Layne Staley

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Layne Staley was nine years old when he wrote in his Dr. Seuss book, All About Me, that he wanted to be a singer. He got his wish. As the original lead vocalist of Alice in Chains, he helped carry Seattle's grunge movement to international fame in the early 1990s. His voice was strange, tense and instantly recognizable. It also blended with the voice of guitarist Jerry Cantrell in a way that fans and critics still talk about. Yet the career that made him famous also became the setting for years of struggle and silence. This documentary asks how a boy from Bellevue, Washington, ended up at the center of one of rock's most talked-about bands. It asks what Staley brought to a group that already had a gifted songwriter, and what pulled at him as his health and spirits declined. And it asks how the people who loved him have worked to make sure he is remembered for more than his illness.

  21722

• 2. Growing Up in Bellevue

  ›

  Layne Rutherford Staley was born on the 22nd of August 1967 at Overlake Hospital in Bellevue, Washington. His father was Phillip Blair Staley. His mother was Nancy Elizabeth Staley, born Nancy Layne, who later became Nancy McCallum. He disliked his middle name and got angry whenever anyone used it. In his teens he legally changed it to Thomas, in honor of Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee.

  At two or three years old, Staley joined a rhythm band in Bellevue as its youngest member. His parents divorced when he was seven. After that his mother and his stepfather, Jim Elmer, raised him. At Meadowdale High School in Lynnwood he took his stepfather's surname and was known for a time as Layne Elmer.

  His family followed Christian Science, and he stayed in the church until he was 16. As an adult he spoke sharply about organized religion. In a 1991 interview he said that once he had the choice, he chose "not to believe in anything apart from myself." In a 1999 interview he said that the song "Get Born Again" was about "religious hypocrisy."

  Black Sabbath filled his parents' record collection, and Staley counted the band as his first influence. Deep Purple was in that collection too. His own tastes grew wide. He loved hard rock and metal acts such as The Stooges, Anthrax, Judas Priest, Saxon, Rainbow, Mercyful Fate, Twisted Sister and Van Halen. He also loved industrial and new wave groups including Ministry, The Lords of the New Church and Skinny Puppy. Prince and David Bowie were two of his biggest idols.

  At age 12 he began playing drums, and in his early teens he played in several glam bands while dreaming of singing. In 1984 he joined Sleze, a band of Shorewood High students. The next year Sleze made a cameo in Father Rock, a low-budget movie from Seattle's Public Access Channel. In 1986 the group became Alice N' Chains, which Staley said "dressed in drag and played speed metal." The band played around Seattle and covered Slayer and Armored Saint. Sleze had also featured future members of The Dehumanizers and Second Coming, and that second name would resurface years later.

  3781828

• 3. Music Bank

  ›

  In 1987 Staley was working at the Music Bank rehearsal studios in Seattle when he met Jerry Cantrell at a party. A few months earlier, Cantrell had watched Staley sing with Alice N' Chains at the Tacoma Little Theatre, in Cantrell's hometown. He was impressed by the voice. By then Cantrell had been kicked out of his family's house and had nowhere to live. Staley invited him to move into Music Bank, and the two spent more than a year as roommates in the run-down rehearsal space.

  Alice N' Chains soon broke up, and Staley joined a funk band that needed a guitarist. He asked Cantrell to come along as a sideman. Cantrell agreed on one condition: that Staley join his own band, which had no name yet. It included drummer Sean Kinney and bassist Mike Starr. To nudge Staley, they began auditioning terrible lead singers in front of him, which made him angry. The final straw was a male stripper. After that audition, Staley decided to join.

  Cantrell never forgot his first impression of the voice. He said it sounded like it came from "a 350-pound biker rather than skinny little Layne." He added, "I considered his voice to be my voice." The funk project fell apart, and in 1987 Staley joined Cantrell's band full time. One of its names was Diamond Lie, the name of Cantrell's previous group.

  Two weeks after the band formed, it played a University of Washington gig with a 40-minute set to fill. The members mixed a couple of originals with covers of Hanoi Rocks and David Bowie. Diamond Lie drew attention around Seattle and eventually adopted Staley's old band name, Alice N' Chains, before becoming Alice in Chains. Staley got permission from his former bandmates first.

