The Alice in Chains song about the loss of Layne Staley: “Deathly ill”
Losing a band member is never easy. When Alice in Chains lost frontman Layne Staley, it seemed as though only he knew his own fate after a long battle with drug addiction. Although Staley had been, for the most part, living away from the spotlight since around 1996, his passing hit hard on an industry that knew all too well the implications of depression and substance abuse.
Staley’s experiences with relapse and recovery weren’t linear: following the passing of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, Staley became fearful of reaching the same fate and attempted sobriety as a result. However, the death of his then-girlfriend, Demri Lara Parrott, led him down a dark path, and he became reclusive to everybody except his bandmates.
From 1999, Staley was in a deep pit of drug abuse, venturing out only to visit toy stores to buy games and return back home again. “It got to a point where he’d kept himself so locked up, both physically and emotionally,” explained Alice in Chains’ drummer, Sean Kinney. “I kept trying to make contact,” he said, which he did three times a week to no avail.
“Every time I was in the area, I was up in front of his place yelling for him,” he continued, explaining that, even if he got into his building, which he managed to do on the odd occasion, Staley wouldn’t answer the door. “You couldn’t just kick the door in and grab him,” he added, “but if someone won’t help themselves, what really can anyone else do?”
Staley died in 2002 from an overdose of a mixture of heroin and cocaine. In a heartfelt tribute, the band referred to the death of their friend and bandmate as an “immense” loss and someone who was “an amazing musician, an inspiration, and a comfort to so many”. A few years later, they released the song ‘Black Gives Way to Blue’ as a final goodbye to the late frontman.
Guitarist and vocalist Jerry Cantrell once recalled becoming “deathly ill” with grief in the months prior to writing the song, which all went away when he started to put pen to paper. Almost like a life-saving release, ‘Black Gives Way to Blue’ enabled Cantrell to process an immense amount of grief that he had been holding on to for years. He even tried to get his symptoms examined, convinced that he was dying, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with him.
Although the song wasn’t an easy one to write, and everyone in the room was reduced to tears the night it was recorded, it is undeniably the perfect send-off for such a talented musician and someone whose contributions to the band cannot be understated. While the whole piece eulogises the musician, the most spine-tingling lyrics arrive in the final verse: “Lay down, black gives way to blue / Lay down, I’ll remember you”.
