“I got out of the car [and] went to see Layne, who was on the front steps. I took him around to the backyard and I spanked him.” That was the first and only time he ever did this. “He was not going to give in. It shows the resolve of that kid. I did push him against the side of the house, and he was not going to show any defeat or anything else. Of course, I felt bad, and I think he felt bad.” Jim and Layne talked about the incident a few years later and apologized to each other.
The family left for the weekend, leaving Layne alone at the house. When they came back, there was a smell of Lysol. “That’s not how we left the house. It was clean, but not spotless. This house was spotless,” he recalled. “Nancy and I looked at each other and said, ‘We’re going to be calm, going to see what happened, what he tells us.’”
Layne approached them visibly shaken and crying. He and his friends who lived next door had gone out to a 7-Eleven to get food. A comment was made that Layne’s parents were out of town, and word got around that there was an open house, so a party was organized. One of the neighbors called the police. Jim found out later on that when the police showed up, there were at least a hundred people at the house.
“Layne came to us and confessed. He was just so remorseful that things were so out of control. It was meaningful because he and the two neighbor boys were going from room to room, constantly keeping people out of closets, looking for stuff and so forth. Once the police got there, got everybody scared away, those boys spent the next two days cleaning that house. It was a telling point in his life where it scared him, in terms of being out of control. He had mentioned that because there were so many people, and he couldn’t do anything about it.
“We didn’t chastise him or anything. He learned his own lesson. But that was telling to us all.”
At about the same age, Layne ran away from home for the first time. He was staying with a friend two houses away for a few days before the mother called Layne’s parents and asked, “Would you come get your son?”
They refused to pick him up and told her to send Layne home.
The second incident happened about six months later. Layne had taken off for a day. It was dark and rainy that night, and his parents got a call from the Lynnwood Police Department, informing them that Layne was at the station and asking them to pick him up. He had not been arrested or detained for anything, according to Jim.
“Nancy and I kind of looked at each other. We [have] got [to draw] a line of responsibility.” Jim’s personal inclination was to pick him up. After talking about it, Jim and Nancy decided to teach Layne a lesson.
“Well, he walked down there. He can walk home,” they told the police officer.
“He may not want to do that.”
“Well, you can bring him home or you can tell him. We’ve made it real clear, he knows where his home is. Just tell him his dinner is waiting and his waterbed is ready.”
Layne walked home, ate his dinner, and went to bed. He never ran away again. “Here we were having another dispute, a child running away. I think both Nancy and I would agree it was the best thing to do,” Jim said. “The point of contention was you can’t just have your way in the family, of running away, and having everything brought back to you in terms of we’ll come pick you up, we’ll take care of you. It’s all about you, Layne. It’s drawing some boundaries—you’ve got some responsibility.”
Jamie’s earliest memory of Layne, probably from around this period when she was about five years old, is of him making potato chips in the kitchen. She also remembers him practicing the trumpet and drums.
At some point during this period, he worked as a busboy and dishwasher at an Italian restaurant close to his home. According to Jim, Layne would do whatever odd job they gave him, but he doesn’t think Layne had any skill or focus at the time to work as a waiter or cook.
When Ken visited on weekends, he and Layne would go to their room and sing along to songs all day. For Ken, it was just fun. For Layne, Ken said, “It was like, ‘I’m training for what I want to do.’ And I think that’s why he got his head on straight a little bit.
“Because he had a focus. He had a goal. He had something that gave him some drive. School didn’t give it to him. He was never overly interested in girls in that way at a young age, and this kind of gave him a push. I think that’s just as much a key as whether he was six feet or not.” In switching from drums to singing, Layne may have found something he was passionate about that he could develop, but it was an encounter and a chance suggestion by Ken that would ultimately change the direction of Layne’s life.
Chapter 2
Fuck, yeah! This is what a lead singer should look like!
JAMES BERGSTROM WAS WALKING between classes at Shorewood High School one day in 1984 when he ran into Ken Elmer, a friend from the marching band. Ken knew that Bergstrom’s band, Sleze, was looking for a singer, and he had somebody in mind for them.
“Hey, my stepbrother Layne plays drums but he wants to be a singer. You should give him a call,” Elmer told him. After the initial pitch, Elmer said under his breath, “I think he kind of sucks, so it’s not my fault—if you can’t do it, then that’s fine.”
Not long after, Ken went over to Jim and Nancy’s home and told Layne about the position. Layne’s mother recalled that conversation to journalist Greg Prato:
“Layne, there are a couple of guys over at Shorewood High School looking for a singer,” Ken told him.
“Well, I’m not a singer,” Layne responded.
“Why don’t you try out anyhow?”1
An audition was eventually set up. Bergstrom told Sleze guitarist Johnny Bacolas about the new singer they would be trying out. Bacolas liked what he was hearing—that he was thin and was peroxiding his hair. The first person who came to mind was Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil, a band that Bacolas and the other members of Sleze were huge fans of.
The tryout took place at Bergstrom’s parents’ house in Richmond Beach, where Sleze had their jam room in the basement. They were young—still in early high school and still learning how to play their instruments and playing covers. Tim Branom—a musician who would later produce one of Sleze’s demos—described the band: “They had a Mötley Crüe but punk influence, something [that] today would be only described as an angry Seattle vibe but as a glam band with black lipstick and black fingernails. This was very radical for them to do, especially since their parents were very straight and churchgoing people.”
The members of Sleze had no expectations before the audition. “[We] didn’t know what we were going to get. Just, we knew that he was really getting into singing, and that he had bleached-blond hair, and that was good enough,” Bacolas recalled. When he arrived, the others noticed his tall stature, soft-spoken demeanor, and that he was very much dressed for the part.
“He came to our jam room and was really shy, real timid,” Bacolas said. “And just as we expected, we were like, ‘Fuck, yeah! This is what a lead singer should look like!’”
Ed Semanate, the other founding guitarist for Sleze, recalls that his most vivid memory of Layne during that first introduction was that he had band names like “Ozzy” or “Mötley Crüe” written on his pants in bleach.
The four surviving band members are all fairly certain that the first song they performed with Layne was a cover of Mötley Crüe’s “Looks That Kill,” although Bacolas and Bergstrom won’t entirely rule out the possibility it may have been W.A.S.P.’s “L.O.V.E. Machine.”