Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

A third of the audience left during the intermission three hours into the show. Alice in Chains was supposed to perform immediately after the intermission, but according to Randy Biro, saxophonist Kenny G threw a tantrum and took that slot instead. Another third of the audience took off after his performance. According to The Seattle Times, “People kept drifting out until only a hard core remained for a short closing performance by Alice in Chains.”

“‘The sax star threw a tantrum,’ Alice lead singer Layne Staley told the crowd when the band finally took the stage,” reported Patrick MacDonald.5 Randy Biro has a different recollection: that Layne said words to the effect of “We’d like to thank you. And this one’s dedicated to Kenny G and his flesh flute.”

Mike’s friend Aaron Woodruff was stationed at U.S. Army Garrison Hohenfels in the heart of Bavaria when, shortly before Alice in Chains left for their first European tour, his mother sent him a cassette copy of Facelift—a gift from Mike. Sometime later, Woodruff’s mother called him to tell him Mike was in Europe and trying to get ahold of him. There was a desk with a phone at the entrance of the barracks. Woodruff was walking by the unattended desk one time when the phone started ringing. He picked up. It was Mike, calling from Amsterdam.

Woodruff arranged to get some time off to watch the Alice in Chains show at Nuremberg. At the time, they were opening for the Almighty and Megadeth, a tour lineup that began in March.6 “The first time I saw them, I was with them. I went backstage with them, on the bus with them, and then I went out in the audience when they were playing and watched them. I was blown away. The only thing I didn’t quite understand was why Mike kept spitting loogies out in the crowd,” Woodruff recalled. “I think somebody, some Germans, pissed him off or something.”

Woodruff brought a video camera to the show and shot footage of himself hanging out with Alice in Chains, which he has since posted on YouTube.7 The material is an interesting snapshot of the band on the cusp of fame. Mike Jordan, another of Mike’s childhood friends, spoke of traveling with the band during this early period. “I was there to see Mike realize his dream of making it big in the music industry. That will always be something I cherish. It was a blessing to be along for the ride [for] a couple of dates on the tour. The guys in the band always treated me like I was one of them, and it was really cool.”

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Coming off the success of his first film, Say Anything, writer-director Cameron Crowe had been working on the script for Singles when Andrew Wood died in March 1990.8 The emotional reaction and coming together of the music community after Wood’s death had a profound impact on him and the script he was developing.9 Crowe approached Alice in Chains to ask for a song for the movie’s soundtrack. He wound up paying for much more than what he actually got.

“Cameron wanted a song, so we got him to pay for us to record ten songs,” Jerry told Greg Prato. “We gave him an inflated budget. We came up with ‘Would?’ for the movie, and we demoed a bunch of shit.” “Would?” was the band’s tribute to Andrew Wood, the music and lyrics credited to Jerry, with the song’s title presumably being a pun on Wood’s surname. Some of this material would appear on Sap and Dirt. One of the songs, “Lying Season,” didn’t make the cut for either release.10

On the night of April 17, 1991, Alice in Chains shot their scenes for Singles at a warehouse on a pier in downtown Seattle, which the film’s art department had outfitted to look like a club. “That part of it was really fun, just being in that movie. But playing that song over and over on that pier was murder,” Jerry said during a 1999 interview.11

Michelle Ahern-Crane, an extra for the shoot, said, “It was a cool shoot in that it was fun, but it was terrible in that it was outside and we were standing dressed in club wear.”

“I was freezing, and I knew the guys had a little backstage area and they had heaters. I was freezing and wanted to go back there and hang out because it was a shoot that started at six in the evening and went until six in the morning. I was too shy to assume it was okay for me to walk back there.”

The singer of the Derelicts, Duane Lance Bodenheimer, was also there. At one point, Layne walked up to him and said, “I need to talk to you.”

Bodenheimer had met Demri through mutual friends, and she made quite an impression on him. “She really just like blew me away. Beautiful, amazing girl. Good energy. Just amazing. I developed a little crush on her,” he recalled. “Demri and I started hanging out. She was a very sexual girl, and I tried to not do that because I knew who her boyfriend was, but it just happened one day. We had a relationship, and there were drugs involved. We were together a lot.”