Late Alice In Chains singer Layne Staley’s early collaborator and friend Tim Branom discussed him in a new Music Festival interview.
“I would take a guess that Layne was completely different in person than you would expect. I met him when he was 18. He was very shy, yet confident / Very quiet, yet processing information around him / Very open to being told what to do, yet very confident with new ideas. He was very non-judgmental and I never heard him say a bad word about anyone. He looked at life as a wave and just road the wave – whatever came to him, he adapted and took the ride. He didn’t complain about things. He just did what he had to do to get good and took his music seriously.
But I think in the end of his life, fame was not what he envisioned. In the late 90s when I had already moved to Los Angeles, I was on the phone with a friend in Seattle and Layne was there in the room, and heard our conversation. I could hear Layne angrily answering some of my questions about being him, being rich, drugs – things like that. He was venting his anger about the illusion that fame and money bring. He knew the anger was not towards me and I let him get it out. And it seems he spent his last few years mostly by himself.
He lived right there across the street by the old Peaches Records, but no one knew because he would never open the door or go anywhere except to the Blue Moon Tavern or a nearby store to buy games. I think what people need to know is that, you may like his music, but as a human being, he was also amazingly nice. But I am sure that he felt that many people had taken advantage of his kindness. So he was very vulnerable and needed to stay away from leeches – which ended up being most everyone around him.”
