Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

When Jerden visited them at the Oakwood Apartments complex where they were staying, he saw they had a Tropicana calendar, featuring pictures of the girls. They put an X over each girl they had slept with. During the recording sessions, the band played a show at a club called English Acid. A lot of Tropicana girls showed up at the gig.

In mid-March 1990, Alice in Chains took a short break from the recording sessions for Facelift in Los Angeles and returned to Seattle. Shortly after, the local music scene would be rocked by a tragic loss.

Chapter 10

1990—one of two roads.

ANDREW WOOD

MOTHER LOVE BONE front man Andrew Wood—dubbed by Experience Music Project’s senior curator, Jacob McMurray, “the Freddie Mercury of Seattle” for his charismatic, goofy personality—had been quietly struggling with a heroin addiction since the mid-1980s. According to music journalist Jeff Gilbert, Wood’s heroin addiction was a secret held “in closed circles” by the people close to the Mother Love Bone camp, especially in comparison to Layne’s and Kurt Cobain’s addictions a few years later, which were public knowledge. “People knew, but it was something you didn’t go around talking about.”

Wood had had drug and alcohol problems for years. In a handwritten piece of paper dated from 1989 that Wood called a “Drugalog outline,” which his family shared with filmmaker Scot Barbour for the documentary Malfunkshun: The Andrew Wood Story, he chronicled his nearly lifelong progression through drugs and alcohol. He started using heroin in 1985 or 1986. He moved to Seattle, moving back in with his father after getting hepatitis from dirty needles. According to The Seattle Times, “His body turned yellow and his liver was shot.”1

During a December 1986 interview with The Rocket, Wood said he and his Malfunkshun bandmates had quit drugs “a few months ago,” and specifically stressed to the interviewer, Dawn Anderson, that it was okay to print that. Their song “With Yo’ Heart (Not Yo’ Hands)” is about heroin and hepatitis.2

Friends staged an intervention around Thanksgiving of 1989, after which Wood checked himself in to Valley General Hospital in Monroe, Washington. It is likely during this treatment that Wood prepared his Drugalog. The final entry in the document reads, “1990—one of two roads.” While there, he told his fiancée, Xana La Fuente, that if he ever had to make a choice between his music career or his sobriety, he’d choose the latter.3

Mother Love Bone played a show at the Central Tavern in Seattle on March 9, 1990. This was Andrew Wood’s final public performance. He had been out of rehab, was allegedly drug-free for 100 to 116 days, and had been working with a therapist and attending AA and NA meetings. On March 15, 1990—a few days before the scheduled release of Mother Love Bone’s album—Andrew Wood’s brother, Kevin, had a premonition Andrew had relapsed. He called Andrew out on it, a charge he would deny.4

The next day, he was supposed to meet with Jeff Ament to work out at a gym. Wood had been on the program to get in shape for his live performances. Wood called Ament, telling him he wasn’t feeling good. “His voice was kind of scratchy,” Ament wrote. “Looking back on it, he was high, but at the time I didn’t notice that. He sounded sick; no big deal.”5

Wood was supposed to meet with his tour chaperone that night, whose job was to ensure that he stayed sober. He called Kelly Curtis and told him he wouldn’t be able to make it to practice and that his fiancée was going to think he had done drugs.

“Did you?” Curtis asked.

“No,” Wood responded.

Also on that same day, Mike Starr said he ran into Wood in Kelly Curtis’s basement. Wood asked him for a ride home. Mike passed it by about three blocks, after which Wood got out. When he did, Mike said he “went up to this Mexican guy when he got out.”

David Duet, the singer of Cat Butt, saw Wood copping drugs at the Denny Street house, which, as he told Mark Yarm, was inhabited by “a bunch of crazy kids … and there was a drug dealer that lived there … I used to spend the night over there sometimes. I would wake up and there would be a cast of characters there. Multiple people moved in and out of that place. They had parties, and bands played in the basement.” David added, “I saw him that day. It was devastating ’cause it’s one of those people you did not expect.”6