They decided they wanted the rhythm section from Jane’s Addiction—Martyn LeNoble on bass and Stephen Perkins on drums—with Serletic on keyboards. The four musicians met at Conway Studios in Los Angeles to record their parts. Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor assisted with some of the keyboard programming. Sony sent a crew to the studio to film the recording of the song. As far as Serletic knew at the time, the footage was for a documentary about the making of the song, but it would ultimately be used for a music video.
They still didn’t have a singer, so Morello and Serletic were asking themselves, “Who can sing this?” A few names were floated, including Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine. “What about Layne Staley?”
Serletic doesn’t recall who exactly proposed Layne but thinks it might have been Morello. Everyone in the band was a fan of his, and, in Serletic’s words, “It was kind of an instant yes if he’s up for it, if he can do it.”
Serletic contacted Sony Records to act as a conduit between them and Layne and relay his proposal. Serletic eventually heard that Layne wanted to do it. By this point, the band was up against a tight deadline and had only about three days to finish the song, which was still missing Layne’s lead vocals and the children’s choir vocals. Serletic went to Seattle to record Layne on a Friday, bringing with him an engineer and a ProTools editor. Layne was supposed to arrive at the studio at nine o’clock—supposed to. He thinks Layne finally showed up at around one in the morning, brought to the studio by Todd Shuss, one of Susan’s employees.
“This is the first time I’ve ever met Layne. I didn’t know what to expect, but he looked rough,” Serletic recalled. “At this point, he had lost most of his teeth. He was incredibly shy. It was kind of a shock to see him.”
Susan was also struck by the change in his appearance. “I hadn’t seen him maybe since I went to his apartment to tell him that his girlfriend died,” she recalled years later. “I wouldn’t have recognized him. He looked different—he didn’t look like himself anymore. But he had the same sparkling wit. Looking at him, thinking, ‘My God, he’s physically changed,’ and just as sweet, just as funny—quoting lines off silly Nick at Nite TV shows.”19
According to Serletic, “He heads up to the lounge upstairs and has a bag of cheeseburgers from McDonald’s. He’s in the lounge, sitting in the corner, really timid. I say hello. He’s chewing his cheeseburger. He really doesn’t engage much, but basically he sits there for about two hours. So now it’s like two or three o’clock in the morning, something like that, when he finally comes out of his shell after I talked to him for a minute. We kind of just small-talked. ‘Oh my God, he’s a great vocalist. I’m excited to work with him,’ anything to make him comfortable.”
Layne didn’t want anybody else around for the session. Complicating things from Layne’s perspective, according to Serletic, was that this was one of the first times he would be working with people he hadn’t worked with in the past. Serletic and his team tried to make it as comfortable as possible for him, and he finally came down to sing at three or four o’clock in the morning. Serletic had his engineer hide under the console to work the preamp and microphone levels as he ran ProTools, “to kind of make it more of a one-on-one direct experience so he didn’t feel like he was being watched and being judged.”
Serletic said, “You can only know what you know about the voice you’re so familiar with from radio and albums and so on. It was still there, but at first especially, it was very papery, kind of a whisper, a ghost of himself. It got stronger as he got comfortable with the track and got his headphone mixes right.”
As was Layne’s trademark, they stacked his vocals. “We stacked it up; we did the harmonies underneath. When you start doing those harmonies, that’s when that great Alice in Chains sound starts really emerging,” Serletic said. It took him a while to get his vocals warmed up, but once he did, he nailed his takes. “Once he got past that, he was in control. I wasn’t having to direct him. He was like, ‘Hey, let me do a double,’ ‘Okay, let me try a harmony now.’ He knew how he liked to approach vocals, and he was still very much cognizant enough to be a pro.”
Layne’s lisp was apparent, so Serletic had to redo some of the material where the letter s was especially pronounced. “I think even on the final, we did some significant s removal on a couple of things to make it not jump out of the track.” They finished at around 4:30 in the morning. “He seemed fairly excited about it. He had settled into a little more of a comfort zone. He liked the track. He seemed to be excited being part of it. Sad to say, he got paid to be on the record, so there might have been a financial concern as well, to make some money. But I think he was pleased from what I could tell by the time we finished,” Serletic said. For Layne’s scenes in the music video, Sony/Columbia used file footage from Mad Season’s Live at the Moore.
As soon as the session was over, Serletic went straight to the airport because the children’s choir was recording their vocals in Los Angeles a few hours later. While on the way, Serletic called Don Ienner, president of Columbia Records, telling him, “You’ve got to help this guy.” In Serletic’s words, “You could tell he was not in good shape.”
According to Serletic, Ienner’s response was “‘We’ve tried. We have. We put him on the corporate jet several times to rehab.’ I’ll always remember this: he said something to me to the effect of ‘You can’t help people if they don’t want to help themselves.’”
In retrospect, Serletic said, “I think there’s a ghostly quality to the final vocal that he delivered that I think is really haunting and moving in its own right. From a production standpoint, he was a guy that had lost all his teeth; he was not in good shape. It was really sad.”
Asked years later about working with Layne on the Class of ’99, Morello tweeted, “Mostly sad. He was not well bless him.” There are two things worth noting about this session: first, this was probably Layne’s last studio recording—it’s unclear whether this session or the Music Bank sessions happened first; and second, it was the last time Susan saw him.20
After the Metallica tour, Jerry scheduled a U.S. headlining tour that would run through October, ending with a Halloween homecoming performance at the Showbox in Seattle.21 Layne went to the show but kept a low profile. According to Jimmy Shoaf, Layne watched the performance from backstage and possibly from the audience. He did not perform. During the after-show party, Layne, Shoaf, and a third person posed for a picture together, which surfaced on the Internet several years later. This is one of the last photos of Layne known to exist. That night was the last time Shoaf saw Layne.22
On July 19, 1999, Jerry, Sean, and Mike were scheduled to appear on the nationally syndicated radio show Rockline to promote their greatest hits compilation and box set. Jerry and Mike were in the studio, while Sean was participating by phone from Albany, New York. There was a surprise twist midway through. Layne, who was listening from home, called in the middle of the show and stuck around for the duration of the program.
Asked about the possibility of the band regrouping to record new material besides the two new songs, there was a bit of a disconnect. Jerry said, “We’ll let you know.” Layne responded, “Okay,” without hesitation.
“Layne, what’s your attitude toward that? Are you ready to record?” the host, Bob Coburn, asked.