Fuck, yeah! This is what a lead singer should look like!
—JOHNNY BACOLAS
JAMES BERGSTROM WAS WALKING between classes at Shorewood High School one day in 1984 when he ran into Ken Elmer, a friend from the marching band. Ken knew that Bergstrom’s band, Sleze, was looking for a singer, and he had somebody in mind for them.
“Hey, my stepbrother Layne plays drums but he wants to be a singer. You should give him a call,” Elmer told him. After the initial pitch, Elmer said under his breath, “I think he kind of sucks, so it’s not my fault—if you can’t do it, then that’s fine.”
Not long after, Ken went over to Jim and Nancy’s home and told Layne about the position. Layne’s mother recalled that conversation to journalist Greg Prato:
“Layne, there are a couple of guys over at Shorewood High School looking for a singer,” Ken told him.
“Well, I’m not a singer,” Layne responded.
“Why don’t you try out anyhow?”1
An audition was eventually set up. Bergstrom told Sleze guitarist Johnny Bacolas about the new singer they would be trying out. Bacolas liked what he was hearing—that he was thin and was peroxiding his hair. The first person who came to mind was Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil, a band that Bacolas and the other members of Sleze were huge fans of.
The tryout took place at Bergstrom’s parents’ house in Richmond Beach, where Sleze had their jam room in the basement. They were young—still in early high school and still learning how to play their instruments and playing covers. Tim Branom—a musician who would later produce one of Sleze’s demos—described the band: “They had a Mötley Crüe but punk influence, something [that] today would be only described as an angry Seattle vibe but as a glam band with black lipstick and black fingernails. This was very radical for them to do, especially since their parents were very straight and churchgoing people.”
The members of Sleze had no expectations before the audition. “[We] didn’t know what we were going to get. Just, we knew that he was really getting into singing, and that he had bleached-blond hair, and that was good enough,” Bacolas recalled. When he arrived, the others noticed his tall stature, soft-spoken demeanor, and that he was very much dressed for the part.
“He came to our jam room and was really shy, real timid,” Bacolas said. “And just as we expected, we were like, ‘Fuck, yeah! This is what a lead singer should look like!’”
Ed Semanate, the other founding guitarist for Sleze, recalls that his most vivid memory of Layne during that first introduction was that he had band names like “Ozzy” or “Mötley Crüe” written on his pants in bleach.
The four surviving band members are all fairly certain that the first song they performed with Layne was a cover of Mötley Crüe’s “Looks That Kill,” although Bacolas and Bergstrom won’t entirely rule out the possibility it may have been W.A.S.P.’s “L.O.V.E. Machine.”
“At the top of our list for sure was Mötley Crüe. That was the band we would want to be,” Byron Hansen said. The other members immediately knew they were onto something.
“I can tell you if it was ‘Looks That Kill,’ when he got to the part ‘Now she’s a cool cool black,’ he could actually hit those notes. We were like, ‘Oh my God! This is awesome!’” Bergstrom recalled with a laugh. “So you had that feeling, ‘Here’s this kid. He’s got a great-sounding voice. He’s cool. He could sing on key. And he also had good range and he was soulful, though he was just a raw beginner.’ So we knew we had something special, and we were like in heaven from then. We became a band.”
Hansen agreed. “We were totally like, ‘Wow! This guy can sing like Vince Neil! He’s like a little Vince Neil!’ We just thought it was awesome.”
Although Layne’s voice was still in a raw, undeveloped form and he was only singing covers at this point, it was impossible to compare his sound with that of singers in the past or his contemporaries.
“He didn’t strike me as ‘Oh, this guy is a [Jim] Morrison wannabe,’ or ‘Oh, this guy is a Robert Plant wannabe,’ or an Ozzy wannabe. Layne had his own thing, and I think that’s what was the most appealing about him,” Bacolas said. “He had a very distinctive voice. I didn’t want another Morrison or another Rob Halford. We weren’t looking for that. I don’t know what we were looking for. We just kind of—we just found it.”
At one point, Layne asked Bergstrom for permission to play his drum kit. Bergstrom agreed, and Layne started playing the beginning of Mötley Crüe’s “Red Hot.” Bergstrom was impressed. “Man, you gotta show me that!”
