While Jerry was working his charm offensive, Layne, Mike, and Sean got into Steve Alley’s car—a 1974 Ford Mustang II—and drove to a nearby 7-Eleven. Layne walked into the store and ran out a few minutes later carrying two cases of beer. He dove headfirst through the window and into the passenger-side front seat and, with his legs still sticking out, yelled, “Floor it!” They returned to the Music Bank, where they handed out beers to people standing outside waiting to get back in.
As the night progressed and the officers hit it off with the band, Alice in Chains was the only band allowed to remove their gear, after the police had thoroughly inspected it to make sure there was nothing in it. The band members stacked everything outside the front door, and ultimately had to sleep under the stars, some of them sleeping on top of their cases “so nobody would steal it,” others “in Layne Staley’s old VW Dasher which hadn’t moved for years.” Jerry called Ken Deans, who went to the Music Bank with a van the next morning to pick them up and get all their gear for the recording sessions.10
Eventually, everyone at the Music Bank at the time of the raid was allowed to leave the building, but Ballenger, Vernon, and Barry Oswald—the other employee on duty that night—had to stay in the office in the company of two police officers. Vernon recalls sitting around the office with Oswald and the two officers watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A young police officer gave them money to go out and buy sandwiches and a six-pack of beer for himself and his colleague.11
As for what the police were looking for, and eventually found, Ballenger said, “Further down, the warehouse was a big, huge, long complex. And there was a solid wall between us and the rest of the complex, and that’s where the big pot-growing operation was. [It was] unbeknownst to me and everybody that they had extended the lease and started [this] operation.
“They were getting all the electricity from their supply room, which was on the Music Bank side. I had a key to it, and surprisingly that key would be missing all the time off that ring, because Bengt or Gabriel came through every three months, ‘Oh, we’re gonna fix this or that, Dave. You’re gonna get cheaper water now,’ or something like that. I’d be, ‘Oh, okay.’”
It is worth noting that, although police questioned David Ballenger and Scott Hunt, in the hundreds of pages of police and court records there is no evidence or allegation that any of the employees or bands at the Music Bank had knowledge of or involvement in the marijuana operation. Ballenger told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “This is a clean place. I keep it clean … No one likes this kind of thing going on in the neighborhood.”12
Scott Hunt saw local news coverage of the raid. Hunt was stunned as he heard the details. He got in his car and went straight to the Music Bank, after which he was questioned by police. “They wanted to know my life story, so I had to go downtown with the one-way glass,” Hunt said. “So I told them everything that they needed to know and they were convinced beyond reasonable doubt that I had nothing to do with it, so they let me go.” Though he was never charged with anything, Hunt was dismayed by what the drug raid would mean for the Music Bank, specifically the loss of income and any chance of recovering his loan.
The Seattle Police Department estimated the operation was capable of growing $30 million a year in crops—calculated at a potential output of 10,000 plants per year valued at about $3,000 each. According to a document, authorities seized 28 boxes of marijuana plants, weighing a combined 448 pounds (204 kilograms).13
According to an article in the Ballard Tribune, the Seattle Police Department turned the case over to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle because of the amount of marijuana involved. “It’s a very complicated case and you want to take your time in cases like this,” the Seattle Police Department’s Ed Joiner told the paper. “We want to indict as many people as possible in this, so time is not a factor.”14
The band went to London Bridge Studios to make a twenty-four-track rerecording of the “Treehouse Tape” and to record some new material. This was the demo the band would shop around to the record labels. Hauser financed the sessions, which took place over the course of approximately one week and were produced by Rick and Raj Parashar. “We got off hours, and Rick and Raj worked with me because I promised them that I would come in later when we were recording and do full price,” Hauser said. He estimated the cost of the demo at about seven thousand dollars. They were able to get it so cheap because they would come in during overnight hours and work until five or six o’clock in the morning. If they had recorded at full price during regular hours, it would have cost Hauser twenty thousand dollars, which he couldn’t afford.15
Some time after the raid, the band moved out of the Music Bank and into a house near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport that they rented from Bob Jeffries, Gayle Starr’s boyfriend at the time. Though money and resources were scarce, somehow they managed to pay their rent. The house had four bedrooms—three upstairs that were occupied by Layne, Mike, and Sean, and one downstairs that was occupied by Jerry to minimize any possible damage in case his waterbed leaked. Layne cut a hole in the floor of his bedroom, which was directly above the rec room where the band jammed, so he could hear the music from his room.
There was a problem when they moved in: one of the toilets had clogged the plumbing for the entire house. They set up a portable toilet in the backyard while doing the necessary repairs themselves, which took about a month. Their next-door neighbors, an elderly couple, offered to let them use their guest bathroom as a short-term solution, an offer that was accepted. Coincidentally, the woman’s name was Alice. They told her that they named the band after her, presumably to get on her good side and so she wouldn’t complain about the loud music. On Sundays, the band went to Gayle Starr’s house, where she would cook them dinner with enough leftovers that would feed them through Wednesday. They would survive until the following Sunday on a diet of pizza, beer, and whatever food girls would bring over.
On August 11, 1988, Alice in Chains was part of a four-band bill performing at the Kent Skate King—a local roller rink—organized by Hauser’s company Standing Room Only Productions.16 Layne had shaped his hair into a Mohawk. One of the people there was Diana Wilmar, a news photographer and editor at KING 5, a Seattle affiliate of NBC News. She had heard about the local music scene and wanted to do a story about “a wannabe famous band.” After the show, she talked to Alice in Chains. “They were just a ton of fun, and they played off each other. They were really funny. Like one guy would start a sentence, and somebody else would finish it.” As they told her their story—about how they all lived together in a house, with one car for the four of them, Wilmar began thinking about these details as visual elements for a story. The band agreed to do it. Wilmar pitched it to the station and brought KING 5 news photographer George Stark and reporter/producer Jack Hamann on board to help write and shoot it.
The KING 5 crew filmed the band hanging out at their house and at the Music Bank, taking showers at Susan Silver’s house and getting ready for a show, and during a performance at the Vogue. Another time, they went with the band to Fishermen’s Terminal, where the band had a job unloading fishing ships that Randy Hauser had gotten them so they could cover the rent on their rehearsal room. “My memory of it was that after ten minutes they’re like, ‘Fuck this, there’s no way I’m gonna do this work. Are you shitting me?’ It’s hard, it’s smelly, and we never ended up really getting any video out of it because they were like, ‘I ain’t doing this. I’ll find some other way to make money,’” Hamann said. He interviewed all four members. It was his impression everybody except Layne was playing to the camera. “When this was done, there was very little role model for [reality television], and so clearly Sean, Mike, and to a lesser extent Jerry had a consciousness that the cameras are there and ‘we’ve gotta be good TV.’ From Layne a lot of it was, ‘I don’t give a shit—take my picture.’ He said a few things, but a lot of it was like, ‘I’m about my music and that’s what I’m here for, and if you guys wanna take my picture, that’s fine.’”