Layne Staley High School Band Footage Posted; Tom Morello Debunks Audioslave Audition Story
We recently got an early look at Alice in Chains playing a 1989 college show before their debut album was released, but there's new footage that will take fans even further back ... to high school.
The footage was actually posted earlier this year on YouTube, but Dangerous Minds recently stumbled upon the video of teenage Layne Staley rocking out with his band Sleze as a high schooler in the '80s. The clip comes from Johnny Bacolas, the founding member and guitar player in the band. The guitarist says the band mostly stuck to Slayer and Armored Saint covers and in the video you can see a rather glammed up Staley taking on the Armored Saint song "False Alarm."
These teens definitely had stage presence, and you can see a little bit more of that as they turned up in a cable access TV movie called Father Rock that can be seen below.
In other Layne Staley news, a recent story about the Alice in Chains rocker planning to audition for Audioslave has been denied by Tom Morello. According to the original report, a friend of Staley's recalled meeting up with the singer around 2001 and stated that the rocker, who had been in a bad way, was in good spirits as he was planning to try out for a band that would eventually become Audioslave. That friend, Morgen Gallagher, told Alternative Nation, "That day we were talking and he said he had gotten a call from the old Rage Against the Machine members and they were putting together a new project, and they wanted him to audition,” Gallagher says. “He said he was going back to treatment and then going to L.A. to do the audition in a couple of months. He never made it, so Chris Cornell went and got the job.”
Morello was asked about whether or not Staley was going to audition for the band via one of his Twitter followers and he offered a one word response: "No!"
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