The decision was a no-brainer—Layne got the job on the spot. Ken Elmer ran into Bergstrom not long after. “He just comes running down the hall, ‘Dude, your brother is fucking awesome!’ I mean, he’s swearing and he’s screaming and he’s like, ‘It’s perfect.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, I thought for sure you guys would hate him. I think he kind of sucks,’” he recalled.
The band rehearsed several times a week, gradually expanding their repertoire and playing ability. At one point, Semanate told Layne he needed a digital delay—a device that creates an echo effect on vocals. Layne and Semanate went to a local music store and bought one. The delay eventually became part of Layne’s singing style.
Bergstrom would often hang out with Layne or spend the night at his house. He remembers staying up late at night watching The Exorcist or plugging in his PA unit so he could practice his singing or experiment with it. “He’d plug it all in and practice. He’d practice singing to like ‘Metal Thrashing Mad’ by Anthrax. He practiced ‘Rod of Iron’ by Lizzy Borden, all these different songs. He was fascinated with his digital delay at first.”
Layne began his senior year at Meadowdale High School in the fall of 1984. A review of the school yearbooks from 1981 to 1985 found only three photos of him: a portrait photo from his sophomore year in 1982–83, a group photo of the industrial woodworking class of 1984–85, and the senior-class group photo. In the two latter photos, his platinum-blond hair made him stick out. There were no portrait photos of him during his freshman, junior, and senior years.
* * *
It was Rick Throm’s first year teaching the industrial woodworking course. “He didn’t seem to have a lot of friends in the class. He was kind of a loner, but he listened to what you said, and he did what you said, and he seemed to really enjoy it,” were Throm’s impressions of Layne. Throm liked Layne enough to hire him at his cabinet shop after school for minimum wage.
“He was really willing to learn, but he sometimes felt that he got kind of the short end of the deal in our shop because he was the low man on the totem pole.”
An example: Throm asked Layne to paint a storage shed at his shop. After spending several hours on it over the course of two days, Layne approached Throm, saying, “Mr. Throm, I think I’d like to be building cabinets more than painting this storage shed.”
“Well, everybody has to start somewhere, Layne, and we’ve all painted, we’ve all done this and that, and that’s what you have to do right now,” Throm responded. Consequently, Layne wrote on his hour sheet “Painted fucking storage shed” in protest.
Another time, Throm asked him, “Layne, what do you think you want to do in your life?”
“[Be] a rock star,” he responded.
“Rock star? I want to be a fishing guy, but, look it, I’m in here working. How do you think you’re going to be a rock star?”
“I’m going to win this Battle of the Bands, and that has a recording contract with it.”
“So you think you can win the Battle of the Bands?”
“Oh, yeah. We’re good enough to win the Battle of the Bands.”
“Okay, well, what kind of music do you play, Layne?”
“You don’t know it.”
“Turn on the radio and let’s listen to the station that has some of that music.”
“It’s not on the station.”
“Oh my God, Layne! You want to be a rock star; you want to play music that isn’t even on a radio station. Maybe you better rethink this thing.”
In retrospect, Throm regrets having discouraged Layne from pursuing his dream and is glad Layne didn’t take his advice. It was one of a handful of times that one of his students taught him a lesson. “Layne taught me never to squelch a guy’s dream. Dream on and dream hard, but have a backup plan.” After Layne became successful, Throm thought he might come back to the shop and make him paint the storage shed as payback, but it never happened.
* * *
Layne’s parents were supportive of his goals, never discouraging him from his chosen profession. “Nancy and I at that time, we knew what pop rock was, but this new stuff that was coming out, we didn’t quite understand the whole thing, but certainly we were supportive of that and reminded him that we certainly wanted him to stay off of drugs and so forth, but we didn’t tie those two together,” Jim explained. When Layne was about seventeen or eighteen, his parents bought him his first car: a VW Dasher. “By that time, we knew he was going to be in the music business and that was [his] dream and he needed transportation, so we wanted to help him out,” he said.
