Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell was couch surfing at Chris Cornell‘s house in 1991 when he wrote a landmark track of the grunge era on an acoustic guitar.
At the time, the Seattle-based group was one album into its career, gaining airplay and new fans as grunge rose to dominance in the U.S. That debut, Facelift, would go on to become the genre‘s first album to be certified Gold.
Despite that success, Cantrell and his bandmates were still sharing a house together. One night, after getting into a fight with Chains drummer Sean Kinney, Cantrell stormed off. With nowhere else to go, he landed at the home of Cornell and his wife, Susan.
“Chris and Susan kind of took me in,” he tells the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in celebration of Soundgarden’s induction last year. “I crashed on their couch for a couple of weeks while I was trying to figure out where I was going. They had a place down in West Seattle, and I remember writing some songs there.”
The time away from his bandmates gave Cantrell a chance to reflect on his strained relationship with his father, Jerry Fulton Cantrell, a Vietnam veteran. The two hadn‘t met until Cantrell was three, and the emotional scars of the war caused difficulty in the family. His parents divorced, with Cantrell‘s mother taking custody of him.
With “Rooster,” the guitarist attempted to reconcile with his father. Its title comes from the nickname his dad had since he was a kid, owing to his cocky attitude and a lick of hair that stood up straight on his head, like a rooster's comb.
In Cantrell‘s lyrics, his father is depicted as the death-defying target of snipers who’ve come to take him out. His words also reflect on his dad‘s experience of seeing his son growing up in photos while a fellow soldier nearby takes his final breaths.
At the time that he wrote the song, Cantrell could only imagine his father‘s experiences in Vietnam.
“Of course, I was never in Vietnam, and he won’t talk about it,” he wrote in the liner notes of the band‘s 1999 compilation, Music Bank, ”but when I wrote this, it felt right... These were things he might have felt or thought.”
The song proved to be “the start of the healing process between my Dad and me from all that damage that Vietnam caused,” Cantrell explained. “This was all my perception of his experiences out there.”
As he subsequently told Team Rock in 2006, “That experience in Vietnam changed him forever, and it certainly had an effect on our family, so I guess it was a defining moment in my life, too. He didn’t walk out on us. We left him. It was an environment that wasn’t good for anyone, so we took off to live with my grandmother in Washington, and that’s where I went to school.”
Cantrell admitted to having resentments, “as any young person does in a situation where a parent isn’t around or a family is split. But on ‘Rooster,’ I was trying to think about his side of it — what he might have gone through.”
Creatively, “Rooster” helped show Cantrell he had what it takes to write a deep and meaningful song.
“It felt like a major achievement for me as a young writer. When I first played it to my father, I asked him if I’d got close to where he might have been emotionally or mentally in that situation. And he told me, ‘You got too close — you hit it on the head.’”
Cantrell recalled that his father was on hand when Alice in Chains performed the song while opening for Iggy Pop in a club.
“I could see him. He was back there with his big gray Stetson and his cowboy boots,” he told Guitar for the Practicing Musician in 1992. “He’s a total Oklahoma man. And at the end, he took his hat off and just held it in the air. He was crying the whole time.”
Released in May 1993 as the fourth single from Dirt, Alice in Chains’ 1992 sophomore release, “Rooster” reached number seven and spent 20 weeks on Billboard‘s Mainstream Rock Tracks chart. It remains one of the group’s signature tracks and an essential song of the grunge era.
Alice In Chains have had a quiet few years following the release of Rainier Fog in 2018, but Cantrell has barely slowed down. In addition to focusing on his solo career, he‘s written a song for the multi-award-winning movie Sinners.
With that said, he remains devoted to Alice in Chains. “It’s no secret where my loyalty lies,” he told Guitar Player in 2024.
