“When I tried drugs, they were fucking great, and they worked for me for years, and now they’re turning against me — and now I’m walking through hell, and this sucks.” – Layne Staley to Rolling Stone (February 8, 1996)
On April 4, 2002, Mike Starr paid an old friend a visit. It was his 36th birthday and he wanted to catch up with the man that he believed saved his life.
Ten years earlier, they were bandmates, both struggling to stay sober. Starr played bass. Layne Staley was the lead singer and one of the main songwriters.
On January 22, 1993, their band Alice In Chains played the Hollywood Rock Festival with Nirvana and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Brazil. Based on two accounts Starr has given publicly, it’s not entirely clear what actually happened that night.
In one retelling, Starr claimed to author David de Sola that “Layne shot me up [with cocaine] first a couple of times. Then Kurt [Cobain] shot me, and then Layne shot me after that and I died, for like 11 minutes.”
In another told to Dr. Drew Pinsky on the February 16, 2010 edition of his long running radio show Loveline in what became his last interview, Starr claimed that the Nirvana singer and his wife Courtney Love got him high first:
“We shot up all night [but] Layne didn’t know that.”
In this version of events, after Staley helped administer a needle, Starr “flatlined” and didn’t have a pulse. In a panic, Starr claims his terrified pal was “crying and punching me in the face”, in a desperate attempt to revive him.
“I wake up,” Starr claimed to Pinsky, “and I’m all wet and I’m laying over the toilet and, you know, I’m in a different room…and he had me in the shower…I was obviously blacked out during that time…”
According to this Diffuser article in 2007, Starr ultimately survived his ordeal because Staley successfully performed CPR on him.
But in that 2010 Loveline interview, Starr doesn’t mention this at all. In fact, Dr. Pinsky informs him that putting an overdose victim in a shower is one of the worst things one can do, no matter how good the intentions of a caregiver. When he tells Starr that it would’ve been better if Staley had given him fluids or performed CPR, the bassist doesn’t correct him on the latter point. Pinsky insists he was very lucky to survive his ordeal.
Shortly thereafter, Starr left the band. Although it was publicly spun in the best possible light (Staley told Rolling Stone in 1994 Starr was simply homesick and quit), he was actually fired for his uncontrollable addictions. “I never the quit the band,” he told Pinsky on Loveline. “I’m not a quitter.”
Nine years later, the roles were tragically reversed. Although Starr himself was “high on benzodiazepine” that day to his eternal regret, Staley was now the one in desperate need of immediate medical care.
When Starr saw his old friend in his expensive fifth floor condo in Seattle that fateful Spring day in 2002, he was shocked. Barely eating and chronically dependent on heroin, he was living a highly isolated life where he mostly kept to himself at home, although an anonymous source told de Sola he would make trips to a local comic book store he worked at from time to time usually accompanied by a couple of friends who had to “kind of prop him up and help with him a lot.”
Not exactly a large man to begin with, Staley had shriveled next to nothing. He was so incredibly thin Starr wanted to intervene. The guilt he was feeling was overwhelming.
According to de Sola’s account in his unauthorized Alice In Chains bio, the TV was on and Staley was clicking around the dial looking for something to watch when he stumbled upon Crossing Over, the since cancelled syndicated talk show hosted by fake medium John Edward who wrongly claims to have full access to the spirit world.
In an alarming moment, as noted by de Sola, Staley asserted the following to Starr:
“Demri was here last night. I don’t give a fuck if you fucking believe me or not, dude. I’m telling you: Demri was here last night.”
An eventual model/actress, Demri Parrott was in her late teens when she met Staley in the late 80s, well before he broke through in the music business, while working in a retail clothing store in Seattle. By all accounts, she was the love of his life. They were engaged for three years just as his band was starting to find mainstream acceptance.
But the relationship was troubled. Both dived headfirst into drug addiction and both failed multiple times to maintain permanent sobriety. Parrott would develop a heart problem so serious she required a pacemaker.
One night in the fall of 1996, Parrott had ingested some pills, overdosed and fell into a coma for 12 hours. With no hope for a recovery this time, her family requested she be removed from life support. She died October 29th at age 27. (Starr was 27 the night he OD’d in Brazil.) Staley was reportedly so despondent over her death he had to be put on a 24-hour suicide watch. Many close confidantes have since revealed to the press that they believe this is the reason Staley kept using and would no longer seek treatment.