Jamie Elmer remembers keeping Layne company as he was working on the Dasher. He had cleaned out the case containing the windshield wiper fluid, filled it with orange juice, and rigged the hose for the fluid so that it came out of the dashboard inside the car. He had turned the windshield wiper system into a drink machine and poured her a glass of orange juice from the dashboard. He could also modify his car for more mischievous purposes.
“The most trouble Layne and I caused together … Layne had a little car at one point and we pried the window washers to spray outward, and we were driving around and shooting people with it. As we drove by, we’d soak them,” James Bergstrom recalled with a laugh. “We saw a police officer coming into the parking lot, and we pulled out and drove across the street to an Arby’s, and the cop followed us, and we were like, ‘Oh, shit! This isn’t good!’”
The officer pulled Layne over. “Hey, are you guys driving around squirting people?”
“No, Officer,” Layne answered.
“Where’s your windshield wiper applicator?”
After Layne pointed to it, the officer reached into the car and pulled on it, getting soaked from his head down to the middle of his chest. Bergstrom started laughing, at which point Layne smacked him on the leg and told him to be quiet. The officer let Layne off with a warning.
Another time, Bergstrom and some of the other band members were spending the night at Layne’s house. They snuck out to go to a party, walking to Aurora Avenue and down to Richmond Beach several miles away. Layne’s mother woke up in the middle of the night and saw they had gone out. At that time, there were no cell phones, so she called Bergstrom’s mother and went out looking for them. Layne, Bergstrom, and the others were walking back and had almost made it home when they saw Nancy driving by in her van at two o’clock in the morning.
* * *
By early 1985, the members of Sleze felt they were ready to perform live. In a scene straight from Back to the Future, Sleze auditioned for the Shorewood High School talent show and didn’t make the cut. “We tried out for the school talent show, and we flunked. They wouldn’t let us do the school talent show,” Semanate said, laughing. “We brought all our shit to the auditorium. We just blasted it out, and they’re like, ‘No fucking way.’”
Sleze eventually got to perform a forty-five-minute set on February 4, 1985, during lunchtime in the Student Activities Center—colloquially dubbed the SAC—at Shorewood High School. Hansen remembers Semanate had designed a hand-drawn poster to promote the show and, as a joke, drew a different version that he showed Hansen first—for “Satanic Sleze,” which featured pentagrams and inverted crosses. On the day of the show, the band members went to Bergstrom’s parents’ house to get ready for the performance. They crowded into a bathroom to put on their stage outfits, makeup, and hair spray.
“We showed up to school like it was Halloween basically. Lunchtime and everyone was just like double-taking us,” Bacolas said, laughing. They had stage fright, since this was their first show. He estimated the crowd size at between two hundred and four hundred students. The set list consisted mostly of covers: “L.O.V.E. Machine,” “Looks That Kill,” Armored Saint’s “False Alarm,” Wrathchild’s “Stakk Attakk,” Venom’s “Countess Bathory,” and Slayer’s “Black Magic.”
Layne was nervous, according to Bacolas. He barely looked at the crowd and mostly paced back and forth onstage, looking down while singing, or else had his back to the audience while looking at the drummer. Despite his nerves and inexperience, he pulled off the performance. The four surviving band members don’t think he forgot any lyrics or hit a wrong note.
After the show, they were feeling pretty good about themselves. “We were high on life! We thought this was it, man. We’re on our way!” Bergstrom said. This was the first and only performance featuring this lineup of the band.
Not long after this show, Semanate went out partying with his bandmates. “We went to this party and we were drinking; we were having fun. It was like a keg. We get in this room, ‘Where’s the bong at?’” Semanate recalled. “This was the first time I smoked weed with them. I even got James high, which blew my mind. It was a lot of fun. Kind of a little bonding thing.”
Shortly after this, according to Semanate, Bergstrom’s mother called a band meeting, where the members and parents would get together at a local pizza restaurant. The concern was that Semanate was a bad influence on the other four.
“I was the bastard child in that band,” Semanate said. “I’d just smoke weed and drink, typical shit I do today.” As soon as the food was served, Semanate said, Bergstrom’s and Hansen’s mothers began expressing their concerns about Semanate. “It was just harping about me. I’m the negative influence in this band, they don’t want their kids looking like me, ending up like me, et cetera, et cetera. So me and my mom, we just left, said, ‘Fuck this. We’re out of here.’”
