Trujillo also noted how Layne could appear out of it, then be focused seconds later. They had ordered baked potatoes, and people wanted butter. Trujillo put the butter in the microwave to defrost it when Layne, who was sitting in the kitchen lounge seemingly not paying attention, said to him, “You better be careful, man. That’s got tinfoil on it. That’ll be dangerous in the microwave.” Layne also talked to Trujillo about video games—there was a Sony PlayStation in the studio lounge, and Layne was giving him tips for how to get ahead in certain games.
They set Layne up in a control room so he could listen to the rough tracks and work on lyrics. Trujillo was tasked with keeping an eye on him and helping him. Shortly after, Layne went to the bathroom and stayed there for a long time. He eventually went back to the control room, where he found the minifridge stocked with sodas. Layne took out a bottle of root beer. Cisneros and Trujillo saw him sitting on a couch in the control room having nodded off, the root beer spilled on the floor. Trujillo cleaned it up.
Offspring drummer Ron Welty had his V drums set up in the control room so that he could practice or develop his parts. V drums are a small electronic drum kit that can be programmed with different sound effects from a memory bank. Layne started playing around with the kit. Trujillo showed him how to change and program the different sounds. Layne went nuts when he discovered he could program cartoon effects for the different pads.
“That’s what he really liked—the cartoon sounds,” Trujillo said. “He just got a kick out of that. He was just scrolling through the bank sounds on the little brain of the V drums and just trying everything. He fucking loved it. He was like, ‘This is great. I want to get one of these. Where do these come from?’” The other members of Alice in Chains and their crew were watching this, happy to see Layne happy and having fun. Shortly after, they brought out the cake and sang “Happy Birthday” and gave him a birthday card that they had all signed. Cisneros took a picture of Layne on the drum set as he was about to blow out the candles.
While Layne was playing around, he showed no indication of being ready to work. Eventually, Layne said he wanted to do everything—write lyrics and track his vocals—that night. By that point, it was almost five o’clock in the morning, and everyone was exhausted, some having been in the studio for almost twenty hours. Jerden, under the impression they still had the next day to work, met with the band and decided to call it a night, telling them Carlstrom was tired and they’d come back and finish on Sunday.
At that point, Layne said he had to go back to Seattle to attend his sister’s wedding, but Jerry tersely cut him off. According to Jerden, he said, “Laaaaaayne,” in an exasperated tone of voice. “[Layne] turned into this little kid that had been reprimanded severely by his parents. It probably didn’t sound like anything, but I’ll tell you it was one of the strangest things I ever saw, how Jerry just wasn’t putting up with Layne’s bullshit anymore, and Layne, who had such a strong personality, had completely turned into this nothing.”
“He wasn’t crying, but he looked like he was about to cry. He reverted to about a four-year-old boy,” Jerden explained. “Layne acted like he was afraid, terrified of Jerry. He just sat there and froze up. I don’t remember him saying another thing that night. Jerry totally understood me. He was cool with the fact that we had to stop, and he didn’t argue with me at all. Jerry did not argue; the rest of the band did not argue. He knew that I’d been told that I had Layne until Sunday—and that bullshit of him saying, all of the sudden, he has to go to a wedding?
“So I blew up, and I said [to Layne], ‘Listen, I’m not here to be your friend. I have a job to do,’” Jerden said. Trujillo thinks Layne may have thought Jerden was mad at him, possibly from memories of the blowup during the Dirt sessions when Jerden confronted him about his drug use.
Jerden was skeptical, thinking Layne was using the wedding as an excuse so he could go back to Seattle to get drugs. Whatever his intentions were, evidence shows Jerden’s skepticism was accurate. According to public records from the King County Recorder’s Office, Liz Elmer and her fiancé, Greg Coats, applied for a marriage license on May 26, 1998; were married on June 1; and filed the marriage certificate on June 11—more than two months before this recording session. According to Layne’s other sister, Jamie Elmer, “They got married just at the justice of the peace, and they had their two best friends there. Nobody else was there.”
“I’ve seen pictures of my sister and her husband, Greg, in the court. And it’s with her best friend and Greg’s friend. But it was the four of them, and I’m pretty darn sure that Layne wasn’t there.” There was a wedding party in mid-June that “Layne very well may have planned on coming to but didn’t make it to, because that’s just sometimes what would happen. So, to his credit, he may have definitely been trying to get there for a wedding party, or that was his plan. But I don’t remember him there.” Jim Elmer, Ken Elmer, and Kathleen Austin also attended the party. All three of them said Layne was not there.
At that point, the band members left. Jerden tried to book a studio in Seattle for Layne’s convenience to record his vocals, but by that point Layne didn’t want to work with him anymore. Susan was furious. “Susan Silver called me up and reads me the fucking riot act. She says my career was based on Alice in Chains, which is totally bullshit. I’ve worked with a lot of famous people before that. I had a lot of hit records that I produced before,” Jerden recalled. Rolling Stone got wind of the episode and wrote a story about it.18
Toby Wright got a call from Layne and Kevan Wilkins, asking if he would be willing to finish the project. He booked time at Robert Lang Studios to record the vocals and mix them with the material from the session with Jerden. Wright said, “At that point, Jerry and Layne weren’t getting along at all. So I had one guy in, and I would have another guy in after he was done. Those two songs required a lot of ProTools editing. That was one of the first times Alice was ever even on ProTools. Because Layne would do something; he’d go home. Jerry would come in. I’d change it for him; he’d go home. Layne would come in and hear what we did, and he’d change it again. So it was a lot of digital manipulation,” Wright said. Recording Layne’s vocals was difficult because of the loss of his teeth, which resulted in a lisp that affected his speech and singing ability. Consequently, they tried to stay away from lyrics that accentuated his lisp. “It was kind of hard to do that, because it shows up pretty much everywhere on those tracks. But it was easy for me, because Layne and I got along really well. So I didn’t have any problem with him at all. It was just a matter of getting him into the studio, having him sit down and get creative.”
“Get Born Again” and “Died” were the last songs Layne recorded with Alice in Chains.
In the late summer or early fall of 1998, songwriter/producer Matt Serletic and Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello were putting together a supergroup called the Class of ’99 to record a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” for director Robert Rodriguez’s forthcoming sci-fi/horror flick The Faculty. “My thought was, How do you take a quintessentially English track—from production to the English schoolkids to everything about it, the dark English thing—and make, like, a dark American version of it?” Serletic said.