Alice in Chains: The Horrific Story Behind “Rooster”

While Alice in Chains’ 1992 album, Dirt is often associated with mental health, drugs, and relationships, one of the album’s tracks encapsulates the horrors of war. The song “Rooster” offered a chance for a son to understand his father’s pain and it would result in healing a fractured relationship.

Alice in Chains Hits Recording Studio for the Soundtrack to Singles

Alice in Chains was given money to record the song “Would?” for the soundtrack to the film Singles. During those recording sessions, the band cut a number of other songs that eventually became their first EP, 1992’s SAP, which was released in February of that year. Also recorded during these sessions was a song called “Rooster”.

Guitarist Jerry Cantrell recalled where he was when he wrote the song, telling Classic Rock Magazine, “I was between places to live at that time so I moved in with Chris Cornell and his wife, Susan Silver at their house in Seattle. Susan was managing Alice In Chains at the time. I stayed for a few weeks, up in this little room.”

Cantrell admitted staying up one night, while he crashed at their place, possibly taking acid, and wanting to get a Jimi Hendrix type of sound on his guitar.

The song was mixed by producer David Jerden in July of 1992. In the book Alice in Chains: The Untold Story, Cantrell recounts how frontman Layne Staley showed up to the studio with his drug dealer and Jerden was playing the song on the studio’s loudspeakers. Layne loved it but his dealer offered some unsolicited advice with Layne telling him to shut up. “Jerden lost it, ‘Who the f are you? Get the f out of my studio.’ He turned to Layne and said, ‘Don’t bring your drug dealer around.'”

“Rooster” is Released as Fourth Single from Dirt

“Rooster” was released as the fourth single from Dirt in February of 1993. It spent 20 weeks on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart and peaked at No. 7.

The term rooster had several meanings. It was the term that was given to Cantrell’s father when he was a little kid because of his cocky attitude. Cantrell’s father was also deployed to the Vietnam War twice and he never talked about his experience to his son.

According to wearethemighty.com, rooster was also a nickname for the M60 machine gunner because the muzzle flashes looked like a rooster’s tail. It’s also how the Vietnamese saw the 101st Airborne Division soldiers who wore screaming eagles on their sleeves. Bald eagles aren’t native to Vietnam so they would sometimes refer to the 101st Airborne soldiers as “Chicken Men” or “Roosters”.

“I was thinking about the things he might have thought and felt there.” – Jerry Cantrell

Jerry Cantrell described to the LA Times the impact the Vietnam War had on his dad’s life, “Vietnam is something he never talks about. I asked him about it once and he said, ‘That’s dead, son, let it lie.’ When I wrote it, I was getting this vibe, thinking about him and what he’s lived through – two tours of duty in Vietnam, he’s been a prison guard. I was thinking about the things he might have thought and felt there.”

In a separate interview with Rolling Stone, Cantrell talked about his dad trying to transition back into civilian life after the war, “My dad was trained to be a f–-ing killer. After that, you can’t just come back home and say, ‘OK, everything’s cool. I’m going to work from 9 to 5 now.’ That stuff scars you forever. We had a lot of problems and occurrences because of that.”

Those problems led to Cantrell’s parents divorcing when he was a young child. He went to live with his mother and grandmother in Tacoma, Washington.

The guitarist recalled to LouderSound, “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. I didn’t have a lot of my father around, but I started to think about him a lot during that period.”

“Rooster” Heals Fractured Relationship

Rather than resentment, Cantrell placed himself in the shoes of his father in Vietnam and “Rooster” was born. After writing the track, he played the song for his father. He asked his father if his depiction of the war was accurate, to which his father responded, “You got too close – you hit it on the head’. Cantrell revealed the song seemed to heal a rift that had been created between himself and his father during his childhood.

While the song’s central focus was on the Vietnam War, it transcends the conflict and found a new audience with the wars that have been waged in the last two decades. Conflicts much like Vietnam, saw soldiers fight an invisible enemy who doesn’t wear a uniform, and who blends in with the local population and has no rules of engagement.

Cantrell shared with LouderSound the impact that the song has had on this generation of veterans, “I’ve been all around the world and I’ve talked to combat Vets from Desert Storm and the recent war in Iraq – and they have a deep affinity with the song.

I just recently got a letter from a guy in Iraq who told me his unit had changed his call sign to Rooster. Obviously it’s unfortunate that these guys still have to fight for political ends. But it’s cool that people connect with that song; for it to be part of them getting through.”

Music Video for “Rooster” is Praised and Criticized

The band filmed a video for “Rooster” that would be praised and at the same time, criticized for being too graphic.

Director Mark Pellington was approached by Alice in Chains in late 1992 to work on a video treatment for “Rooster”. Pellington was told the video would be very personal since it was about Jerry’s father.

The band gave Pellington a lot of artistic freedom and a budget of about $250,000. Pellington’s vision for the video consisted of interviews with Cantrell and his father, hallucinatory color re-creations and recreated combat scenes of Vietnam.

“Layne was pretty high. His eyes were really f–ed up.” – Mark Pellington, Director

The video also consisted of a few performance shots of Layne Staley, which proved to be one of the hardest parts of the video to capture. Pellington revealed in the book, Everybody Loves Our Town by Mark Yarm, “Layne was pretty high. His eyes were really f–ed up. He was totally pinned.”

Pellington recalled that Layne wanted to wear a cowboy hat in the video, but the director had a better idea. He revealed in the same book, “I put him in sunglasses. I said, ‘God, you look like a badass in those sunglasses.’ And it was like, ‘All right, let’s go. Let’s get a couple of takes.'”

In the book Alice in Chains: The Untold Story, Pellington explained, “I think the sunglasses actually look cool because it’s more sinister and the song is kind of evil and you guys are f–d up and evil.”

Layne can also be seen wearing a peace symbol earring, something the director claimed was a coincidence.

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