Was Staley so lonely and so lost that he could’ve been experiencing severe hallucinations? Did he really believe he had seen his dead girlfriend in his apartment?
Already awkward and uncomfortable, the visit with Starr was also unpleasant. Staley immediately suspected Starr was using and called him out on it. The two men argued about Staley’s emaciated condition. (Staley didn’t deny he was unwell. Starr recalled him saying, “I’m sick.”) When Starr threatened to call 911, Staley threatened to end their friendship. Fed up with being lectured by a fellow addict while nowhere near healthy himself, Starr stormed out. (“Fine, I’ll just leave.”)
The bassist intended on coming back but never returned:
“I went home and blacked out on benzodiazepine,” he told Pinsky on Loveline.
In his later retelling, he remembered a scared, conflicted Staley’s last words to him:
“Not like this. Don’t leave like this.”
It was the last time anyone saw the Alice In Chains frontman alive.
In the days that followed, his friends, his bandmates, his business associates and especially, his family became even more worried than usual. It was not uncommon for him to ignore the ringing of his phone or to refuse to let anyone enter his building despite repeated knocking and shouts from the street. Months would go by without a word or an encounter at all. (It had been a month or two since he was last seen at his favourite comic book store. His Mom hadn’t seen him since Valentine’s Day.) The silence from his end was already deafening.
It was only when his accountants realized he had stopped withdrawing funds, which he had presumably been using to buy more drugs, as well as comics and action figures, that more alarm bells went off. They contacted Susan Silver, Alice In Chains’ longtime manager, who called his mom.
On April 19, just before 6 p.m., Nancy Staley McCallum arrived at her son’s condo. She knocked on the door and got no response. Then, she dialed 911 requesting a welfare check.
Within 10 minutes two officers from the Seattle Police Department arrived. They knocked on the door. Still no response. They knocked it down.
As they searched for answers on the fifth floor, they made a startling discovery. A razor thin body in “an advanced state of decomposition” still sitting upright on the couch, his skin “darkened” and “leathery”, an empty syringe jabbed in his leg. In his hand, another needle, this one fully loaded, waiting for its turn to be injected.
“You don’t want to see this,” the cops told McCallum.
It was a grisly scene. The place was a mess. Drug paraphernalia scattered all over the place. When Layne Staley’s body was moved, it turned out he was sitting on even more empty needles. The TV was still on. His starving pet cat desperate for food. (Bandmate Jerry Cantrell would later adopt her and she would live for another eight years on his farm, according to de Sola.)
His crestfallen mother said her last words to him as he sat there motionless. All his teeth were missing and he weighed less than 90 pounds. His answering machine completely full of unreturned messages.
After 13 attempts at rehab, three trips to the ER and three previous near-death experiences, Layne Staley’s body could take no more.
The next day, Pearl Jam were back at Bad Animals Studio (now Studio X) in Seattle for a long day of recording. Two months earlier in February 2002, they commenced work on their seventh studio album. They were comfortable here having already recorded Vitalogy and Yield in the previous decade.
By this point, the band had already worked up dozens of songs (“more than 30” altogether, according to a fan who later made a free, unauthorized double-disc bootleg of the complete sessions), far too many to include on a single album.
Then came word about Staley.
“I got a call from Kelly Curtis [Pearl Jam’s manager] that Layne died,” guitarist Mike McCready revealed in the 2011 coffee table book Pearl Jam Twenty. “We were at the studio at probably eleven at night. I wasn’t surprised, but I was. It was sad. I hadn’t seen him for, like, three or four years.”
Back in 1994, McCready had collaborated with Staley on what became the only album by the Seattle supergroup Mad Season which also included Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin and bassist John Baker Saunders who later died of a heroin overdose himself in 1999.
Above would surface the next year and spawn the radio hit River Of Deceit. There were plans to do more recording but Staley’s deteriorating health prevented that from ever happening. (However, over time, there were occasional reunions with surviving members for live gigs.) McCready, a recovering addict who met a then sober Saunders in rehab, had hoped this cleaner environment would convince his friend Staley to straighten out for good.
