Sing Backwards and Weep Read online

  Our album went on to sell somewhere around 300,000 copies, well short of the half-million sales required for a gold record. I remember reading somewhere that we were raised to our peak in record sales due to the soundtrack. I knew the reverse was true. We’d shot ourselves in the dick for the sake of the soundtrack, a soundtrack we’d helped to sell, never receiving a single penny in payment at the expense of our own album. A soundtrack to a film that I had been told by friends who’d seen it was just as corny as it sounded when Pfeifer had first told me about it, a lame and sap-filled farce of a movie. It was supposedly set in the “Seattle Scene,” but sounded like an episode of General Hospital, an obtuse bandwagon jump if ever there was one. To me, it may as well have been the Spice Girls film. Seeing a poster for it featuring actor Matt Dillon in a terrible wig was as close as I ever got to watching it. That poster, plastered all over town, told me more than I ever cared to know on the subject. Years later, while drinking together post-gig in a NYC bar, I stuck my lit cigarette into the pocket of Matt Dillon’s suit jacket when his back was turned and set it on fire while I walked away.

  Soon after the release of Sweet Oblivion, the Trees found ourselves touring America again. During an East Coast swing in October, we were scheduled to appear on Late Night with David Letterman. A couple nights before the show, we had a day off in the dying tourist town of Asbury Park, New Jersey. I woke up in our shitty waterfront hotel near the empty boardwalk. With no drugs to speak of and too hungover to go up to NYC to get some, I started drinking gin. I could always drink gin. By eleven a.m., I was fairly messed up.

  When evening fell, after a half dozen phone calls from Anna where I repeatedly denied drinking or using, I finally decided to go out and get the lay of the land. I thought I might prowl around and scare up some dope but quickly put that idea out of my head: this place was as quiet as a tomb. Walking through a cavernous empty building along the seaside in the dark, I suddenly felt a chill run up my spine and started shaking like a wet dog in the thick and misty cold sea air. I glanced down and noticed I had not one, but two used condoms stuck to my boot. It was time to quit sightseeing and get the fuck inside, someplace warm.

  Back at the hotel, I found out that some of the band and crew were going down to the Fast Lane, the bowling alley where we were booked to play the following night. I went along and started drinking for real, throwing back double after double, having a rare good time out with my bandmates.

  In the haze of a near blackout, I thought again about scanning this stone-dead neighborhood for drugs and headed for the exit, still carrying my drink. As I passed through the door, a rotund bouncer grabbed me by the throat with one hand and batted the drink out of my hand with the other.

  “Goddamnit, I told you idiots, no drinks outside!” he yelled.

  Without thinking, I immediately clubbed him in the face with my fist, knocking him backwards off his barstool and down the three or four steps out of the place. Another bouncer then shoved me down the same steps. Right behind me came Trees drummer Barrett Martin, suddenly caught in the fray. As I drunkenly scrambled to get up in the street, I grabbed a large piece of wooden signpost lying in the gutter.

  Barrett and I found ourselves back-to-back, surrounded by four very round, very large goons. The weight of the two-by-four was too much for me in my inebriated state and I dropped it just before it pulled me over. The bouncers closed in and the six of us began trading punches. It was a long couple of exhausting minutes before an armed security guard appeared out of the gloom and broke it up.

  The guard took us back inside to have the manager decide whether or not to call the cops. When he found out who we were, he let us go but also refused to let us play the next day. I later discovered what had primed the pump for our fight: Van Conner, the Screaming Trees’ massive bass player, had come out the door right before me. When asked to leave his drink inside, he had told the doorman to go fuck himself. I welcomed having a day off and went up to NYC that next afternoon to score some heroin and cocaine.

  The next night we made our national television debut performing on Late Night with David Letterman. I had a bruised black-and-blue eye and Barrett was unable to play because his shoulder had been dislocated in the brawl. Sitting in the greenroom where we were required to hang out during the afternoon hours before our performance, I drank from a pint bottle of gin hidden in the inside pocket of my jacket. I looked on with a kind of curious bemusement as the featured guest, actor Jeff Goldblum, read aloud from some book in a huge, affected, obnoxious voice as he walked quickly up and down the empty hallway alone for at least an hour. It was like being forced to watch some bizarre preparation of an audition for a role in a tedious, weird Shakespearean play.