  Promoter Randy Hauser heard the band at a show and offered to pay for demo recordings. One day before the session at the Music Bank studio, police shut it down during the biggest cannabis raid in the state's history. The band finished a demo in 1988 called The Treehouse Tapes. It reached the managers Kelly Curtis and Susan Silver, who also managed Soundgarden. They passed it to Nick Terzo, an A&R representative at Columbia Records, and he arranged a meeting with label president Don Ienner. Terzo signed the band to Columbia in 1989. A separate untitled demo from that year survives only on a bootleg called Sweet Alice.

  217262741

• 4. Facelift to Dirt

  ›

  Alice in Chains released its debut album, Facelift, on the 21st of August 1990, and the record set the band's signature sound. The second single, "Man in the Box," had lyrics by Staley and became a huge hit. It opens with a wordless melody in which his tense, throaty vocal moves in unison with a guitar soaked in effects. Cantrell's drier, calmer voice takes over some of the lines. The RIAA later certified Facelift double platinum for two million copies sold in the United States.

  The band toured behind the album for two years. Then came the acoustic EP Sap in early 1992. That same year Alice in Chains appeared in Cameron Crowe's film Singles, performing "It Ain't Like That" and "Would?"

  Dirt arrived in September 1992. Critics praised it, and it became the band's biggest seller. It debuted at number six on the Billboard 200 and went quadruple platinum. Staley designed the sun logo that appears in its inlay. During the Dirt tour in Brazil in 1993, he saved Mike Starr's life after Starr overdosed.

  Cantrell wrote almost all of the band's music and lyrics, but Staley's share grew with time. By the release of Black Gives Way to Blue in 2009, he was credited with about half the lyrics in the whole catalog. He wrote both music and lyrics for "Hate to Feel," "Angry Chair" and "Head Creeps," and he supplied melodies for other songs. He also played guitar on "Angry Chair" and "Hate to Feel." Listeners often read his words as a window into his own troubles.

  In the liner notes of the 1999 Music Bank box set, Cantrell wrote about "Angry Chair." He called it a brilliant song and said he was proud of Staley for writing it. He called it a fine example of Staley "stepping up with the guitar and writing a masterpiece."

  3031351343

• 5. Mad Season and Collaborations

  ›

  Jar of Flies, the band's third EP, arrived in 1994 and entered the Billboard 200 at number one. It was the first Alice in Chains release to do that, and the first EP ever to top the chart. The other members saw how far Staley's condition had slipped and chose not to tour behind it. Staley instead entered a rehabilitation clinic and began a side project with Mike McCready of Pearl Jam, Barrett Martin of Screaming Trees and John Baker Saunders of The Walkabouts.

  The four worked on material for several months. On the 12th of October 1994, they played their first show at the Crocodile Cafe in Seattle under the name "The Gacy Bunch." Within weeks they became Mad Season. In January 1995 they played "Lifeless Dead" and "I Don't Know Anything" on Pearl Jam's Self-Pollution satellite radio broadcast. Their album, Above, came out in March 1995 and reached number 24 in the United States, earning a gold certification. Its first single, "River of Deceit," did modestly well on alternative radio. A concert filmed at Seattle's Moore Theatre was released that August as the home video Live at the Moore.

  Staley's voice turned up on other people's records too. On Heart's 1993 album Desire Walks On, he shared lead vocals with Ann Wilson on a cover of Bob Dylan's "Ring Them Bells." On the debut album by Second Coming, L.O.V.Evil, he sang lead on "It's Coming After." That group included his old bandmates from Alice N' Chains. He also sang "I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier" on Working Class Hero, a 1995 tribute album to John Lennon.

  In November 1998 he recorded one of his last tracks with Class of '99, a supergroup built for Robert Rodriguez's film The Faculty. The group included Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, bassist Martyn LeNoble and drummer Stephen Perkins, both of Jane's Addiction and Porno for Pyros, and keyboardist Matt Serletic. Together they covered Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall." The other members were filmed for the music video, but Staley's part was footage lifted from the 1995 Live at the Moore video.

  One more Staley vocal surfaced long after the fact. A song called "Things You Do" appeared on the soundtrack of the 2012 film Grassroots, credited to "The Bondage Boys featuring Layne Staley." When it leaked online years earlier, it had carried the names "Layne Staley and The Aftervibes" and "Layne Staley and Second Coming."

  4662585956

• 6. Addiction and Loss

  ›

  In February 1996, Staley told Rolling Stone, "Drugs worked for me for years." He said they were now turning against him. He also said, "I didn't want my fans to think that heroin was cool." Some fans, he noted, gave him a thumbs up and told him they were high, which was exactly the opposite of what he hoped for.

