Seattle, WA ~ Friday, April 5, 2002
Weather History for KBFI
Precipitation ~ 0.05 in
Events ~ Rain
Could she love me again, or will she hate me?
Prob'ly not, I know why, can't explain me.
Did she call my name?
I think it's gonna rain
When I die.
~ Alice In Chains
It's been 22 years to the day since Kurt Cobain died. Facebook is awash with posts commemorating the event, reminding us all that the world has grown bleaker and generally more hopeless since that Spring day when the reluctant Father of Grunge was found with his face blown away by a single shotgun blast.
I was 24 when it happened and, in all honesty, it really did seem like the death of an entire generation. For roughly three or four years, we'd ruled the world: we were the latchkey kids of the seventies and eighties. We'd suffered through a Cold War, Reaganomics, Wham! T-shirts and Flashdance legwarmers, pink and green neon and yuppie-ism. Now it was our turn. We were the misfits, awkward and depressed, suspicious of authority, zombified by Prozac and stuck with the stale leftovers of the metal years in the form of shitty hair metal knock-offs like Dangerous Toys, Winger and Slaughter. When grunge exploded onto the scene in a plaid flannel colored mushroom cloud of weariness and anger, it was like a massive defibrillator reanimating our dormant corpses from a drugged sleep with a sharp kick to the ribs.
I find myself nostalgic for the 90s a lot, even though at the time I was convinced that we were living in perpetual final countdown mode. The economy was booming, colors seemed brighter and I personally attended two Lollapalooza's. I was simultaneously the most miserable and the coolest person on planet Earth, suffering mightily in my John Lennon purple tinted sunglasses, combat boots and Beastie Boys T-shirt. Hope seemed tangible and I could afford a pair of Doc Martens on my coffee shop salary.
Then Cobain died, and all of the color was bleached out of the world. I cut the rainbow hair wrap out of my hair, gave my fatigue jacket back to the secondhand store and went to work, blending in with the rest of the faceless cogs. I moved out of my twenties and found myself in my thirties with no idea of how I'd gotten there.
But if Kurt Cobain's death was the tolling of a bell signalling the end of an era, then Layne Staley's passing was the ringing silence that follows, the kind that fills your ears with the loud, numbing silence that follows a deafening cannon fire.
I found out about Staley's death on an online message board, back in the early days of the InterWebs. I heard nothing about it on TV, or read anything about it in the newspapers, nor heard it mentioned even in passing on MTV, which has ceased being a legit music channel by that point and had become one long fucking commercial/reality show, making stars out of mannequins and containing all of the substance of a stale marshmallow.
Alice In Chains, along with Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Jane's Addiction, had ruled the early 90s. When lead singer Layne Staley disappeared from the public spotlight in 1996, nobody thought much of it. It was just another case of a band's time being over and their fame flames dampened by obscurity. Everyone just assumed he'd retired and was living off of the millions earned by their albums, relaxing in ostentatious luxury in some mansion somewhere with some supermodel or other. None of us - the scattered GenXers - had any idea that he was dying. And he probably had no idea that any of us gave a shit.
“I know I’m near death,” Staley said.
“I did crack and heroin for years. I never wanted to end my life this way. I know I have no chance. It’s too late."
I remember reading bad reviews for
Dirt in Rolling Stone, who would later go on to claim it was one of the best and most important albums ever recorded once Layne had died. I remember hearing people make fun of them, claiming they weren't really grunge, had once been a glam metal band and were just shamelessly cashing in on the whole Seattle thing because it was there and they could. Clearly, none of the naysayers had ever heard Layne sing.
He looked like he was made out of cheap white porcelain that would shatter if rattled too hard. He was woefully pale, gaunt, so skinny he could have easily found gainful employment as a toilet snake in the plumbing industry. He was almost too pretty for a boy, with delicate features and pure blond hair. But the voice that emerged from those girly pink lips was anything but willowy and innocent. Layne sang like a Harley Davidson engulfed in a gasoline fire. His voice was a rusted chrome calliope, a metallic Metatron, ripping the air apart like a dirty length of rebar through a sheet of plain white paper. He screamed like a demon and wailed like a banshee, plunging into depths of sorrow and slamming back up again with a violent fury. Nothing about his voice was phony or affected or manufactured solely for monetary gain.
"When police kicked in the door to Layne Staley's University District apartment on April 19, there, laying on a couch, lit by a flickering TV, next to several spray-paint cans on the floor, not far from a small stash of cocaine, near two crack pipes on the coffee table, holding a fully loaded syringe in his right hand, and the syringe in his leg, reposed the remains of the rock legend."
For me, Generation X truly died with Layne Staley. Cobain's death had been sudden, loud and utterly shocking. Staley's death had been a slow, sad suicide, lasting over five years and finally puffing out like a wet candle, without fanfare. In a way, Layne had literally done what the entire X Generation had been doing figuratively for the last 8 years: fading, dissolving, unmourned and unmissed. He proved what we had all thought of ourselves all along, that we had been left behind, forgotten and never much wanted to begin with. I know that sounds self pitying and melodramatic. Tough titty, it's how I feel.
Spring is a cruel season, and the six inches of unprecedented snow that fell on the tulips and daffodils yesterday did nothing to improve the bottomless funk I've been in since March, when I turned 46. For reasons unknown, my mood soured and all of my hope dried up and died. The world seemed irreversibly ugly to me, and life a long, pointless joke. Lasting three weeks, it was the longest, darkest spell of bipolar depression that has yet struck me down. Staley's lasted for six years. And yet he didn't officially commit suicide, didn't blow his head off with a shotgun, just accepted that his choices had been bad ones and his life doomed to end sooner rather than later. And fourteen years ago today, he died alone on his couch in front of the TV and it took two weeks for anyone to notice he was gone.
That about sums up our generation.
