Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

“I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’” According to Biro, Susan said Starr had told her that Biro was saying mean things to him. “I would never, ever say something mean to the guy, especially when he was just about to be kicked out,” he said. Susan was yelling at him, and Biro was dishing it back. The conversation got so heated and so loud, Biro claims, that Mary Kohl, the band’s associate manager, could hear Susan yelling at him on the phone while standing in the corridor outside the open doorway to Biro’s room.7

Over the years, Mike Starr gave several excuses for why he was kicked out or left the band, some accurate, others outright fiction. “He told me that Jerry didn’t like him and Jerry wanted him out of the band and that he was blackmailed out of the band by Susan Silver,” his close friend Jason Buttino said. The evidence—Susan’s comments that the band made the decision to fire him and her phone call to Biro in Brazil—shows his blackmail claim is false.

Starr told his biographer that he informed the other band members he was quitting and that his last performances would be the Brazil shows. According to the book, “Mike had initially made the formal decision he would leave the band. He firmly believed it would be only temporary. It became permanent.”8

He told Mark Yarm that he was fired not only for scalping tickets on the Van Halen tour but also because Jerry was jealous of him for getting more attention from women, noting that he was in a magazine as “sexiest babe of the month.”9 Biro dismissed this claim. However, he did note, “My impression was it was almost like he felt the amount of blow jobs you get in one night represented fame to him.” He also speculated that Starr had a sexual addiction.

Several years later on Celebrity Rehab and after, Starr said he was fired from the band and that he never would have quit. “When they asked me to leave the band, it broke my heart.” During a 2010 interview on Loveline, he said, “I don’t care about a band thing. I don’t care about them dismissing me from the band. I never quit the band, for one thing. I’m not a quitter.”10

After the firing, the band said publicly that Mike had left of his own accord. An edition of the fan-club newsletter published in spring of 1993 reads, “For those of you who have not heard, Mike Starr is no longer with Alice in Chains. He decided all this touring stuff just wasn’t for him. We wish him all the best of success in all of his future endeavors, we’ll miss him.” A February 1994 Rolling Stone feature reads, “The rift with Starr occurred, Staley explains, as ‘just a difference in priorities. We wanted to continue intense touring and press, Mike was ready to go home.’” The biography on the band’s first official Web site—the now-defunct aliceinchains.net—reads, “Mike Starr reaches the top of the mountain, then retires.”11

On January 22, 1993, the band took the stage to an audience of tens of thousands in Rio de Janeiro and performed a blistering hour-long set, firing on all cylinders. “I remember the last song. I think it was in Rio. I was in tears on the stage,” Biro said. “I couldn’t even see straight, I was so upset over it.” Starr later told Jason Buttino that he shot up before the show. “He said when he was playing ‘Would?’ he could barely move. His knees were shaking and his hands weren’t working the way he wanted them to, and he felt like he was going to collapse.” Although this doesn’t appear in the footage, Biro said Starr was crying onstage during the final songs. During the last instrument change, Biro hugged Starr, and they said that they loved each other, despite everything that was going on. Biro also told him to never give up. After it was over, without any public acknowledgment of what had just happened, the band left the stage. Five years after the band started out at the Music Bank, and unbeknownst to anyone on the outside at the time, the Rio de Janeiro audience had just seen Mike Starr’s final performance with Alice in Chains.12

There were two red flags during the Brazil trip indicating how severe Starr’s heroin addiction had become. The first, according to what he told Aaron Woodruff, was when he was riding in a helicopter and had to throw up outside of it in midflight, possibly because he was going through withdrawals. This account was corroborated by Randy Biro, who was present. The second red flag was after the show, when he decided to shoot up with two of the most notorious addicts in the Seattle grunge scene and barely lived to tell the tale. According to Biro, when the bands got to Brazil, it was discovered that there was cocaine but no heroin. The solution they worked out was that Kurt Cobain would pay for the heroin, and Layne would pay for the plane to bring it down.