Ignoring his friend's protestations and calls for him to stay, Mike Starr stormed out of Layne Staley’s apartment in Seattle's University District and slammed the door behind him. It was Starr's birthday, and the 36-year-old musician wasn't in the mood for a lecture from his friend and former bandmate. Staley was annoyed that Starr was high on Benzodiazepine - "too high", the bassist subsequently admitted - and had told him, "You're an idiot on these pills'. But Alice In Chains' frontman was also high, on a cocktail of morphine, codeine, and cocaine, and even in his disoriented state Starr had been sufficiently concerned about his friend's health that he wanted to call 911 and have paramedics attend to the singer.
"He said if I did, he would never talk to me again," Starr later recalled.
As fate would have it, even though Starr reluctantly agreed not to call the emergency services, he and Staley would never speak again anyway. On April 19, 2002, when Seattle police officers kicked in Staley's apartment door after a relative voiced concern about his whereabouts, they found the lifeless 34-year-old singer sitting upright on his couch with a syringe of heroin in his hand, and cocaine and crack pipes on his table. Alice In Chains' vocalist had been dead for two weeks, passing away on April 5, the day after Mike Starr's birthday.
"I'd been expecting the call for a long time," Alice In Chains drummer Sean Kinney told New York Times journalist Mark Yarm for his definitive grunge history Everybody Loves Our Town. "For seven years in fact. But it was still shocking."
I talk to Layne, but we don't hang out. I don't live his lifestyle, so his house isn't the healthiest place to be
Sean Kinney, Alice In Chains
In 1999, I spoke to Sean Kinney when Alice In Chains were promoting their expansive box set Music Bank. The collection included two brand new AIC songs, Get Born Again and Died, recorded with producer Dave Jerden in Los Angeles the previous August. Given that the band had been inactive since the summer of 1996, when they played a handful of arena shows supporting Kiss, the fact that the Seattle band were making music again was exciting news, offering hope of a fourth studio album. It was an open secret in the music industry that Alice In Chains' enforced hiatus was at least partially a consequence of Layne Staley's struggles with addiction, as the singer openly acknowledged in a 1996 interview with Rolling Stone.
"When I tried drugs," he said, "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."
When I asked Sean Kinney how things were with the singer, he replied with commendable honesty.
"I talk to Layne, but we don't hang out," he admitted. "I don't live his lifestyle, so his house isn't the healthiest place to be around. I don't need any help to get annihilated."
Given that the singer hadn't been in the spotlight for a couple of years, the staff at Dave Jerden's El Dorado were startled by Staley's appearance when he showed up to record his vocals for the two new AIC songs on August 22, 1998, his 31st birthday.
"I didn’t recognize him," engineer Bryan Carlstrom told author David De Sola for his book Alice in Chains: The Untold Story. "He looked like an 80-year-old man. He didn’t have any teeth. I was shocked, to say the least."
Despite his obvious ill-health at the time, this would not be Layne Staley's final recording session. That came later, in November 1998, when the singer laid down vocals on a cover of one of the best-known songs in rock history with a one-off supergroup featuring some of the shining stars from the decade's alternative rock community.
The music supervisors in charge of assembling the soundtrack to high school horror film The Faculty, director Robert Rodriguez's follow-up to cult classic From Dusk Till Dawn, were Columbia/Sony A&R co-ordinator Leslie Langlo and Denise Luiso, who'd helped put together the soundtracks for Armageddon, Spawn and more. The pair pulled assembled an impressive roster of contemporary acts - Oasis, The Offspring, Garbage and Creed among them - but wanted to land a marquee name to record a cover of Pink Floyd's Another Brick In The Wall, Part 1 and Part 2, Roger Waters' song being viewed as pivotal to the film. Drawing upon their extensive contacts list, Langlo and Luiso decided to create a bespoke supergroup for the recording, featuring Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello (now married to Luiso), Jane's Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins, Porno For Pyros bassist Martyn Le Noble, and Layne Staley, with producer Matt Serletic playing keyboards. This one-off group took the name Class of '99.
Staley showed up ten hours late for the recording.
"People were waiting and wondering and worrying," Alice In Chains/Soundgarden manager Susan Silver recalled in Everybody Loves Our Town. "When he finally got there around midnight, Layne was as sweet and funny and unaffected and mischievous as always."
It would turn be the last time that Silver saw Staley. And the last recording that the singer ever made.
"Was there more I could have done to help Layne?" Jerry Cantrell mused to Mark Yarm when asked about his friend's passing. "I don't think so... we were grown men at that time and you live your life the way you're going to live it. I don't think there was anything anybody could have done. He made a choice, and stuck with it, and it didn't turn out very well."
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