60 Songs That Explain the '90s - "Would?“—Alice in Chains

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

Rob closes out the first set songs with a heartfelt appraisal of Layne Staley via an exploration of the Seattle band’s tribute to vocalist Andrew Wood. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Chuck Klosterman Producer: Justin Sayles  Associate Producer: Devon Renaldo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rejoice Bachelor Nation, Bachelor Party is the podcast for you. Juliet Lippman is here to break down every detail and piece of drama from the latest episode of a Bachelor franchise. Joined by fellow superfans, members of Bachelor Nation, and ring your colleagues, this is the one-stop shop for all your bachelor needs. Check out Bachelor Party on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, friends. A quick reminder that this is the 60th episode of 60 songs that explain the 90s, but

somehow this is not the last episode. We're doing 30 more songs. We are doing exactly 90 songs total. Probably we're not changing the name. We're sticking with 60 songs as the name. Probably if we're changing the name, nobody's told me about it. Anyway, we will be taking a two-month break.

I got to get my kids off the roof, so on and so forth. But we will return in April, mid-A-I-A. I'm on Twitter at at Harvilla, H-A-R-V-I-L-L-A. I will keep you apprised of our exact return date, and I will also tweet a bunch of random dumb shit that will hopefully keep you occupied or at least keep me occupied. Okay, too long didn't listen.

This will be our last episode for a while, but we'll be back real soon. So you're at my funeral, right? Sorry, this is years in the future, decades in the future, possibly. It's a long way off, a medium long way off. Don't be sad. I've lived a full and happy life. 50 plus years of adoring and consistently surprising marriage. Just two goofballs in love.

Our children are grown and prosperous and don't remember any of my stupid parenting decisions. All my professional goals were met. I read Ulysses. I translated the Prince song. My name is Prince into Spanish. A dream of mine since the ninth grade. Mayamo Prince I'mo Soi Funky is as far as I've gotten. I stole that giant gold cube in Central Park.

I finally played through all the final fantasy games. I died peacefully in my sleep just after rewatching all six seasons of Justified. My last words to my wife are we dug coal together. I am at peace. It was time. My funeral is held at the airport, as that's the only nearby building large enough to accommodate. All the weeping mourners, the despondent ex-girlfriends, the kindly folks on Twitter, who suggest I do an episode about Luscious Jackson or Jeff.

Buckley or the tragically hip, et cetera, a medium-sized airport in Ohio. I'm not arrogance. The John Glenn Columbus International Airport. CMH. Lousy food options. Sorry, but they got a Jenny's ice cream vending machine. In lieu of a eulogy or whatever, my loved ones take turns reading poems from three classic books of poetry, Actual Air by David Berman, A Knight Without Armor by Jewel and Blinking with Fists, by Billy Corgan. I haven't read any of those yet. The Berman's been on my shell for years. I will add reading that to my professional goals. And then they play a song. My funeral ends with one song played over the PA system at the John Glenn Columbus International Airport. This is the song.

The song is again by Alice in Chains from their 1995 album, Alice in Shains. Right up front, I'm going to tell you I have no idea what this song is about. And now doesn't seem like a great time to find out. That guitar riff, though, right? That immaculate crunch. Yesterday I was listening to another Allison Shane song on that record. It was heaven beside you. And I said, out loud, in an otherwise empty room, I said,

That's a really great guitar tone, because this is who I've become. Or realistically, who I've always been. The guy who says, that's a really great guitar tone. out loud to himself. Jerry Cantrell on guitar, he also sings a lot and writes most of the music. Fantastic riff here. Man, I'm saying that to you. I imagine wherever you're living, you've got at least one hard rock radio station.

Probably only one. Active rock is the term of art, I believe. So stuff as old as ACDC and Black Sabbath, or at least Crazy Train. Metallica, all the 90s grunge, all the turn of the century new metal. And then, however you would describe. whatever is happening hard rock wise now. Here in Columbus we got the Blitz, 99.7, the Blitz. See, in the past half hour here, they've played Big Empty by Stone Temple Pilots,

Dio's Holy Diver, TNT by ACDC, five-finger death punch, disturbed live sound garden, and also Fuzzy, which is Chris Jericho's band, Chris Jericho, the wrestler Fuzzy. I wasn't up on this, but what I love about the Blitz is that it feels, to me like every song played on the Blitz spanning five decades in countless hard rock subgenres. Every song regardless of artist or era is required to use the same distorted electric guitar tone, that macho crunch, like 70s, 90s, 2020s, whatever. It's such a comforting and thematically consistent sound to me.

It sounds like I'm not serious, but I'm serious. I'll be driving with my kids. They'll be making me listen to whatever. But for just five seconds, I'll check on the blitch. Like, boop, and then I'll go about my day. No idea what song that was. I'm just heartened to know that the crunch is still out there. Crunching.

It's like the eternal flame at the tomb of the unknown soldier. And to my mind, again, by Allison Chains, is the raddest, crunchiest crunch that ever crunched. Staley on lead vocals, just a monster voice on Lane's Daly, just a monster bellow, but like a pointy bellow. That description of Lane Staley's voice tops my list of professional accomplishments. Lane's voice melt exquisitely with Jerry Cantrell's singing voice, the vulnerable, tough guy, jarring harmoniousness of these two. These are close harmonies from a melodic standpoint. I would call these guys the Lovin brothers of hard rock,

but that would be trolling, I think, and I don't do that. Belaine Staley's voice especially has this sort of midnight movie force and beautifully grotesque anguish and voluptuous ferociousness to it stack up a bunch of his vocal tracks and they warp together into something colossal and magnificently inhuman. Or, I suppose, more human than human. Sure, this part,

of the song is chorus shaped, I suppose, and is occurring at the point in the song where a song's chorus normally occurs. I'm into it. We haven't gotten to the reason you're hearing this song of my funeral yet, but I'm into it. I'm also into the second verse in which Lane Staley, or rather Lane along with probably Jerry and of course a complimentary stack of additional lanes. All those guys sing the words, why, why you slap me in the face, ow. Just the right amount of incredulous tough guy emphasis on the word ow there, I think you'll agree. Then the chorus again. Then Jerry unveils rad, crunchy guitar riff number two, which is, I think you'll agree, both ratter and crunchier.

See, I told you, I'd never fully noticed the symbol bashing there. Your drummer is Sean Kinney, just a delightful to spur that riff on. He's like an over-excited 10-year-old. He's like an audience surrogate. Delightful. I am delighted. The key to this new guitar riff is the harmonics, right? The little noisy blips.