When McCready told his bandmates what had happened, everyone wanted to go home except Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam’s longtime frontman. He ultimately stayed behind in Studio X with producer Adam Kasper. Filled with rage and despair, Vedder strapped on an electric guitar with banjo tunings and started working on an impromptu solo tribute for Staley. The song was written and recorded that same night. According to McCready, it was recorded at “two or three in the morning”.
“I think he was just so angry, and he wanted to get it out,” the guitarist noted in Pearl Jam Twenty.
Loosely structured like The Velvet Underground’s Heroin but not nearly as powerful despite a highly agreeable lyric, it begins with soft, slow, simple, start-and-stop strumming as Vedder quietly seethes against the many highly successful Layne Staley imitators:
“So all you fools/Who sing just like him/Feel free to do so now/Cause he’s dead”
He never names anyone in particular but surely he’s addressing Scott Stapp. Himself a troubled figure (he, too, struggled with addiction and erratic behaviour until he was properly diagnosed with bi-polar disorder), the Creed frontman achieved far more commercially with his much maligned band than Alice In Chains ever did which clearly irked Vedder. (Human Clay alone sold more copies than all AIC albums combined.)
Rage immediately turns to empathy as Vedder warmly empathizes with Staley’s pain. In a higher register he thankfully quickens his playing to match the adrenaline rush of the elusive high his old friend still desperately craved:
“Using, using, using/The using takes toll”
Imagining he preferred being a loner (“Isolation just so/Happy to be one”), a crushed, helpless Vedder also mourns the absence of Staley’s closest friends and family in his final moments:
“Sad to think of him all alone”
The pace unfortunately slows down again as a low-voiced Vedder mournfully reflects on the bitter irony of his beloved colleague unable and unwilling to reach out when any number of supporters would’ve gladly been there in an instant to help get him clean:
“Lonesome friend/we all knew/Always hoped/You’d pull through”
The tempo increasing once more, Vedder insists Staley’s fans issue no judgment (“No blame, no blame/No blame, it could be you”), and then offers this obvious warning about chronic addiction:
“You can’t grow old using”
Vedder wraps up reiterating his antipathy against the Staley clones calling them “fuckers” and dares them to keep ripping off his distinctive vocals because “it won’t offend him/just me/because he’s dead”.
At the time, Pearl Jam already knew which 15 songs, of the 30 or so they had recorded, would make the cut for Riot Act. Vedder’s anguished tribute to Staley was not going to be one of them.
“Most of the songs are about bigger kinds of things,” guitarist Stone Gossard asserted in Pearl Jam Twenty. “The energy was feeling so positive, and there was something about the song that felt like it maybe wasn’t right for this particular record.”
As a result, 04/20/02, as Vedder would eventually call his solo tribute referring to the date he first learned of Staley’s death (even though technically the song was recorded on April 21st), would stay in the vault.
A year later, as the band grew disenchanted with Sony, the band decided to no longer produce studio albums for their longtime label. Instead, they started compiling existing tracks for a couple of double compilations.
The first one, Lost Dogs, features B-Sides, soundtrack and tribute album contributions, a few rare fan club singles and material never before unveiled. As the band discussed the track listing, inevitably the subject of 04/20/02 came up. Was it finally time to release it?
In the end, the answer would be yes but everyone agreed it would be buried at the end of track 14 on disc two. It begins just after the six-minute mark.
“I think the reason it’s hidden,” Mike McCready asserted in Pearl Jam Twenty, “is because [Vedder] wouldn’t want it to be exploitative. I think he wants it to be hidden so you have to find it and think about it.”
Pearl Jam’s personal and professional relationships with Staley and Alice In Chains goes right back to their origins. In 1991, AIC asked them to open for them on numerous dates during their tour in support of their major label debut Facelift. At the start of that year, Pearl Jam were still going by their soon-to-be-discarded original name Mookie Blaylock, the New Jersey Net whose jersey number 10 became the title of their own first full-length release.
Both bands appeared in the underappreciated Singles, Cameron Crowe’s humourous cinematic paean to the Seattle music scene. And they both shared space on the more popular soundtrack which has since been rereleased and expanded. Alice In Chains and Pearl Jam would continue to play live shows together right up until the late summer of 1992.
In the decades since his death, Staley has not been forgotten by the man who secretly eulogized him on Lost Dogs.
