Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

According to the employee, Layne would typically buy comic books and action figures and paid with cash, but he could not recall what specifically Layne would buy, only that the selections were random. “Whatever caught his eye; there was no normal pattern,” he said. Layne had people with him when he came to the store. “There were usually a couple of people with him. They would kind of prop him up and help with him a lot.” He did not know who they were. The last time he saw Layne was in February or March 2002.

Layne went to Jim Elmer’s home in Bellevue in Christmas of 2000 or 2001 to spend the holidays with his family. There was a minor snag—he showed up one or two days late.

“He was funny,” Jamie Elmer recalled of this holiday. “For him to show up, and get himself together enough to show up and be out, and be in front of the family—I don’t know what it was like for him to mentally … go through that process. But when he did show up and was out and about, he was funny and on his game, and sweet, and just like I remember him to be.”

“I remember he arrived with bags of little Christmas presents—some stuff that he had bought for us, and some stuff that he made, like little craft projects that he had made for us with our names on them. He looked sick, but his mood and his energy and his whole disposition was as I remember him to be.” Jamie never saw him again.

A major family milestone happened in early 2002: Liz had given birth to her first child. Around Valentine’s Day 2002, Layne went to Jim Elmer’s home to meet his nephew, Oscar. He brought a camcorder for the occasion, although Jim doesn’t recall if he actually filmed anything that day.

“We hadn’t seen Layne for a while, and he looked pretty good. He certainly was shy about his teeth issue, but he looked good, and you could tell that he had a little spark in his eyes when he saw Oscar, because he hadn’t been through this before,” Jim said. “So it was kind of like he knows what life is and he knows what the next generation is and he can be a part of it or maybe not be a part of it, but it was a touching moment, and it didn’t last very long, but it was touching [to] see that next generation come up.”

A photograph was taken of Layne holding Oscar. This is the last picture the family has of him and is the only image that is known to exist of him from the final months of his life. It is likely this was the last photograph of him ever taken.

Jamie Elmer—who was not there but has seen the photograph—said of Layne’s appearance, “He looked like I remember him looking when I had seen him last. He was smiling and looked like Layne, but he looked older than he really was, and he looked like he was sick. He did not look well. He looked sweet, and he looked happy.”

Despite his poor shape, Jim Elmer said that the general mood surrounding Layne’s visit was hopeful and optimistic. “He was smiling, he was talkative, so there’s a good sign that either he was doing better or he was trying to do better, that there’s a more hopeful thing as compared to ‘We’re going to lose him in two days’ or something like that. I didn’t get that feeling at all.” Jim, Nancy, Liz, and Greg never saw him alive again.

His mother told Greg Prato, “I think Layne knew he was dying, but he didn’t plan on it. He had just gotten his driver’s license renewed, and he was in the middle of art projects. I really expected that Layne would survive this ordeal.”4

In late March or early April, Toby Wright was in a Los Angeles studio producing Taproot’s sophomore album Welcome. The band had written an instrumental song with the working title “Spacey” because “it had a dark, spacey/ethereal feel to it,” Taproot bassist Phil Lipscomb wrote in an e-mail. Being fans of Layne, they wanted him to sing on it. According to Wright, “It was a really good song, and Layne really liked it, and he really wanted to sing on it. I had sent him some demos of it, and he said, ‘Yeah! Come on, let’s do this!’”

Wright said Layne’s mood seemed good during their phone conversations. “I think he was excited about the track, for sure, and honored that they wanted him to sing on it.” The members of Taproot wanted to be there for the recording session, but Layne requested Wright come alone, because “he wasn’t looking or feeling great, and he didn’t want to be seen.”

The plan was for Layne to “do his thing” and write his own lyrics, and then have Taproot singer Stephen Richards work off whatever Layne did. “Obviously anything he would’ve done would have been magical,” Richards said in a quote relayed by Lipscomb via e-mail.

Wright booked time at Robert Lang Studios in mid-April to record Layne’s vocals. Although he had set up Layne’s home recording studio, and Layne was known to prepare his vocals on scratch recordings, Wright doubts he recorded anything ahead of time. “I think it was all just in his head; it was going to be on the fly.”