You lift your fingers on your fretting hand just a little. You know what I'm talking about? This is a super technical guitar player thing. How do I, what's the best way to describe that sound? Doot-doot. I'm sorry? Doot-doot. And here it is.

Here is the reason this. song is playing at my funeral. Here is, in all likelihood, my all-time favorite eight seconds of recorded sound. Doot-doot. Miraculous. I love it. I will fight and die to protect it. I am serious. I love everything about what is transpiring here. I love doot-doot. Most of all, naturally, the video for again. Quite popular on MTV is one of these Uber 90s, brooding dudes in black leather rocking out in a giant hanging glass and metal box deals like they're rocking out in a factory that manufactures testosterone the giant industrial chandelier is swinging its strobe lights lane's got sunglasses and black leather gloves you got weird creepy orderly dudes

in all white you got weirder dudes in all red they're druids one of the all white dudes writes the words educate and sedate on a chalkboard so as to illustrate the similarity between the words educate and sedate

many of the same letters think about it it's tough it's provocative but then also multiple loving closeups of Lane Staley

going yeah yeah the Louvin brothers never thought of that shit doot yeah the bass swooping and

Mike Inez on bass in this area. You got more delightful symbol bashing from Sean Kinney. You got Jerry Cantrell throwing a bluesy little guitar riff on top. Put it all together. And what do you got? You got perfection. That's what. This is the ideal male body.

You may not like it. But this is what peak performance sounds like. and then my loved ones burned down the airport. That's my funeral. That's how I'm going out. Alice and Chains are not the biggest or most culturally significant band to emerge from Seattle in the late 80s, early 90s. That's Nirvana.

Silly, they are not turn of the decade. Seattle's fanciest band in the musical sense, or the city's most uber masculine band in the classic Led Zeppelin 70s Hotel Room defiling sense. That's Soundgarden. They are certainly not turn of the decade, Seattle's most enduring band in any commercial or emotional sense.

That's Pearl Jam. But Allison Chains to my mind are the heaviest, the darkest, the crunchiest of the Seattle gods. But crucially, they were also, not often, but just often enough, the silliest. One more time. Doot, doot.

The silly parts make the heavy parts heavier, but also easier to bear. If you're ever listening to Alice in Chains and it all gets to be too heavy from a musical or emotional standpoint. Just toss in a few doot-toots. That's the last time. Works on any song,

no matter how dark, no matter how crushing. Might even work on this one. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is 60 songs that explain the 90s, and this week we're talking about Wood by Alice in Chains, W-O-U-L-D,

question mark. The question mark is important. The crunch is immortal. Lane's voice is so intimidating, and entrancing to me that generally I don't fixate much on the words he's singing. Mostly he wrote the lyrics, though sometimes Jerry Cantrell did. Jerry wrote the lyrics for Wood. But so I made a big mistake.

Try to see it once my way feels important here as a mission statement. Or unfortunately, as an epitaph. I will concede that I never thought too hard about what this song is about. Either, though I feel silly now that I never quite made the connection to Andrew Wood, the front man for beloved Seattle band Mother Love Bone, who died of a heroin overdose in March 1990, right before his band's debut album, Apple, came out.

Andrew Wood serves as a sort of guardian angel and tragic origin story for the Seattle boom. A couple of his bandmates and Mother Lovebone, Jeff Ament, and Stone Gosser jumped a Pearl Jam, of course. And they also hooked up with Chris Cornell from Soundgarden for the Andrew Wood tribute side project, Temple of the Dog, hit single, the drunk karaoke all-timer hunger strike.

We have discussed in this venue previously. If I recall correctly, and it's no big deal if I don't, I tried to make the case back then that the big rad blustery piano power ballad, Chloe dancer, Crown of Thorns by Mother Lovebone, is the November reign of grunge. Or maybe I said that in the November rain episode. That would have made more sense. Hopefully whenever I said, whatever I said, I didn't put it exactly like that. though, that would be super hacky.

I'm not going to go back and find out if I said that. I'm not really into nostalgia. Learning to play Chloe Danceer on piano is another of my professional goals. By the way, haven't gotten around to it yet. I'm very busy, but Mother Lovebone broadly right there in 1990, to my mind they served as the precise midpoint between 80s hair metal and 90s grunge. I keep saying grunge. All these bands hated that word so much.

And who can blame them? I got to stop saying. That word. Knock it off. I don't want to sound like I'm in the Tom Tom Club. I don't want to make this a harsh realm. I don't want to be a lame stain. Certainly I don't want to be a cob nobler. But however you define their options,

Mother Lovebone sat right at the fork in the road, the mythical crossroads, the sliding doors moment, if you will. Could have gone either way. Andrew Wood could have gotten way grittier or way glamier. Or both at once. You can imagine him in spandex, day glow, spandex.

You can imagine him wearing long underwear under shorts or whatever that Seattle deal was. As hard or out goes, the differences between grit and glam are often cosmetic, literally. Really, it's all down to the hairspray. When I listen to Mother Lovebone now, I can still feel a pleasant mist. I can feel my own hair curl perfectly into place. That's Star Doggian, Ergo Temple of the Dog. That's from the Apple album. Pretty crunchy that tune.

which, as we've established, is the highest compliment I can pay anything. But so instead, for me, early Allison Chains went on to personify this conflict between the 80s and the 90s, between the sunset strip in L.A. and whatever street in Seattle, all the cool rock clubs were on. I didn't live there. It feels rude somehow to look that up. That's what a Cobb Knobler would do. But there's a pretty cool alternate universe where these fellas are forever the bells of MTV's headbangers, ball. The first thing you notice about Man in the Box from Facelift, the first Allison

Shane's album released in November 1990, is that Lane Staley is wailing his fucking ass off out of all proportion to the song or to any previous societal standards of awesomeness. Who is this guy? What is that voice? Lane wrote the lyrics to this one. Man and the boss is about censorship, about being crammed in a boss and force fed by the media. You know how they make veal, the baby calf, and the boss educates a date. Think it over. Lane had gone out to dinner with some label executives who were vegetarians. The rub my nose in spit radio edit is quite amusing.

Spit is not the word he uses. But as a 12-year-old still in Catholic school at the time, I'll tell you honestly, that I got quite a scandalous jolt out of Deny Your Maker. That's Jerry Cantrell singing the counter melody. vocally think of Jerry Cantrell as the David Banner to Lane Staley's Incredible Hulk? No, I'm going to find the absolute stupidest way to describe this relationship. If it's the last thing I do, the guitar riff to Man in the Box, the Nuclear Chug of this song is provided by Jerry via a talk box, a guitar voice box.

