Jerry Cantrell: “Layne Staley Is One of the Greatest Singers In Rock & Roll History”
Remembering Layne Staley with Jerry Cantrell, Ann Wilson, Mike McCready and Barrett Martin (2017). Jerry Cantrell (Alice in Chains), Ann Wilson (Heart), Mike McCready (Pearl Jam/Mad Season) and Barrett Martin (Screaming Trees/Mad Season) remembering Layne Staley 15 years after his death. Video released in May 2017 to celebrate the 25th anniversary edition of the ‘Singles‘ soundtrack. Alice in Chains appeared on the movie and the song “Would?” was featured on the soundtrack.
Rooster by Alice In Chains was Jerry Cantrell’s tribute to his Vietnam veteran dad, and it showed a different kind of dark side to the band
Rooster by Alice In Chains may have become one of the band’s defining tracks, but it came from humble beginnings. When guitarist Jerry Cantrell found himself temporarily homeless at the start of 1991, he turned to a fellow grunge legend for help. “I was between places to live at that time,” Cantrell recalls, “so I moved in with [Soundgarden singer] Chris Cornell and his wife Susan Silver at their house in Seattle. Susan was managing Alice In Chains at the time. I stayed for a few weeks, up in this little room.”
Alone, late at night, Cantrell’s thoughts kept turning to his estranged father, whose psychological scars from his service in the Vietnam War had contributed to the breakdown of the family some years earlier. “That experience in Vietnam changed him forever,” explains Cantrell, “and it certainly had an effect on our family, so I guess it was a defining moment in my life, too.
“He didn’t walk out on us. We left him. It was an environment that wasn’t good for anyone, so we took off to live with my grandmother in Washington, and that’s where I went to school. I didn’t have a lot of my father around, but I started thinking about him a lot during that period.”
Sitting in front of a four-track recorder, the song that poured out of Cantrell might have been laced with bitterness. Instead, its harrowing lyrics were written from the standpoint of his father; describing the ‘stinging sweat’ and ‘mosquito death’ of a trek through the jungle, and an imagined skirmish with the Vietcong.
The title was the nickname given to Cantrell Snr. by his great-grandfather: “Apparently he was a cocky little kid, and his hair used to stick up on top of his head like a rooster’s comb.”
“I certainly had resentments,” Cantrell notes, “as any young person does in a situation where a parent isn’t around or a family is split. But on Rooster, I was trying to think about his side of it – what he might have gone through. To be honest, I didn’t really sit down intending to do any of that; it just kinda came out.
But that’s the great thing about music – sometimes it can reach deeper than you ever would in a conversation with anybody. It’s more of a forum to dig deeper.” Alice In Chains had enjoyed some success with their 1990 debut album Facelift and its single Man In The Box, but Rooster was arguably the first song to announce the depth of the band’s talent.
Cantrell recalls that “it felt like a major achievement for me as a young writer,” and this sentiment was echoed when he played the demo to vocalist Layne Staley, bassist Mike Starr and drummer Sean Kinney.
When it came to recording Rooster, the band turned a prior engagement to their advantage. “Cameron Crowe had already come to us to ask for a song for his movie Singles,” recalls Cantrell. “So in the session that was meant for recording that one song [Would?], we ended up demoing about 10 songs, which included all the stuff that ended up on the [1992] Sap EP, Rooster and a couple of others from Dirt.”
Rooster by Alice In Chains: the video
Rooster was taped at Eldorado Studios on LA’s Sunset Boulevard, which the band co- produced with Dave Jerden. “It turned out to be really powerful,” notes Cantrell, “and the way Layne sang on it is amazing.”
Similarly powerful was the video, in which director Mark Pellington [fresh from Pearl Jam’s Jeremy] interspersed scenes of Apocalypse Now-style brutality with an interview with Cantrell’s father.
“My father had never talked about that time in his life, and was reluctant to do so if anyone ever asked,” recalls the guitarist. “So I was amazed that he agreed to do Mark’s request, for about an hour, on film.
“He was totally cool, totally calm, accepted it all and had a good time doing it,” Cantrell added in the notes for 1999’s Music Bank box set. “It even brought him to the point of tears. He said it was a weird experience, a sad experience and he hoped that nobody else had to go through it.”
Released as a single in 1993. Rooster drew immediate praise, both among followers of grunge and further afield.
“I’ve been all around the world,” explains Cantrell, “and I’ve talked to combat vets from Desert Storm and the recent war in Iraq – and they have a deep affinity with that song. I just recently got a letter from a guy in Iraq who told me his unit had changed their call sign to Rooster. Obviously it’s unfortunate that guys still have to fight for political ends. But it’s cool that people connect with that song; for it to be part of them getting through.”
And yet Rooster’s greatest triumph was ultimately a personal one. Against all the odds, the song repaired the fractured relationship between father and son.
