“Just a super nice guy, ya know… Layne was just funny. Never had a bad word to say about anybody. And.. unfortunately just struggled really hard with his addictions. He had a helluva voice and when we did the Mad Season record, I remember him coming in and just doing these things that were just amazing…”  -Mike McCready, guitarist Pearl Jam.

I’m sitting inside a coffee shop in Spartanburg, South Carolina. That old Southern sun is drifting down and bouncing light off the corporate headquarters of Denny’s into the park below. The flow of today’s latest Pop filters out of the speakers and caffeine’s consummate soldiers come marching in and out of the doors. My head is weary, slightly perplexed and the simple thoughts of this article… an article that I’ve had spinning in my head for months now… just won’t let me concentrate on anything else. So, the fingers have begun to do what they do and the story begins.
I didn’t drink coffee very often in 1993. By 1996 I drank more of it, but still not all that much. Ten years later, I drink coffee all the time. It could be my one vice, linking me with affection to the great cowboys of ancestral lore. It could be my link as well to the astute businessmen and women, those that I have little in common with, who traipse up and down the busy streets of cities from here to Seattle. It is a link, yes, that grows and continues to thrive in the Starbucks, the Joe Muggs and all the quaint, privately owned coffee bars across the nation.

I’ve never been to Seattle. I’ve never stepped inside the original Starbucks. I’ve never felt the rain on my shoulders. Never stood in the wind, staring up at the Space Needle. I’ve never been to Richmond, Indiana either for that matter. I’ve never walked around in any of the cornfields in the Mid-West. Never prayed a prayer uttering the name of Saint Francis while listening to the wind whipping across the prairie near Wichita. But even though I’ve never tasted the air in either of those places, I’ve traveled there just the same. Two wayward sons of those cities have dominated my life, dominated my music and even in their death, ignite an urging in me to keep walking and press towards the sun.

The early 1990’s found me at that great crossroad of youth, where everything is in front of you, every girl’s smile meant something, every friend’s laugh was energy, every book not read didn’t matter, and every day was your day. Jilted by the weight of not understanding the cliques that come along with high school and discovering my penchant for art, drama and the mere poetry of this life, I staggered through my teenage years drenching myself in every type of aggressive or soul-tearing music that I could find. Nobody fit this bill for me quite the way Alice in Chains did. And I, like a lot of kids, identified with the angst and the depression of those songs, even though I’d never done drugs. At the time, I hadn’t even seen drugs, but I understood a sense of despair… a sense of depression… the never-ending onslaught of questions that this life presented.

At least I thought I did.

I had escapes as most teenagers do. I have escapes as an adult as well. Most sane people, in order to stay sane, develop these at some point and when times get rocky, they run to them. Music was and is my escape. I find just as much justice, just as much authentic release in music now as I did thirteen years ago. The porch at 30 is still a porch, just with a slightly better view.

In the history of rock and roll, there has never been a voice quite like Layne Staley’s. As part of the vocal duo that brought such beautiful, melancholy harmony to all of Alice in Chains’ songs, Staley became a poster child for gut-wrenching metal and heroin addiction. All over America, youth and adults alike found comfort in the fact that someone was going through the same misleading fable that they were. I, thinking I understood the world at seventeen… eighteen… sang along and empathized. Layne’s singing voice was one of power and it came not from some showmanship quality, but from the brutal reality of the art he created and lived. Away from the mic, Layne’s voice was quiet. It carried humble truth. And when it breathed its last breath in April 2002, it gave us the answer to its most famous question, “If I would, could you?”

Since his death, songs have trembled from the fingers and lips of other musicians, some in his memory. The musical landscape of the late 90’s seemed to change into a contest of who could sound the most like Alice in Chains. The trouble is, someone like Layne, can’t be replaced. Layne (like the rest of Chains) was honest and the music machine, when replicating sounds, can never produce honesty. Therefore, on rainy days when I’m lost, on days when this country rumbles, on days when I have to fight for honesty… I put Chains in and let them spin. Layne, even from the grave, gives me weight and I have a friend to help me face the trials that call my name. While hopeful that my search will pull me beyond the end that met Layne, I well recognize the essential message of his life: Honesty mends, but not without tearing the scars open first.

Rich Mullins was nothing like Layne Staley. Rich believed firmly in a God that stared him down from across the cornfields of Kansas. He believed in speaking and conversing about God at every opportunity. Rich’s songs often resonated with a sense of his spiritual presence in them. He taught, inhaled, slept, ate, and lusted for the very breath of God. It gave his music power. It gave a purpose to his dulcimer hammering, his bare feet and his willingness to turn over his possessions to the poor and unfortunate. While Rich walked the countryside finding God, I walked a college campus in Alabama finding Rich.

Alice in Chains put out the “Tripod” album and then drifted into silence in the mid-90’s with only an appearance on MTV’s Unplugged to mark any sense of their existence. While this hiatus progressed, my ears plugged in to Rich Mullins and my new discovery of his wandering ragamuffins. The valley between Rich’s music and Layne’s was monumental except for the blistering honesty that reared its head in each. Both struggled with this life and both brought that to their artist’s table.

In an odd way, the fact that Rich died coming back from a charity concert really says it all. He died doing what he always did, by giving his best away. He was a human being that was consumed with finding the real marrow of this life and then extending it to others. His life became about other people and in the process, possibly gave us the most unselfish and truthful artist to ever experience the Earth’s color green.

I have been shaped by many things. But as an artist, especially as an artist struggling with his spirituality, I don’t know that anything has touched me as much as the works of Layne Staley and Rich Mullins. And I don’t know if anything has left as great a void in that same sense as the loss of Layne Staley and Rich Mullins.

So as I sit here in this coffee shop with night beginning to fall outside and I think about rock and roll. I think about Seattle. I think about Layne Staley and about Rich. And, I think about my life. The big truth comes down to the small things. Things like the fact that I haven’t heard a great record all year. Things like the fact that if you walk in your bare feet often, you develop calluses. Things like the fact that yes, it did rain when they died.

And it is still raining today.