Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Champagne went to a club with the band members one night. As they were about to leave, Champagne saw Layne go in the bathroom, light a paper towel on fire, and throw it in the garbage can. “He’s like, ‘Run!’” Champagne recalled. “I’m like, ‘Oh, shit.’” They left and piled into Layne’s car, a station wagon Champagne thinks he borrowed from his mother. “It seems like everywhere that we went, we were running for our lives to get out of there.”

A frequent hangout for all of them was the Vogue. One night the bathrooms were so full, women were using the men’s room. At that point, either Layne or Jerry decided it would be easier to go outside. He was in the parking lot urinating when a woman sitting in the car behind where he was standing turned the lights on. Layne or Jerry, whoever it was, turned around and peed on the hood of the car. The woman was furious and started yelling. She followed him inside, still screaming. At that point, everyone bolted out of the club. Layne went into getaway-driver mode, got the station wagon, and drove up and down the street picking people up. “We are literally diving into the car, because people are chasing us. It was that bad. I swear to God. It happened almost every time we went there … some crazy shit,” Champagne said. It got bad enough that he started going to the Vogue by himself.

Champagne stopped by the band house once. His reaction was “Holy shit.” He remembers one girl going downstairs with Mike to have sex. After she had left, another girl came over and went downstairs with Mike. Champagne got the impression that Demri didn’t like that Mike was such a womanizer, because she thought he might be a bad influence on Layne. Jerden and Champagne said Layne was not using heroin at the time. However, they heard unconfirmed rumors at the time that Demri was using. People who knew Demri well do not know when or how her heroin use started.

The sessions at London Bridge wrapped up in December 1989. Jamie Elmer vividly remembers Christmas of that year, although it might have been 1990 or 1991. “Layne and Demri came over to where my mom was living, and my sister and I were there. And they had actually bought Christmas presents, because it was the first time Layne had money to buy Christmas presents.”

The band, Jerden, and Champagne relocated to Los Angeles after the holidays to finish the album, mainly vocals and guitar overdubs. “They had just rebuilt Capitol Records Studio A, and I was the first client in there, and my wife managed the studio.”

Bryan Carlstrom was an assistant working at Capitol Records, floating between three different projects at the time, one of them being Facelift. Carlstrom had not heard of the band before they came to the studio. Because he was hearing only bits and pieces of the record, he hadn’t really formed much of an opinion on the band. Outside the studio, Carlstrom hung out and smoked pot with Layne. Carlstrom’s impression at the time: “Kind of a Birkenstock kind of hippyish kid, really skinny, pretty innocent kid, to tell you the truth. He looked really young, really childlike, aside from I think he had a goatee, a goatee with a couple of beads in it or something, very childlike.”

Champagne described the remodeled Studio A as “a million-dollar coffin,” meaning that if you went into the middle of the room—which was about the size of a gymnasium—and spoke, “you could see your words stop in the air like a cartoon word bubble.” He had Layne go out in the middle of the room with only a stool to place a water bottle, an ashtray, and his sunglasses.

“Turn the lights down low so you can barely see me,” he told Champagne, who was in the control room. He agreed, and responded, “Okay, I got to turn down the control room lights, too, so you can just barely see me.” Champagne said Layne nailed his vocals on the first take pretty much every time. Jerry was the same. According to Jerden, “When I was doing lead vocals, I’d double them. And then any harmonies we did, which were not extensive, we’d just do maybe a third harmonic harmony, but it wasn’t that stacked vocals that came out on Dirt.”

Phil Staley came to the studio while Layne was recording his vocals. Champagne thinks there might have been an element of surprise to the visit. Layne was happy to see him. Beaming with pride after hearing his son sing, he turned to Champagne and asked, “Man, where the fuck did he learn how to do that? I just got the chills!”

The band asked Jerden where they could find a strip club. “Go to the Tropicana,” he told them, which he described as “a tourist strip bar.” Champagne went with them the first time. “I started half of that mayhem,” he said. “The first night that we went there, Mike was goofing around with this one stripper, and he paid her to walk up to me, grab the back of my head, and shove it—she had massive breasts—shove my face and rubbed it, and she had the worst perfume I’ve ever smelled, and it was all over me.”