[Deathwatch] Layne Staley, musician, 34

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Thanks to a reader for a suspiciously early tip on this one... - Ed

Layne Staley, lead singer of Alice in Chains, found dead at 34 in
Seattle home 
Sat Apr 20, 8:39 PM ET 
By GENE JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer 

SEATTLE - Layne Staley, lead singer and guitarist for the grunge band
Alice in Chains, was found dead in his apartment, authorities said. He
was 34.
  
Tests were required to establish the identity because the body,
discovered Friday, had started to decompose. The King County Medical
Examiner's office did not release his cause of death.

"It was natural or an overdose — that's the way it was determined by
our investigators," said Seattle Police spokesman Duane Fish.

Police did not immediately release details on anything that was found
at the scene, and a spokesman did not respond to several messages.

With Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, Alice in Chains was one of the
most prominent bands of the Seattle grunge scene of the early '90s. The
group was known for its dark, menacing sound, which combined grunge and
heavy metal, and often wrote about heroin.

"He was a sweet guy, but very troubled," said Charles Cross, a former
editor of the defunct Seattle music magazine The Rocket who recently
wrote a biography of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. "He lost his
girlfriend to drugs a number of years ago. People still had hopes he
would turn around. It's a sad tale."

While Alice in Chains didn't garner as much respect as other Seattle
grunge groups, the band's influence still reverberates, Cross said.

"Critically, they'll never rate in the same pantheon as Nirvana, but
they were a band that inspired hundreds, if not thousands, of other
bands," Cross said. He pointed to Creed and Godsmack, a band that
shares its name with an Alice in Chains song.

"They had huge commercial aspirations from the beginning. They
fulfilled that, and so much of that was Layne's voice," Cross said.

His voice ranged from a low, growly monotone to a pained, piercing
wail; many a bar-band singer frayed vocal cords in the early 1990s
trying to imitate it. Staley also played some guitar for the group.

Alice in Chains stopped touring in the mid-'90s, when Staley's drug use
proved too great an obstacle. He began a number of stints in rehab.

In a 1996 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Staley spoke of how
his drug use influenced his lyrics.

"I wrote about drugs, and I didn't think I was being unsafe or careless
by writing about them," he told the magazine. "Here's how my thinking
pattern went: When I tried drugs, they were (expletive) great, and they
worked for me for years, and now they're turning against me — and now
I'm walking through hell, and this sucks."

The group's first album, "Facelift," was released in 1990. It later
released "Dirt" and "Alice in Chains." The group's hits included "Man
in the Box," "Them Bones," "Rooster," and "Would?"

The latter song was partly inspired by the 1990 heroin overdose death
of Andrew Wood, singer of the seminal grunge group Mother Love Bone.

Staley's body was found just over 8 years after Cobain was found dead
in his Seattle home of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Heroin was found
in Cobain's bloodstream, and his head had been so mutilated that he
could not be immediately identified.

In the 1996 interview, Staley reflected on Cobain's death: "I saw all
the suffering that Kurt Cobain went through. I didn't know him real
well, but I just saw this real vibrant person turn into a real shy,
timid, withdrawn person who could hardly get a 'hello' out. ... At the
end of the day or at the end of the party, when everyone goes home,
you're stuck with yourself."