According to Nesbitt, Slaughter Haus 5 were the favorites to win. He didn’t think that was Diamond Lie’s best performance, noting he had made a few mistakes. Diamond Lie pulled off the upset and won it. They received a cash prize and a few hours of free recording time at a local studio, but it was a moot point because the band was falling apart. On top of the issues with Jerry, right before they took the stage, Muasau told them a band he was friends with was moving to the area and they wanted to hire him for studio work. Nesbitt and Nutter weren’t happy about it, but they didn’t get upset. This wound up being Diamond Lie’s final performance. They broke up a few days later. At some point after moving to Seattle, Jerry tried to get Diamond Lie back together for a show. According to Nutter, “We just said no. We were kind of done with it, because at that time we wanted to have a little more involvement with the songs. We wanted to be part of the writing process, instead of just, ‘Here’s the next song; here’s the next song.’ So he said, ‘Okay.’ Bam, hit Alice in Chains and made it superhuge, and we never did. So it’s kind of like that fork in the road where he took a right and we took a left.”
Jerry offered the following account of the events leading to the formation of Alice in Chains:
I met Layne when he played the Tacoma Little Theatre in Tacoma. So I met him first, but I actually played with Mike Starr first in a really crappy band called Gypsy Rose in Burien. My mother had just passed away, and I didn’t really have anyplace to stay, and I kind of was done with Tacoma anyway, so I met this guy Tim Branom. He invited me to come up and hang with him, and I stayed in his basement for about a week, and Mike Starr came over and we were jamming, and then we both got kicked out after a week.18
Jerry and Mike’s tenure in Gypsy Rose is a bit more nuanced than this account. In the summer of 1987, Gypsy Rose singer Tim Branom and drummer Mike Gersema were looking for a bass player, and Mike Starr happened to be nearby and available. Their guitarist, Brock Graue, knew Mike from high school and had been in a band with him.
Michael Christopher Starr was born April 4, 1966, in Honolulu, Hawaii—the first child of John and Gayle Starr—and his sister, Melinda, was born three years to the day later. After his parents split up, Mike lived with his father before moving to the Seattle area when he was around nine years old. His father bought him his first bass guitar. He formed his first band with his best friend Paul Parkinson and named it Cyprus. Jim Hacker, another childhood friend with whom he would listen to Jimi Hendrix and Van Halen, would later recall Mike telling him, “‘When I grow up, I’m going to be a rock star just like them!’ It was never a pilot, astronaut, doctor. Mike knew what he wanted to be. There was never a doubt in his mind.”19
“All I wanted to do twenty-four hours a day was play music,” Mike told Mark Yarm.20 According to Mike’s friend Aaron Woodruff, Van Halen was probably a big inspiration in Mike’s decision to become a musician. Woodruff, who met Mike when they both attended Highline High School, described him as “bigger than life.” Mike was a sophomore or junior, but he was something of a celebrity on campus because he was the bass player in SATO. Even in this early stage of his career, Mike already had a reputation for being a ladies’ man. His drug use at the time was limited to marijuana and alcohol, Woodruff said, although some time later, Mike took some pills and then walked into Woodruff’s house and took his guitar. After he sobered up and realized what happened, he returned the guitar to Woodruff.
According to Ken Kramer, SATO’s guitarist, “We were jamming in Danny and Dave [Jensen’s] mom’s garage, a couple of blocks away from where Gayle lived, and this kid would constantly come down the road and hang out and sit outside: ‘I play bass. I can play. I’m gonna be a rock star someday.’ After two or three months of that, I actually bought into it.”
In 1982, Mike, Kramer, and guitarist Terry Hildebrand formed SATO—named after the Ozzy Osbourne song—and the band began performing in the Seattle area. One of the band’s flyers featured the catchphrase “Don’t Say No … SATO,” an idea which was credited to John Starr. Its members were between sixteen and twenty-one years old at the time but acted like professional musicians, practicing four or five nights a week, according to a 1983 article about the band published in The Profile. The band played their first show on November 20, 1982—a Battle of the Bands held at the Crossroads Skating Center in Bellevue—and won it, as reported by the December 1, 1982, edition of the Hit Line Times. They received a $1,000 gift certificate and a $500 photo session to promote the band. In its first year, SATO performed at the Seattle Arena, the Spokane Convention Center, and the Showbox and won the Washington State Battle of the Bands, held at the Moore Theatre in Seattle on December 3, 1982. The band used lights, pyrotechnics, and fog machines for their shows and, like many bands of that period, wore spandex and had well-rehearsed stage choreography. They recorded their original song “Halloween” at Entertainment Plus Studio on April 21, 1983. “Leather Warrior” was recorded at Triad Studios in January 1984.21
At some point in 1983 or 1984, Jeff Gilbert was working at Penny Lane Records when he put out a call for local bands to submit a song for a compilation album he was producing called Northwest Metalfest. SATO’s was one of the hundreds of tapes he received. “I went through and picked out the ten bands, because I wanted to represent a wide range of all the different styles of hard rock and metal. I was really young at the time; whatever sounded polished or pro I went with,” Gilbert said. “Leather Warrior” made the cut. According to Gilbert, “They were just kids. They were just trying to invoke the most powerful words or imagery. They didn’t even know what they were saying or doing. I had to laugh. They were so popular—I mean, they had ladies all over the place. So I thought, ‘If I put them on the record, I’m going to sell lots of records.’” The Northwest Metalfest album was released in 1984. It was at some point after Mike was out of SATO that he joined Gypsy Rose. By the time Mike joined Alice in Chains, he was probably the most experienced musician of the four founding members.22
Gypsy Rose had three managers who concluded Graue wasn’t right for the band, for reasons Branom still doesn’t know. In retrospect, Branom called the decision to fire him a mistake. Gypsy Rose was in the market for a new guitar player.
Branom went to a party at Vinnie Chas’s home in Tacoma, where he met Jerry, who was staying there and asked Branom to listen to some demos he had recorded. Branom described the recordings as sounding like Boston because of the guitar harmonies. He told Gersema about Jerry and arranged for an audition at some point in July 1987. Jerry got the job. For a brief period, the band’s lineup featured half of the future Alice in Chains. Branom described the band’s sound as Dokken with Ronnie James Dio–style vocals. After getting the job, Jerry moved into the basement of Gersema’s mother’s home in the Des Moines area of Seattle.
Jerry didn’t last very long in Gypsy Rose—about three or four weeks. Branom said neither he nor Mike Starr were involved in the decision to dismiss Jerry. By process of elimination, this means the decision to fire Jerry was Gersema’s. To make things worse, Jerry had also lost his place to live.
Although Branom disputes Jerry’s explanations for why he was dismissed from the band, he acknowledges Jerry had a legitimate reason to be upset about it. He also disputes Jerry’s comments putting the whole Gypsy Rose episode on him. “People think because I’m the singer that I’m the boss of the band, but it wasn’t really that way,” Branom explained. “I got kicked out [of Gypsy Rose]—I mean physically beat up, like I might die because of it.”