Layne’s living arrangement was a source of amusement because of the double entendre involved. “We used to give him so much crap about coming out of the closet in the morning. He’d come out rubbing his eyes, ‘Oh, Layne’s coming out of the closet again,’” Ahern Rammell recalled. Her car at the time was a 1969 Pontiac GTO Judge. When Layne wanted to look cool, he would borrow her car. She rode in Layne’s car many times and saw him squirt people with his windshield wipers the same way James Bergstrom did.
Morgen Gallagher recalls that he moved into Mitchell’s place after Layne had already been living there for a few months. They lived near an expressway off-ramp and had Big Wheel races down the ramp when there was little or no traffic in the early hours of the morning.
“One night they got drunk enough they thought it was a grand idea to go for a walk, and they came back bloodied, skinned-up,” Ahern Rammell recalled. “They’re laughing their asses off and I’ve got them all sat down like little kids putting Band-Aids on their elbows and washing off their boo-boos. They had stolen Big Wheels and taken them up on the express lane off-ramp and ridden them all the way down the off-ramp and down the road until they wiped out. They did that a couple times, and the last wipeout was so bad they decided they were done.”
Subsequently Mitchell was dismissed from the band and Gallagher joined as his replacement. Mitchell’s dismissal forced Layne and Gallagher to move out of his house. Marianne Condiff, who wanted to manage Sleze, let them stay in her studio apartment in West Seattle for several months.
The timing of Mitchell’s departure was especially bad because it happened a day or so before Sleze was scheduled to shoot the scene for Father Rock. Gallagher took Mitchell’s spot in the band for the movie. Over the course of a Friday and Saturday in September 1986, Byrd shot the Father Rock scenes with Sleze at the Richmond Beach Congregational Church. Sleze brought along about fifty extras for the shoot. The actor playing the lead role in the movie had to take off for a few hours because he was working as a stripper and had to jump out of a cake.
Byrd was annoyed when he found out Layne was drinking hard liquor in the church bathroom before the performance. Byrd filmed Sleze in the church, which took about three hours. Layne lip-synched as the band performed two songs: “Fat Girls” and “Over the Edge.” Byrd wrapped up the shoot and had everyone come back the next day.
Layne had a small cameo with spoken lines in the script. According to Byrd, he told the actress to call him Candy, which wasn’t in Byrd’s original script. There was an attractive girl sitting in the front row. Byrd later discovered Layne went home with her that night. There was trouble with the extras: one or more of them vandalized the church’s vending machine and caused ten thousand dollars’ worth of damage to the organ pipes. Byrd’s parents had homeowner’s insurance, which paid for the damages as a goodwill gesture.
Byrd was originally set on using “Fat Girls” but later changed his mind and used “In for Trouble,” a song by Tim Branom’s band Gypsy Rose, which played over the footage of Sleze performing “Over the Edge” in the final cut. The movie, which aired on local cable in Seattle, wasn’t released until 1989. By that point, Sleze had broken up and Layne was in Alice in Chains. The last time Byrd saw Layne was in the mid-1990s, backstage after a Second Coming show—Johnny Bacolas and James Bergstrom’s band that Byrd was working with at the time.
“I hadn’t seen him in years. It was really cool to sit down and talk. I remember he had a firm handshake, and he looked muscular. He’d been working out, and he looked good,” he recalled. One of the first things Layne said to him was, “Hey, I saw Father Rock…”
“Oh my God! Where did you see that?”
“Someone had a copy of it.”
“What’d you think?”
“I liked it but it was corny.”
At some point during this period, Layne and Chrissy Chacos were introduced by Chrissy’s sister and started dating. Both Layne and his mother told Chacos she was his first serious girlfriend. Chacos, a Seattle native who had moved to Minneapolis where she became part of the local music scene while Prince was filming Purple Rain, had moved back to Seattle. While in Minnesota, she was a fan of Apollonia Kotero, the female lead in the movie. Somehow she wound up getting two pairs of Prince’s pants and a purple outfit—pants, jacket, and white ruffled shirt—similar to the one he wore on the album cover and movie poster.
Her initial impression of Layne: “Layne was awesome. Layne was a total comedian. He was always in a good mood.” They would go out to see local bands or hang out at the Music Bank.
After several months of crashing at Marianne Condiff’s place, Layne and Gallagher had worn out their welcome. She got fed up because they did not help pay the rent. According to Gallagher, “We would tell Marianne that we were going out job hunting, and we’d go down to the Rainier Brewery and just sit in that sample room and drink half the day.”
They would take the free tour of the brewery, which ended at the sample room, which had a three-beer limit. Layne and Gallagher would leave and come back and take the tour two or three times a day. How did they get by at this point? “Basically, we were taken care of by people. People wanted us to hang out with them. They paid for everything, pretty much,” Gallagher said. “We were acting like rock stars, and we were being paid to do it, so we just kept on doing it.”
In other words, they had no incentive to get a real job. The two moved into the band’s rehearsal room at the Music Bank. Eventually, Johnny Bacolas rejoined the band as a bassist and replaced Gallagher.
Another personal and professional milestone happened at some point in the second half of 1986 when Layne cowrote “Queen of the Rodeo” with local musician Jet Silver. Tim Branom remembers being there with Layne and Silver as they were writing the song. “They were sitting at the piano, and I was there with them at the Music Bank. It was about two or three o’clock in the morning and they were just completing that song, and it was pretty funny,” he said.
Morgen Gallagher has a slightly different recollection of the writing of the song and how Layne came across it. “It was a gift from Jet Silver and that was for Layne’s birthday. And it was just the first verse and then the chorus. And then me and Layne wrote the second verse. It’s a good song, and then we just took and finished it up.
“Jet had first played it for [Layne] and then gave it to him. It was for a birthday present up at Jet’s house in West Seattle, when we were living with Marianne maybe four or five blocks from him, so we saw him quite often.
“Whenever we were over at his house we just played some stuff, and Layne heard it and just fell in love with it and kept on raving about it. So Jet says, ‘Fine, it’s yours then.’”
Nick Pollock said of the song, “We played that one in the old Alice ’N Chains a lot. It was a big crowd-pleaser because it was such a ridiculous song.
“I would say we’re playing it by, I don’t know, early ’87. It seems to be a big part of that band any way you look at it. I think it may have correlated with when we did the name change. I can’t remember. But it was such a big show hit, I just remember playing it at every show.”
One of the more curious elements of the Alice in Chains history is that none of the members of the first or second version of the band came up with the name. Credit for the name goes to Russ Klatt, front man for the band Slaughter Haus 5.
In the fall or winter of 1986, Johnny Bacolas was at a party and ran into Klatt. The two started a conversation about changing Sleze’s name. Layne and Bacolas had designed backstage passes. One pass said something to the effect of “Sleze: Welcome to Wonderland Tour.”2 The conversation shifted to Alice in Wonderland and evolved into Alice in Bondage. Eventually, Klatt said three fateful words: Alice in Chains.