Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Cornell remembered being in the crowded living room, with La Fuente telling everybody, “This is just like La Bamba,” the 1987 Ritchie Valens biopic. At that moment, he heard “slapping footsteps growing louder and louder as they reached the front door and Layne flew in, completely breaking down and crying so deeply that he looked truly frightened and lost. Very childlike.” Cornell added, “He looked up at everyone at once, and I had this sudden urge to run over and grab him and give him a big hug and tell him everything was going to be okay.

“Kelly has always had a way of making everyone feel like everything will turn out great. That the world isn’t ending. That’s why we were at his place. I wanted to be that person for Layne, maybe just because he needed it so bad. I wasn’t. I didn’t get up in front of the room and offer that and I still regret it. No one else did, either. I don’t know why.”14

Mike walked in and said, “Who wants to smoke a joint?” He immediately regretted the insensitive nature of his comment when he saw Cornell in tears looking at a photo album of Wood.15

Nick Pollock came to the wake and ran into Layne, and the two talked a bit. “I remember hanging out with Layne and how upset Layne was because he was much closer to him than I was … I remember [Layne] being upset and I’m pretty sure he was crying, and I remember becoming emotional talking to him about that situation,” Pollock recalled.

“I think I felt a certain amount of that for Andy Wood. I was not friends with him. I was an acquaintance. Layne knew him more because they had played, and I believed that he identified with that, and he felt his pain and the way he dealt with it.” Asked if Layne was distraught at the wake, Deans said he was, but noted everyone else was as well.

Mother Love Bone was thought to be on the brink of stardom. No one knows what might have been if Wood had survived. Just before his death, Mother Love Bone’s management had received a bonus check from Polygram Records. “I remember sitting with Kelly at the house and we’re looking at this check for $250,000, and he’s going, ‘Fuck, I got to send it back.’ It was the signing bonus for finishing the record,” Ken Deans explained. “The check came on Friday and Andy died on [Monday], so it hadn’t been deposited yet.” Mother Love Bone broke up, but bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard stuck together and started the band that would become Pearl Jam. In retrospect, Wood’s death was not an isolated incident but a foretaste of things to come.

“Andy was that sort of big precursor to all of those later worries about heroin and drug addiction. He was the first major blow that had happened, that sort of realization that there is a dark side to all of this,” Jacob McMurray explained.

“Andy dying was a huge blow. And unfortunately, it wasn’t a wake-up call,” Deans lamented. “And a funny thing—at that time, nobody was, other than some occasional binge drinking or some cocaine here and there, nobody was out of control.”

“It’s difficult to articulate it, but up to that point, I think life was really good for us as just a group of musicians in a scene making music,” Cornell said during an interview for the Pearl Jam Twenty documentary. “You know, the world was sort of our oyster, and we had support, we supported each other, and he was kind of like this beam of light sort of above it all. And to see him hooked up to machines, that was, I think, the death of the innocence of the scene. It wasn’t later when people surmised that Kurt [Cobain] blowing his head off was the end of the innocence. It was that. It was walking into that room.”16

In death, Wood proved to be as influential as in life, if not more so. His loss inspired Cornell to write “Reach Down” and “Say Hello 2 Heaven,” songs that eventually led to Temple of the Dog. Candlebox’s “Far Behind” was also a tribute to Wood.17 Alice in Chains would dedicate Facelift to his memory and that of Gloria Jean Cantrell. In time, they would pay their own musical tribute to Wood as well.

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Not long after finishing Facelift, Jerden offered Bryan Carlstrom a job as his engineer. Carlstrom happily accepted, even though it meant taking a pay cut. “It was like, ‘Wow, it’s going to be like the Wild West. I’m going to be working with a guy who works on the records that I like.’ He’s probably my favorite producer at that time. It was an amazing opportunity to go work with him and get that kind of experience and those kinds of credits engineering,” Carlstrom said. He would play a key role in the recording sessions for Dirt.