“The most badass thing ever”: the frontman Jerry Cantrell said no one can touch
The alternative scene has always been hit-and-miss when it comes to having great lyricists. Although many people have written pure poetry that deserves to be passed on for generations, it’s hard to take Michael Stipe seriously on the first REM records when he openly admitted to making words up when trying to find the melodies to certain songs. When the grunge movement started to take over, though, people like Jerry Cantrell were showing everyone how dark mainstream rock could get.
Then again, Alice in Chains always felt a little bit removed from the rest of the Seattle scene. Compared to the punk energy of Nirvana or the classic rock worship going on with Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains was the perfect middle ground for metal fans to get acclimatised to alternative music, down to performing with groups like Van Halen and even getting Tom Araya of Slayer to appear on one of their albums.
But whenever Cantrell and Layne Staley started singing, they created a sound that no one else could have come close to. The riffs were still incredibly heavy and made everything sound like a long road down to hell, but when listening to the way that both of them harmonised together, it was like listening to Simon and Garfunkel front Black Sabbath across many of their classic tunes.
And whereas everyone was talking about personal pain, Cantrell was also looking to paint pictures on some of his tracks. There was the odd song about pure anger and frustration like ‘Dam That River’, but a song like ‘Rooster’ still resonates to this day because everyone who’s ever seen combat or knows someone who has can relate to the story of someone walking through war and wondering whether he’s going to live.
Cantrell wasn’t looking to mess around when writing his lyrics, but compared to his serious tunes, Staley was on another level. It was clear that he was dealing with some nasty habits as far back as Facelift, but listening through most of Dirt, no other lyricist had ever been more honest about their internal pain on tracks like ‘Rain When I Die’ or ‘Sickman’, almost liek Staley was predicting his demise before heroin took his life.
But whereas most remember Staley as a walking tragedy in retrospect, Cantrell only remembered the raw talent he had, saying, “I’ve never given him something and not thought it was going to be the most badass thing I was ever going to hear. Whether I showed it or not, I always knew it was going to be great, and I was always excited. Anytime that he goes up to the mic, anytime he puts his mind to it, there’s not a guy who can touch him.”
And that included the times when Staley wasn’t at 100%, too. Since he was dealing with withdrawal when they were asked to perform on MTV Unplugged, all signs pointed to the whole thing becoming an absolute trainwreck, but for those few hours onstage, Staley sounded even more powerful than before, which was probably why he ended up looking so frail when the night was over.
There are far too many who like to single out Staley as the classic example of a rocker who let drugs get the better of them, but that’s not the person that Cantrell knew. He might have had his fair share of demons, but looking at what he brought to the world, Staley was one of the most powerful presences of the 1990s and could turn virtually anything he was thrown into melancholic beauty.
