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. But it also did something else,
that was unexpected. That’s what were going to explore int today’s video.
Several of the songs found on Alice in Chains 1992 album Dirt dated back to the sessions the band did
for the Cameron Crowe film Singles. The band was given money to hit the studio to record the song
Would? For the film’s soundtrack. It was during those sessions that band cut a number of other
songs that would eventually become their first EP 1992’s SAP which was released in February of
that year. I’ve done a whole video on SAP. The link is down below. Also recorded during these
sessions was a song called Rooster, which would be held over until Dirt which came out later in the
year. If you want to hear the demo of Rooster it’s up on YouTube.The link is down below.
Guitarist Jerry Cantrell would recall 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 [Soundgarden singer] 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 would admit 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 being mixed by producer David Jerden in july of 1992. In the book Alice in Chains the
untold story tells an anecdote about the mixing of the song. Frontman Layne Staley showed up to
the studio with his dealer and as Jerden was playing the song on the studios loudspeakers,
Layne loved it but his dealer offered his unsolicited advice with Layne telling him
to shut up. The book would set the scene saying “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" was released as the fourth single from Dirt in February 1993
It spent 20 weeks on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart where it peaked at No. 7
The term Rooster came from his father’s nickname he was given as a little kid because
of his cocky attitude. Cantrell’s father would also be deployed to Vietnam twice
and never talked about his experience to his son. According to wearethemighty.com
Rooster was also the name of M60 machine gunners because the muzzle flashes looked like a roosters
tale. It's also how the Vietnamese saw the 101st Airborne division soldiers who wore screaming
eagles on their sleeves. Because bald eagles aren't native to Vietnam they would sometimes
refer to the 101st Airborne soldiers as and i quote "chicken men" or "roosters".
Jerry Cantrell would tell the LA Times the impact that the Vietnam war had on his dad's life saying
“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 in 1996 Cantrell
talked about the impact the war had on his Dad as he transitioned back into
civilian life after the war saying 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 9 to 5
now.' That stuff scars you forever. We had a lot of problems and occurrences because of that."
Those problems would lead Cantrell to his parents divorcing when he was a young child
and him living with his mother and grandmother in Tacoma, Washington.
The guitarist would recall to Louder Sound 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 thinking about him a lot during that period" he'd say
Rather than resentment Cantrell placed himself in the shoes of his father in
Vietnam and Rooster would be born. After writing the track, he would play the song for his father
asking him if his depiction of the war was accurate and his father would respond and i
quote “You got too close – you hit it on the head’. Cantrell would reveal that the song
seemed to heal a rift that been created between himself and his father during his childhood.
While the song’s central focus was on the Vietnam War it would transcend that conflict
and find a new audience with the wars that have been fought in the last two decades.
Conflicts much like Vietnam, saw soldiers fight an invisible enemy who doesn’t wear a uniform,
who blends in with the local population and has no rules of engagement. Cantrell would
tell Louder Sound the impact that the song has had on this generation of veterans saying
“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 that song. I just recently got
a letter from a guy in Iraq who told me his unit had changed their call sign to Rooster.
Obviously it’s unfortunate that 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.
The band would also film a video for the song that would be praised and at the same
time be criticized for being too graphic. Due to his success with Pearl Jam’s video for Jeremy,
Director Mark Pellington was approached by teh band 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.
And Pellington could relate because he had his own complicated relationship with his father who had
alzheimers at the time. The band gave Pellington a lot of artistic freedom and a budget of a quarter
of a million dollars. Pellington’s vision for the video consisted of interviews with Cantrell and
his father, hallucinatory color re-creations and recreated combat scenes of Vietnam. The footage
of the Cantrell and his father being interviewed took place in Oklahoma. For the combat scenes
Pellington brought on Olive Stone’s military adviser Dale Dye who worked on the movie Platoo
on how to make the combat scenes more realistic. The video also consisted of a few performance
shots of frontman Layne Staley, which proved to be one of the hardest parts of the video to capture.
Pellington would reveal in the book everybody loves our town by mark yarm
"Layne was pretty high,". "His eyes were really fed up. He was totally pinned." Pellington would
recall that Layne originally wanted to wear cowboy hat in the video, but the director had
a better idea revealing in the 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 would go on to say “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 earing something that the director
claimed was a coincidence. That does it for today's video guys thanks for watching. Be sure
to hit the like button and subscribe and we'll see you again on rock n' roll true storeis. Take care.