“When I first played it to my father,” recalls Cantrell, “I asked him if I’d got close to where he might have been emotionally or mentally in that situation. And he told me: ‘You got too close – you hit it on the head’. It meant a lot to him that I wrote it. It brought us closer. It was good for me in the long-run and it was good for him, too.”
From Soundgarden, Audioslave and Temple Of The Dog to his solo work, this is a journey through the late Chris Cornell’s life and career in 15 songs
“There are a lot of misconceptions as to what it is to be in a successful rock band,” Chris Cornell once told Classic Rock. “The reality is just a bunch of normal people playing music for a living. It’s not like you’re suddenly hanging out with a better or more interesting class of people.
“Guys like Freddie Mercury and Alice Cooper were proper rock stars; really cool, really entertaining, larger than life people. I could never do that though, because being larger than life in my punk grounding was really bad, the complete antithesis to all that punk stood for.”
In the end, one of the tragic ironies of Cornell’s early death was that it did much to manifest the kind of legacy that is larger than life, conferring an almost mythic status on the singer. He might not have been comfortable with this, but it was deserved, because, like Mercury, Cornell had a once-in-a-generation voice.
He was a singer capable of despair and disgust, tenderness and triumph. And these are 15 of his greatest performances.
Soundgarden – All Your Lies (From Deep Six, 1986)
Soundgarden weren’t the first grunge band, but they did more than most to define the genre’s sound and look. The band’s earliest recorded appearance came via three tracks on the 1986 C/Z Records compilation Deep Six, including this galvanising burst of punk-metal intensity. Even at such an early stage, all the pieces were in place – not least Cornell’s Robert Plant‑esque wail.
Soundgarden – Beyond The Wheel (From Ultramega OK, 1988)
Guitarist Kim Thayil once described Soundgarden’s music as “Black Sabbath without the parts that suck”. He might have added “…and Led Zeppelin too”. Certainly the Cornell-written track Beyond The Wheel was the sound of classic rock filtered through the prism of mid-80s punk rock: sludgy, monolithic but strangely epic at the same time.
Soundgarden – Loud Love (From Louder Than Love, 1989)
Unlike every other Seattle band, Soundgarden weren’t afraid of singing about sex, even if it was through the lens of irony. From Cornell’s electrifying opening scream, which emerges unexpectedly from the guitar barrage, the (almost) title track of their major-label debut Louder Than Love crackles with carnal energy.
Temple Of The Dog – Hunger Strike (From Temple Of The Dog, 1991)
The only album that Temple Of The Dog recorded was Cornell’s tribute to the late Mother Love Bone frontman (and Cornell’s former roommate) Andrew Wood. The magnificent Hunger Strike showed a more sensitive side to Cornell, as well as a rare graciousness – this was the track that introduced an unknown Eddie Vedder to the world.
Chris Cornell – Seasons (From Singles OST, 1992)
Film director Cameron Crowe’s 1992 grunge rom-com Singles was a love letter to his adopted home town of Seattle, and he filled the soundtrack with local bands. Cornell’s jagged acoustic track Seasons was a standout, its Led Zeppelin III-ish vibes pointing the way to his post-Soundgarden solo career five years before it arrived.
The iron-fisted riff and unconventional 7⁄4 time signature scream classic Soundgarden, but Cornell offered a glimpse of a more melodic future on this, Badmotorfinger’s second single, via its fleeting but memorable bridge. The line ‘I’m looking California but feeling Minnesota’ quickly passed into the Gen-X lexicon. Sadly it proved to be all too prophetic.
Soundgarden – Into The Void (Sealth) (From the Satanoscillatemymetallicsonatas EP, 1992)
Soundgarden sealed their love of Sabbath with this cover of the band’s 1971 classic. While it remained musically faithful, Cornell stripped out the lyrics and replaced them with words from a 19th-century land-rights speech by Native American leader Chief Seattle, the man who gave the city its name. The result was one of grunge’s few protest songs.
Soundgarden – Black Hole Sun (From Superunknown, 1994)
Like almost every other child of the 60s, Cornell grew up loving The Beatles, but their influence only became apparent on Soundgarden’s fourth album, Superunknown. Black Hole Sun dialled back the hobnailed attack of old in favour of quavering psychedelia, but its surface prettiness was undercut by the singer’s bleakly surreal lyrics.
Soundgarden – Burden In My Hand (From Down On The Upside, 1996)
Kim Thayil described this, Cornell’s undulating murder ballad, as “a Hey Joe for the nineties”, and its opaque narrative of a man who murders a woman drips with existential questioning. Musically it conformed to grunge’s tried and tested quiet/loud dynamic, but the weight of experience brought to it a welcome depth and maturity.
Chris Cornell – Preaching The End Of The World (From Euphoria Morning, 1999)
If Soundgarden’s split in 1997 came out of the blue, then Cornell‘s confessional debut solo album Euphoria Morning made sense of it. It was the singer breaking free of the confines of 90s rock, picking up where his friend, the late singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley, left off. The plaintive Preaching The End Of The World stands as its highlight.
