The Alice In Chains story has been told and re-told link by link. Back in 1994, the Seattle grunge hipsters released their self-titled album. Eight years later lead singer Layne Stayley would be gone. That’s the tale in a nutshell. AIC were laid to rest. But there were various sightings in these intervening 14 years. Alice guitarist Jerry Cantrell brought together the original rhythm section of Sean Kinney and Mike Inez to perform at a function here and there and usually the guy handling vocal duties was Comes With The Fall singer William DuVall. Comes With The Fall was actually Cantrell’s backing band as well as opening act back in the early 2000s for the guitar player’s Degradation Trip tour.
So, the relationship between
DuVall and
Cantrell goes back many years. And born from this organic chemistry that flowered between them comes the new
Alice In Chains album.
Black Gives Way To Blue is the singer’s debut and what he brings to the band is completely different than what the group created back in the
Staley days. Produced by
Shadows Fall and
Foo Fighters craftsman
Nick Raskulinecz, the album has resonatged with hardcore
Alice fans. The first single, "
A Looking In View" lashes together burning guitar licks by both
William and
Jerry (
DuVall also brings a second guitar to the previously single guitar
AIC sound) and the second single, "
Check My Brain," a strange and typically twisted
AIChains track, climbed all the way to Number One on the Billboard Rock Songs chart.
Here, William talks about how he and Jerry first connected and ultimately ended up reforming the legendary Alice In Chains band. There were bumps and hiccups along the way but at the end of the day, the pair triumphed over what must have been seriously daunting odds to record a new album and re-capture an audience that hadn’t heard any new music for a very long time.
UG: Back on July 14, 2009, Alice in Chains premiered Black Gives Way to Blue for the very first time. You also did an acoustic gig after the listening and played two new songs from the album – “Your Decision” and the title track. What did that feel like? Was that moment one that was a long time in coming?
William DuVall: That felt pretty good. They’re just very sort of delicate songs and you’re in an acoustic setting and it’s very revealing. Just us being together and on the same wavelength was very important and we also had an extra musician (Jordan Rudess), a keyboard player, who was a friend of a friend of mine to add to that particular event and kind of flesh things out a little bit more. I think we did really well and it felt good to get through that ‘cause it could be nerve wracking. But it was good; it was really good. We actually listened back to the recordings of that night and found it to be good enough to actually see the light of day in some way, shape or form. In fact, the version of “Your Decision” that we did that night is one of the extra tracks on the iTunes version of the new album. So that gives you some indication of how we felt about the night.
Talk about nerve wracking, Black Gives Way to Blue was the first Alice in Chains album in 14 years. Was there some unspoken burden placed upon you to really step up to the plate and create something monumental in terms of the past legacy of the band?
At the end of the day, all I can do is just be me. I think when you just rely on your own instincts and your own wherewithal, you usually end up OK. I kinda got into this band under circumstances where it wasn’t like there was some master plan in early 2006 when they asked me to do those initial shows (ReEvolution Tour) that eventually led to a full year of touring. At that point, it was really kind of one event at a time. And so the very first thing I did with them was the VH1 show honoring Heart (Decades Live). That was filmed in an arena for television and it’s like it doesn’t get any deeper than that. The water doesn’t get any deeper and you just have to swim.
I think from that moment, it was just kind of a thing of, “Look, I’m gonna go out here and I’m just gonna be myself.” That’s all you can do and let the chips fall where they may.
Then a week after that VH1 show, we were standing on a stage in front of 40,000 people in Portugal. And I was like, “Wow, how did we get here? OK, just go out and do this.”
And that’s kind of been the approach every day. We all have very high standards for ourselves. I set sometimes unbearably high standards for myself [laughs]. But that’s how you excel in anything and that’s how you grow as a person. And this experience has taught all of us a lot about personal growth individually and collectively.
Do you think everyone in the band felt the weight of the world in making the album?
Were we aware of expectations or of the tall order that we were writing for ourselves? Sure! But if we didn’t think that we could meet or exceed those expectations – particularly our own because we’re our own worst critics – then we wouldn’t be doing this. But the fact that the album is coming out on September 29th is itself the best indicator of how we feel. And the fact that we’re playing shows and introducing new material from the new album into the set before it’s out, all of those things I think speaks for itself.
"I go back 10 years with Cantrell; we have a long back-story that leads us to where we are now."