Bergstrom doesn’t recall too many specifics about that dinner. “I don’t really remember what the whole thing about it was. ‘His hair was too long and he was a bad influence!’ Something silly.” Bacolas has a similar recollection.
Layne was at the dinner, accompanied by his mother and possibly his stepfather, but no one remembers what, if anything, they said. Semanate recalled, “Nancy was pretty cool. She just kicked back and she was on the sidelines.” The next day Semanate went over to Bergstrom’s house to pick up his gear in the basement, still bitter about the dinner.
“It was weird, man, because it was like back then, I was a diehard,” he said. “I would die for my band. I believed in rock and roll that much. I was just a kid who … it was like being a superhero. It was all I had.” On top of that, Semanate was the one who came up with the band name.
Layne called Semanate the next day, telling him he was quitting, too. The two discussed starting a new band, which would be called Fairfax. A day after that, Semanate got a call asking him to join a punk rock band, with hints of a possible record deal, an offer he accepted. Layne went back to Sleze, who would fill Semanate’s spot with Chris Markham.
Bergstrom and Hansen recall another show from 1985 at the Lynnwood Rollerway, where they were competing in a local Battle of the Bands—presumably the same one Layne told Rick Throm about. Layne’s voice was shot, and he was struggling to get through the set.
“He like lost his voice, just kind of hoarse and hurting. He had this spray bottle of Chloraseptic or something like that. He was constantly shooting it in his throat, trying to get it to where he could sing,” Hansen said. According to Bergstrom, Layne had strep throat.
Sleze did another show at the SAC the same year and performed at the Lakeside School talent show, where Markham was a student. They also performed at Shorecrest High School for what Bergstrom described as a pep assembly, during which Sleze performed a cover of the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie.”
Several members of Sleze turned sixteen that year, which meant they could get their driver’s licenses, which provided greater freedom and mobility. Sleze didn’t tour in a van—they played only in the Seattle area and got to and from gigs in their own cars. Bacolas estimates the band was getting a few hundred dollars a show from local promoters. They didn’t have a manager, so they did their own bookings, a responsibility handled by Bacolas with a landline at his parents’ house or by networking with other bands.
At the end of the 1984–85 school year at Meadowdale, the industrial woodworking class had an awards banquet at which certain students received recognition for their work. Layne got Most Improved Student because, according to Rick Throm, “he really did blossom.”
Layne was supposed to graduate in the summer of 1985, but it turned out that he was one course or one credit short of being able to graduate. According to a school record, there is a note saying that Layne “did not graduate” dated June 5, 1985—most likely graduation day of that year. Layne’s school records were sent to the Chrysalis School in Woodinville on December 4 of the same year, where his sisters were enrolled. “It was a way to keep Layne engaged in some intellectual activity, because he was certainly growing up and so forth,” Jim Elmer explained. “It was an idea that did not come to fruition, because I don’t remember Layne ever going out there.” Layne’s formal education ended when he left Meadowdale.2
When Nancy went to Layne’s twenty-year high school reunion, she spoke to several people, many of whom were surprised to find out their former classmate went on to be the lead singer of Alice in Chains. “They said ‘Layne Staley was Layne Elmer? He was the quietest boy in our class!’ They were shocked,” she told The Seattle Times.3
Hansen started his junior year of high school in the fall of 1985. By this point, he was meeting new people and was getting into different kinds of music and skateboarding. That fall, Sleze was booked to perform at the Rock Theater, a heavy metal–oriented club in downtown Seattle, a big deal at the time. Hansen had a change of heart and told his bandmates he wanted to quit after the show. The only point of dispute was that he wanted to be reimbursed for his share of the PA and audio equipment they had bought as a band. He was replaced by Jim Sheppard.
