It appears that Audioslave could have been a very different beast had things played out differently for the late Alice In Chains singer Layne Staley, who passed away in 2002 after a long struggle with drug addiction that included heroin and crack. A friend of Staley‘s, by the name of Morgen Gallagher, shared with Alternativenation.net that then former members of Rage Against The Machine had approached Staley about fronting the band. Speaking of running into Staley in 2001, Gallagher relayed of his condition:
“I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years and wasn’t prepared for it. By this point he had quit [Alice In Chains], he had lost most of his teeth, and weighed barely 100 pounds. We talked for a little and when we parted ways, I cried.”
Speaking on an encounter at a Super Bowl party on January 28th, 2001, he said that Staley had revealed his potential role in the group that eventually became Audioslave, uniting Rage Against The Machine members with Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell:
“So two weeks later [our mutual friend] was having a Super Bowl party. When I got there, Layne answered the door and he was back to the old Layne. He had just gotten pretty much the entire Nerf arsenal, so we went to war. We were running around like two little kids! Needless to say, we missed the game and kept pretty much everyone else from watching it as well.
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. He said he was going back to treatment and then going to LA to do the audition in a couple of months. He never made it, so Chris Cornell went and got the job.”