Facelift producer David Jurdin said he was driving to the studio one day, and Bon Jobe's Living on a Prayer came on the radio. man in the boss that's clever fair enough though man in the box sounds like living on a prayer getting beat up by 15 dudes wearing doc martin steel toe boots in slow motion down at the dock i told you it wasn't spit can i share with you a disturbing fact this chart i stumbled across like an hour ago let's get back to jehovah's witnesses i want to talk about active rock again for just a second. This was not surprising, but it was shocking. So Nielsen, the Gargantuan Media Data Company, they measure radio airplay. Here now are Nielsen's top 10 mainstream rock radio songs

of the 2010s from 2010 through 2019. The 10 most played songs on mainstream rock radio are as follows. Number 10, Nirvana, lithium. Number nine, Sound Garden, Black Hole Sun. Number eight, Metallica, enter Sandman. Number seven, Nirvana in bloom. Number six, the offspring, self-esteem. Number five, Pearl Jam, Evenflow. Number four, Stone Temple Pilots, Plush. Number three, Nirvana, come as you are. Number two, Allison Chains, Man in the Box. Number one, Nirvana smells like teen spirit. Anything strike you is odd about that list of the most played songs on mainstream rock radio from 2010 to 2019. The youngest song, self-esteem, came out in April 1994, not even the fall of 1994, the spring. I was a sophomore in high school.

How mad would I be about this list if this list weren't cater to me specifically? Arguably even weirder is that man in the box is the oldest song on that list. November 1990, the entire active rock radio format as it exists right this second. I just checked on 99.7, The Blitz. They displayed Daughter by Pearl Jam. The entire active rock radio format in 2022 is built on songs from the five-year span from 1990 to 1994. Kids from today should defend themselves against the 90s. This is why I'm so opposed to nostalgia.

Bourbon and root beer? Hot chicken and waffles? One of those viral animal lovers videos where a dog and a bear become friends and the dog rides the bear around, I'm going to nail the Jerry Lane vocal dynamic. I swear, this song's also on facelift. It's called It Ain't Like That.

I beg to differ, fellas. Lane Staley started out playing drums, but as a 17-year-old kid in suburban Seattle in 1984 or so, he switched to lead vocals to audition for a teenage glam metal garage band called Sleez. No A in Slees. Sleez. That's how sleazy they were. One of the guitar players in Slees, a guy named Johnny Bacca Loss. He did an interview with the Atlantic in 2012 for an article about Lane Staley, the Atlantic.

And Johnny says that for the audition, Lane wore jeans with band names like Motley Crew and Ozzy written. on him and white out. Johnny says, he came to our jam room and was really shy, real timid, and just as we expected, we were like, fuck yeah, this is what a lead singer should look like. Our jam room. I love it. I can smell that jam room. Lane auditioned by singing Looks That Kill by Motley Crew. I'd pay 20 bucks for a tape of that. Be totally honest for you. This isn't him. This is the actual Motley Crew. It's the best I can do. Sleaves eventually changed their name to Alice and Chains. Alice capital N apostrophe chains like pork and beans.

So styled like guns and roses. But guns and roses weren't huge yet. Alice and Chains. So like it's not Alice in bondage, Alice imprisoned in chains. This is just Chains in addition to Alice. And then they break up. And then Lane Staley joins another band. This band's Lane on vocals.

Jerry Cantrell on guitar and vocals. Mike Starr. two R's on bass in this era, Sean Kinney on drums. And that band can't come up with a good band name. So they basically just steal Lane's previous band's name, except now it's Alice in Chains. You might think Alice in Chains is a dorky name, but it's an improvement for pretty much everyone.

Jerry Cantrell and Mike Starr at first hooked up while playing on what Jerry calls a really crappy band called Gypsy Rose, which is the most late 80s headbangers ball-ass name I've ever heard in my life. I can smell Gypsy Roses jam room as well. The first Allison Chains' album, Facelift, comes out in 1990.

That's skipping over quite a lot. But the play-by-play matters less to me than the broad notion that Allison Chains have some roots in the suburbs, ooh, of Seattle, and have explicit roots in glam metal, and hair metal, in sleaze, both capital S and lowercase S, both with and without the A. 80s promo photos of these fellas,

are hilarious. They look majestic. They look Leonine. They start out theoretically representing everything that, quote, unquote, grunge would very soon, quote unquote, destroy. Grunge destroyed hair metal and don't you forget it. Nirvana's Nevermind, which, as you recall, contains four of the ten most popular songs played on mainstream rock radio in the 2010s.

It's coming in November 91. In January 92, Nevermind is going to beat out Michael Jackson to be the number one album in America. Whereupon Molly Crew and poison and winger and warrant and so forth will be smote from the face of the earth. Quote unquote, I listen to FaceLift now and I hear a band not so much trapped between the 80s and 90s.

It doesn't feel like bondage. It doesn't feel like a conflict at all as Allison Chains embody it. They're a hard rock band in 1990. They're rolling with it. They're not embarrassed by the past and they have no fear of the future. This song's called Sea of Sorrow. Good company. Shit, bad companies from the 70s. This album's even more confusing than I thought.

Jerry and Lane are like a peanut butter and pickle sandwich. I'm going to stop. These are getting worse. Plus here, I think this is Lane harmonizing with himself. There is some ferocious Lane zest to even the harmony part. This isn't even important. The words I live to my love to myself. tomorrow you I'll not follow are way more important as a mission statement.

Once Nirvana blows up and once Seattle magically transforms into Seattle, there's a great deal of suspicion and rancor and derision in the air. Which Seattle bands are real Seattle bands? Who's doing this for the right reasons? I'll be talking later with Chuck Closterman, whose new book is called The 90s, a book. And he quotes an old Kirk Cobain fanzine interview word, Kurt says, I have strong feelings toward Pearl Jam and Allison Chains and bands like that.

They're obviously just corporate puppets that are just trying to jump on the alternative bandwagon, and we are being lumped into that category. Those bands have been in the hairspray, cock rock scene for years, and all of a sudden they stop washing their hair and start wearing flannel shirts. It doesn't make any sense to me. There are bands moving from L.A. and all over to Seattle and then claiming they lived here all their life so they can get record deals. It really offends me. End quote. There's a great book called Everybody Loves Our Town and Oral History of Grunge by Mark Yarm. And he talks to a lot of people who share that rancor. A Seattle rock critic and editor named Grant Alden, he worked at a paper called The Rocket. He says, it's indicative of my

impotence as a rock critic that Alice and Chains had a career because I did my level best, not to do anything on them at the rocket to squash them. He says they were a suburban metal band and decided they would be Soundgarden Jr. We called them kindergarten. I should note that the very next person quoted in that book is Mark Arm, the frontman for the rad Seattle band Mudhoney. Mark Yarm and Mark Arm aren't related at all. This is addressed in the back cover of the book.

