alice in Chains
They might have put drugs and death behind them, but on sixth album Rainier Fog Alice In Chains sound as dangerous as ever. The Seattle veterans told us about riffs inspired by Psycho, the mad flea-market amp that powered the new material and why you shouldn’t call them a grunge band…
Carrying out an interview with Alice In Chains comes with certain preconditions. A few days before our encounter, an email pings in from the Seattle band’s press officer. We must not ask about the drug habit that dogged original vocalist, Layne Staley, as they broke through in the early 90s. We must not broach his tawdry death in the post-millennium, which turned their hiatus into a full-stop. We should focus instead on happier times since 2006 – when the band rose again with vocalist and rhythm guitarist William DuVall – and the latest album, Rainier Fog.
Under normal circumstances, there is nothing worse for the music journalist than to be steered past the drama towards a band’s late period. Thankfully, right from the brutal opening riff of The One You Know – and guitarist Jerry Cantrell’s first drawled expletive when the dictaphone starts rolling – it’s clear that Alice still has plenty of edge. “There’s still darkness in this band,” nods Cantrell. “And light too. Just like there always has been.”
The OneYou Know is a vicious way to start an album…
Jerry Cantrell: “We do make a racket, don’t we? It’s a cool riff. It’s very fucking ‘us’. But it’s very new, too. It’s got that headbanger beat, so it gets everybody moving, hopping up and down and doing the devil horns. It makes you want to move. It kinda reminds me of the shower scene in Psycho, y’know? Eeek! Eeek! Eeek!” Does it feel normal now to be a two-guitar band?
William DuVall: “It’s a dance. It’s a balancing act. We have a friendship that predates the whole reunification of Alice In Chains. Jerry would come over to the apartment in LA that I shared with the guys from my band Comes With The Fall. He wanted to know how to play songs off the first Comes With The Fall album, and I’d ask him, ‘What was that thing you were doing in God Smack from Dirt [1992]?’ So it wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, this guitar god is gracing us with his presence’. He’d hang out and he was a friend. That’s what we do now. And then we go out and play frisbee golf or whatever.”
JC: “I mean, I’ve always written as a two-guitar band. Now that you bring it up, I always intended for this to be a two-guitar band – but the guys wouldn’t let me have another guitar player. I grew up on two-guitar bands – AC/DC, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden – and I always thought it would be cool to have the interplay.
“Y’know, Layne started picking up the guitar a little bit on Dirt, with Angry Chair and Hate To Feel. But it was basically mostly me, and on record, I always layered shit. So having William involved, it’s added the element of those parts being expressed live. Also, somebody you can depend on to come up with cool riffs on their own – like So Far Under. Alice has always had a bendy bass riff thing at least once on each record. Now William’s written one, which means he’s truly in the clan.”
What themes did you write about?
JC: “You have to start from a personal point, and kinda puke it back out on a piece of paper. But I always think the best thing is to leave you to interpret it. Some songs are specific and lend themselves to being explained. Like the song Rooster [from Dirt], which was my father’s nickname. He was in Vietnam and it’s about my trying to understand his experience. That’s easy to say, y’know? But most of our stuff is not that easy. And maybe I like to be a little selfish and keep some things to myself.” So Far Under is a great guitar moment…
WD: “That’s all my riffs and I play the solo. Cantrell does stuff over the top in a different octave, or incorporates the tremolo bar to give it a different kind of bend that you can only do with a bar, not with fingers. There’s a lot of bending throughout that song. The main riff is built on a series of bends, then the first note of the chorus starts from a bent position, which is tricky to do, but the effect is worth it. Then, since we’ve already conveyed that seasick feeling, I wanted to extend that to the solo, which starts out in the lower octaves feeling adrift, then becomes soaring in the higher octave. It’s interesting, building a solo where it really becomes part of the composition and not just a freeform exploration.” Tell us about the guitars you used…
JC: “The one thing we can count on is that we’re gonna sound like ourselves. But it’s like different paintbrushes or tools in the toolbox. You gotta go through the process of trying shit out. Most of the songs have a good dose of my [signature] G&L Rampages coupled with my Les Pauls. Another piece of gear I used on Fly and Maybe was the replica of Malcolm Young’s Gretsch. I’m a huge AC/DC fan, so it meant the world to me to have that. But also, as a player, just to see how hollowed-out and no-nonsense that guitar is. Like, all the pickups are taken out, all the knobs are off, it’s one knob, one pickup, it’s got holes and stuff. Which is kinda what my signature G&L is as well. It’s the Eddie Van Halen model – just a volume knob and humbucker. That’s all you need.”
WD: “I was using my old faithful 1960 Sunburst Les Paul and my battery of Framus guitars. That relationship has blossomed into creating the Talisman, which is the ultimate guitar for me. I had the very first raw-wood prototype for the sessions. It was meant to replace my high-end Les Paul, so it’s a mahogany body and neck with a maple cap – but also a curlier maple insert at the centre. So it’s like all the best attributes of every great Les Paul I’ve played – a bit of the Custom, mixed with the best aspects of the Standard. It’s a brilliant all-purpose guitar.
