Deans would often go to the Grand Central Bakery for lunch. Deans knew the cashier, former Green River guitarist Stone Gossard. One day Gossard gave Deans a copy of the demo made by his new band, Mother Love Bone, which Deans described as “terribly recorded, but [having] some really great songs.” He liked it enough to take it to Curtis, and he tried to convince him they should go back to managing, an idea Curtis was initially against.

They split the company, with Curtis managing the band and Deans producing concerts. At some point during the spring or summer of 1988, Randy Hauser walked in with a proposition. “Hey, I’ve heard about you guys. I’ve got a band that I’m working with that I want you to check out,” he told Deans. The two of them went out to lunch to discuss it. “He starts talking about it, and Randy really wanted to do something, and I think he saw this as an opportunity to maybe change his life,” Deans recalled. It was his impression this band was more than just a business opportunity for Hauser. “He truly believed in the band. It wasn’t just that he thought, ‘Hey, here’s some guys. Maybe I can get them a record deal and make some money and stop doing what I do and get legitimate.’ He was a fan and passionate, and he was smart enough to know that he couldn’t do it by himself because he didn’t have the connections.”

According to Hauser, Deans told him that Curtis and Susan had already passed on the band. Hauser also alleges they called the band losers. Deans has no recollection of this, but does recall Curtis referring to Jerry as the band’s biggest asset, because he was the main songwriter. Deans agreed to comanage the band with Hauser.

There are differing accounts of when and how the decision to change the band’s name came about. Ken Deans said he went to the Music Bank for a meeting. At the time, he recalled they were still undecided about whether to stick with Diamond Lie or switch to one of several possible spellings of Alice in Chains. “I remember one night Randy made up a bunch of T-shirts, and we decided that it looked cooler on T-shirts that said ‘Alice in Chains,’ and then … they decided to [use] that [name],” Deans said.

Hauser has a different recollection of how the name change came about, although he does admit that Diamond Lie T-shirts were made. According to him, when Nick Loft came back from Los Angeles, he told them, “Diamond Lie is not going to work. We’ve got to change the name.” Hauser knew what a big deal a name change was and would not have suggested it on his own. However, when the head of A&R at Atlantic Records told them to do it, they all got on board.