During this time, much of the attention among musicians was on the Parents Music Resource Center. Cofounded by Tipper Gore, the PMRC was created to raise awareness about the violent, sexual, or occult content in popular music, which the group argued could have a negative impact on children. The PMRC was lobbying for the creation of a voluntary ratings system for explicit content. Their efforts culminated in the famous hearing before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on September 19, 1985, which featured testimony from the PMRC on one side and, as a counterpoint, the musicians Frank Zappa, John Denver, and Dee Snider. In retrospect, two years later, Tipper Gore told the New York Times that the hearings were a mistake. “The hearings gave the misperception that there was censorship involved.”4
A few weeks after the hearing, KOMO’s television talk show Town Meeting did an episode about the controversy. Layne and Bacolas were in the audience. The Seattle Times did a write-up on the episode and noted Layne’s comments, writing, “Layne Staley, a Lynnwood teen who plays in a heavy-metal group called ‘Sleze,’ says, ‘Our lyrics are all positive—we don’t use bad language or sing about drugs and sex—but I just want the freedom to write about what I want.’” This is likely the first time he appeared on television, and the first time he was quoted in a newspaper.5
At some point during this period, Sleze played a show at Alki Beach. The significance of that show was not the performance itself, but rather who was in attendance—a nineteen-year-old drummer from Renton named Sean Kinney.
* * *
Of his childhood, Sean said, “My dad’s a cop. My mom’s a city official. They got divorced in your typical [white-bread] suburban upbringing for a hyperactive son. I got in trouble. I wouldn’t get in too much trouble. They both worked, so my sister pretty much raised me. They were gone all the time,” he recalled during an interview for an electronic press kit made to coincide with the release of the band’s self-titled album.
He showed an interest in music because of his grandfather, who was a member of a band called the Cross Cats and allowed him to sit in with the band when he was nine years old. “They’d play like country and swing or whatever, and I’d always be over at their house. When they’d take breaks, I’d play. I’d get up and try to play the drums.
“That was the only other band I was really in, the Cross Cats. Nine years! I wore a bow tie. From when I was nine, I took over for the Bob Holler guy. He left. They’re all older, of course, my grandfather. I took over and played for years with them, until I was about twelve or thirteen. I got to do a little road work, my first tour. That was the only other band I was ever in. I did that, and then this [Alice in Chains].”6
“I first met Layne around 1985 when his band was playing at Alki Beach. I told Layne that I thought he was cool but his band sucked. I also told him he should get a different drummer—me” is how Sean recalled their first meeting in an article published in Guitar Legends magazine. Sean—who didn’t have a phone at the time—gave him his girlfriend’s number on a piece of paper.7 Layne hung on to it, unaware of the impact it would have on both of them two years later.
In late 1985, Nick Pollock was a senior at Lindbergh High School when Layne and Bergstrom were looking for a guitar player to replace Chris Markham. According to Pollock, “James and Layne heard from somebody that I had cool hair and played guitar.” They arranged a meeting, where they hit it off, and Layne and Bergstrom invited Pollock to a rehearsal.
“I remember meeting [Layne] in person. I thought he was a totally cocky dude and just totally fit the singer persona. He was a really cool guy,” Pollock said of his initial impression. “I remember hearing him sing on the demo tapes that James gave me, and I thought, ‘Holy shit! This guy’s got some serious pipes!’
“He had a grind to his voice that was just unbelievably cool. It was totally natural. You could tell that he was just star material right there, but just young.” Pollock got the job. Layne and Pollock became friends, each the other’s wingman when going out to meet girls. “I would say that I thoroughly sowed my oats, and Layne was thoroughly my partner in crime in doing so. We happened to be in a popular band and we were able to inspire some very lovely young ladies to do whatever the hell we wanted them to do. So that worked out well!”
Regarding the girls who went to their shows, Bergstrom joked, “The benefits of rock and roll—no such thing as medical and dental.” Bacolas—who left Sleze at one point and later returned as their bassist—offered a similar account. “We had a lot of fun with a lot of girls back then,” he said with a grin. “All of a sudden, we had hundreds of girls at the shows, and it was whatever we wanted, whoever we wanted.”
Pollock got to see a side of Layne most didn’t see in public. “He was a very caring and feeling individual. He cared about people around him and friends and things like that, but at the same time he’s this cocky, irreverent rock-and-roll guy that’s going to be telling people to screw off, being an anarchist, that kind of thing.”