We did three years of touring before we ever set foot in the studio. You know what I mean? And that set the tone for everything. That is the only way the whole thing would have worked because like I said there was no master plan or grand scheme in early 2006. It was just Jerry saying, “We’d like to go and play some shows and celebrate this music from my past and we’d like to share it one last time with the fans and give the circle some closure. Would you like to help us do that?” I go back 10 years with Cantrell; we have a long back-story that leads us to where we are now.
In ’06, it was like, “Sure, man, let’s go out and do it.” Was there a lot of weight on me? Yeah, of course and I was aware of it. And it’s just, well, the part that I can control is what I actually do; I can’t legislate anybody else’s reaction.
To get to your question, that was the beginning of a really long, sometimes difficult, but more often amazing gelling period; a kind of a baking in period. All those shows back-to- back-to-back in Europe and then the United States and Canada and then Japan. By the beginning of ’07, we’d done 23 countries and I think that is the difference between this album being something that I think has a lot more resonance for us and hopefully other people. Because it’s actually kind of a snapshot of our journey to get to this place. If we had started and frontloaded the whole thing with, “We’re gonna get Alice in Chains back together and we’re gonna make a new album and then we’re gonna tour,” if we had done that in ’06, well then it would have tipped it over into something that none of us really … that’s not how we think. You know what I mean? At that point, it would have become something that doesn’t reflect any of our values.
The way it happened was we started playing these shows with kind of a, not necessarily a finite end point, but an undefined end point. And that led organically to new ideas. Because you get four musicians together for that length of time traveling over that many months in close quarters and new ideas are gonna happen. Go figure. There are guitars laying around, there are soundchecks, there are hotel rooms, and there are long bus rides. So when we got home from all that touring in ’06, there was a nice pile of new riffs and things.
Can you talk about what you bring to AIC that is different than what Layne brought?
One thing is Alice basically become sort of a two-guitar band whenever we want to be. I started out as a guitar player; I never started playing music with the idea of being a singer. That came much, much later in the game. And so that sensibility of me being a guitar player first in my mind and the interaction that that creates with Cantrell and (Mike) Inez and Sean (Kinney), I think lends itself to a different kind of jamming than they perhaps used to be able to do. Just the other day, we finished soundcheck and Kinney and I just didn’t want to stop. We went into a frickin’ Band of Gypsys-meets-White Stripes jam. Those are the kinds of things that happen night-after-night.
You get home from the tours that you do and you assess what you have. We actually had enough at the end of ’06 that we were considering taking all of 2007 off and then Velvet Revolver asked us to go out. We said, “Sure” and once again you’re on tour and there’s stuff happening. And that tour we actually took one step further and had a dedicated jam room backstage every night. Because we were playing these sheds with Velvet Revolver and so there’s enough backstage area there where you can have your dressing room and you can have your tuning room. So we had a full-on setup everyday; you could just roll off the bus in your pajamas and go rock if you wanted to. And it was cool; sometimes only one of us would be in there; sometimes all four of us would be in there; and sometimes any combination of two or three; and sometimes Duff would show up or Slash. It was just a rolling musical circus every day.
So, if we go backwards a bit, what happened after the Velvet Revolver tour?
That takes us into the holidays of 2007; we’ve got another mountain of ideas to add to the previous mountain. Then at the end of ’07 is when it really got to like, “OK, we should go into a studio and at least see what we really have here.”
That kind of led to meeting producers and then finally choosing Nick Raskulinecz who was just a great guy. He brought a lot of enthusiasm and light and humor to the whole process. Obviously he could have been a very emotional thing and it was some days; of course it is. But he helped to diffuse a lot of that.
And again, that’s how it evolved; it was an organic thing that happened step-by-step and at each stage of the game. At the end of each leg of a tour, we’d say, “OK, do we want to go out and do more shows?” And then at the whole year of touring, it would be, “OK, well we have some new ideas – do we want to rent a room somewhere and explore some of these? OK, now do we want to go into the studio? Do we want to start meeting producers and seeing what happens?”
And the beauty of this is that this was all self-directed; we weren’t contractually obligated to anyone. There’s no label, there’s no nothing. So this is all happening on our own time and on our own dime and that liberated us from feeling any more pressure from anywhere than we already would anyway; just because of how we are. And we were able to go in and work at our own pace and bring people in to help us as we wanted and when we wanted. At any point in all of this, the plug could have been pulled. I mean we could have literally got to the end of the last mixing session for this album and decided, “You know what? I don’t know.” You know what I mean? But we didn’t. We got through this whole thing and it was, “Wow, this is pretty cool; let’s start engaging the business end. We’ll start interfacing with the business and see if we can find a home for this thing.” And we ended up going with Virgin/EMI obviously.