  I thought, What the fuck man? Is he on coke? Is this how a serious thespian prepares for a talk show? I concluded that he was just a weird fucking dude. I put some headphones on and listened to Suicide’s A Way of Life on my Walkman. I loved them and that album in particular always got me jacked up. There were many days I would take my first shot of heroin with Alan Vega’s creepily affected voice saying, “Yeah, this is the cops, yeah, she’s wild in blue” over a propulsive industrial electronic beat as the soundtrack to my morning fix. Just as the Dead Kennedys were the only thing I wanted to hear while on acid as a kid, I had my favorite music for shooting heroin. While shooting coke, I needed total silence.

  Finally good and drunk, it was time to play. With Steve Ferrone filling in on drums, smiling stage manager Biff Henderson held my drink as we galloped unsteadily through our current single and still best-known song, “Nearly Lost You,” while Paul Shaffer chicken-necked behind us. Letterman, with a well-known propensity for ridiculing heavy people, liked us enough that he called us out again at the end of the show to avail ourselves of the catering. While the Conner brothers dug in, I took the opportunity to wing some food at Lee’s head, accidentally catching an unamused David Letterman with the shrapnel. It devolved into a full-on food fight ending with Van trying to force a carved pumpkin onto Lee’s head. It would be seventeen years before I’d be allowed back onto the show.

  10

  HOUSE OF PAIN

  In November of 1992, we began another two-month tour of the States, this time playing in the middle slot on a bill with Seattle band Gruntruck opening and Alice in Chains headlining. Offstage, it was an insane, dark, drug-and-alcohol-fueled frat party from start to finish, with Layne and I raising hell, behaving like teenagers, staying up days on end. We partook of whatever drugs came our way: heroin, cocaine, painkillers, anything. On one particularly pleasing night, Alice in Chains bassist Mike Starr pulled Layne and me aside.

  “This chick I was hanging out with gave me this and told me you guys might want it.” He pulled a large bottle out of his coat. “She said it’s called Dilaudid.”

  Layne and I both grabbed for it at the same time while trying not to look too eager.

  “Thanks, Mike. Yeah, we can probably find something to do with it.”

  We spent several days shooting the Dilaudid in a hazy bliss. When it was gone, we resumed drinking like madmen until we were able to get our hands on some opiates again. One night while riding on Alice’s bus with Layne, we got so shitfaced we tore apart the back lounge of the bus in a drunken frenzy, leaving a huge mess. Susan Silver had come out and joined the tour for a few dates in her capacity as Alice’s comanager; the next day I was ashamed to receive a kind yet stern talking-to from my now ex-manager who told me that Layne and I were to clean up the mess immediately and that I was no longer allowed to ride on their bus.

  I witnessed some of the greatest performances I had ever seen, by anyone. Alice in Chains was like some massive apocalyptic machine onstage. No matter what shape Layne was in, no matter how little sleep we’d had, he would fucking kill it every night. Guitarist/singer/ songwriter Jerry Cantrell, the architect behind their sound, delivered nuanced but powerful vocal harmonies that gave their songs their unique, haunting, one-of-a-kind quality. Layne was such a monster
vocalist. I was amazed that after partying with me the previous twenty-­four hours, Staley could get up and roar in a voice so painfully powerful you could feel it physically while watching from sidestage. He was the most singularly impressive hard rock singer I would ever hear, up there with some of the greats from my youth—Rob Halford, Brian Johnson, and even Freddie Mercury, all guys I’d seen play live as a kid. In my mind, Layne was in their league.

  We found it effortless to meet girls to hang out, have sex, and party with. On a weekend off somewhere in Florida, Layne and I were having a round-the-clock party with three cute girls we’d met after a show. Every couple hours, I would leave the hotel, go out to our tour bus, and grab some beer. At the time we had a temporary bus driver, a total redneck. Each trip to the bus to grab more booze, I had to walk past him and a tough-looking, mannish woman seated next to him in the front of the bus. She wore a denim vest covered in dozens of truck-stop buttons with corny country witticisms written on them.

