Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Susan would come in asking if they had seen Layne, and Barbero or someone else would confirm he was hanging out with them. Eventually, it got to the point that Susan went to the Babes in Toyland dressing room when she had to find him. “He hung out in our room all the time. I don’t really know why. Maybe he just liked to be around ladies. Or just to get away from his own crew that he had to be around all the time, but he just really liked hanging out with us, and we just had a lot of fun.”

Regarding Demri, Barbero recalled, “[Layne] really adored her. I mean, he wasn’t a shit talker. Some guys in bands are just like ‘Rawr…’ and they pretend their girlfriend’s a drag, so if anything happened with another girl it would be cool because he didn’t really like his girlfriend anyway. From what I gather, he really adored her at this point.” Layne also spoke about the recently departed Mike Starr. “Whenever he spoke about him, he was sad about whatever happened,” Barbero said. “He had a really good heart, and I know he was really sad about whatever went down and why he wasn’t in the band anymore.”

Layne had a bodyguard and personal chaperone named Val who he was always trying to get away from. According to Herman, she didn’t think Val knew about the contents of their dressing room, so Layne would hide out there. He got along with Babes in Toyland singer/guitarist Kat Bjelland, and the two began hanging out on the tour—as drug buddies and possibly an occasional tryst.

“Kat was, in some ways, his style of a girl except she was a gross version of what he liked. She was very much like a fucked-up version of Demri,” Randy Biro said.

“Kat and he seemed to really hit it off and get along and that ended up turning into a relationship during the tour. And I do remember Val throwing Kat into a tub of water once because, at one point, they did kind of connect the dots of [Layne] getting into trouble by hanging out with us and/or Kat more specifically,” Herman said.

There is a disagreement on whether or not Layne and Bjelland were hooking up. According to Herman, “I wasn’t in the room with them to watch them have sex or anything like that, but I find it extremely hard to believe that there was not a relationship going on there. It’s just not possible.” Barbero thinks they weren’t: “They didn’t disappear that much that I ever thought anything was really going on. I think they were more drug buddies.”

At some point during the tour whatever relationship existed between Layne and Bjelland went south. “It was clear that there was rejection going on, and Kat doesn’t take rejection well. Some of her best songs cover that territory,” Herman said. According to Herman, Bjelland decided to cope by doing heroin and overdosed on the bus after their show in San Francisco. This happened within the first week of the tour.25 Entertainment Weekly was in town to do a photo shoot with Babes in Toyland. Because Bjelland was unavailable, they shot Barbero and Herman and ultimately used a photo of Herman for the magazine cover.

There was at least one other incident, which Barbero thinks happened after Bjelland’s overdose. At one show, she wanted to hitch a ride on Layne’s tour bus, and he said no. She did not take it well. “He was just like, ‘No, you’re going crazy,’ and she jumped on their bus, and as it was going, jumped on the front and tore off their windshield wiper blade in a rage,” Barbero said. “She’s a real spoiled brat, and she didn’t get what she wanted, so she causes chaos.”

It got to the point that the Alice in Chains crew started running interference to keep Bjelland away from Layne. “That whole overdose thing—I think she tried to guilt Layne, and he just said, ‘Well, it’s not my responsibility to look after her.’ He felt bad about it, but you can’t. It wasn’t his fault. He never felt like he was at fault for any of it,” Biro said.

Layne briefly dated an African American girl that Biro thinks he met on the tour. When Speech, the lead singer of Arrested Development, got wind of the relationship, he told Layne, “Okay, you’re not all that bad. I can talk to you now.” Biro, who was there with Layne when this happened, said, “We’re looking at each other, going, ‘Wow, that’s weird.’” He doesn’t remember her name or how they met but described her as “a really nice, sweet girl.”

Besides Layne, Lori Barbero bonded with Mike over their mutual Filipino heritage. She also hit it off with Sean and eventually met his Steve alter ego. On a night off from the tour, several musicians went to a bar and did karaoke. “We took over the stage, and we all just started playing, and we did this superjam, and that was the night where they were like, ‘Lori, can you take care of Steve?’ And for some reason I don’t know, everyone always thinks that the woman needs to take care of the guy, so I did, and he was actually really pleasant with me.” They had warned her he could be difficult to keep under control, but she did it.