Let’s dive into the album and have you comment on some of the songs. “A Looking In View” will be the first single and it was written by all four members. A pretty big rock tune.
We thought that was a good one because it immediately sort of throws down a gauntlet: “Here’s a seven minute-plus hunk of metal to chew on – take that!” That’s kind of how we looked at it. This is gonna sorta separate the wheat from the chaff as it were in terms of who’s with us and who isn’t. It’s a real sort of test of endurance to play the thing and I think it also, as I say, you’re definitely not going for radio friendly when you choose that as your opening salvo. It just kind of made what we thought was a cool statement that reflected our mind set. Like, “Here it is; it’s about as undiluted as you can get. And if you guys dig this, then you’re liable to kind of be in for the ride, you know?” And what’s interesting about it is we really figured radio is not gonna touch that. And sure enough the thing went Top 15 or Top 10 like Active Rock in America; stations all over the nation were playing the thing. No edit and no call for an edit; if anybody had asked, we would have refused (laughs). You know? And it got such a great reception and we see people sing along to it every night.
That song is really loaded with guitars.
That’s a really cool one because that’s one where I was saying about the two-guitar interaction, that’s one where Cantrell and I pretty much go riff for riff and line for line vocally and melody for melody in terms of ideas. That’s part of why the thing is so darn long.
Did you play guitar on the actual track or are you talking about live?
On the record? Yeah, I do play some guitars on the record. And that’s one that came out of a lot of jams that were happening on the road.
When you’re working on guitar parts with Jerry, will he show you specific inversions or a certain riff? Does it get that focused? Or is it more trial and error?
It depends; we’re both capable of taking the lead. If he’s got something that’s got multiple, there’s times I’ll get shown a part. But with a thing like “A Looking In View,” that’s more like he had a riff, I had a riff, he had a riff, I had a riff, and we glued them together. And it’s, “Oh, man, check it out, this part goes really great into this one!” You’ve got piles of riffs laying around. “Remember that one thing you were doing in upstate New York a month ago?” So there’s a lot of that kind of stuff. And again, I’m sure there’s gonna even be more of that; this is only the beginning.
"Alice basically become sort of a two-guitar band whenever we want to be."
Right now my main guitar is a 1960 VOS sunburst Paul that I’ve been rockin’ for almost a year now. I was never a Les Paul guy; I came up through punk rock. Hendrix is what got me started and then the next biggest influence after that was Greg Ginn from Black Flag and so as a kid I loved the Dan Armstrong (the Black Flag guitarist played an Ampeg Dan Armstrong clear Lucite guitar during much of his career) and the power of that look and the whole thing. I played guitars that were made of anything but wood for a while (laughs). There was a guitar called a Renaissance that was also a see-through plexi-glass thing that a guy put together for me. I got a Dan Armstrong for $250 when I was like 15 in New York. Can’t get ‘em for that now that’s for sure; that’s a stock that rose. I played Jerry Jones guitars and at one point Steinberger made its way in there. I went through a lot of stuff – everybody played Les Pauls and that’s the one thing I’m not gonna do. That’s kinda how I looked at it.
Eventually you just get to this place where you’re so yourself that it doesn’t matter. That you don’t have to try so hard to go out on a limb to do anything; you’re gonna be yourself whatever it is. I was recording the most recent Comes With the Fall album, Beyond the Last Light, and I was recording at this studio in Atlanta, and the guy had a couple of goldtop Deluxes that was all green and gnarly and I ended up using that for like 60 per cent of the guitar tracks. I kept going back to it and it was like, “Man, this maybe cliché, but this Les Paul/Marshall thing sure works.” You gotta go around the world to get across the street sometimes.
I ended up going home and immediately got a couple of goldtop Deluxes for myself and loved those and started using those on the road with Alice when we started touring again in ’07. And then eventually it was like, “If I’m gonna do the Les Paul thing, let’s just do it.” So I started looking at the VOS guitars and I like the slender neck so I went with a 1960 rather than a ’59. Also because you don’t see ‘60s everyday; the market is saturated with ‘59s. I’ve still got a little bit of the collector/rarity geek in me so I went with the 1960.
