Happy Birthday, Layne Staley

The fact that Layne Staley died before he turned forty isn’t a surprise when you listen to a lot of his work with Alice In Chains. It's not hard to imagine that he’s seen a few dirty needles, but when news of his death hit, it was shocking to learn how far down his addiction had taken him.
Emaciated and missing teeth, it wasn’t uncommon to go weeks without hearing anything from Staley. He had reached the point where even his closet friends allowed him to pursue grunge music’s Howard Hughes isolationism.
Metalheads still hold Alice In Chains in rightfully high regard and have secured a perennial spot on local rock stations to the point where I'm actually burnt on most of the band's catalog.
Nonetheless, there was something appealing about Alice In Chains back in the day and, as we later learned after Staley's untimely demise, a lot of it was the honest-to-God tortured soul topics that Layne so honestly wrote about and effectively voiced.