Mud Honey, I get the sense pretty much everyone in town loved, or at least deeply respected. The title, everybody loves our town, is from, a mud honey song, a song about the Seattle rock boom called Overblown. Actually, it's worth hearing the way Mark Arm sings it. But then in the book, Mark Arm says, everyone came from different backgrounds. There's no kind of purity test. Alice and Shane were definitely better than some of the punk bands that were happening in town. Anyway, I don't think Allison Chains invite any of this suspicion or derision here in the midst of the Seattle boom. If they don't make one of the best records,

of the Seattle boom, one of the heaviest, the darkest. The second Allison Chain's album comes out in September 1992. They call it dirt. And it sure sounds to me like they're wallowing gloriously in a sea of sorrow. That song is called Down in a Hole.

That song's called Angry Chair. When I was in high school, my great grandma, who everyone loved was struggling with various health problems and mostly confined to her rocking chair. For some English class, I wrote an essay about her and I called it Angry Chair. My mom still might have that paper stashed in a bus somewhere. I don't think that song is about Lane Staley's great-grandma. That song's called Sick Man.

You can find footage on YouTube of Allison Chains playing Sick Man live in October 1992. And Lane Staley's in a wheelchair. He jumps from crutches to a wheelchair. Rolling Stone did a story on Allison Chains around this time and reported that Lane had been in a cast since September, when he ran over his foot riding a three-wheel all-terrain vehicle backstage at a show in Oklahoma City.

I'm curious about the logistics of running over your own foot while riding an ATV, but then I watch Lane's Daly bellowing sick man like he's 300 feet tall while sitting in a wheelchair and I forget whatever stupid thing I was thinking about.

This song's called God Smack. Two words. Right, like the band. band Godsmack. One word is named after this song, though perhaps not inspired by the sentiment. Rolling Stone reports in Dallas during a moody new song about heroin called Godsmack. Staley scoots around in a wheelchair, repeatedly jabbing his arm with a microphone, simulating a junkie's needle. No hidden symbolism for this bunch. End quote. Have you guessed yet what this chorus is going to rhyme with what in God's name have you done?

Stick your arm for some real fun. Yeah, I can see that line blew right by me when I was 16, probably for the best. Not this one, though, I think only because it went by slower. This song's called Junkhead. Two words. I love the vocal harmony here, even if the vocal harmony is very much beside the point. The point being that the fucking song is called Junkhead. I am struggling with the precise amount of space and time and power to grant heroin.

Here, if I spend too much time on it, that's ghoulish and sensationalistic. But if I ignore it entirely, that's incredibly naive. What I'll tell you is that the climactic lines of the song, Junkhead, chilled me to the bone then and now. He's wallowing in a sea of sorrow here, but as a teenager anyway, it also felt like he was taunting in some sense, the people who weren't.

One day in high school, I was sitting in the school newspaper office, being just cool as hell. Of course, we were talking about. for some reason about heroes and I indicated that one of my heroes was Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails of course and this girl Becky just like blurts out oh does that mean you want to take heroin and date Courtney Love and I'm sitting there thinking well that's fucking rude but it occurs to me from time to time I still wonder what percentage of the music that I loved as a teenager what percentage of the music that defined my personality as a teenager how much of

that music was about or influenced by or vaguely or not so vaguely associated with heroin. The needle tears a hole, the old familiar sting. And I'm sitting in my bedroom listening to Hurt by nine inch nails while despondently stewing over an ex-girlfriend or whatever. Shut up, Rob. That dissonance between why I was wallowing and why the singer very well might have been wallowing. Is that a testament to the universal power of the song or the singular naivitia?

of the listener. Is the song great, or am I just oblivious? Probably both. Definitely both. Something to think about it. You don't have to think about it. I'm still thinking about it enough for the both of us. The voluptuous ferociousness with which Lane Staley is about to sing the words and it ain't so bad is really quite chilling to me. I listen to a lot of music with medium gnarly lyrics in high school, but those five words might be the gnarliest. Would I be doing like him if I let go and open my mind? Would question mark? Another day, I'm still in my late teens, I think.

My buddy Mike shows up at my house and says, you got to come with me. You got to see this. I'm like, all right. So we drive to a modest building in town. I driven by it 10,000 times, but I was not aware it was a tattoo parlor. We walk in the tattoo parlor, and there's our mutual friend, Brian, face down on a table, getting a fairly large tattoo on his calf of the assail. Allison Chains logo.

The Sun logo. It's a cool logo. It's a great tattoo. There's a photo of Brian from roughly 10 years later that I will cherish forever. It's from my bachelor party. And Brian had announced, out of nowhere, he's just like, it's hammer time. And we're all like, what? And he says, it's hammer time.

And then he starts drinking a tremendous amount of alcohol. And we're all like, oh. And so this photo that I cherish is Brian drunk and lying on the floor smiling. You can just barely see the Alice in Chains tattoo. I have said this to my friends too many times at this point, but it looks like Brian is running and he just happens to be lying down. There's just been some confusion physically. There's a friendly disagreement between what Brian is trying to do and what he's doing. This counts as a tremendous, a famous act of debauchery within my peer circle.

We played frisbee golf at my bachelor party. I mean, Jesus. In context, this is a monumental event, right? the time Brian got medium drunk, hedonism, what's my drug of choice? Woodchuck, the hard cider. I don't want to sound naive, but I'm 96% sure Brian has never been in the same room with heroin. Or maybe I shouldn't speak for him. Anyway, I haven't.

He loves Allison Chains. I love Allison Chains. Maybe he always knew exactly what the Allison Chains song Wood was about. But I sure as hell didn't. The coolest Alice and Chains songs often start with Jerry singing and then Lane's whoops in to darken the mood, to intensify, to escalate. Jerry is the thunder, but Lane is the lightning. That's as good as it's going to get.

Know me broken by my master. It could mean anything, I suppose. But I could have made an educated guess as to who the master might be. On this song, it comes at the very end of an album that also includes the songs Down in a Whole, Angry Chair, Sick Man, Junkhead, and Hate to Feel. Let's just say I was distracted by the baseline, sweet bass line. Dirt will be Mike Starr's last album with Allison Chains. He'll leave in 1993.