I love that guitar and I love my goldtops too. I also got a Telecaster Deluxe that Sean Kinney gave me for my birthday in ’06. That’s a cool guitar. Actually Cantrell is using that onstage now for “No Excuses.”
So Cantrell is doing the G&L thing and you have the Gibson end covered.
He’s still a G&L guy but you use different weapons for different mission. We were trying to get “No Excuses” together and he was always having trouble with his sound on that. He said, “Man, you got that Telly?” He’s rockin’ the Keith Richards Telly Deluxe that’s actually mine. It’s fine.
That stuff happens. Again, that’s just part of being a two-guitar band. You get to interface in all these interesting ways.
And your amp rig?
Amp-wise with kind of a Bogner/Matchless deal. I think right now I’m rockin’ the Uberschall and one of the new Matchless Independence heads. I’ve used Matchless forever; I was a huge fan back in the Mark Sampson (company founder) days. I think the C-30 amp is one of the best amps ever made. But the Independence is great too and it more fits the Alice bill.
What about the album’s title, “Black Gives Way to Blue”?
It’s a really beautiful song that Cantrell wrote for Layne. I think I heard that as soon as he did a little demo of it around Christmas time in ’07 after we had finished the Velvet Revolver tour. I heard that and felt like well, “That’s one of those perfect moments of clarity that we all pray for as writers and that come far too infrequently.” You know what I mean? That’s one that happened and when those happen they’re undeniable. It’s like, “Well, there you go. Right on.” It’s great and it’s just so succinct; no wasted motion on that one at all. In and out in two minutes and there you go. It’s a good-bye to Layne but it’s also a hello to the future as is the rest of the record. The reason that is the title track is we felt like it would make a good ending and it also sort of sums the worldview of the record if you will. If the record has a worldview, at least in part it’s about how one bounces back from things in life that knock us down. You’re presented with a choice when you get knocked to your knees: You can lay down and just wither away and die or you can choose to get up and put one foot in front of the other and start walkin’ and see what happens. And even if you get up and start walkin’ and you find yourself in the desert with a sandstorm just trying to beat you back down, eventually if you keep goin’ usually life rewards you. You’ll end up in an oasis of some kind. Just for the simple fact of your refusing to go down. I think we’re all gonna be presented with those kinds of challenges throughout our lives or we already have been.
We’ve all lost people in this band; people that are very dear to us. Layne becomes the focal point for obvious reasons but when you lose somebody it hurts no matter how famous they are; no matter how much of a juicy press angle it makes. It just plain hurts. Layne hurt and so did my grandfather and grandmother and so did my great friend, Sean Costello, who died during pre-production of this record one day before his 29th birthday. Killed himself in a hotel room. They all hurt, man.
So the song is kind of a barometer of where the band is at emotionally?
I think that song kind of sums up where we’re at in terms of the outlook. It’s like we decided to do this thing, put this record out, keep going, and add to the legacy that the band already has. We know that’s a tall order for some people but it felt right to us and so we’re doin’ it. And I think the people who are responding so overwhelmingly positively to it are doing so certainly for the music. But also I think in part a lot of them are responding to the possibilities that this thing represents for their own lives and for whatever challenges they might face that might knock them down. And I do think there’s a little bit of like, “Wow, if Alice can do, maybe I can.” Whatever it might be that’s holding you back.
“Acid Bubble.”
That’s a cool one; that’s a Cantrell deal that I really dig. It came really late in the process; that was actually one of the last ones that got spat out. It came pretty much fully formed and I dig it. That’s one of the ones that we’re playing in the set every night; I always have a great time playing and singing that one. That’s one that I use to try and really fire the folks up.
“Check My Brain” was the second single. Was it meant to represent the other side of “Black Gives Way to Blue” or to bookend the first single in some way?
We kind of came out with the seven-minute chunk of non-diluted, unfiltered metal. And the next one, “Check My Brain” was still heavy and still creepy and it still had a lot of the sonic earmarks that people were familiar with with Alice. But there’s nothing quite like it in the Alice canon and it is also one of those tunes that does the neat trick of being really heavy and a little creepy and seasicky and catchy. And so, the consensus was, “OK, they liked the seven-minute chunk of undiluted metal; now let’s throw this at ‘em and see what happens.” The thing just went Number One the other day on the rock charts so it’s doin’ quite well and we’re really pleased with that. It’s a cool tune.
