"Alice in Chains"My law office served as legal counsel for a number of small cities, one of which was Fife. The City Clerk there was Shirley Kinney Mott, and she brought me her son as a client. Shirley explained the background. Her son Sean Kinney was a rock musician, a drummer. He had worn out several sets of drums, and one day came to visit Shirley and her husband, who was Sean’s step-father. Sean needed a new set of drums, he explained, and he just felt that his band was on the verge of a break-through to the big time. Sean had been playing since he was a young child. He had begun by playing with his grandfather’s square dance band, where one musician played a cross-cut saw. Shirley and her husband thought it over, and decided. Yes! They would finance Sean’s new drums.
When Sean and his band came
to my office, they had been offered a management contract, and they needed
somebody to look it over. My associate
Don Kellman had been a professional saxophone player, playing blue-eyed soul
all over Europe. He knew the proposed
managers, who were good, and he looked at the contract, and said it was
good. We grabbed my secretary and we all
went out to lunch at the nearby Mexican restaurant.
The boys in the band wore
shoulder-length hair, T-shirts, Bermuda shorts, and army boots. The maître de’ looked them over and frowned,
but recognized my office mates and me, and let us in. Afterwards, my secretary grumped, “They have
better hair than I do.”
The boys signed their
contract, and a short time later, they were playing at a teen club in downtown
Seattle. I drove there after work, and
met up with my boyfriend at the time, who had just gotten off work as a bridge
operator for the City of Seattle. I was
wearing a lawyer go-to-court suit, and he was dressed in his work clothes, a blue denim jacket
and jeans. We didn’t match the crowd, so we were
scrutinized at the door. He was patted down, and my purse was searched. Shirley came in right after us, wearing a
dotted Swiss dress with a large white collar.
“You must be the Mom,” the security dude said, “Go right in.” When I bought a souvenir T-shirt, the vendor
laughed at me. “Ha ha ha, you don’t look like the Alice in Chains type.” He was
right, of course. The T-shirt said, “We’re Alice in Chains, So F—K off.”
The opening act was “Mother
Love Bone.” One word describes their music:
It was LOUD! When we left, everything we heard sounded muffled until our
ears relaxed an hour later. The Seattle Fire Marshal who had to attend all
major assemblies, including rock concerts, told me later, “We wear ear plugs,
but it’s weird—you can feel the music even when you can’t hear it.”
Alice in Chains signed their
contract, their new managers placed them with proper entertainment lawyers, and
most of them excelled. It wasn’t a perfect existence. Layne Stayley died in
1992 of apparent drug overdose. His body had been alone for some time before it
was found.
As for their opening act that
night, lead singer Andrew Wood also met an early demise, but his band
regrouped, and several went on to become “Pearl Jam.” One, Stone Gossard, is
the son of David Gossard, a lawyer whom I met
professionally from time to time. David Gossard was older than I, admitted to
practice in 1959 (as opposed to my 1974).
At one of our last encounters, David Gossard told me and other counsel
how he had invested his retirement nest egg in timberland, which was
uninsurable. His land had burned up in a
forest fire. I always hoped that his son Stone, who had made the big, big time
in rock music, would take good care of his father in the father’s old age.
This comes to mind because
tonight “American Masters” on PBS is featuring Pearl Jam.
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