Staley’s final public performance was in Kansas City, Mo., in 1996. What’s not known is if they finally connected.Ĭourtney Love, center, tried to chase down Staley following the death of Kurt Cobain (r.), to see if he might’ve known something about the mysterious circumstances surrounding Cobain’s death. Since both Staley and Cobain were smackheads and ran with the same musicians, the assumption was he might know something. She wasn’t happy with the suicide ruling and wondered what more there might be to the story. That was the last time Staley would do a major tour.Ĭourtney Love tried to chase him down following Cobain’s death. “There is no f-–g way I’m going to do that,” he shouted. Band manager Susan Silver told Staley that he had to be the one to break it to ticket buyers that the concert was going to end midperformance because he was too screwed up to carry on. In 1993, when the band was touring in support of “Dirt,” Staley would walk offstage midsong to get high. Meanwhile, Starr, who’d been introduced to heroin by Staley, drank a bottle of bleach used for cleaning syringes, thinking it was water. Kinney claims he had an alter ego he called Steve who would stand on a chair in an upscale restaurant and pee on the dessert cart or methodically pour beer into the sconces lining a hotel hallway for the pleasure of seeing them explode seconds later. Just as Alice in Chains became famous, Staley’s girlfriend, Demri Lara Parrott, introduced him to heroin. “He was sort of a classic destroyer of hotel rooms.” “When Sean got lit he was pretty unstoppable,” a friend says. Kinney, though, continued to have fun the old-fashioned way on the Shi–y Cities tour in 1992. Staley created a personal shrine in the recording studio featuring a dead puppy in a jar that he used for inspiration as he crooned lyrics like “Stick your arm for some real fun.” But when the band was recording in Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots in 1992, Staley would hit the scary streets, desperate to score.įor the first time, there were problems with his vocals. Close to a dozen more stints in rehab were in his future. At that point, Staley had already been to rehab after an intervention. By the next year, the band’s dark and deeply pained breakthrough album, “Dirt,” was rife with references to the drug. On the other, Staley’s affair with heroin got serious fast. One night, Alice in Chains dressed up as strippers in skimpy panties and combat boots, and followed Van Halen on stage, aping their signature walk. On one hand, the two bands got up to some hilarious business pranking each other. Staley’s girlfriend, Demri Lara Parrott, started shooting smack - and Alice in Chains got famous.Īlice in Chains was opening for Van Halen on tour in 1991 when Staley, prompted by Parrott, started using. “They were obviously coked out because they (the strippers) started b-ing up one side and down the other to the point where Layne actually told them to shut up because they were making it worse than it needed to be,” according to one observer.īack in those days, the band lived in abject poverty, “obsessed with getting p-y and who they were f-–g.” Layne turned a corner with two strippers into a hallway crowded with cops. One of the purely amusing anecdotes de Sola shares concerns the night the Music Bank, the rehearsal warehouse where the band rented space, was raided in 1988. Sean Kinney, Layne Staley, Mike Starr and Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains during an In-Store record promotion in Los Angeles in September 1990.īoth Jerry Cantrell, the other engine driving Alice in Chains, and drummer Sean Kinney openly talk about their sobriety these days, but are none too specific about the substances, other than booze, at the source of their addictions.Īctually, the best of times was when everyone was just strung out on booze, coke and sex - the basic musts on any rocker’s CV.
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