Pollock said Layne never had anything bad to say about his stepfather. “He may joke about [him] irreverently, because he was a parent and we were seventeen and all adults are stupid at that age.” He also said Layne had good relationships with his sisters. Layne and Pollock would sometimes tease Jamie, who was about seven or eight years old at the time. “We called her Chewbacca, because her hair was like round on the top. It was just a way to tease her, and it got at her.”
Inevitably, the two friends would turn on each other. Pollock says Layne made fun of his last name, calling him Polack. One time, he randomly called Layne “Lance Rutherford Elmer” and touched a nerve. “It would make him madder than fuck. He would get so angry at me, he would be ready to get out of the goddamn moving car,” he recalled. “Whenever he would be shitty to me and piss me off, I would start going down that road and then he’d shut up.”
Pollock had forgotten what the Rutherford name meant until he was interviewed for this book. James Bergstrom doesn’t recall how they found out about it. “I think he confided in us. I think we were having one of our band talks. I don’t know if it was just him and I, because I don’t think I told anybody because he asked me not to.” He did confirm Pollock’s account that Layne’s middle name was a very touchy subject. “He hated that. He basically swore to us, ‘Don’t you ever tell ANYBODY.’” Layne turned eighteen on August 22, 1985. At some point, he went to court and legally changed his name to Layne Thomas Staley—the name he would be known by for the rest of his life—to get rid of the Rutherford middle name he so disliked.
By this point, there were tensions between Layne and his mother. Pollock witnessed a few of their arguments when he was at the house. “His mother is very strong-willed and has her own definite opinions, and they clashed a lot with Layne, and Layne rebelled against that.”
What was Layne rebelling against?
“I would say that it pretty much centered around her sense of morality and how that connects with religion. I believe she was a Christian Scientist at the time.
“I have in my mind these images of sitting at the bar with him in the kitchen, witnessing a fight build up between the two of them and how he would get snarky with her, and how she would push back. I think I got a really good relationship with my father, but she reminded me of him in the sense that she had an agency to her that was like a man, and she wasn’t going to take any dissent whatsoever. The more he escalated with what he was saying, the more she would try to hammer him down.
“I felt, and I still to this day feel, that she was too hard on him and she really pushed him away in a lot of ways, in ways where I think she alienated him.” These tensions eventually resulted in Layne’s moving out of the house. Pollock does not recall the specific circumstances. “I don’t believe as I understood it from him that it was necessarily his choice. And at least in the moment, he was more than happy to go. But I remember his talking about it.”
Was it his impression that there was an ultimatum and Layne called it?
“Something along those lines, yes, I do believe so.”
“It was part of his life. It’s part of Nancy’s life. She’s got her viewpoint on what happened, Layne had his viewpoint on what happened, I have my viewpoint on what happened because I had been in their house during these occasions, and I think I described that well enough. I’ve also got my recollections on how it affected him, and what that was.”
Pollock tried to get his parents to take Layne in, but this wasn’t an option because Pollock’s disabled sister required assistance, so his parents couldn’t have another person there.
Jim Elmer agreed with Pollock’s assessment that there was an ultimatum, saying it was a culmination of discussions and arguments between Layne and both of his parents about his drug use. “We had several conversations,” Elmer recalled. “‘We don’t want drugs in the house. You’ve got two little sisters here, and this is going to be a drug-free house, and so if you want to continue taking drugs, then you can’t be here.’ So it didn’t happen just in one day, but Layne definitely knew what was expected of him in terms of the drug issue, and we just couldn’t bend on that for him.”
At around the same time, Sleze moved out of the Bergstrom family basement. According to James Bergstrom, it was Layne’s idea for the band to get a room at a new rehearsal space in Ballard. He thinks the idea was to have a private space with greater freedom to practice, and to be in the scene with the other bands. But there was another issue. Mrs. Bergstrom is described by her son and others as a very religious woman. According to Bergstrom, “My mom prayed for all of us,” he said with a laugh. “She loved everybody.” Layne had a jacket with a pentagram on it, which he would take off and sneak in when he came to the house so as not to offend her.8 Nick Pollock agreed with Bergstrom’s explanation for the move, but also said Layne did not like that Bergstrom’s mother was unhappy about their music.
Thus began Layne’s involvement with the Music Bank.