Audioslave – Like A Stone (From Audioslave, 2002)
In truth, the Soundgarden/Rage Against The Machine hybrid Audioslave worked only fitfully, but when they nailed it, they really nailed it. Like A Stone eased back on both bands’ tendencies for musical histrionics, in favour of a clear-headed, low-key melodicism – all the more remarkable given Cornell’s growing substance problem.
Chris Cornell – You Know My Name (From Carry On, 2007)
Cornell was an unlikely choice to sing the theme to back-to-basics James Bond reboot Casino Royale, but the result combined the grit of the film with the grandeur of past Bond epics and rubber-stamped Cornell’s passport into the musical mainstream.
Chris Cornell – Before We Disappear (From Higher Truth, 2015)
Cornell’s stock had plummeted following his brave but ultimately misfiring detour into electronic R&B territory with 2009’s Scream. Higher Truth, his fourth solo album, found him back on more familiar ground, although the lush arrangements of Before We Disappear suggested that he was a world away from Soundgarden’s Jesus Christ Pose.
Soundgarden – Been Away Too Long (From King Animal, 2012)
Soundgarden’s not entirely unexpected reunion was built on friendship rather than money, and their comeback album, King Animal, picked up where they’d left off. Cornell himself sounded revitalised on knowing opener Been Away Too Long. It was good to have them back.
Chris Cornell – Nothing Compares 2 U
Of all the tributes recorded following Prince’s death in 2016, Cornell’s solo acoustic take on the song made famous by Sinead O’Connor was among the most emotive. His unvarnished voice exudes loss, and the occasional bang of his guitar against the microphone only deepens the sense of rawness. If this performance was poignant then, it’s doubly so now.
Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell stopped by The Kevin & Bean Show to discuss the 20th Anniversary of the band’s album ‘Superunknown.’ He also talks about his vinyl collection, AC/DC’s influence on the band, meeting Prince and Ozzy Osbourne, and more!
A new video has been released the commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Singles soundtrack, featuring Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Screaming Trees, and Heart members. You can watch the video following the transcribed comments.
“I just remember thinking, ‘Cameron’s magic,’” Alice In Chains drummer Sean Kinney recalls. “‘You’re gonna go to Seattle and make a movie about stuff that just a small sect of people know?’ At the time, there was no ‘the grunge.’”
Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell said, “Because the film was conceived and shot before the international explosion of all of the bands, that ended up being kind of a key factor in what was referred to as the Seattle scene, and the Seattle movement, and then the Grunge movement. Because there was this one thing called the Singles movie, where if you saw it, you were exposed to it.”
Alice In Chains singer/guitarist Jerry Cantrell remembered, “It was a big deal man, it really was. For as small and humbly as we all started, to be that involved in a major film, and to have it be with a guy who you’re friendly with, and cares about music as much as he does. Things took off really quickly.”
“It bottles a moment in time,” Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin adds of the soundtrack.
Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready said, “It was an exciting time to be here, and that was just another part of it. Like oh, and then there’s a movie, it was surreal.”
Heart’s Nancy Wilson, “You know when it’s Eddie Vedder, you know when it’s Alice In Chains with their great dissonant harmonies, you know Soundgarden. It’s the Seattle sound (laughs).”
It is the 2nd anniversary of Chris Cornell’s death today so I am posting some rare treasures from his long career. This time Chris sings the songs of other artists and the list is really impressive.
1. Beatles 0:00 2. Michael Jackson 6:35 3. Creedence 10:40 4. Pearl Jam 13:40 5. Prince 17:40 6. Otis Redding 22:39 7. Whitney Houston 26:20 8. Mad Season 31:12 9. Eagles 36:00 10. Skynyrd 40:50 11. Mother Love Bone 43:32 12. Springsteen 48:24 13. Sabbath 54:27 14. Metallica 1:01:48 15. Bob Marley 1:06:04 16. Elvis Costello 1:09:30 17. John Lennon 1:11:39 Bonus 18. Pearl Jam/ Nirvana 1:15:34
Following the stunning and heartbreaking death of Chris Cornell, tributes to the late singer have been showing up everywhere. Last night in Indianapolis, Red Hot Chili Peppers delivered their own salute to the beloved musician.
During the band’s set at Bankers Life Fieldhouse on Thursday evening, guitarist Josh Klinghoffer opened the encore by coming out on stage alone. He performed a cover of “Seasons”, a solo acoustic song Cornell had written for the Singles soundtrack. Watch video of the performance below (via Rolling Stone).
Grunge Graveyard 
Following the stunning and heartbreaking death of Chris Cornell, tributes to the late singer have been showing up everywhere. Last night in Indianapolis, Red Hot Chili Peppers delivered their own salute to the beloved musician.
During the band’s set at Bankers Life Fieldhouse on Thursday evening, guitarist Josh Klinghoffer opened the encore by coming out on stage alone. He performed a cover of “Seasons”, a solo acoustic song Cornell had written for the Singles soundtrack. Watch video of the performance below (via Rolling Stone).