Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

Rocky Schenck shot the cover in his dining room on September 8, 1993. “The band had come up with the idea for the title and wanted the cover to be a young boy looking into a jar filled with flies. I remember they asked me to use ‘crazy colors’ in the shot, so [I] utilized lots of different color gels over the lights to achieve the final look,” he wrote. Schenck’s assistant made several trips to a nearby stable to collect hundreds of flies with a butterfly net.

Released on January 14, 1994, Jar of Flies was an immediate success, debuting at the top of the Billboard album chart. It was the first EP ever to reach number 1, a feat that has been matched only once—by Jay-Z and Linkin Park’s Collision Course—in the twenty years since its release as of this writing.

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In March 1994, Kurt Cobain was in trouble. Courtney Love had already seen him overdose on heroin a dozen times by the time he tried to kill himself by taking sixty Rohypnol pills in a Rome hotel room with a three-page suicide note clutched in his left hand.3 Despite the history between them, Susan got a panicked phone call from Courtney Love.

“You have to help me—Kurt’s going to kill himself. What should I do?” she asked. Susan put Nirvana’s manager in touch with Dr. Lou Cox, a New York physician who had worked with Aerosmith and was working with Alice in Chains at the time. Susan told Greg Prato that they agreed to do an intervention but chose a different interventionist, and not everybody showed up.4

On April Fools’ Day 1994, Cobain went AWOL from the Exodus Recovery Center in Marina del Rey, California, two days after checking in. A week later, his body was found in the greenhouse in his home. He had killed himself by a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head after shooting up a lethal dose of heroin. He was twenty-seven years old.5

Susan helped organize a private service for Cobain at a church as well as the public memorial at Seattle Center, both scheduled at the same time out of concern that fans or the media might try to go to the private service. After it was over, Susan felt “the same sort of overwhelming compassion” for Courtney Love as she did for Yoko Ono after the murder of John Lennon. Susan walked up to Love to offer her support. When she was about ten feet away, Love saw her approaching, turned her back, and walked away.6

“I saw all the suffering that Kurt Cobain went through,” Layne would recall. “I didn’t know him real well, but I just saw this real vibrant person turn into a real shy, timid, withdrawn, introverted person who could hardly get a hello out.”7 Layne’s private views were skeptical of the official story. “Layne was a little more vocal on the Kurt issue, because he never thought Kurt would take his own life,” Jim Elmer said. “He mentioned that multiple times, about that issue, that he never did believe it. And so this was not right after he died, this was years after, too. He still remembered that and just thought that was not characteristic of Kurt.”

A few weeks after Cobain’s death, Jim Elmer got a call from Courtney Love. She had been trying to get ahold of Layne and somehow got Elmer’s phone number. According to him, they spoke twice. “The gist of the conversation was that she was looking for Layne because she knew Layne and Kurt were friends and wanted to find out what had happened the last few days, that she intimated to me that she was not happy with the outcome that it was a suicide. She thought there was more to it than that, and she wanted to chase down Layne and have a discussion with him.”

Love was probably assuming that because Cobain and Layne ran in the same social circles—musicians, drug users, and drug dealers—he might have seen Cobain or have some knowledge of his final days. Whether Layne saw Cobain during his final days is not known, but there is evidence of at least one mutual drug connection.

Cobain confidant Rene Navarette told Nirvana biographer Everett True about an encounter with some of Seattle’s highest-profile musicians in the spring of 1993, who all coincidentally found themselves at the same place at the same time trying to procure drugs. “When Courtney went to England, that was the first time me, Kurt, Dylan [Carlson, guitarist from the band Earth], and Cali [DeWitt, Frances Bean Cobain’s nanny] had a few days to mess around without her … We had too much fun. We would go into town, walk into a drug dealer’s living room: Kurt, Dylan, Mark Lanegan, and Layne Staley coincidentally walking into the same basement at the same time. It was pretty amazing. Everyone had mutual admiration for each other. Now, looking back on it, there were all these great talented guys who were tainted forever because of their drug use.”8

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