Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

“I don’t even know when the whole heroin thing happened for them. I know there was a little bit of blow going around at one point and we were all doing it like nobody gave a shit,” Music Bank cofounder Scott Hunt said. “[Heroin] just hadn’t hit Seattle yet. If … it was going to hit anywhere, [you think] it would have hit us. We never saw it.”

Music Bank manager David Ballenger offered a similar recollection, with a slight caveat. “There was a problem with cocaine around, but I’m not saying there wasn’t heroin around. Cocaine was a real scourge around the Music Bank. I’ve got some hellacious stories about that, involving psychotic people with guns.”

There is some evidence of heroin use at the Music Bank. Layne and Hit and Run drummer Dean Noble went to the room occupied by the band Broken Toyz, who had a larger room and whose singer, Rob Brustad, was always down for getting stoned. “We were smoking some weed, and Rob broke out some heroin and offered it to us. I looked at Layne and he looked at me and we’re like, ‘No thanks. You go ahead—we’ll just stick with weed. We’re cool.’ That was pretty much it. It wasn’t like a hard sell or anything like that. At that time, Layne wasn’t interested in that.” Duane Lance Bodenheimer, singer of the band the Derelicts, who had his own struggles with heroin, agreed with Noble’s assessment. “A heroin junkie doesn’t turn down heroin.”

Darrell Vernon offered a surprising account of Layne’s views at the time. “Back then, he was very against heroin. They were doing just about everything else. There was lots of cocaine, like, and LSD and stuff like that, and everybody is smoking pot and that sort of thing, but it was ironic that he became a heroin addict, because he was so against heroin at that point in time.

“There was like sort of a line where junkies weren’t cool,” he added. “Generally, there was this sort of peer-pressure thing that the heroin was definitely not okay. Junkies were bad, but all other sort of drugs were okay, but that wasn’t.” Brustad would later die of an apparent drug overdose in 1996. He was thirty-one years old.2

Regardless of his opposition to heroin, Layne was developing a growing appetite and tolerance for drug use, enough that his bandmates were becoming alarmed. During one night out in Seattle, Layne and Pollock—“fueled by mushrooms”—were walking around, and there was talk about the movie A Clockwork Orange. “We went out being decadent, breaking shit, that kind of thing. We ran—Layne got caught,” Pollock said. Layne decided to give the police officer, a woman, some attitude. According to the account he heard from Layne later, “He was a smart-ass to her, and she sicced the dog on him and it chewed up his legs. We came by him a little bit later in the evening. The cops had him in the back of a car at 7-Eleven. We just saw him kind of like look up and nod at us. I believe his hands were still handcuffed behind his back.” Someone eventually got Layne out of jail.

On another occasion, Nick Pollock drove to Layne’s parents’ home to pick him up for band practice. He was driving across the 520 bridge when he noticed Layne’s eyes were extremely dilated. “His eyes were just totally crazy, but he had this really calm look on his face.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Pollock asked.

“I took some acid.”

“How much?”

“A sheet.”

“The man had a constitution for drugs,” Pollock would later recall. “He could ingest so much stuff, and it just didn’t mess him up. We went out one night with a bottle of tequila somehow he got a hold of. I remember imbibing enough of it to get me pretty wasted. But he drank all the rest of it.” Pollock estimated Layne drank more than half of the bottle by himself. “I always remember that the guy just could do a lot. He could drink a lot, he could do a lot of drugs, and it didn’t seem to slow him down too much.”

On another occasion, Layne brought Pollock into a room at the Music Bank. His motives for doing so were unknown to Pollock until they actually did it: they freebased cocaine.

Pollock was shaken because he enjoyed it so much that it scared him. “I walked away from that and said, ‘I will never, ever do that again,’ because it felt way too good,” Pollock said. “I remember feeling like I was standing at the opening of an abyss, and then I turned around and walked away.” Layne and Pollock talked about it after, and both agreed they would never do it again. Pollock doesn’t know if Layne did it again.

Layne’s drug use got to the point where Pollock, Bergstrom, and Bacolas organized a band meeting at the Music Bank to confront him at some point in 1987, not long before their band broke up. “I think he [was] doing more and more and more of it, and then we started to notice, band-wise, like, ‘This is freaking us out,’ because we’re worried for our friend. We had something of an intervention with him. There were tears involved,” Pollock said.

“I’ll take care of it. It’ll get better. I’ll stop doing it,” Layne told them.