When Pearl Jam played a show in Chicago on August 22, 2016, Vedder had a very special reason for bringing up his friend’s memory:
“It’s the birthday of a guy called Layne Staley tonight, and we’re thinking of him tonight too.” As Vedder pointed out that night, he would’ve been 49.
Pearl Jam played Man Of The Hour, a song given to the Tim Burton film Big Fish, in his honour.
Almost exactly four years later, Vedder appeared on a podcast hosted by Chris Cornell’s daughter Lily. Although much of the conversation focused on his close friendship with the late Soundgarden vocalist, while discussing his “dark lyrics”, he also pointed out similar traits shared with Kurt Cobain and Staley:
“These weren’t people going, ‘I’m going to pretend to write a dark song.’ It was real for everybody. It became a thing to make fun of the dour grunge groups. I think people took it personally. They were like, ‘We weren’t fucking around.’ That’s probably why people liked it and seemed to need it. ‘This guy is speaking for me. I feel these things.’”
Like Ian Curtis before him, when it came to songwriting, Layne Staley never kept his personal demons closeted. They were always there, front and centre, unvarnished and uncensored. Like Lou Reed before him, he did not advocate for more addicts. (“I don’t want my fans to think heroin was cool,” he told Rolling Stone in 1996.) He presented cautionary tales based entirely on his own self-destruction. If you paid attention, you heeded his words and hopefully avoided dangerous paths of your own. If you didn’t, you either ignored his suffering or paid your own price for being a devoted, misguided follower.
One man who never got over his death was Mike Starr. Eight years after their last encounter, Starr had appeared on the third season of Celebrity Rehab in extraordinarily rough shape. (In one scene while lying in bed one night, he rolls over and vomits on the floor before falling back to sleep again.)
In one fateful episode, he speaks with Layne’s Mom where he expresses deep regret and shame for not calling 911 that traumatic April day. (“I wish I would’ve called 911 that day…I wish I would’ve known he was dying…I wouldn’t have just walked out the door.”)
To her eternal credit, a kindhearted McCallum doesn’t blame Starr at all and insists that “Layne would forgive you.” When the bassist expresses his profound shame for not being sober when confronting his old friend, McCallum explains why her son wouldn’t call 911 himself:
“Because he was embarrassed. A beautiful man with huge talent had squandered his life and his talents and that’s not a judgment, that’s just a statement of fact and he knew that. And it’s a horrible thing but I don’t blame you and I never have.”
Despite her best efforts, Starr never forgave himself. Despite brief periods of good health, he reverted back to his worst impulses until March 8, 2011 when he was discovered dead of an overdose in a home he shared with Days Of The New’s Travis Meeks, his new bandmate, in Utah. He was 44.
Two years earlier, Alice In Chains would reconvene after a long absence with a new singer. Pearl Jam would join them for a festival gig in Belgium in 2010, the first time in nearly twenty years that the two bands had shared a bill together.
In Grunge Is Dead, one of two literary oral histories about the Seattle scene, Nancy Staley McCallum revealed how she struggled to fully understand her son’s health problems:
“…I was completely unaware or completely unprepared for any kind of drug involvement. He struggled a bit in high school for a couple of years, but had quit using. Then he was off and running with the band…I had no idea how to help my son, and I didn’t know how severe his use was. I just didn’t know how much to be alarmed.”
She didn’t accept that his music was often autobiographical until it was too late:
“I thought that the songs he was singing about drug addiction were about people he was observing…I was so naive. If I had any idea what the entertainment industry is like, and what would happen to him…I would have hidden him.”
In his 2010 interview with Drew Pinsky on Loveline, Starr was still struggling with the loss of his best friend:
“Sometimes I feel naked without Layne in this life…I just really miss him.”
As for Alice In Chains, starting in 2013, founding drummer Sean Kinney starting paying tribute to both men. The front of his bass drum reads “LSMS”, the initials for Layne Staley and Mike Starr.
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, September 14, 2022
9:32 p.m.
CORRECTION: Layne Staley had a cat, not a dog, that was later adopted by his friend and bandmate Jerry Cantrell. Many thanks to GrungeFairy54 over at Reddit for pointing out the error, the kind comment and posting the link which explains why this piece has been accessed so much recently. I’ve corrected the text. I’m sorry for not catching my mistake sooner.
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
3:00 p.m.
THE WRITINGS OF DENNIS EARL 