Lane will tell Rolling Stone it was an amicable split due to a difference in priorities. Michael later say he was kicked out over his drug use. Mike Starr appeared on the I Can't Believe this was a real TV show, Celebrity Rehab in 2010. Mike Starr died in 2011, reportedly of a prescription drug overdose. Into the flood again. Same old trip it was. back then. So I made a big mistake. Try to see it once my way. Then the outro. Eventually, Lane fully hijacks this song and starts fucking wailing as one does, as anyone else

doesn't actually, as only Lane does. But maybe the most impressive thing about the song Wood is that it's the last song on dirt, right? It's the cataclysmic finale to this monumentally gloomy hard rock album with countless defiant, unambiguous reference. to drug addiction. But Wood is also the first song on the soundtrack to Singles, the endearingly cheerful 1992 Cameron Crow Romcom singles, which is set in Seattle and features cameos from Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell and Allison Chains and gave millions of impressionable romantic flyover state teenagers like myself their first in-depth look at life in Seattle. Put scare quotes around any of that if you want. Singles holds up, honestly.

as a tender time capsule wrapped tenderly in flannel. And speaking as someone who did not live in that city in that era, it feels true to its city in its era, despite no references to drugs whatsoever. And wood doesn't sound lighthearted or frivolous or defanged as the starter on the single soundtrack, but it doesn't immediately kill the mood either. The single soundtrack has Chloe Dancer Crown of Thorns by Mother Love Bone

and Overblown by Mudhoney and Great Songs by Pearl. Jam and Soundgarden and the screaming trees. And Allison Chains sets that mood so perfectly. Wood, in this context, conveys the heaviness, but not the gloominess, not the despair. The despair is always there. Of course, it's audible in Elaine's voice in that pointy bellow of his, but it's okay if you don't really fixate on it.

You can truly love that voice, even if you aren't truly hearing it. Next time you see me on the street, let's talk about Allison Chains for a couple more hours. Yeah. Let me tell you all about how my favorite Alice and Chains record is actually Jar of Flies from 94, the mostly acoustic record. The first one with Mike and as a doofy guitar lesson taking teenager, I bought the guitar tablature book that combined the notation for jar of flies and sap of little mostly acoustic EP they'd done back in 92. In high school, I learned Jerry Cantrell's whole guitar solo for the song, Brother off sap, took me a whole afternoon, if not all. weekend, I was so proud of myself for learning how to play that whole little guitar solo verbatim, shakily. I can picture the whole thing now. Note for note, let me tell you about how I used to do the song,

Don't Follow from Jar of Flies at College Open Might Nights. And I could sing the Jerry Cantrell parts well enough. Say goodbye, don't follow to generate the courage required to sing the Lane Staley part quite poorly. Let me do my whole spiel about playing again at my funeral. Again, let me tell you how disturbed I was by Rolling Stone's cover story on Allison Chains in 1996 to promote that self-titled Allison Chains album from 95. The interviewer spends a lot of time writing about looking at Lane's wrists while Lane is speaking, checking for track marks. It's just Lane Staley on the cover as sunglasses pushed up on his forehead. The cover line is the needle and the damage done. Was all of that a little

and sensationalistic or was the magazine genuinely fearing for Lane's life can it be both let me tell you about how the Allison Shane's MTV Unplugged album from 96 is my second favorite unplugged ever after Nirvana's great version of rooster on unplugged and down in a hole and no excuses and over now let me fuss over the unplugged record without mentioning that it was the band's first show in like two and a half years and it's the last consequential thing this iteration of Allison Chains ever did Lane's Daly died of a drug overdose in 2002. The details, the rumored details are profoundly unpleasant. Let me talk around that.

Let me tell you instead about the time I saw Allison Chains in New York City in 2010, the dawn of a new decade in which Alice and Chains would once again rule over active rock radio. The band carried on with a new lead singer named William Duvall, and he can wail like Lane's Daly. He's great. They're still at it with William, and God bless. So I went to see a reborn Allison Chains. I had low expectations.

The second song they played that night was again. Doot, doot. I freaked out. I was ecstatic. I was joy incarnate. It was one of those deals where I considered running and buying a beer for like 12 bucks or whatever, just so I could ecstatically throw it at the ceiling. One of my favorite concert memories ever.

I'll tell you all about it. I'll talk for hours. season. We didn't talk about mad season. Eventually, I'll let you talk to. And maybe eventually we'll get around to the true darkness, the abject tragedy of it all. Or maybe it's better that we never do. Say goodbye. Don't follow. We are honored to be joined today by Chuck Kloesterman, whose latest book is called The 90s, a book. Thank goodness you're here, Chuck. Thank you so much for joining us today. Great to be here. It's my pleasure. I was down to talk about whoever you wanted to talk about, honestly, and you wanted to talk about Alice and Chains.

And I love those guys. I'm very excited. But what drew you to Alice and Chains out of everyone from the 90s? Well, you know, I have two answers to that question. One is the answer I'm giving because we're on a podcast and the other is the real answer. The answer that I'm giving because we're on a podcast is the fact that, you know, this series is called like these songs that explain the 90s. And when you think about groups from this period, Allison Chains is a group that existed in the 80s, was very clearly pursuing an 80s aesthetic at one point in their career, sort of almost assumed to be positioned to sort of fit in to the world of like sort of L.A. Sunset Strip Metal. And then became a completely different band with even technically a different name. I mean, they were Alice in Chame. with an N in the middle and a Z at the end when they first were created.

And then they were Allison Jains in the 90s and were in many ways the first grunge band to sort of have mainstream success. So I think if you're trying to explain the 90s, they were a very good candidate to at least describe this kind of central evolution from one period to the next. But, you know, the real answer is that I guess, even though I don't consider them among my favorite bands, It turns out I am unconsciously obsessed with Allison James.

I didn't realize this until someone told me. I was living in Akron, Ohio, and I was friends with this librarian. And every so often I would say things like, oh, hey, you know, I know it's not really your thing, but there's this cool song called Again by Allison Chains. I think you should hear this rift. You know, I'd send it over to him, tell them to listen to it. Or I would tell this story about how when Man the Box was like the new video on MTV, I lived in this apartment complex, and the video was kind of scary.

And this girl from across the parking lot named Heather would always come to our apartment anytime, man, the box came on. So we looked forward to it because she was really cool. It was very cool. We looked forward to coming on, so she would like come over to kind of be afraid of it. And then like, you know, there's a Van Halen song called Learning to See from like 2004. And I would go, it kind of sounds like Jerry Cantrell. And I would say this. And finally my friend said, why won't you admit you're obsessed with me?

