Not long after, Demri asked Austin to come to her apartment north of Seattle and give two friends—Layne and Sean—a ride into the city. This was the first time Austin met Layne. “I knew they were hanging out,” Austin recalled. “Layne was very respectful. I don’t think I formed a first impression at the time. These were two guys who I picked up that are burned out. They’ve probably been partying all night long. They get in my car, and we drive to Seattle. They tell me where to go, and I let them out.” Demri saw Layne’s talent immediately and did not hesitate to say so. “Mom, Layne’s going to be a star,” she told Austin.
Austin was skeptical, although she didn’t say it out loud. “I’ve known a lot of musicians who were going to be stars, and just a few who actually made it.” She humored her daughter: “‘Well, that’d be nice,’ ‘I hope he is,’ things like that.” The first time Austin ever saw Layne perform was at the Pain in the Grass concert at Seattle Center in 1990. Austin brought along Demri’s brothers—who were sixteen, ten, and eight at the time—and they wound up becoming part of the show. “Layne took them up onstage, and they were so thrilled.”
“They loved their sister and they loved Layne. These boys were little—he’s giving them piggyback rides, they’re playing. Layne was a funny guy. He was a sweetheart.”
“The two of them together, before drugs, were always laughing. They were always happy,” Austin says of this period. “They’d go to clubs. They would go see their friends.”
According to Darrell Vernon, there was a joke going around the Music Bank at about the time they started dating—that Layne had found the woman of his dreams with the body of a twelve-year-old boy, a reference to Demri’s small stature. According to her mother, Demri was barely five feet tall and never weighed more than a hundred pounds. Though they didn’t have much in terms of money or possessions, both of them were generous. During Thanksgiving of 1988, David Ballenger said several girls showed up and brought Layne a huge dinner, but that nobody had brought him anything. Layne and Demri shared their dinner with him. On another occasion, Ballenger asked Layne to take him shopping for nice clothes, because Layne was a good dresser. Layne took him to a mall in Bellevue, where Ballenger spent about five hundred dollars. He still has the Capezio shoes and Armani clothes from that shopping spree. Ballenger had a folding metal chair in his office at the Music Bank, which Layne decorated with Jackson Pollock–style splotches of paint. Ballenger was annoyed that it took so long to dry, but he still has the chair.
Jamie Elmer, who was about ten years old at the time, visited the band at their rehearsal room. “I remember sitting on the couch with the girlfriends or the wannabe girlfriends at the time and watching them practice. I mean, it was fun for me. I was the little tagalong sister that got to see a whole world most people my age didn’t get to see,” she said. “I remember [Jerry, Mike, and Sean] being like older brothers to me in the best sense of the term. They were taking me under their wing, and I never felt like I was a bother. They were always cool with me hanging out or watching, and were always really nice to me. Growing up, to me it felt like they were extended family. They felt like … siblings that were part of our family.”
The punk rock band Cat Butt moved into the Music Bank in the summer of 1987. It was a transitional period for the band, since two of their members returned to their main band, the U-Men. After several personnel changes, front man David Duet and guitarist James Burdyshaw decided to revive Cat Butt with new members and do it full-time. They met Layne early in their time at the Music Bank because of his job there.
“Layne was just so enthusiastic and interested in who you were. It was like, ‘Hey, cool! You guys got a band! What’s the name? Cat Butt—that’s really funny! All right! Oh, man, we should do a show sometime!’ Then he’d say things to you: ‘Do you need anything? ’Cause I can get you anything you need. You need pot? I can get you pot. You want some acid? I can do that. Whatever you want. Want me to go on a beer run for you?’” Burdyshaw recalled.
“It’s like he just was eager to please, just wanted to be your friend so bad. I thought that was real endearing about him. I didn’t think it was phony. I thought he was just like this metal kid who was nice, whereas a lot of time the metal guys were too cool for school, and they wouldn’t talk to you because you were in the punk band.” They also met Demri, who, after being told of their band’s name, lifted up her shirt, pushed her abs and belly button together, and said, “Look, I can make a cat’s butt!”
Soon after meeting Layne, they were introduced to Jerry, Mike, and Sean. “When we started practicing there, they got real curious about us and they wanted to know about us. And to be honest with you, my whole attitude was like, ‘They’re really nice guys, but, Jesus Christ, I don’t want to hook up with these guys. They’re like Lynnwood rockers.’ It wasn’t that I didn’t think they were nice people. I just thought that their music was dumb.
“We didn’t want to be mean to them. They were so nice it was impossible. I sort of figured we could be friends with them at the Music Bank, but there was no way we were going to have anything to do with them outside the Music Bank.”
Besides Layne, the person Burdyshaw had the closest relationship with was Jerry, although for very different reasons. “Jerry was cool with hanging out, but he wanted to learn about you. He wanted to learn about your influences. He liked picking your brain.”
“He was very complimentary and asked me about my guitar sound. He liked to talk shop a lot. I probably had the most interesting conversations with Jerry just about music in general, because Jerry seemed to know more about stuff. Even though they were playing rock music, he knew about Bowie, he knew a lot about the history of rock and roll, so we could talk about the stuff I was into, like the Who and that kind of thing. He didn’t know a lot about punk music, but he sure wanted to. He was really curious.”
Burdyshaw credits Jerry for reinventing and developing what would eventually become the Alice in Chains sound. Of Cat Butt’s influence on Alice in Chains during this crucial early period, Burdyshaw said, “It seemed like Cat Butt was one of the catalysts for them to be like, ‘Hey, these guys are doing something different than what we’ve been doing. Let’s get in their circle.’ And then, I don’t think it was necessarily calculated, but I think they just found us fascinating and they wanted to be a part of our world and they invited us to be a part of theirs.”
Burdyshaw won’t take credit for being an influence, because he said they were picking the brains of every band they could get near. Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil said he was at a show and ran into Jerry, who asked him about the songs “Beyond the Wheel” and “Nothing to Say”—specifically, if the songs had a different tuning. Thayil explained to him the concept of dropped-D tuning—a popular tuning among hard rock and metal musicians in which the low E string on the guitar is tuned down a whole step to D, giving it a heavier sound. According to Thayil, “Alice in Chains became a different band almost overnight!” (Jerry disputes this claim, saying he first learned it from Van Halen’s “Unchained.”13)
Thayil wasn’t the only one to notice the change. Grant Alden, managing editor of The Rocket, said, “There were a series of bands who saw what was working and began to try to do that. I think Alice in Chains was one of them. It doesn’t mean they were without talent, but it meant in some ways that they were without heart or without soul.” His dislike of the band got to the point that he made an effort to deny them coverage in the pages of his publication.14