“I think this was sort of Jerry’s sort of shtick. He would be like, ‘Yeah, well, do you have fluorescent lights?’
“‘Yeah.’
“‘Well, I can’t stand fluorescent lights, and I’ll just bash them out. So you guys got to get rid of those if I’m going to ever work there. Where’s your manager?’
“‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir, he’s not here.’
“‘Well, do you got his phone number?’”
The gag would go on and on, sometimes as long as fifteen to twenty minutes, and people would keep talking. Other times, they would randomly call somebody in the middle of the night. “We did that night after night until that got kind of old.”
At another town, someone thought it would be a good idea to try cow-tipping. “We go find some cows sleeping on their feet and tip them over, and it’s just hilarious,” Rockwell said. “We get into the pasture, and all of a sudden we hear this, like, big ‘moo’—like, it’s a bull, and we all freak the fuck out and hightail it out of there.”
Rockwell and Sean, both being drummers, wound up hanging out together quite a bit. “When Sean got lit he was pretty unstoppable. He was sort of a classic destroyer of hotel rooms.”
Case in point: the two drummers walked out of the room looking for something to do when they noticed the hallway was illuminated by tulip-shaped sconces lining the hallway. Sean, with beer in hand, walked down the corridor and poured a little beer in each sconce before walking to the next one and pouring more beer as he and Rockwell continued down the hall. A few seconds later, each lightbulb would explode. Rockwell thinks the band might have been banned from the hotel where this happened.
Sean had an alter ego he called Steve, which he referred to whenever he was particularly rowdy or destructive. According to Randy Biro, Sean once walked into the restaurant of a nice hotel in Toronto where a brunch had been set up. “He’s standing on a chair, peeing onto the dessert cart in the middle of the dining hall,” Biro said. For some mind-boggling reason, the band was not kicked out of the hotel. When Sean was asked about it later, he allegedly responded, “That wasn’t me. That was Steve.” Multiple sources have said that Sean has given up drinking in recent years.
Rockwell’s memories of Sean during the Shitty Cities Tour aren’t all mayhem and destruction. After the first show, because they had similar drum kits, Sean suggested they share his kit for the tour to avoid changing drum kits between sets. As the tour progressed, Sean used his contacts in the drumming industry and got Rockwell endorsements with DW, Vic Firth, and Sabian. By the second leg of the tour, several boxes of brand-new drums and drumming equipment had been delivered for Rockwell.
Mike was known to like younger girls, and this became the subject of a prank. “We knew he had this girl down in his hotel room. We were all upstairs drinking, bored out of our skulls—needed something to do,” Rockwell said. “So we all decide to run down to his room, and we knew she was in the room, knock on the door, and, like, ‘This is the hotel manager. We know you’ve got a young girl in there.’” Jerry told them Mike had gotten in trouble for this on a previous tour.
“We’re knocking on the door, and he won’t answer the door, just will not, and we’re all snickering.” The gag changed from being the manager to the girl’s father. “Finally, he cracks open the door and realizes it’s us. We bust into the room, and the sliding glass door in the back of the room is open, and she’s, like, out—like, gone.” When she heard everyone laughing and realized it was a joke, she came back, but Mike was furious. Rockwell said for the most part, Mike kept to himself on that tour, as did Layne.
After the conclusion of Shitty Cities, the band opened for Ozzy Osbourne for about a month in the fall of 1992. There was a noticeable difference in the crowd’s reaction to Alice in Chains compared to two years earlier. “By then, ‘Man in the Box’ had hit, and Dirt was out. So as a rock fan, if you didn’t have it already, you went out and bought it after that,” Jimmy Shoaf said.
There were two mishaps during the tour. Mike drank a water bottle full of bleach by mistake and had to be hospitalized, leading to the cancellation of a few shows. The bleach was used to clean out syringes. According to Randy Biro, “It looked like some water. Poured it down his throat. And before he could realize what the taste was, it pretty much had gotten into his system.” Biro thinks Mike was using heroin at this point. “I could see him doing heroin, because he really looked up to Layne. And if Layne was doing it, he would be doing it.”
In September 1992, Layne was at a state fairground somewhere that had a racetrack where people were driving trikes or three-wheeled ATVs, which caught his interest. According to Randy Biro, “People were saying, ‘You shouldn’t ride those things. They’re dangerous.’” Layne dismissed the concerns and took one for a spin.
“He ends up going … I don’t know how far—not that far—and he puts his foot down to make a turn, like you would a motorcycle, and the back wheel runs over his foot.” His left foot was broken, and he would be in a cast and on crutches for several weeks. He kept performing, on crutches or sitting in a wheelchair or on a couch onstage. When asked about it later, he said, “I didn’t break my neck, so there’s no excuse not to play.”4 Mike noted that Layne stage-dived with his foot still in the cast.5
The subject matter on Dirt left Layne open to legitimate questions from journalists about drugs. Layne told Rolling Stone, “The facts are that I was shooting a lot of dope, and that’s nobody’s business but mine. I’m not shooting dope now, and I haven’t for a while … I took a fucking long, hard walk through hell. I decided to stop because I was miserable doing it. The drug didn’t work for me anymore. In the beginning I got high, and it felt great; by the end it was strictly maintenance, like food I needed to survive. Since I quit doing it, I tried it a couple of times to see if I could recapture the feeling I once got off it, but I don’t. Nothing attracts me to it anymore. It was boring.”6
During a November 1992 interview with Canadian TV channel Musique Plus, the host asked Layne, “When you have a problem with heroin, does it automatically make you think about death because you’re playing with your life a lot?”
“Yeah, I suppose that comes with the territory. Flirting with death … That’s probably what’s most attractive about it at first, is the danger, you know?” Layne answered. “But I beat it, I beat death! [Layne cheers.] I’m immortal!”
Later in the interview, the host asked, “What’s the hardest part when you’re trying to get over that?”
“The cravings, probably.”
“Has it been an excuse for creativity?”
“No. I never created anything when I was in that state of mind. It was only when I stopped that I could create.”7
The persistent questioning bothered Layne. He told SPIN about a French journalist who accused him of being on heroin during their interview. “I asked him if he was on heroin,” he recalled. “The guy got all offended. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘now you know how I feel.’”8
Drug and heroin references were part of the band’s live act on this tour. Layne introduced one song as being “about a hopeless fucking junkie” at a show in Dallas in October 1992. During a performance of “God Smack” at the same show, Layne repeatedly jabbed his arm with the microphone while scooting around onstage in a wheelchair. “I really like the wheelchair effect,” Mike said. “I don’t know, it somehow makes Layne seem more … evil.”9 According to Biro, Layne was sober during this tour.