  In the early 1990s he had enrolled in several rehab programs without staying clean for long. At one point his Alice in Chains bandmates flew to Los Angeles for weekly therapy sessions at his rehab. During the Dirt tour, manager Susan Silver hired bodyguards to keep him away from anyone who might pass him drugs. He relapsed anyway, and the band did not tour long behind that album. Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees remembered those days as "an insane, dark, drug and alcohol-fuelled frat party from start to finish."

  The death of Kurt Cobain in April 1994 frightened Staley into a short stretch of sobriety, but he soon went back to the drugs. The band's managers turned down lucrative touring offers and kept the group off the road, hoping that would help. Mike McCready invited Staley into Mad Season in the belief that playing with sober musicians might encourage him.

  The band's self-titled album arrived in November 1995 and is nicknamed "Tripod" because its cover shows a three-legged dog. It debuted at the top of the US charts and went double platinum, as Facelift and Jar of Flies had. Staley wrote the lyrics for every song except "Grind," "Heaven Beside You" and "Over Now," making it his largest lyrical contribution to the catalog. The band released a home video, The Nona Tapes, but then lapsed again and failed to complete the tours planned for the album. Cantrell later said the band never stabbed each other in the back despite the hard times.

  On the 10th of April 1996, Alice in Chains played MTV Unplugged in New York, its first concert in two-and-a-half years. The group then played three more shows supporting Kiss on their reunion tour. Staley's final live performance came on the 3rd of July 1996 in Kansas City, Missouri. Fans and the media had been trading reports about his addiction during the hiatus, partly because his physical condition had visibly changed.

  On the 29th of October 1996, Staley's former fiancée, Demri Lara Parrott, died of a drug overdose. NME reported that he was placed on a 24-hour suicide watch and was taking her death extremely badly. Lanegan told Rolling Stone in 2002, "He never recovered from Demri's death. After that, I don't think he wanted to go on."

  1652766144

• 7. The Last Years

  ›

  On the 26th of February 1997, Staley joined his bandmates at the Grammy Awards, where "Again" was nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance. That April he bought a three-bedroom condominium of about 1,500 square feet in Seattle's University District. He bought it through a trust under the alias "John LaRusta." Toby Wright, who produced the band's third album, installed a home recording system there.

  By 1998 rumors were circulating that Staley rarely left his apartment, had gangrene and could no longer eat, living on Ensure. Jerry Cantrell told Kerrang! that the band regularly spent time at Staley's place. On the 22nd of June 1998, Staley phoned the radio program Rockline during Cantrell's promotion of his first solo album, Boggy Depot. He said he loved the record. In October 1998 he re-emerged to record "Get Born Again" and "Died" with the band, released on the Music Bank box set in 1999.

  People who saw him then were alarmed. Dave Jerden, who produced Dirt, said Staley weighed 80 pounds and was "white as a ghost." Studio engineer Elan Trujillo said he no longer looked like himself and noticed he had no teeth and wasted legs. On the 31st of October 1998, Staley attended a Cantrell solo show in Seattle, his last public appearance. He turned down Cantrell's request to sing on stage. A backstage photo from that night remains the most recent publicly released picture of him.

  On the 19th of July 1999, Cantrell, Jerry's bandmates Inez and Kinney were on Rockline discussing Nothing Safe: Best of the Box when Staley unexpectedly called in. It was his last interview. From then until 2002 he grew more reclusive and depressed, and little is known about those years. Rumors had him making art, playing video games or nodding off on drugs. A claim that he was asked to audition for Audioslave was later debunked by guitarist Tom Morello.

  His mother, Nancy McCallum, told The Seattle Times in 2007 that he was never far from the love of family and friends. They filled his answering machine and mailbox with messages. She said she saw him on Thanksgiving of 2001 and again near Valentine's Day 2002, when he visited his sister's baby. Sean Kinney described calling three times a week and standing outside his building shouting. "But if someone won't help themselves," he said, "what, really, can anyone else do?"

  On the 17th of April 2002, McCallum went to his apartment to tell him that Demri Lara Parrott's brother had died, but no one answered. Two days later, his accountants told former manager Susan Silver that no money had left his bank account in two weeks. Silver called McCallum. McCallum returned, saw mail by the door, and became worried when Staley's usually quiet cat, Sadie, meowed. She called 911, saying she had not heard from him in about two weeks. She entered with police and her ex-husband, Jim Elmer.

