The riff Jerry Cantrell said he would never play again: “They cringed every time I played it”
You take a look at the above headline and, even with only a passing interest in Alice In Chains, you might think you know what comes next. After all, this is a band that, even away from the terrible tragedy at the core of their being, doesn’t seem to be a barrel of laughs.
Their music is intense, moody and visceral even when compared with other grunge bands, so there must be a truly devastating reason behind it. After all, Jerry Cantrell and his band of Seattle noisemakers were always a darker prospect than their peers.
Nirvana were a product of 1980s punk and hardcore. Pearl Jam and the Smashing Pumpkins were indebted to 1970s hard rock and prog, respectively. Alice In Chains, on the other hand, were the closest the grunge scene got to a full-on classic metal band. Their molasses-thick, scudding riffs show a clear debt to Black Sabbath and pave the way for sludge and doom metal in a way that only Ozzy’s Brummie battalion can claim more responsibility for.
So, when you have a riff, made by Jerry Cantrell himself, that he will not play anymore, the backstory must be as pulverising as the riff itself. There must be something truly horrific at work for it to remain untouched in the annals of Alice In Chains’ history. Well, the truth is that for a band as dark as Alice In Chains, behind the scenes wasn’t always a trial. In fact, life in Alice In Chains often looked a lot more like The Young Ones than anything else, and the 43-second joke song ‘Iron Gland’ is a perfect example of this.
Why Jerry Cantrell never plays ‘Iron Gland’
The truth is that beneath the darkness, Alice in Chains were a bunch of unreconstructed dudes who did all the things unreconstructed dudes do and more. While the band’s history is a tough read at the best of times it is also filled with the requisite punch ups, pranks and stupid shit that young men are want to do when stuffed in close proximity to each other.
Really, the clue is there on the surface. These are Sabbath worshippers who got Tom Araya of Slayer to growl “I AM IRON GLAND” over a droning guitar thrash. The jokes absolutely write themselves, and the biggest joke of all comes at the very end of the song, with the discordant, incongruously chirpy riff that plays the “song” (if you can call it that) off.
Turns out, this was an in-joke, as Cantrell wrote in the liner notes to their Music Bank box set. He says, “The riff at the end of it was a riff I played for years to annoy the guys. They cringed every time I played it, so I figured I’d do this thing with ‘Iron Man’, get the riff in there and put it to bed, which made the guys very happy.” You might be wondering how he got one of the true Gods of extreme metal, Tom Araya, to contribute to something so brainless, and wouldn’t you know it, Cantrell has an answer for that, too.
He says, “At first he thought it was stupid, but I told him that is exactly why he had to do it.” I mean, it’s a flawless argument, flawlessly made, and the moment that tape was cut on ‘Iron Gland’, Cantrell did as promised and has never played the riff since. A sorely needed reminder that light and shade exist within all bands, even the darkest ones of all.
