Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

At one point, Jerry expressed an interest in buying one of Eddie Van Halen’s guitars and amplifiers, a proposition Van Halen refused. After the tour was over, Jerry went to Kelly Curtis’s house, where he was still living in the basement. Curtis asked him to move out the garageful of amplifiers and guitars Van Halen sent over as gifts.12 Michael Anthony gave Mike several of his Spector basses that he wasn’t using, along with some Mesa Boogie amp heads.

There was a prank war between the two bands. Van Halen pulled four pranks on Alice in Chains during one set, consisting of strips of upward-facing duct tape placed all over the stage, a group of ugly strippers who stayed onstage for a song, one of their techs in a Little Bo Peep outfit with live sheep, and, during the set-closing “Man in the Box,” the Van Halen crew came out and started breaking down their gear while they were still playing the song. “They left Sean with a kick and snare, left me with one cab. They just unplugged Mike Starr. And that was all in one set!” Jerry said.

Alice in Chains was determined to have the last laugh. “Van Halen used to do this signature walk across the stage, and at the time they had these skimpy panties that they would sell to the chicks in the audience. Really skimpy panties,” Jerry said. “So we took some of these panties and put them on—of course they weren’t big enough [to] keep our junk in, so we had to turn them around with the butt parts in front to keep our stuff together—and put on some combat boots, and we made ourselves up as strippers and did that Van Halen signature walk across the stage behind them, and they didn’t know it was happening, except for Alex.” He adds, “There’s a great photo of it, taken right as Eddie turns around and realizes what’s going on, and he’s totally losing it. He’s one of those guys who never fucks up. I’ve seen him play in so many different states, and he’s always on, but hearing him miss a couple notes while getting a laugh out of us was great.” A photo of this is on the Internet.13

The band’s ambitions for Facelift were fairly low to begin with. “When Alice in Chains packed out the Central Tavern two nights in a row, that’s when I was completely satisfied,” Layne told MTV. “That’s when my dreams came true. In Seattle, I was a rock star. Record companies started coming around, but I had never even thought about that. It was enough for me to be a star in Seattle.”14 By September 1991, the band’s hard work had paid off. Thirteen months after its release, Facelift was certified gold for selling in excess of five hundred thousand copies—the first Seattle grunge band to reach that milestone. That bar would be matched and significantly raised after Pearl Jam and Nirvana released their landmark Ten and Nevermind albums on August 27 and September 24 of the same year.15

Once the money started coming in, the band members were modest in terms of what they did with it, buying homes and cars. According to Ken Deans, “The most nuts [thing] Sean ever did was he bought a Porsche. And he bought a couple of nice Harley motorcycles. Jerry bought a really nice truck. He bought a Dodge pickup truck, [his] Oklahoma roots coming through. Nobody bought a Ferrari. They all live in fairly modest homes today. It’s not like they really ever did the giant rock star thing.” According to Aaron Woodruff, the first thing Mike bought was a Nissan 300ZX, paying $36,000 cash.

Layne told the story of how, after getting his first credit card, he maxed it out the first three months during shopping sprees at Toys “R” Us. In the same interview, he also said, “After I got my first gold record, my friend came over and pulled out a couple lines of blow, and I pulled the gold record off the wall, because that was a dream of mine. If I ever got a gold record, I was going to do my first line of coke on that.”16

While it is possible he did cocaine off his gold record, his claim that it was the first time he tried it was an outright lie. Multiple sources have said on the record that Layne was using cocaine as early as the mid-1980s.17

As the money started coming in, Jim Elmer said Layne worked with an accountant to keep track of his finances, developed a budget, and paid his credit card through a trust account. Elmer described Layne and his accountant as “conservative” in terms of managing and spending his money. In terms of his personal expenses, Elmer said that once he had money, Layne bought a car and video games and, later on, a condo.

Chapter 14

Can we get her to do the “Barracuda” song?

SEAN KINNEY