Ignoring his friend's protestations and calls for him to stay, Mike Starr stormed out of Layne Staley’s apartment in Seattle's University District and slammed the door behind him. It was Starr's birthday, and the 36-year-old musician wasn't in the mood for a lecture from his friend and former bandmate. Staley was annoyed that Starr was high on Benzodiazepine - "too high", the bassist subsequently admitted - and had told him, "You're an idiot on these pills'. But Alice In Chains' frontman was also high, on a cocktail of morphine, codeine, and cocaine, and even in his disoriented state Starr had been sufficiently concerned about his friend's health that he wanted to call 911 and have paramedics attend to the singer.
"He said if I did, he would never talk to me again," Starr later recalled.
As fate would have it, even though Starr reluctantly agreed not to call the emergency services, he and Staley would never speak again anyway. On April 19, 2002, when Seattle police officers kicked in Staley's apartment door after a relative voiced concern about his whereabouts, they found the lifeless 34-year-old singer sitting upright on his couch with a syringe of heroin in his hand, and cocaine and crack pipes on his table. Alice In Chains' vocalist had been dead for two weeks, passing away on April 5, the day after Mike Starr's birthday.
"I'd been expecting the call for a long time," Alice In Chains drummer Sean Kinney told New York Times journalist Mark Yarm for his definitive grunge history Everybody Loves Our Town. "For seven years in fact. But it was still shocking."
