Alice In Chains interview - Jerry Cantrell and Sean Kinney about Layne Staley

i met lane when he played the tacoma little theater in tacoma so i met him first but actually played with mike starr first in a in a really crappy band called gypsy rose and burien my mother my mother had just passed away and i didn't really have any place to stay and i kind of was done with the coma anyway so i met this guy tim branham and and uh he invited me to come up and hang with him and i stayed in his basement for about a week and mike starr came over and we were jamming and then we both got kicked out after a week so then i didn't see mike again until i uh met lane again at a house party kind of recently or pretty much right after that and he kind of he kind of had heard about my situation and i didn't really have a place to live or anything and and uh so he invited me up to uh ballard where he lived at this place called the music bank which was [ __ ] awesome i mean for a bunch of young kids there's a 20 24 hour rehearsal hall 50 rooms and just something going on all the time i met lane we exchanged information i mean there's no way to get a hold of each other but somehow he remembered me and he had a piece of paper with your number yeah and then when jay or you know somebody's number i didn't have a phone probably melinda's or something yeah my girlfriends or something who was mike starr's sister and uh and jerry i guess was looking to put a band together and lane said oh this drummer dude seems cool call him so jerry called my girlfriend at the time and and me and her went down that's right it was melinda it was millennials and you called her and then we went down to the music bank and i listened to some of your demos and stuff you had like a headband at one of those kind of like a thing like uh it's like a gold like yeah like eating asparagus i came down and listened to a couple tunes and i thought it was pretty cool and you know we kind of feeling each other out and as i was sitting there you said something like oh you know we need a bass flare to jam i thought jim was just kind of like starry or so ago he seemed like kind of a cool dude and i was like that's weird because this is his sister and and i've been in bands with mike on and off since we were 11 or 12 or something yeah he's like wow that's weird so i called mike and mike either came down that night or the next day and we came back and we got in a room and borrowed some gear it was just a period of time of kind of like waiting them out and then that didn't seem to work so we just we we basically told him okay we're gonna get a new singer so we started auditioning singers in in his rehearsal room and we just brought in the shittiest guys we could find the worst singers we could find we'd bring him in and have him sing and then he'd be coming in and out he's just like oh my god yeah kept saying what are you guys doing like it wasn't that he wasn't that wasn't too bad i kind of like that guy he's pretty cool we were purposely doing that and it just got after about three guys that were just so horrendous he came in and he was like okay [ __ ] that i'm joining i think the final straw was we we auditioned a male stripper no no we we we auditioned a red-headed male stripper who was just terrible yeah and that that was it and he's like okay [ __ ] it i'll you guys i can't let you guys play with these [ __ ] clowns i'll [ __ ] join the band and that was it a lot of those early kind of demos were kind of searching for whatever the [ __ ] we were you know and they're pretty bad but i mean if you if you kind of think about like the young kids we were in the time we came up with you know there was there was at least some good choruses and a couple of good riffs here and there i mean the lyrics were [ __ ] horrible but but i mean it was a start and we ended up kind of stumbling onto a couple of tunes that were like okay you know we all kind of looked at each other and like wow that's that's kind of maybe where we should we should be going you know it just kind of it was just kind of natural there was a song called chemical addiction [Music] again music wasn't the foremost thing at the beginning it was just survival and and partying and having a place to go and and then once we hit upon some stuff that was a combination of how people actually played and worked together and spending that time then it was like oh wow this is different than the other things we'd all done individually and then then it you know took on a life of its own and started when you find your sound is basically when all four of you are digging whatever the [ __ ] you're playing and that's what it is rock world lost one of its more honest voices this weekend when allison chains front man lane staley was found dead in his seattle home on friday he was 34. seattle police say they responded to a call from one of staley's relatives asking him to check on his well-being since he hadn't been seen in two weeks police then discovered a body later identified as staley that had been deceased for at least a few days surrounded by intravenous drug paraphernalia that was always that was always possible there was always a possibility it was never closed until then for me or any of us or delane or anybody until the day he passed away you know he he also talked about doing stuff of course yeah because well the image is that he was just not into music anymore but he was no that's not true no i mean i'd [ __ ] go over to his place and [ __ ] he'd be playing me [ __ ] he'd be writing all the time you know and and and i would too and he'd play me stuff and and play him stuff and vice versa [Music] it was so much more than whatever they tried to sum up and it really really dawned on me and made me really sick when yeah when we he just passed away and we'd been up for another grammy and we went to they convinced us to go we were going to [ __ ] go and you know and i'm you know we ended up going i ended up going because i was like well this probably this is never going to [ __ ] happen again so we went and they at the end of those or during those shows they played a collage of all the people that had passed away that year they didn't even put him up there no no how come why i don't know i'm not in the ground you know this is this is what we're saying and that's what that's what kind of really i remember was like looking at each other and just getting up and leaving like how [ __ ] stupid is that

Channel: FaceCulture

Views: 771,976

Keywords: 2010, alice in chains, jerry cantrell, sean kinney, grunge, rock, layne staley, faceculture, music, mike, starr

Id: tJW77uMEHdI

Length: 7min 27sec (447 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2010