  After I grabbed what I’d come for, I would leave through the same door, say, “Thanks, Roscoe!” and then head back up to the party. On the way out after my umpteenth beer run, I said, “Thanks Roscoe!” once more. This time, his female companion angrily heaved herself up, blocked the exit, and yelled in my face, “His name is Royce, goddamnit!”

  Another bus driver we used had been a part of country singer Sonny James’s band in the ’60s. He was now a hardcore Christian evangelist and he tried his damnedest to convert us to the ways of Jesus. One day, I heard the Righteous Brothers tune “Unchained Melody” for the first time and was so captivated by it that I listened to it nonstop on my Walk­man the entire day. While parked at a truck stop, the driver had come up to me, talking and gesticulating wildly, as I sat smoking a joint. I was irritated that I was obliged to take my headphones off for a second to hear what he was saying.

  “You sick SOB! You owe me a Bible, MF-er!”

  His angry, abbreviated expletives drew huge laughter from everyone on the bus. Turns out I had been rolling joints with pages torn from one of his personal Bibles. I’d not known where the book had come from and used it because it was all I could find.

  “Whatever,” I said and went back to the song.

  He quit that day.

  We had a show in Philadelphia on November 25, my birthday. To celebrate, Layne and I went back to the hotel to get high. We ran into the guys from the rap group House of Pain, who were staying in the same hotel. Their single “Jump Around” was a huge hit at that moment. Lead rapper Everlast was a nice guy, and with a wide smile, he invited us to come hang out and party. Before we joined him, we each did a shot of some powerful East Coast white powdered heroin. By the time we got up to Everlast’s room, I was in such a heavy nod that I could barely lift my head off my chest. I remember Layne telling Everlast, “It’s cool, he just smoked some great weed” and not much else.

  While playing a show in Boston two days later, I got so drunk that I was like a rag doll on rubber legs. At one point, I found myself on my knees in the crowded dressing room going down on a hot red-haired stripper. Whenever the door opened, a group of audience members could clearly see what I was doing but I didn’t care. Whenever I was drunk, all decorum went directly out the window.

  On the tour bus driving to Montreal that night, I noticed a slight tightness and heat in the crook of my arm where I had injected the dope in Philly. By the time we arrived in Quebec, my entire arm was swollen twice its normal size, flaming hot, and apple red.

  My road manager first took me to see a doctor in a seedy medical building. The moment I took off my shirt, the doctor said, “You have to go to the hospital immediately. You have a blood infection. You’ll be lucky if you don’t lose that arm.”

  Later, on a gurney in the basement hallway of the French-speaking hospital, a doctor hooked me up to IV antibiotics. With a ballpoint pen, he drew a line around the inflamed, scarlet area from my shoulder to my wrist and said, “I’m gonna come back in twelve hours. If the redness has gone outside the line, I’m afraid we’re going to have to amputate your arm at the shoulder.”

  At the show that night, Layne got up onstage with the Trees to sing some of my songs in my absence. Afterward, he came to the hospital to see me. He broke down in tears for a minute at the sight of me lying in the hallway with my huge, bright-red swollen arm.

  A cute French girl I often hung out with when in Boston had traveled with me on the bus to Canada. She came to see me as well. After speaking to a doctor in their native tongue about my condition, she looked at me with profound sadness and shook her head before also breaking out in tears. I was starting to feel like this might not turn out in my favor.

  Sleeping that first night was next to impossible with the constant crying and moaning of the elderly woman in front of me and my mind racing about the possibility of losing my dominant arm from the shoulder down. Late at night, as I was almost asleep, out of the break room directly opposite me in the narrow hallway came a rousing version of “Happy Birthday” in French. I snapped and yelled, “Shut the fuck up!” The break room door slammed shut.