"I started out as a guitar player; I never started playing music with the idea of being a singer."
I look nothin’ like him (laughs).
Obviously not. Can you explain the chemistry between Jerry and you and the other guys?
I don’t know, man; that is a tough thing to try to put a fine point on. When I moved with my band from Atlanta to Los Angeles back in 2000, he was one of the first people I met. My band, Comes With the Fall, came out there and we had our first album (Comes With the Fall) that we recorded in Atlanta and we came armed with that to drop a bomb on Hollywood. And we did; we played every dive that would have us. At some point, a mutual point had turned Jerry onto that album and he just flipped out over it and was hanging out with every moment practically after that. He was jumping onstage to play our songs with us. He would learn ‘em and he’d be in our apartment and ask me to show him how this one went or that one went. Or I’d say, “What are you doing on ‘Sickman’?” or whatever.
I don’t know why it happened; I think there are a lot of characteristics that we share in terms of just being really kind of certain of what we’re doing musically. Maybe that was part of it. I really don’t know beyond that. It’s been a much of years; it’s been a lot of personal changes that have gone down over the last decade with both of us. We’ve stuck together and it’s finally led us to this point.
I just think that maybe it was in part what you just said – that I’m not Layne, that I’m not somebody who would try to be Layne. All of those things to me are unthinkable to even attempt – I’m too busy just being me and that’s enough, that’s enough to contend with.
What does go through your head when you sing the old Alice songs that Layne sang on? Are you consciously trying to make them your own or attempting to stay faithful to the original? Is Layne looking over your shoulder?
Yeah, you know, he’s there, looking.
Did you know Layne personally?
No, I didn’t; I only know him through his work. When Cantrell and I met and actually started touring together, my group Comes With the Fall did double duty backing him up and opening for him when he was getting the Degradation Trip record off the ground. And so we were actually the touring band for that as well as the opening act. We did it for two years straight, man, all of 2001 and 2002. We went all over the place and that’s how he and I kind of bonded on the road beyond the initial bonding that took place in Hollywood, right?
So, we’d be on a ride somewhere and he’d have some story or somethin’ from the past about Layne. There were a lot of times where he’d say, “Man, you guys would get along so great.” Of course, Layne was still living for most of that time. When we were on the road during the 2002 run that we did, Layne passed while we were on tour. So I was with him (Cantrell) for all of that.
I didn’t know him but I feel like I do because of the work and because of being around these guys who carry him with them everywhere that we go. And all the stories and the funny stuff. And it just seemed like I would have liked him a whole lot. I certainly loved his work; I loved his singing.
When I’m singing those tunes, I’m just trying to sing ‘em from my own place of truth. Again, that’s all you can do. I’m gonna get inside (the songs) in terms of melodic liberties. I do a little of that occasionally just if it hits me to do it just because I’m inside of it. I don’t do it consciously. In other words, I’m not trying to consciously stray away from it and just putting my stamp on it and getting all American Idol all over it. At the same though, even if I’m faithful completely note-for-note to a certain part of a tune or something like that, it’s still coming from me. I’m in it, you know what I mean?
The fact is, Layne was singing a lot of songs he didn’t write. He did it from his own place of honesty and truth and he was himself and he was amazing so why would I do anything other than that myself? Even songs that he did write that were very much from a personal experience, what’s cool about those songs is the feelings behind those personal experiences are universal feelings. It’s just different shades of the blues. I understand that; I get that, man! So, there’s no problem there, no disconnect there. Just get it done, you know what I mean?
Black Gives Way to Blue is the first step for this new Alice in Chains lineup. The album has the expected Alice rockers and the dark songs but there is also acoustic stuff and modal sounding tracks. And so you’ve allowed yourself a lot of different musical avenues to pursue on the next album. In the same way that Facelift gave the original band an opportunity to pursue different directions on albums like Dirt and Jar of Flies.
Right! Dude, I mean, that is how we look at it. It’s added a whole new wing onto the house; it really has. And we can explore that and explore that and we look forward to it. We’re very excited about that. So, cool …
Interview by Steven Rosen
Ultimate-Guitar.Com © 2009
it's gonna take a while to get used to it. but bout ur point of it not being that dark i think musically it is one of the heaviest things they have done 
