Years later, Layne told journalist Jon Wiederhorn he realized he wanted to make music for a living in the fourth grade. “I didn’t know what I was going to play. I started playing the trumpet, then cornet, then drums. I’d listen to my favorite rock bands on headphones and try to imitate them. But when I was fifteen I realized I was getting much better than when I started, so I decided I wanted to sing. At the time I was in a cover band with friends from high school.”10
Jim’s parents owned a vacation home on Long Beach, Washington, and every summer Jim would take his family there for a week. Ken has many fond memories of Layne during these trips. Ken remembers spending time at the sand dunes or Marsh’s Free Museum. The last year they went, Layne and Ken wound up double-dating a girl from Marsh’s and one of her friends the entire week.
A major milestone was the birth of Jim and Nancy’s daughter, Jamie Brooke Elmer, on January 20, 1978. At the time, Layne was ten, Ken was nine, and Liz was seven.11 In terms of parenting, Jim credits Nancy for joining a support group with other stay-at-home mothers focused on how to help or improve the parenting process. “That was extremely important,” Jim said. “I think that fostered a lot of good things in the state and certainly within our family, with the girls as they were growing up.” She began the classes within a year or so after Jamie’s birth.
According to Rolling Stone, Layne took up drums when he was twelve. “Our friend had a drum set and offered to let Layne use it,” Nancy would later recall.12 According to Ken, “He started playing the drums, and he was a pretty good little drummer. But he just never had contacts or never really had that big group of friends to go and form a whole bunch of bands. You’ve just got those pockets of guys who are like that, and Layne just wasn’t like that.”
The decision to switch from drums to singing was one of the most consequential of Layne’s life. Years later, he explained how it happened. “I was playing drums and I wanted to sing one song, and the singer said, ‘No, you’re a drummer. Drummers don’t sing.’ So we got in a fight and I packed up my drums and got in my van and drove straight downtown, traded in my drum set for a delay, a microphone, and a mic cord, and went home and started practicing. I was horrible at first, but I found my instrument.”13
Ken Elmer was in the car with Layne when Layne mentioned in an almost offhand manner, “Oh, by the way, I sold everything and I got a microphone.” Layne and Ken shared a large downstairs room, each with his own waterbed. Until that day, their beds had shared the space with Layne’s drum kit, which had been replaced by microphones and a PA system. “The drums were always a part of the family for years, and he would always be a drummer. And then one day I came over for visitation, and all the drum stuff is gone. And there’s these big speakers and an amplifier and like two microphones. I’m like, ‘Dude, what did you do?’”
“Oh, I sold everything. I’m gonna be a singer.”
Ken was flabbergasted. “I’m like, ‘You can’t freaking sing!’” he recalled years later, laughing pretty hard. “I’m like, ‘You suck!’”
“No, this is what we’re gonna do now.”
Ken had no idea where his decision to sing came from. During subsequent visits, Layne and Ken would transcribe lyrics to songs by Twisted Sister, the Scorpions, and Van Halen and then sing over the songs. This lasted for about a year at most. “The funny part of it is, I really didn’t think he had a good voice.”
Though they went to schools in different districts, Ken remembers Layne had little interest in academics growing up. “He was a very intelligent guy. He just didn’t have time for certain structures that society told him he had to be a part of. He would say, ‘Screw that. Why?’ And later in life, I kind of respected him for that.”
Regarding his grade school years, Layne said, “I hated school. I wasn’t very popular and I wasn’t big into sports. I liked woodworking and skateboarding.”14
According to Jim, Layne began dabbling in drugs and alcohol at some point during his teenage years. “He was running around with the wrong crowd and coming home from school later. He was doing something. We knew that; we could smell it.” He doesn’t remember smelling marijuana on his clothes, but he did smell alcohol. He never found evidence of drugs or drug paraphernalia while Layne was living at the house during this period.
During one of Ken’s weekend visits, he and Layne—who was a teenager at the time—went to a neighbor’s house one night to watch Friday the 13th on HBO. Someone had brought marijuana, and everyone there that night except Ken smoked it.
Layne once tried Dexatrim, a weight-loss drug that was available over the counter at the time. According to Ken, “It speeds up your metabolism massively. I think that the thing was when we were kids, we were told if you take a bunch of that stuff, it hits you like speed. I mean it makes you super high. I just remember him experimenting with that at least once that I knew of.” Ken does not know the extent of Layne’s drug use during this period, but does not think the Friday the 13th episode meant he was regularly smoking marijuana. Nancy told The Seattle Times, “He got in trouble doing things kids do. He dabbled in trying drugs, about the age thirteen or fourteen. Then his junior and senior years he stayed drug-free, and he was the happiest then.”15 Ken has no recollection of Layne’s doing any hard drugs at this point but said he was drinking.
Layne began his freshman year at Meadowdale High School in Lynnwood on September 8, 1981, according to a record shown by a school source. When he was a student, he was one of the shortest boys in his class. “In his junior year he had pretty much lost interest in school—he’d been picked on because he was small, so he was really through with the scene,” Nancy said. She gave Layne the option of dropping out. Around the same time, Layne went through a growth spurt and went from being one of the shortest boys to being six feet tall—a height he had always wanted to be. He told his mother, “The girls have started to notice me,” and decided to stay in school.16
According to Jim, “He did get picked on when he was at that younger age because of his size. He certainly started to dabble around. It took him a while to grow, but when he did, he did. Then things started to change.”
“I can remember when he was in a situation where he was getting picked on [at] school. A couple of times, it ended a little more dramatic than just getting picked on. He got in a couple of fights and so forth. He started to change and got more interested in the drug culture and music and so forth. He definitely had some options.”
According to Ken, “I’m not going to say that he always hated being around people, but he wasn’t an overly gregarious person. So I don’t think just that he was short, it was a little bit of his nature, his personality, as well.” He also noted with a slight laugh that “Layne was not a big stud with the ladies. He kept to himself a lot. He didn’t have a lot of girlfriends growing up.”
When Layne was about fifteen, he and Nancy were having an argument. The car was packed for a weekend family trip and Layne didn’t want to go. Jim recalled, “They were having words and things started to escalate. Nancy had mentioned to me, ‘Why don’t you do something?’ I was prepared to just leave and let things cool down. She says, ‘You’re not protecting me.’ Calling his mother names and that type of thing—I’m caught in the middle between her getting verbally abused and so forth.