NEEDLE TAKES ANOTHER MUSIC PIONEER

Much is made of the tragic deaths of '60s rock stars such as Jim Morrison,
Jimmie Hendrix and Janis Joplin, voices for a generation gone by.

Yet last Friday, the needle took one of the voices of my generation, Layne
Staley.

For those of you who don't know, Staley was a singer/songwriter with Alice
In Chains, a Seattle band that rode the same grunge wave that ushered
Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Sound Garden onto the national stage.

Staley was part of a revolution in rock 'n roll. He and his contemporaries,
Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder and Nirvana's Kurt Cobain among them,
staged a coup against the corporate-controlled music industry.

The grunge wave swept eastward out of Seattle in the early '90s, and turned
the rock world upside down. Suddenly, after years of rock superstars such
as David Lee Roth and glam bands the like of Def Leppard, it was safe to
listen to rock again. Rock 'n roll was no longer about whooping it up and
seeing how many groupies you could bed.

Hits like "Love in an Elevator" and "Adrenalize" plummeted back to the
bottom of the charts as "Smeels Like Teen Spirit" and "Jeremy" continued to
rise. Videos on MTV replaced the high-flying kicks and scantily clad women
with images of a young boy's struggle with acceptance by his classmates and
rumpled singers contemplating what life is really about.

I was a freshman in college at the height of the grunge movement when Alice
in Chains' EP "Jar of Flies" came out. The lyrics of the songs seemingly
spoke to us in an honest voice, it was something we could relate to instead
of the swill about how great it was to be a rock star theme that the record
companies had been pushing for so long.

We chase misprinted lies

We face the path of time

And yet I fight

And yet I fight

This battle all alone

No one to cry to

No place to call home

Those lyrics are from the lead track "Nutshell," written by Staley. Just as
my parents' generation had become aware of the injustices going on around
them and in Vietnam, so too had my generation awakaned to what was going on
around them.

We woke up and discovered a world owned by big business interests, no place
more apparent than the music business. The blatant commercialism that
permeated our surroundings stood out as if the artist had suddenly turned a
bright spotlight on it and revealed it standing naked for the whole world
to see. It didn't matter if you wore Guess Jeans or Polo shirts. We traded
them in for flannel shirts and old blue jeans. It was a rebellion against
the social norms, the "misprinted lies," that bombarded us every day.

It was cool not to be cool.

The music had a certain honesty to it, which also probably drew the most
criticism. Staley, as well as Cobain, wrote, among other things, about
their struggles with drugs, specifically heroin. The conservative would-be
censors trumpeted about the glorification of drug use, but nothing could be
further from the truth.

It was the stark truth that scared so many people. Staley admitted he was a
junkie, and professed how hard he had found it to quit. But like so many
others - Cobain, Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone, Jonathan Melvoin of
Smashing Pumpkins and Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon, to name but a few - the
needle got the best of him. Heroin killed them all, just one more parallel
to the music movement of the '60s. Let's hope that their deaths can become
a lesson for another generation.

I write this in the hope that the movement can be remembered for what it
was, before the record companies caught up and stuck their claws into it,
just as they did in the '60s. The original pioneers, those who are still
alive, are still out there, you just won't hear too many of them on
commercial radio, the way it was in the beginning.