Susan’s main responsibility as a manager was to promote and defend the interests of her clients. One night, Soundgarden was playing a show with Redd Kross, Malfunkshun, and Green River. An A&R person was there to see Green River, but because Soundgarden was the first act, Susan was able to sneak the A&R person out during Green River’s set. At the time, there was no frenzy to sign Seattle bands. According to Green River guitarist Bruce Fairweather, his bandmate Jeff Ament was furious with Susan for a long time after that.18 Susan had been managing Soundgarden for several years by the time she agreed to represent Alice in Chains.
Thad Byrd was still working on his Father Rock movie when his producer, Mike Bentley, heard “Sea of Sorrow” playing on Seattle radio station KISW. He recorded it on a cassette and told Byrd, “I heard Layne on the radio, and they have a song!”
Byrd was impressed. He was twenty-one or twenty-two years old at the time and got a very ambitious idea, implausible as it might sound: he would finance and shoot a music video for “Sea of Sorrow,” which he would sell to the record label Alice in Chains signed with, who would then get it played on MTV. Byrd went to the club where Alice in Chains was performing and was reintroduced to Layne through Mike, where he pitched his idea of making a video.
Byrd recalled that Mike was the one who was most enthusiastic about making a video. “Mike was always the guy that was hovering around me every time I was with the band, and he was always like the buddy-buddy guy: ‘Hey, come on! I gotta show you this!’ He was such a nice guy; that was my impression. If you wanted to have a good time, Mike Starr was the go-to guy.”
Layne told Byrd he’d have to discuss it with their manager and gave him Susan’s business card. He called her shortly after, and Susan invited Byrd to a meeting at her office with her and Kelly Curtis to pitch his idea. Byrd’s plan was to hire a cinematographer friend and Steadicam operator. By doing so, they would have access to his camera cranes, have a production manager and crew, and shoot the video using sixteen-millimeter film. Byrd estimated he could do all this with a budget he would put up of five to seven thousand dollars—a feat possible only because the crew was working for free as a favor to him. Otherwise, the video could have cost as much as twenty to forty thousand dollars.
Susan and Curtis gave Byrd their blessing, and Susan gave him a copy of the band’s demo. Byrd thinks Susan offered suggestions for which songs might be best for a video. As he recalls, they considered “Killing Yourself” to be one of their best singles and were kind of leaning toward that. Byrd set up a meeting with the band at their house.
When he arrived, he noticed that planes were flying so low and making so much noise that when you were outside, you could hear only about half of a conversation. Once inside, Byrd recalled, “They all lived there in absolute poverty. It is not cool. These guys are really dedicated, because most people would not be willing to do this.” The initial plan was to do “Killing Yourself,” when Byrd said he liked “Sea of Sorrow.”
“Jerry was a little bit hesitant. He wasn’t sure we could do it because Jerry had a very specific vision. He had written a song, and he had a very specific vision in mind. In fact, out of all the music videos I’ve ever done, I’ve never seen a musician who was more specific.”
Byrd recalled Jerry’s ideas: “He wanted to do a spaghetti Western, and I convinced him we could do anything … Jerry started telling me what he wanted was, it was going to begin with the four of them riding into town during the little musical intro. And then they were going to go into a saloon with a brothel upstairs, and they were going to romance the hookers. Then there was going to be a shoot-out in the saloon.” The video would cut back and forth to live performance scenes, which would be filmed at the Redmond stage being used as Queensrÿche’s rehearsal space at the time.
The plan was to shoot over the course of two days in Winthrop, a small town several hours away from Seattle. It was going to be a big production, with horses, a shoot-out, and then the band members would ride off into the sunset. “There were things in the song that said, like, ‘I aim my smiling skull at you.’ Jerry showed me the skull tattoo on his arm. He wanted a shot of him pulling out a gun, and the camera was going to zoom in on the smiling skull. He very much wanted things that he had written for the lyrics to synch up with the visuals.” Mike had a cowboy hat with a clothespin on the front that looked kind of funny. With the hat in mind, Byrd had the idea of making Mike’s character the comedic relief, an idea Mike embraced. Byrd began storyboarding his treatment for the video.
One time Byrd went over to the band’s house, which happened to coincide with Jerry’s birthday, for whom he brought Heineken as a gift. The band members had been out partying all night, but Layne was the first one to get up. Byrd and Layne went to a convenience store up the street. Layne was so broke, he couldn’t afford to buy a pack of cigarettes. He would scrounge up enough change to go to this convenience store and buy a single cigarette at a time. Byrd felt so bad for him, he bought Layne several cigarettes. When they returned to the house, the other band members eventually woke up. His recollection was, “I remember every other word out of Jerry’s mouth was ‘fuck.’ ‘Yeah, man! We’re fucking happening!’ ‘Fuck yeah!’ ‘Fuck!’”
His other impression was similar to Salieri’s reaction when he first meets Mozart in the movie Amadeus: trying to reconcile the disconnect between the band he heard on the radio and the four young, immature musicians in front of him.
“They seemed like they were just children,” Byrd said. “They just seemed so irresponsible to me, and I was super irresponsible at twenty-one, but they would never be on time for meetings, every other word was ‘fuck,’ they were obsessed with getting pussy and who they were fucking. Everything was—it was like a bunch of children. I could not reconcile these guys that I saw with the brilliant music I was hearing them play.”
While this was happening, Byrd was living with his parents. He would occasionally use his mother’s Chrysler van for transportation. One time he went out to scout locations, and she got mad about it. Byrd suspects she told his brother-in-law Kevin about it. When Byrd got home, Kevin was waiting. “He gives me the whole guilt trip about, ‘You’re taking advantage of your parents. The only reason why you’re able to do this is because you live at home for free. It’s not fair to your mom. Your mom has said this to me. You don’t know if this band is going to go anywhere.’ I’m like, ‘No, I think they’ll be big.’ ‘You don’t know that; there’s no way to know that,’ things like that,” Byrd said. “I still don’t know why I listened to him, but I felt so guilty. Probably some of it had to do with the fact that I grew up Mormon and I didn’t go on a mission, and my mom used to come into my room and cry when I was nineteen. So I already had kind of a little guilt thing about my mom, and my brother-in-law Kevin knew how to bring it home.”
Byrd abandoned the project. He enlisted in the army. About a year later, his neighbor called him over. He had recorded a video from MTV: it was for Alice in Chains’s “We Die Young.” Byrd was furious when he found out Columbia Records had bought the video from the Art Institute of Seattle. It was confirmation that his idea to shoot, produce, and sell a music video for “Sea of Sorrow” would have worked. He didn’t forgive his brother-in-law for years.
The summer of 1989 was an interesting time, just before careers were about to take off. According to Krisha Augerot, Kelly Curtis’s assistant, “It was just an epic kind of summer, where there was a lot of parties and we’d go to the beach all the time, just a fun time. A lot of socializing, and just really good times, a really hot, fun summer.” This would become the subject of the Mad Season song “Long Gone Day.” “It’s interesting that he felt the same way … Kristen Barry rented a house where Screaming Trees practiced in the basement. Her band practiced in the basement. Alice in Chains was happening. All those bands were happening.” According to the Above liner notes, the song was “inspired by those who shared this memory.” The notes mention by name Augerot, Demri, Layne and Demri’s close friend Fabiola Gonzalez, Cole Peterson and Rich Credo of the band Sweet Water, and Kristen Barry. Absent from the list was Sweet Water’s Paul Uhlir, who, according to Augerot, had an off-and-on relationship with Demri during this period.