Allison Chains. It seems to be your example for everything. Because anytime I need to use just like a generic random band from the 90s, like, oh, what if, you know, just some odd hypothetical, I always use Allison Chains. So I feel like in a weird way, I am an accidental Alice in Chains completest. I see in your book, Sex Drugs and Coco Puffs, you do use them in a hypothetical. I believe it involves swallowing a pill that makes every song you hear by anybody sound as. as though it's performed by Alice in Chains. And I was curious how you went about deciding to use Alice and Chains in this hypothetical situation, but it's because you're obsessed with them. Well, this is an example of my friend Sites again. He's like, of all the bands you could have picked in this situation, why did you pick Alice and Chains?

He was almost always like, why didn't you pick some more canonical band from the past that we all know will exist kind of in perpetuity? Why did you pick Alice and Chains? Well, one thing is, is I do think that they are unusual. distinctively, sonically, in the sense that I have never heard an Allison Chain song and wondered who it was. I had to wait until the end. You notice them almost immediately, both from the way the vocals are presented, but also sort of the atmosphere and the tempo. Is Allison Chains a funny name? I guess I don't really think it's humorous, but it's like a collection of words that only

makes sense as the name of a band. That's correct. That's exactly right. Like, there is something about Allison Chains that does have the sense that it was, it's like in a novel where there's a rock band. The band is called Alice and James. But the novel in this case is reality. Earlier in your book, you quote Kirk Cobain, you know, talking shit about Alice and Chains in Pearl Jam, and it's what you're saying.

They were an 80s band that became a 90s band. Kirkoban calls Allison Chains corporate puppets who jumped on the alternative bandwagon. like they were into hairspray and cock rock and then they cynically rebranded as a Seattle band. That's Kirk Cobain's take. So two questions. Do you agree that Alice and Chains were alternative or grunge bandwagoners? And maybe more importantly, does that matter? Hmm.

Well, okay. To an extent, yes. Although some of these things about Allison Chains, even the way I presented them, are a little unfair. Like the idea that they were Alice in Chains. Like, it seems like, oh, they were trying to be guns and roses. That was actually in 1986. It was a very hair metal name, but it was, I guess, their own hair metal name. It's like they weren't using it to try to trick people and think they were this other band or like this other band.

You know, and then Lane Staley leaves that group and starts a funk band for a while and then meets Kentrell and kind of forms what we understand to be Alice and Chains. Now, were they like a bandwagon group? Well, it wouldn't really make sense to make that argument, considering their first record came out before, never mind. I mean, it's, you know, and although it isn't as sort of conventionally grunge as maybe their next record would be or some of the other groups that would kind of fit in this world, I do think that, and this is not going to be an analogy the band might love, but I think they're somewhat similar to Stone Temple pilots in the sense that they had a pretty high degree

of musicianship, a real sort of natural understanding of songwriting, and would have likely succeeded in the 70s, 80s or 90s. I think that any period that was happening, they would have been able to sort of take the songs that they made and sort of represent them or project them to the prism of what was sort of commercially popular. So I do think they had some desires to be successful. I think that they saw that this is how you do it. This is the way music is now. But that seemed to suggest they didn't have legitimate interest in it. And when you think of what they like to do musically and also what they seem to be like as people, they did fit very comfortably into the grunge world in a way that may not have worked if they had remained,

if the 80s had gone on forever. And they were, you know, more like bang tango or dangerous toys. Or Cinderella. Well, yeah. And Cinderella is an interesting example because I suppose Cinderella was as popular. as an 80s metal band, as Allison Chains was, is a 90s grunge band. So, you know, if the question is like, could Alice and Chains have been Cinderella? I think absolutely.

I also think Cinderella had they left Philadelphia and moved to Seattle in 1991 and not had an 80s career, they could have been like Allison Chains. So there may be a degree that hard-wrought groups from this period were all pliable enough to sort of, you know, to, to, to, you know, to. to comfortably exist in what was happening in larger society. It is interesting to think that a band's credibility is dependent on them being inflexibly tied. We kind of do that, though. That's a common thing.

Like if you look at a band, like say, the Jesus lizard or whatever, and be like, well, Jesus lizard could not have thrived. If they would have had to, like, open for Docking or whatever, they would have. Right. And it's like, well, that's true. They probably wouldn't have. I mean, but it's a weird thing to criticize someone for, for saying that they can kind of do what everyone's doing comfortably.

Right. A fundamental 90s concept that comes up on this show from time to time is the idea that grunge killed hair metal, right? Like, Nevermind comes out and Hair Metal ceases to exist. That new Hulu series, Pam and Tommy, I know you've talked about it. They have a scene where Tommy Lee is watching MTV News and is informed that Nirvana destroyed Motley crew. Is that true?

Like, there is no one on her. Earth, I trust more to say definitively whether or not that's true. Did Grunge kill hair metal? Well, this may seem like kind of a cowardly answer, but the thing is that there's a real key difference between a genre of being eliminated and a genre becoming less popular. Now, Grunge definitely made the music from that 80s period significantly less popular. And because it became less popular, some of the things that. define it instantly became embarrassing using Cinderella again.

It's like when Cinderella was hot and everybody was doing that, Cinderella almost seemed to look exactly the way you'd want a band to look. But the moment that became uncool, then it just seemed ridiculous that their hair was that way and that they only didn't, you know, thumbs up at the camera or whatever. Alison Chains gets dragged into this quite a bit, though, because of one specific scenario, Jenny Lane, the now deceased singer of Horn,

told this story like 5,000 times, which was that he used to go into the offices of, you know, of like, I think it was Columbia Records. And over the receptionist's desk was this huge picture of warrant. And they were like, aha, the label was behind us. And then one day he comes in and the poster is down. And now it's an Alison Shane's. Yes. This is interesting and funny for a handful of reasons.

One of which is that I always think it's like, well, obviously warrant replaced somebody else. Like, Ronald Ritchie or somebody had been at one point they put up the warrant. poster. And then he couldn't have believed that the Warren poster would be there forever, I don't think. I mean, it'd be extraordinarily odd if you went to the office today and there was still a warrant poster up. I mean, not because it's a Warren bandy band. But what he said is that when he made this point, it was always like, well, here's a group that, you know, is playing hard rock. Their guitar-based band wouldn't be unthinkable for Warren to be able to cover an Allison Shane song. Allison Shane's could easily probably play a Warren song. And yet the fashions

and the aesthetic that Allison Chains now embraced was what was replacing his sort of out-of-touch fashion or the fashion that was in his mind other people decided was no longer desirable. So yes, I mean, if you really, it seems counterintuitive to try to be one of these people who's like, well, you don't actually grunge did not destroy hair metal. There was all these other, you know, socioeconomic factors. And it's like the demographics were changing up. It's like, yes, sort of. but MTV and radio stations had an amount of space that they were going to vote to loud, heavy bands.

