“I was freezing, and I knew the guys had a little backstage area and they had heaters. I was freezing and wanted to go back there and hang out because it was a shoot that started at six in the evening and went until six in the morning. I was too shy to assume it was okay for me to walk back there.”
The singer of the Derelicts, Duane Lance Bodenheimer, was also there. At one point, Layne walked up to him and said, “I need to talk to you.”
Bodenheimer had met Demri through mutual friends, and she made quite an impression on him. “She really just like blew me away. Beautiful, amazing girl. Good energy. Just amazing. I developed a little crush on her,” he recalled. “Demri and I started hanging out. She was a very sexual girl, and I tried to not do that because I knew who her boyfriend was, but it just happened one day. We had a relationship, and there were drugs involved. We were together a lot.”
Bodenheimer dates the beginning of his involvement with Demri to some point during 1990–91, after Alice in Chains started touring. While Layne was gone, Demri and Bodenheimer would hang out at another local musician’s home and do drugs, and they became close. “I fell in love with her. I really cared for her and loved her.”
Not surprisingly, Layne didn’t like Bodenheimer at all and had his suspicions. One time he called Bodenheimer over to another local musician’s house and confronted him. “If you’re fucking my woman, why don’t you tell me?”
Bodenheimer denied it, because he wasn’t proud of it. He kept seeing Demri—mostly while Layne was touring, but occasionally when Layne was in town. Layne called him again, telling him he knew what was going on, and that—in Bodenheimer’s words—“it was out there, pretty much.”
“You could have told me the first time you were sleeping with my girlfriend,” Layne told him. “You’re not a good person. You’re a piece of shit.” For all his jealousy and anger, Layne was not a model of virtue and fidelity himself. Cat Butt’s singer, David Duet, said, “Layne and Demri had kind of an open relationship. In the position he was in, it’s probably the only way he could’ve had a lasting relationship. Layne was very true to Demri in his heart, but he related many, many wild touring adventures to me.”12 According to Bodenheimer, Demri was aware of Layne’s flings on tour. “She kind of said that they had that kind of relationship.”
“She would complain sometimes about she knew he was probably fucking other girls,” Bodenheimer said, but beyond that, she never said anything bad about him.
At one point, Bodenheimer went to Denver to visit his parents. Demri came down and stayed for about a week and a half. The next time Bodenheimer hung out with her in Seattle, “it was just kind of different.” She explained her feelings for Bodenheimer in a letter—which he has since lost—in which she wrote words to the effect that Layne was her white knight and Bodenheimer was her dark knight.
At the Singles shoot, Bodenheimer and Layne sat at a table, and Layne—presumably with long-built-up jealousies and frustrations finally reaching a boiling point—tore into him. “You’re a piece of shit. It should have been you that died instead of Andy Wood. I fucking hate you.” This comment was made with Layne knowing full well that Bodenheimer was a heroin user, and it came a little more than a year after Wood’s fatal overdose.
Bodenheimer was shocked. “Layne said that to me, and that was very hurtful—it hurt me. I wasn’t, like, a total dick. I did have feelings, I felt bad about what was going on, but I couldn’t help it, because I truly … I really did love her.” Although he wasn’t there, Bodenheimer later heard from a friend who attended the Clash of the Titans show at Red Rocks that Layne had introduced a song—he doesn’t know which one—saying words to the effect of “This is about Duane Bodenheimer, scummy drug junkie.”
The same night as the Alice in Chains shoot, Nirvana was performing a last-minute show at the OK Hotel before heading to Los Angeles to record their sophomore album, Nevermind. The show is best remembered for being the first public performance of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and has since grown to near-legendary status in Seattle grunge lore.13
Alice in Chains landed the opening slot on the Clash of the Titans tour during the summer of 1991, literally by accident. Musically, they were the odd men out—the other three bands on the bill were Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax. The opening slot was originally supposed to go to Death Angel, who had to bail out of the tour after a bus accident.14
Asked by Riki Rachtman, host of Headbangers Ball, what it was like to be opening for them, Mike responded, “It’s really smelly, but it’s great—it’s awesome—we’re having a great time. All of the guys are really cool.”15
A more candid assessment of the experience came years later. “Slayer fans were brutal to us,” Jerry would recall. “When we played at Red Rocks, they were throwing so much shit at us that we could hardly see the crowd.
“Someone threw a huge water jug that knocked over Sean’s cymbals, and spit was flying everywhere. Layne just shouted ‘Fuck you!’ and spit back at them.”
Their toughness and willingness to stick it out in the midst of a relentless onslaught from a hostile crowd won them a few converts. “We finished the set and we were like, ‘Jesus Christ, that was insane,’” Jerry recalled. “We’re waiting to get in the bus to leave, and there were a bunch of Slayer fans backstage that had passes and they started walking toward us. We’re like, ‘We’re gonna get our fuckin’ asses kicked.’ But they walked over and went, ‘Okay, man. You didn’t puss out. I guess you’re all right.’”16
Before the tour came to Seattle on May 30, Jeff Gilbert was interviewing Megadeth front man Dave Mustaine for an article for Guitar World magazine. Gilbert mentioned he was friends with Alice in Chains. Mustaine asked what he knew about them. Gilbert praised Alice in Chains but noted, “They used to be a full-on Poison-style glam band.”
Mustaine looked at him and said, “Are you kidding me?”
“No. In fact, I still have pictures of them from back in the day.” He was referring to the Alice ’N Chains design he had pressed onto T-shirts a few years earlier. He sent it to Mustaine, who had the tour manager make posters out of it and place them all over Mercer Arena. “By the time Alice in Chains showed up, you couldn’t walk anywhere. Those poor guys would walk in and see this glam band Alice ’N Chains, and it was so flippin’ funny. Just everywhere, before the doors even opened. So that way, when these guys rolled in backstage, it was the funniest thing,” Gilbert said, chuckling pretty hard.
Gilbert was walking down the hallway backstage when he saw Layne.
“Hey, Layne.”
“Hey, man.”
And then Layne put two and two together.
“HEY!”
“Layne knew exactly when he saw me. He goes, ‘God dang it, man!’ He liked the joke, though—he thought it was pretty funny,” Gilbert said. “I asked [the other members of Alice in Chains] later, and Jerry and I were talking. He said, ‘Oh, man. We did some shows with those guys and they just ripped us into the ground. They were busting our chops left and right.’ I’m like, ‘Well, you deserved it. Look how goofy you guys used to look.’”
The most important thing to happen during this tour wasn’t even the tour itself. “Man in the Box” was about to jump-start the band’s career.
At some point in the late spring of 1991, there was a meeting at MTV to decide which of two videos—“Man in the Box” or either Blue Murder’s “Valley of the Kings” or “Jelly Roll”—would get the network’s coveted “Buzz Bin” seal of approval. In that pre-YouTube, pre–realityshow era when music videos formed a large part of MTV’s daily programming, getting a video in regular airplay on the network could have an enormous impact on a band’s career. According to Rick Krim, at the time MTV’s vice president of music and programming and a participant in that meeting, “Buzz Bin” meant a video would get heavy rotation: “That clip got X number of plays for that week and then it probably goes into some other kind of rotation after that.”