The fistfight that inspired a classic Alice in Chains song
Take a moment and have a think about the things people in your life have done that made you sever ties with them. Completely cut them off without a second thought, at least for a little while. It’s probably some pretty severe stuff. Or so you might think, until you think about the things that didn’t split up Alice in Chains and consider perhaps you were a little thin-skinned about it?
After all, the ‘Rooster’ hitmakers are some of rock’s great survivors. 2027 will mark 40 years since one of grunge’s greatest-ever bands came together, and of all those years, precisely three of them were spent without Jerry Cantrell’s mob making their brand of down-tuned, intensely heavy grunge-metal.
Now, this isn’t totally unheard of. Underworld, Green Day, and, comfortably dwarfing all of them in sheer musical might, Color Me Badd were all formed in 1987 and are still going strong today. However, Alice In Chains deserve special mention for this feat as they continued despite losing their lead singer to a debilitating drug addiction in 2002.
A singer merely leaving a band is hard enough, but the likes of Van Halen, Iron Maiden and Nightwish just about made it through with some serious changes. Layne Staley lost his life and his band were able to pick up the pieces and move on, A legitimately herculean task that, by finding new singer William Duvall, they passed with flying colours.
What else did Alice In Chains live through?
Perhaps we should have seen this coming, though. As the liner notes for their career-spanning box set Music Bank shows, the band were willing to put up with some serious shit for the sake of the music. Nowhere is this more apparent than the classic track from their signature album Dirt, ‘Dam The River’.
Just a cursory glance through the lyrics to the song shows that something serious happened here.
In their typically humourless fashion, ‘Dam The River’ finds Staley hollering, “I broke you in the canyon / I drowned you in the lake / You, a snake that I would trample / Only thing I’d not embrace” over a riff that is, admittedly, one of the finest Cantrell ever wrote. You might think that whoever is the subject of lyrics like that probably isn’t around to tell the tale. God knows I wouldn’t want to be on the business end of anyone in Alice in Chains’ wrath.
However, while they are about a bandmate of Cantrell’s it’s, shockingly enough, one of the living ones. In Music Bank, every track has a paragraph of text detailing its creation. The literally mind-boggling story behind ‘Dam The River’ is as follows.
“It’s about a fight I had with Sean. I wrote it about him. ‘…I kicked you in the face’ which, of course, I didn’t because I couldn’t I was being an immature prick and I basically deserved what I got. It was over a ride, I kept on bugging for a ride until he got so mad he picked up a coffee table and broke it over my head! My retaliation was writing this song!”
On second thoughts, perhaps you weren’t being thin-skinned about all the reasons you cut people out of your life. Perhaps you’re just more mature than these bunch of strung-out rockstars ever could be in their prime. It’s not a high bar to clear, but an important one nonetheless.