And they weren't going to have these bands coexist, you know. It was a trend and it was an evolution that probably is not that dissimilar from any other time period, except for how fast it happened. And that a whole, you know, menagerie of groups suddenly became untouchable. Absolutely. Yeah. And just like in a way that, that, you know, maybe a lot of music critics at the time had been waiting for. Like, they had to begrudgingly pretend that Dr. Fend was meaningful.

And they had to somehow deal with this idea that's like, oh, everybody knows who, you know, Brett Michaels is. And nobody knows who Jandek is. And it's like, it's like all these things. And all of a sudden now it changes in just a fucking title wave. It's like all those bands are gone. And our sort of taste, what we believe is central to authentic, legitimate music, we can project that into these bands. And even though Kurt Cobain would like criticize Pearl Jam and Alice and Chains and all

these things, you know, I think from the general audience, so the general music consumer, Ellis and Chains was part of a more serious kind of music. Their lyrics are dark and dour and serious, you know, it's not. can't really party to those songs unless your idea of sitting in a very big chair. Oh God. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. Kirk Cobain would criticize Nirvana. I always remember that his quote, like he doesn't like Nevermind. He doesn't like his own album because it sounds to him like a motley crew album. Does Nevermind sound to you like a motley crew album? Does Dirt by Alison Chains ever sound to you like a motley. crew album. For me, they don't, but that's because I was also consuming all the music culture at the time.

This is one thing that is different about the 90s, I think, when we compare it to say now, in that music culture actually did seem more significant than the music itself. And that you sort of injected things into this music beforehand that changed the listening experience. I recently did an interview with somebody, a kid who was born. born in, like, he told me he was born the same day, the first slashes snake pit record he was born in the ninth, right? Wow. He's into all this music.

And what he said is how confusing it was to hear bands from the late 80s and early 90s in almost like a vacuum and sort of see them as being similar. And then to later find out that their relationships were not just not similar, but like completely contradictory. So now, if I think. about it, if I listen to Nevermind and I listen to this particularly the drum sound, like how Butchfig records those drums, and then I listen to Dr. Fieldgood and the way like, you know, Bob Rock records those drums, it is very similar. Those are polished, sculpted albums. Like,

there are aspects to Nevermind that, I mean, to me, you could argue are actually closer to to say a record like hysteria, where it's sort of like that guys in the studio put a lot of time in making it sound accidental when it's incredibly specific. But I mean, what, what, what, Cobain, I think, was just trying to do as he was trying to emphasize the fact that in his mind, their music was ideologically punk. What you're hearing on that record sounds good to you. It sounds easy to listen to. But actually, it's like, that's not what I like.

I want it to sound like killdozer. Like, I want it to be hard and corrosive. And like, I want to repel people who aren't like me. I mean, that was sort of the whole center of the selling out argument. It wasn't that you were making money if you sold out necessarily. All that could happen. The main thing is is that you were. were trying to appeal to people who weren't naturally your fans, people that existed in a different

insular culture, culture that didn't really sort of a, that you need to make a certain kind of compromise to appeal to, or at least you couldn't be totally uncompromising. When that kid said I was born the day that Slash a snake pick wherever came out, did you know when that was? Were you like, oh, you're a Gemini? That's cool. Like, is that a reference that other people get? Well, I know that it came out in the summer of 1994. That's way more information than I had at my fingertips. So the thing is, is I was like, you know, I was, I graduated in May of 94. So I was working a professional job as an entertainment writer.

And I got to interview, Slash, it was a very memorable interview to me because Slash in the interview told me that he'd quit drinking. And I was like, that's incredible. And he was like, yeah, now all I do is I take a 32 ounce glass and I fill it up with vodka and cranberry and just drink that all over. And I was like, that's a very interesting definition of quitting drinking. And yet I totally understood what he meant. What he meant is like I no longer just drink until I can no longer exist. I now slowly drink. I still need to drink for several hours and that's quitting.

It's a subtle distinction. You have a very good reason to remember all this. So that's that's very, that's very impressive. You mentioned Alice and Chains as like the dark lyrical content, whatever you thought of whether they sounded like Motley Crute. You write in the book that half the songs on dirt are about heroin. And you specifically mentioned to me the song Junkhead, which I've always read as like a taunting song, right? Like you can't understand the user's mind. Try it with your books and degrees.

If you let go and open your mind, I bet you'd be doing like me. Like, does it read that way to you? And is the vibe of dirt overall more like be more like me or just leave me? alone. Oh, I think it is the latter. I don't necessarily see it as taunting as much as it appears to be someone in a, I mean, maybe sort of a tongue-in-cheek way or whatever saying, this is who I am. Okay. I know that you've been socially conditioned to see this as tragic, but it's not. It's like, I like being on drugs. Part of the reason I find that song, so like a kind of, I kind of, I kind of of like kind of discompanning but also like really intriguing is the lyric where he says like

what's your drug of choice well what have you got right and i've always thought that was so kind of insightful in a weird way because so often when we think of drug use we have this idea that someone is doing one drug they're addicted to cocaine or they smoke marijuana but they would never do anything else i remember an mp. interview with cordonie love where she was talking about kirk cobain and basically saying like, you know, there are people who are interested in one drug, and then there are people who are just garbage cans. They're just fucking gobblers. Whatever you have, they'll take. And that is sort of the idea Lane Staley is expressing. He's sort of like, I am not taking these drugs because I see a romantic relationship to heroin like Keith Richards, you know,

sticky fingers or whatever. I'm not using cocaine because I want to drink more and stay up all night. I want whatever drug you have that will shift my reality. The reality that shifted is the one I like. And it is kind of like it's a mission statement almost. He seems to be expressing this idea that like he's not trying to convince you that he's a genius for doing this. But he's also saying, I'm not going to change this even if you argue that I should because I know that you will. And I'm not going to listen. Yeah.

Even if it's a giant glass of vodka, that's totally fine with Lane Staley. You write later in your book about cop killer, you know, in the national debate over whether cop killer inspired anyone to try to kill a cop. Do you think Junkman or any other Allison Chain song explicitly convinced anyone to try drugs? Was this a dangerous band in that sense? Well, okay. So there's like the one kind of thinking, which is that, well, you know, every year we spend four billion dollars on advertising thinking that, you know, that can change people's behavior. Why wouldn't art that people actually want also change their behavior?