“The pickups are Duncan’s stock [APH-1 and SH-11]. But for two of my Talismans, Dave Stephens of Stephens Design built me these amazing PAF replicas. Dave is a total obsessive and he’s done more over the last 20 years to reverse-engineer the PAF than anybody else. But he’s more of a monk. He’s not into advertising and going to NAMM. He is the mad scientist. All those guys that are trying to do the brandbuilding thing – he’s their conscience, y’know? And he builds his PAFs using old copper wire from the 40s and 50s that he scours the earth for. It conducts the signal differently. And that is a huge part that people don’t talk about, about why the real PAFs in the 50s Les Pauls – and Jimmy Page, Peter Green, Paul Kossoff, all those guys – sound the way they do.” How about your amps?
JC: “I run two identical 100-watt Friedman JJ heads, but there’s an adjustable switch, so one runs a little hotter than the other. Then I run custom-build Friedman cabs with 30s on one side, 25s on the other. We had some Bogners, Marshalls, an AC30, all the stuff we usually have. But on every record there’s always some quirky piece of gear. Nick went down to the market in Seattle and paid about $150 for this cigar-box amp. We plugged it in and it sounded so throaty. It’s not necessarily something you would hear, but if you took it away, you’d know it was missing.”
“The one thing we can count on is that we’re gonna sound like ourselves”
“It’s interesting building a solo where it really becomes part of the composition and not just a freeform exploration”
WD: “We have a lot of amps between Cantrell and myself. But then Nick [Raskulinecz, producer] has a whole battery of amps as well, and he brings all of those to our sessions. So it’s like a guitar store in there. What we do a lot is use several amps in combination. We might choose an old 60-watt Silverface Laney Klipp. We have a couple of old Orange Rockerverb 200s. And then we have a battery of the old-school Marshalls, both Plexi and JCM variety. But what was exciting was I had the first prototype of my new amp I’ve done with George Metropoulos, called the DVL-1. You definitely hear it on So Far Under, for sure.” What are the key features of that amp?
WD: “It’s beautiful, man. We were trying to create the ultimate all-tube 100-watt British-inspired amplifier, with EL34s in there. Maximum versatility and minimum circuitry. It’s basically a two-channel, fourmode design, and the modes are named for the year of rock awesomeness they represent. Channel 1 has ’65 and ’66 mode; Channel 2 is ’68 and Mod mode. The idea is ’65 mode takes you from a Bassman type thing into JTM45 territory, then ’66 mode gets you into the first 100-watt amp that Marshall built. It sounds like the amp that Townshend first ordered, where he’s like, ‘Take this but make it twice as powerful!’ That gets you into heavier blues-rock territory, like early Cream or what Hendrix was doing when he landed in London.
“Then ’68 mode is based off of George’s own ’68 Plexi Marshall. It’s basically Eddie Van Halen’s Marshall Plexi that he used on the first six Van Halen albums. So it’s that magic brown sound. Then, with Mod mode, there’s more low-end and chunk, it gets you more into the things that Alice In Chains is known for. And when you’re rocking out and doing your Angus Young meets Pete Townshend on Live At Leeds, instead of stepping on a fuzzbox, you just hit the gain boost and go off on your solo flight, crank it up to ‘14’ and still preserve the tonal character.” With all those amps, did you need effects?
JC: “It’s a pretty simple setup, but we’ll fuck around with shit. The [Dunlop] Crybaby has always been my go-to, and a few years ago I worked with Dunlop to make one that was a little darker and throatier. Dunlop has done a few of us. Kirk [Hammett] has a great one. I got one. They just gave me a gold-plated version and that felt pretty good, because the first one I got was a Jimi Hendrix Crybaby. Now I got my own. Working with Nick, we use all sorts of weird stuff. That epicsounding picking on All I Am – we created that with some pedals and an Axe-Fx. Live, the only pedals I have out front are my Crybaby and a Dunlop Rotovibe that I’ll use once in a great while.”
WD: “I’m not much of a pedal guy. If we use pedals, it’s for effects that cannot be achieved any other way. Like, if you need a little bit of phase shifting or wah. So it’s minimal, but it is there. Live, I’m using very minimal effects as well. There’s just an MXR Carbon Copy, the MXR Phase 45 and the light blue Boss Chorus [CE-2W] pedal. Everything is coming from the amp in terms of gain stages and most of the tone.” You couldn’t call this a ‘grunge’ album, could you?
JC: “Well, we were around before that ever happened. We were the first to have a gold record out of all the bands in Seattle. So we kinda predated grunge. And it’s really just a word. It was convenient to lump us all together. But I can’t really hear anything that’s in Nirvana, to Mudhoney, to Soundgarden, to Screaming Trees, to Alice In Chains, to Pearl Jam. The only alikeness is that we’re all rock bands. That’s it. And maybe the ethos of doing it your own way. Be yourself. Y’know, don’t try to copy what fucking Soundgarden is doing. Soundgarden is doing that and they do it quite well. Do your own thing.”
“We were trying to create the ultimate alltube 100-watt Britishinspired amplifier”