  Staley, who stood 6 feet tall, weighed only 86 pounds. Medical examiners identified him through dental records. The autopsy found a mixture of heroin and cocaine, known as a speedball, and concluded that he died two weeks before he was found, on the 5th of April 2002. That was the same day Kurt Cobain had died eight years earlier. Staley was 34, and the death was classified as accidental.

  His bandmates issued a statement saying they were heartbroken over the death of their beautiful friend. They described him as a sweet man with a keen sense of humor and a deep sense of humanity. It ended, "We love you, Layne. Dearly."

  In 2010, on VH1's Celebrity Rehab, former bassist Mike Starr said he was the last person to see Staley alive. He said he spent time with him on the 4th of April, Starr's birthday. Staley was very sick but would not call 911. They argued, and Starr stormed out. He said Staley called after him, "Not like this, don't leave like this." Starr said he had been high on benzodiazepines and regretted leaving. McCallum told him, "Layne would forgive you." She said her son had tried rehab 14 times. Starr was found dead on the 8th of March 2011, from a prescription drug overdose.

  1268818494

• 8. Remembered

  ›

  On the night of the 20th of April 2002, at least 100 fans and friends gathered at the Seattle Center for an informal memorial. Cantrell, Starr, Inez, Kinney and Chris Cornell of Soundgarden were among them. A private service followed on the 28th of April on Bainbridge Island, in Puget Sound, after Staley was cremated. Cornell sang The Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses" with Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, and they also performed The Lovemongers' song "Sand." Fans still leave messages on a wall outside his University District home.

  Donations from fans around the world began reaching his parents, Nancy McCallum and Phil Staley, soon after his death. The two worked with Seattle's Therapeutic Health Services clinic to create the Layne Staley Memorial Fund, which helps other heroin addicts and their families in the Seattle music community. Cantrell dedicated his solo album Degradation Trip, released two months after the death, to Staley's memory. He also took in Sadie the cat, and the family cared for her until she died in 2010 at age 18.

  Alice in Chains stayed inactive for years and refused to perform out of respect for him. In 2005, Cantrell, Kinney and Inez reunited for a benefit concert for victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, with several vocalists filling in. The response was positive, and the band reunited formally in 2006. William DuVall of Comes with the Fall, who had sung Staley's parts in Cantrell's solo touring band, took the vocal role. Early reunion shows paused for a five-minute filmed tribute to Staley. In 2009 the band released Black Gives Way to Blue, its first studio album in 14 years. Its title track, written and sung by Cantrell, is a goodbye to Staley. Elton John, whose concert was the first Staley ever attended, played piano on it.

  Musicians across rock answered his death in song. Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins said Staley's "heaviness was in that voice." Cold, Staind, Black Label Society and Kat Bjelland's Katastrophy Wife each recorded tributes between 2003 and 2004. Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam wrote "4/20/02," a hidden track on the 2003 album Lost Dogs that plays four minutes and twenty seconds after the last listed song. Metallica credited Staley as an inspiration for the title of Death Magnetic, and the band recorded a tribute to him called "Rebel of Babylon." Cantrell said Staley gave him the confidence to sing, telling him, "You wrote this song, this means something to you, sing it." Staley had earned six Grammy nominations as a member of Alice in Chains.

  His bandmates have said that one of the saddest parts of his legacy is hearing him remembered mainly for drug use. Kinney and Cantrell were also frustrated that the Grammys left him out of a tribute to musicians who had died that year. Kinney painted the initials "LSMS" on his drum kit in 2013, honoring Staley and Starr. Since 2011, Cantrell has paid tribute to both men before performing "Nutshell."

  Two biographies by Adriana Rubio, Layne Staley: Angry Chair in 2003 and Layne Staley: Get Born Again in 2009, claim an interview done months before his death. His family disputes this. Sister Liz Coats doubted it, and journalist David de Sola's 2015 book, Alice in Chains: The Untold Story, argued that Rubio never spoke to him. Staley also appears in oral histories of grunge by Greg Prato and Mark Yarm.

  On the 22nd of August 2019, Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan proclaimed "Layne Staley Day" in the city. The proclamation honored his contributions to music and drew attention to the memorial fund. Since 2002, a tribute concert on his birthday has raised money for that fund, hosted at venues including the Moore Theatre, The Showbox, The Fenix and The Crocodile.

  89959810097