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It also ends one of the longest-running personal tragedies in rock, as Staley's protracted drug problems were well documented both in the press and in his powerful lyrics. His death ends the fifteen-year history of Alice in Chains, of the most successful Seattle bands of the Nineties. A heroin cooker and a syringe were found next to Staley, and though authorities remain uncertain of the cause of death, drugs clearly played a role. The medical examiner estimates Staley had been dead for two weeks, putting his date of death roughly as April 5th - the exact date, eight years earlier, when Kurt Cobain took his own life. On Friday, April 19th, his body was discovered in his Seattle condo. Sometime in the first week of April, that oversize voice - which fueled a half-dozen radio hits and helped sell millions of albums - died along with Staley. It sounded like it came out of a 350- pound biker rather than skinny little Layne. And when Cantrell heard Staley sing, he was convinced their friendship would be a lasting one: "I knew that voice was the guy I wanted to be playing with.
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Cantrell didn't have a place to live, so Staley took him back to what passed for his residence - a dumpy, piss-smelling rehearsal studio where both would live for the next year. "he had a big smile on his face, and he was sitting with two gorgeous woman," Cantrell recalls of the moment he met Layne Staley. In the summer of 1987, guitarist Jerry Cantrell walked in a raucous Seattle party and saw a man at the center of it all, with bright pink hair pilled atop his head by means of fire poker.