Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Jamie Elmer remembers keeping Layne company as he was working on the Dasher. He had cleaned out the case containing the windshield wiper fluid, filled it with orange juice, and rigged the hose for the fluid so that it came out of the dashboard inside the car. He had turned the windshield wiper system into a drink machine and poured her a glass of orange juice from the dashboard. He could also modify his car for more mischievous purposes.

“The most trouble Layne and I caused together … Layne had a little car at one point and we pried the window washers to spray outward, and we were driving around and shooting people with it. As we drove by, we’d soak them,” James Bergstrom recalled with a laugh. “We saw a police officer coming into the parking lot, and we pulled out and drove across the street to an Arby’s, and the cop followed us, and we were like, ‘Oh, shit! This isn’t good!’”

The officer pulled Layne over. “Hey, are you guys driving around squirting people?”

“No, Officer,” Layne answered.

“Where’s your windshield wiper applicator?”

After Layne pointed to it, the officer reached into the car and pulled on it, getting soaked from his head down to the middle of his chest. Bergstrom started laughing, at which point Layne smacked him on the leg and told him to be quiet. The officer let Layne off with a warning.

Another time, Bergstrom and some of the other band members were spending the night at Layne’s house. They snuck out to go to a party, walking to Aurora Avenue and down to Richmond Beach several miles away. Layne’s mother woke up in the middle of the night and saw they had gone out. At that time, there were no cell phones, so she called Bergstrom’s mother and went out looking for them. Layne, Bergstrom, and the others were walking back and had almost made it home when they saw Nancy driving by in her van at two o’clock in the morning.

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By early 1985, the members of Sleze felt they were ready to perform live. In a scene straight from Back to the Future, Sleze auditioned for the Shorewood High School talent show and didn’t make the cut. “We tried out for the school talent show, and we flunked. They wouldn’t let us do the school talent show,” Semanate said, laughing. “We brought all our shit to the auditorium. We just blasted it out, and they’re like, ‘No fucking way.’”

Sleze eventually got to perform a forty-five-minute set on February 4, 1985, during lunchtime in the Student Activities Center—colloquially dubbed the SAC—at Shorewood High School. Hansen remembers Semanate had designed a hand-drawn poster to promote the show and, as a joke, drew a different version that he showed Hansen first—for “Satanic Sleze,” which featured pentagrams and inverted crosses. On the day of the show, the band members went to Bergstrom’s parents’ house to get ready for the performance. They crowded into a bathroom to put on their stage outfits, makeup, and hair spray.

“We showed up to school like it was Halloween basically. Lunchtime and everyone was just like double-taking us,” Bacolas said, laughing. They had stage fright, since this was their first show. He estimated the crowd size at between two hundred and four hundred students. The set list consisted mostly of covers: “L.O.V.E. Machine,” “Looks That Kill,” Armored Saint’s “False Alarm,” Wrathchild’s “Stakk Attakk,” Venom’s “Countess Bathory,” and Slayer’s “Black Magic.”

Layne was nervous, according to Bacolas. He barely looked at the crowd and mostly paced back and forth onstage, looking down while singing, or else had his back to the audience while looking at the drummer. Despite his nerves and inexperience, he pulled off the performance. The four surviving band members don’t think he forgot any lyrics or hit a wrong note.

After the show, they were feeling pretty good about themselves. “We were high on life! We thought this was it, man. We’re on our way!” Bergstrom said. This was the first and only performance featuring this lineup of the band.

Not long after this show, Semanate went out partying with his bandmates. “We went to this party and we were drinking; we were having fun. It was like a keg. We get in this room, ‘Where’s the bong at?’” Semanate recalled. “This was the first time I smoked weed with them. I even got James high, which blew my mind. It was a lot of fun. Kind of a little bonding thing.”

Shortly after this, according to Semanate, Bergstrom’s mother called a band meeting, where the members and parents would get together at a local pizza restaurant. The concern was that Semanate was a bad influence on the other four.