  I awoke the next morning to something heavy landing on my chest and some hot liquid hitting me in the face. I opened my eyes and saw the large male orderly who had just dropped a breakfast tray on me, splashing hot coffee in my face. With an evil smile, he leaned down and whispered in a heavy French accent, “Still happy, rock and roll?”

  I was never to get into a room, just a gurney lined up with several others in a subterranean hallway. Every twelve hours for the next eight days, someone came by to look at my arm.

  “It looks like it’s getting better. We may be able to let you go tomorrow,” one doctor would say.

  Hours later, a different doctor would say, “If this thing isn’t better by tomorrow, we may have to take it off.”

  I tried to console myself with the pitifully small doses of painkillers they gave me, and I became obsessed with getting head from one of the street hookers outside before I lost my arm. My close friend John Hicks, who some people not unfairly referred to as my “bagman,” was working as the Screaming Trees’ drum tech. While the rest of the band kept traveling with the tour in case I was released and could rejoin them at some point, Hicks had stayed behind in a flea-bitten motel near the hospital to keep me company. He had been my close friend for years. I’d met him in Seattle, where he’d come from Johnson City, Tennessee, bringing with him the thick, heavy Southern accent many Europeans, and even some Americans we’d come across, found confounding to decipher. I loved him and his balls-out courage in his role as my surrogate and closest ally. He was one of the first people I’d ever done heroin with and we traveled together for years.

  Every day he tried to get a hooker past security with the idea that I would roll my IV stand down the hall to the stairwell to receive one final blow job as a two-armed person. Much to my consternation, it never happened—the security guard at the door was particularly vigilant and immediately wised up to Hicks’s game. In a stagnant fury, I envisioned Hicks in his motel room, getting endless rounds of oral sex from the hookers outside, scoring dope for himself and not sharing it with me, while I was laid up in this grimy, soot-covered hallway, amputation imminent, bored to fucking death with sick, elderly French-speaking homeless people as my only companions. Unable to get off their gurneys, most of these unfortunate souls were faced with the indignity of having to shit in bedpans in plain view of everyone else. The whole place constantly stank like a hole-in-the-floor Italian gas-station toilet. I thanked God I could at least walk to the restroom when I had to. By the end of my stay, Hicks steered clear of me to avoid my wrath at his failure.

  Finally, the swelling subsided. After eight days—during which I did nothing but hit up nurses and doctors for painkillers, berate Hicks, and obsess about sex, drugs, and amputation—I was released. Not for one moment did it cross my mind that I had done this to myself. I wasn’t built like that. God forbid I should change my way of living. John and I rejoin
ed the band in Cleveland, where he and I spent our first evening back partying with two strippers all night in the hotel sauna, which we’d broken into after hours. I eagerly accepted the first blow job one of them offered and the next day immediately started shooting dope again. Self-reflection and soul-searching were not in my limited vocabulary.

  A few weeks later at a show at Los Angeles’s Palladium, Everlast tracked me down backstage before the concert.

  “Hey, man, I got something for you,” he said with a huge grin.

  I quickly ushered him into an empty room where he broke out a large bag of pungent weed. I couldn’t hide my disappointment.

  “Oh damn,” I said, unable to mask the letdown.

  “What’s wrong, bro?” he asked with a puzzled look on his face.

  Suddenly I felt like an asshole.

  “I’m sorry, man, I just thought it was something else.”

  “But you were so high in Philly … I thought you’d appreciate it.”

  “Dude, I so appreciate it … but I just quit smoking.”

  11

  DRINKING BLOODY WATER

  In early 1993, we headed for Europe, again opening for Alice in Chains. After doing my last shot in the restroom on the plane several hours earlier, I arrived in London on the edge of dopesickness. Layne and I hooked up with an American guy we knew named Craig Pike, our London connection at the time. He had previously done a brief stint as bass player in Iggy Pop’s band. Now he squatted in a large decrepit house with no electricity or running water, playing bass for London band Thee Hypnotics, strung out and scoring drugs for people to feed his own habit. Though I liked Craig, I found his predicament pathetic. I would certainly never sink that low, you could fucking count on that.