So I suppose you can say, of course, if someone loves Allison Chains and they're young and impressionable and they hear these songs about drugs, they may think that to be more like these people, that is how you're supposed to live. I think more likely if somebody was an unconstitutional. artist who specifically wanted to exist sort of in the genre that Allison Chains did. They might see this and hear this and think, well, this is the way to do it. But in general, I'm pretty skeptical that art makes people dabble in hard drugs who wouldn't do so otherwise.

Like the song, Sweet Leaf by Black Sabbath. He says in the song, he's like, try it out. He's like advocating. My life was terrible. Now I smoke pot and my life is good. I could see how that could make someone who's young be like, well, I don't know. Life is kind of weird. I know some kids who smoke weed.

They seem different than me. Maybe they're different the way Ozzy is. So maybe, you know, I'll do that. But I don't think somebody would get to heroin in that way. I mean, to get to heroin, you got to take a lot of steps. You know, you have to sort of, you'll first be comfortable with drinking and smoking pot usually, and then you have to have someone introduce you to harder drugs. then if someone introduces you to heroin, you know, maybe you snorted or whatever,

but to actually like tie off your arm and inject heroin, you need to ask someone, teach me how to do this. And it's like, it's not something that art is going to push, you know? It's not, oh, no, art will push it, but it's not going to make it happen. Yes. I mean, we, we, so many jazz musicians had a relationship with it. I don't know if a lot of people will listen to jazz and it's like, well, I'm doing this now. I think that jazz musicians did.

You said that you don't necessarily hear this song Junkhead as a tragedy. To my mind, Lane Staley had one of the best, most distinctive, most alarming voices in 90s alternative rock. But even when Allison Chains were at full power, like everything written about him was at least 50% about drugs. Like, did the perpetual tragedy of Lane Staley and the way he died obscure the greatness of Lane Staley as a singer? Not really because certainly.

in pop music, relationships to drugs does not tend to erode people's willingness to take you seriously as a musician. I mean, in fact, when they made that record Mad Season, right? They made this album where it's all these guys

who got out of rehab for heroin God came together and like made a record. And I actually think that that music was taken more seriously because of the knowledge that this had a relationship to kind of self-destructive behavior. I think if they had just done it as

like this is our fun super group and we're having, you know, and we've made these songs. I think it would have been like, oh, you know, this isn't as good as Temple of the Dog or whatever. But because it was this drug thing, it made it seem as though you could get something from that music. You couldn't get elsewhere. I think that once people came to the realization that Lane Staley was like a real living on the edge person where it's like, this is not something he's doing for like posturing or it's not, like, I think. I think, think that they actually took his music more seriously. I think that they perceived him them as a tortured artist, which is a little odd because he's technically torturing himself.

Right. But that's kind of how it goes. So I do not think the relationship to drugs or his eventual death obscures the memory of him as a singer. It probably enhances it. I love that Mad Season record. And I tend to love like the lighter, like the acoustic side of Allison and chains, right? Jar of flies, sap, unplugged. Like, was this the fairly uncommon, like, loud rock band that might have gotten better and more intense, like the quieter they got? Well, you know, I never liked that part of their music as much, but I think what it probably does is sort of prove the point I was making earlier that they could have succeeded during any period of time and any kind of musical genre, because ultimately they did have authentic

songwriting ability and were very good singers. And they could harmonize in a way that you didn't need a lot of distortion and volume behind it to appreciate it. So, you know, when a band is able to translate their music and strip it down in that way and play acoustically and say like, well, this is really the core of what we do. No bullshit. Yeah. Like this is like if you take away all of the production, like we can still do this and, you know,

maybe a sophisticated listener will like it more. that probably does show just like virtuosity, like their ability. You know, I think Jerry Cantrell is a very good guitar player. I think that when I hear him play, much like, you know,

Staley's voice, I think it's pretty distinctive. And it has kind of a woozy feel to it. It always feels as though he is, has just figured out the song. But it's not. Like that's a real, that's a real wonderful illusion

to give people the sense that like, just figured this out. And I'm barely keeping it together. I'm not playing this perfect. How does this sound to you? And yet that is what it is. Like he has worked and woodshed to get himself in this position where there can be a sense that this is a brilliant amateur who doesn't fully understand the like the instrument

he's wielding, you know, but it was conscious. Yeah. I want to go back and listen now and listen for that because that sounds interesting. to me. Do you think he did that consciously, Jerry Cantrell? Like, he knew that he was creating that this is just who he is, and that whatever we project onto it is, whatever we project. Well, I certainly assume that my take on this would not be his. Like, he might hear, if he listened to what I said, he might be like, oh, I guess, I guess someone could interpret that or whatever. I'm sure that wasn't his idea. You know, maybe he would even be insulted. He's like, he thinks I am trying to

purpose. I don't know. I just know that, that like, uh, that he was trying to create tone to his instrument that was singular. And, you know, that, uh, you know, I always, you know, wonder, I used to wonder this about J. Mascus all the time. You know, I love Dinosaur Jr. And sometimes I'd wonder, it's like, is there ever footage of like Jane Mascus at like someone's like wedding reception where he just goes up and like plays a whole lot of love? the wayhole level of sounds. Or it always sound like J. Maskes. It's like could he play smoke on the water?

And it seems like Ritchie Blackmore doesn't seem like J. Maskis. I've never heard Jemaskis play anything that didn't seem like him. Now, I like to think that is a choice. Yeah. But maybe it's not. Maybe it's just like, it's like who you are.

I'd mentioned Eddie Van Halen earlier that, you know, there's this Alison Shane's song that reminds me of them and they did tour together. But, like, you know, when Eddie Van Halen would talk about when Van Halen was mostly a cover band, very often people would think their covers were originals. And he was like, I was playing the song, right? It's just that it sounded so much like me that people just assume that I must have written it.

You know, it's like if they weren't, if they weren't super familiar with the song, it sounded more like Van Halen than any group, you know, Grand Funk Railroad or whoever they were covering, you know. I think that's part of the reason why I use Allison Chains as an example. I feel like if the rest of your life, you were only hearing music the way Allison Chains performs it, it would be hard to find examples where you'd ever forget that was happening. Like you'd always know that like, oh yeah, this is Allison Chains, you know, doing the Starst Make a Banner. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to get married again just so I can invite Jay Mascus to my wedding reception to try and trick him on stage to test your hypothesis.

I'm very interested in this now. We're going to make this happen. Chuck, thank you so much for your time. It was my play you're up. Thanks very much to our guests as week, Chuck Closterman. Thanks as always to our producers, Justin Sales and Devin Ronaldo. Thanks very much to you for listening. That was 60 songs.

And we're going to do 30 more in just a couple months. We'll see you then. In the meantime, without further ado, Here's Alice and Shanes with Wood. Talk to you later.