“At the top of our list for sure was Mötley Crüe. That was the band we would want to be,” Byron Hansen said. The other members immediately knew they were onto something.
“I can tell you if it was ‘Looks That Kill,’ when he got to the part ‘Now she’s a cool cool black,’ he could actually hit those notes. We were like, ‘Oh my God! This is awesome!’” Bergstrom recalled with a laugh. “So you had that feeling, ‘Here’s this kid. He’s got a great-sounding voice. He’s cool. He could sing on key. And he also had good range and he was soulful, though he was just a raw beginner.’ So we knew we had something special, and we were like in heaven from then. We became a band.”
Hansen agreed. “We were totally like, ‘Wow! This guy can sing like Vince Neil! He’s like a little Vince Neil!’ We just thought it was awesome.”
Although Layne’s voice was still in a raw, undeveloped form and he was only singing covers at this point, it was impossible to compare his sound with that of singers in the past or his contemporaries.
“He didn’t strike me as ‘Oh, this guy is a [Jim] Morrison wannabe,’ or ‘Oh, this guy is a Robert Plant wannabe,’ or an Ozzy wannabe. Layne had his own thing, and I think that’s what was the most appealing about him,” Bacolas said. “He had a very distinctive voice. I didn’t want another Morrison or another Rob Halford. We weren’t looking for that. I don’t know what we were looking for. We just kind of—we just found it.”
At one point, Layne asked Bergstrom for permission to play his drum kit. Bergstrom agreed, and Layne started playing the beginning of Mötley Crüe’s “Red Hot.” Bergstrom was impressed. “Man, you gotta show me that!”
The decision was a no-brainer—Layne got the job on the spot. Ken Elmer ran into Bergstrom not long after. “He just comes running down the hall, ‘Dude, your brother is fucking awesome!’ I mean, he’s swearing and he’s screaming and he’s like, ‘It’s perfect.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, I thought for sure you guys would hate him. I think he kind of sucks,’” he recalled.
The band rehearsed several times a week, gradually expanding their repertoire and playing ability. At one point, Semanate told Layne he needed a digital delay—a device that creates an echo effect on vocals. Layne and Semanate went to a local music store and bought one. The delay eventually became part of Layne’s singing style.
Bergstrom would often hang out with Layne or spend the night at his house. He remembers staying up late at night watching The Exorcist or plugging in his PA unit so he could practice his singing or experiment with it. “He’d plug it all in and practice. He’d practice singing to like ‘Metal Thrashing Mad’ by Anthrax. He practiced ‘Rod of Iron’ by Lizzy Borden, all these different songs. He was fascinated with his digital delay at first.”
Layne began his senior year at Meadowdale High School in the fall of 1984. A review of the school yearbooks from 1981 to 1985 found only three photos of him: a portrait photo from his sophomore year in 1982–83, a group photo of the industrial woodworking class of 1984–85, and the senior-class group photo. In the two latter photos, his platinum-blond hair made him stick out. There were no portrait photos of him during his freshman, junior, and senior years.
It was Rick Throm’s first year teaching the industrial woodworking course. “He didn’t seem to have a lot of friends in the class. He was kind of a loner, but he listened to what you said, and he did what you said, and he seemed to really enjoy it,” were Throm’s impressions of Layne. Throm liked Layne enough to hire him at his cabinet shop after school for minimum wage.
“He was really willing to learn, but he sometimes felt that he got kind of the short end of the deal in our shop because he was the low man on the totem pole.”
An example: Throm asked Layne to paint a storage shed at his shop. After spending several hours on it over the course of two days, Layne approached Throm, saying, “Mr. Throm, I think I’d like to be building cabinets more than painting this storage shed.”
“Well, everybody has to start somewhere, Layne, and we’ve all painted, we’ve all done this and that, and that’s what you have to do right now,” Throm responded. Consequently, Layne wrote on his hour sheet “Painted fucking storage shed” in protest.
Another time, Throm asked him, “Layne, what do you think you want to do in your life?”
“[Be] a rock star,” he responded.
“Rock star? I want to be a fishing guy, but, look it, I’m in here working. How do you think you’re going to be a rock star?”
“I’m going to win this Battle of the Bands, and that has a recording contract with it.”
“So you think you can win the Battle of the Bands?”
“Oh, yeah. We’re good enough to win the Battle of the Bands.”
“Okay, well, what kind of music do you play, Layne?”
“You don’t know it.”
“Turn on the radio and let’s listen to the station that has some of that music.”
“It’s not on the station.”
“Oh my God, Layne! You want to be a rock star; you want to play music that isn’t even on a radio station. Maybe you better rethink this thing.”
In retrospect, Throm regrets having discouraged Layne from pursuing his dream and is glad Layne didn’t take his advice. It was one of a handful of times that one of his students taught him a lesson. “Layne taught me never to squelch a guy’s dream. Dream on and dream hard, but have a backup plan.” After Layne became successful, Throm thought he might come back to the shop and make him paint the storage shed as payback, but it never happened.
Layne’s parents were supportive of his goals, never discouraging him from his chosen profession. “Nancy and I at that time, we knew what pop rock was, but this new stuff that was coming out, we didn’t quite understand the whole thing, but certainly we were supportive of that and reminded him that we certainly wanted him to stay off of drugs and so forth, but we didn’t tie those two together,” Jim explained. When Layne was about seventeen or eighteen, his parents bought him his first car: a VW Dasher. “By that time, we knew he was going to be in the music business and that was [his] dream and he needed transportation, so we wanted to help him out,” he said.
Jamie Elmer remembers keeping Layne company as he was working on the Dasher. He had cleaned out the case containing the windshield wiper fluid, filled it with orange juice, and rigged the hose for the fluid so that it came out of the dashboard inside the car. He had turned the windshield wiper system into a drink machine and poured her a glass of orange juice from the dashboard. He could also modify his car for more mischievous purposes.
“The most trouble Layne and I caused together … Layne had a little car at one point and we pried the window washers to spray outward, and we were driving around and shooting people with it. As we drove by, we’d soak them,” James Bergstrom recalled with a laugh. “We saw a police officer coming into the parking lot, and we pulled out and drove across the street to an Arby’s, and the cop followed us, and we were like, ‘Oh, shit! This isn’t good!’”
The officer pulled Layne over. “Hey, are you guys driving around squirting people?”
“No, Officer,” Layne answered.
“Where’s your windshield wiper applicator?”
After Layne pointed to it, the officer reached into the car and pulled on it, getting soaked from his head down to the middle of his chest. Bergstrom started laughing, at which point Layne smacked him on the leg and told him to be quiet. The officer let Layne off with a warning.