outasite`08
Gold $$ Contributor
The way things are going, sticks and rocks, and you`ll sing your own song.
never knew the meaning behind this song
- Thread starter ebb
- Start date
It won't be a pleasant one either.
farmerjohn
Gold $$ Contributor
Hopefully some simple way of listening to it when your hearing leaves, sure miss my music...... John
Alex Wheeler
Site $$ Sponsor
You should check out mad season too if your aic fans
When my hearing leaves? I'm afraid that horse is already out of the barn.
I'm totally deaf in the left ear and have a 75% high frequency loss in the right.
I use a Bluetooth headset and sometimes listen using the intercom in my helmet when on the bike. It doesn't sound like when I was 18 but it's the best way I have.
Z-29 was a Vega GT
DeerHunter82
Gold $$ Contributor
Grew up on the grunge scene. But now I just listen to 80s and 90s Country. Got old I guess.
outasite`08
Gold $$ Contributor
Got wise.
True, but the Z29 / ZR2 can be driven off road in comfort
I used to see v8 vegas in hot rod magazine. Grumpys toy built small block chevy in a vega. I bet that would throw you back in the seat. Doug
Rooster by Alice In Chains may have become one of the band's defining tracks, but its meaning was rooted in humble beginnings. When guitarist Jerry Cantrell found himself temporarily homeless at the start of 1991, he turned to a fellow grunge legend for help. “I was between places to live at that time,” Cantrell recalls, “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.”
Alone, late at night, Cantrell’s thoughts kept turning to his estranged father, whose psychological scars from his service in the Vietnam War had contributed to the breakdown of the family some years earlier. “That experience in Vietnam changed him forever,” explains Cantrell, “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. I didn’t have a lot of my father around, but I started thinking about him a lot during that period.”
Sitting in front of a four-track recorder, the song that poured out of Cantrell might have been laced with bitterness. Instead, its harrowing lyrics were written from the standpoint of his father; describing the ‘stinging sweat’ and ‘mosquito death’ of a trek through the jungle, and an imagined skirmish with the Vietcong.
The title's meaning was prompted by a nickname given to Cantrell Snr. by his great-grandfather: “Apparently he was a cocky little kid, and his hair used to stick up on top of his head like a rooster’s comb.”
“I certainly had resentments,” Cantrell notes, “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. To be honest, I didn’t really sit down intending to do any of that; it just kinda came out.
But that’s the great thing about music – sometimes it can reach deeper than you ever would in a conversation with anybody. It’s more of a forum to dig deeper.” Alice In Chains had enjoyed some success with their 1990 debut album Facelift and its single Man In The Box, but Rooster was arguably the first song to announce the depth of the band’s talent.
Cantrell recalls that “it felt like a major achievement for me as a young writer,” and this sentiment was echoed when he played the demo to vocalist Layne Staley, bassist Mike Starr and drummer Sean Kinney.
When it came to recording Rooster, the band turned a prior engagement to their advantage. “Cameron Crowe had already come to us to ask for a song for his movie Singles,” recalls Cantrell. “So in the session that was meant for recording that one song [Would?], we ended up demoing about 10 songs, which included all the stuff that ended up on the [1992] Sap EP, Rooster and a couple of others from Dirt.”
Rooster was taped at Eldorado Studios on LA’s Sunset Boulevard, which the band co- produced with Dave Jerden. “It turned out to be really powerful,” notes Cantrell, “and the way Layne sang on it is amazing.”
Similarly powerful was the video, in which director Mark Pellington [fresh from Pearl Jam’s Jeremy] interspersed scenes of Apocalypse Now-style brutality with an interview with Cantrell’s father.
“My father had never talked about that time in his life, and was reluctant to do so if anyone ever asked,” recalls the guitarist, “So I was amazed that he agreed to do Mark’s request, for about an hour, on film.
“He was totally cool, totally calm, accepted it all and had a good time doing it,” Cantrell added in the notes for 1999’s Music Bank box set. “It even brought him to the point of tears. He said it was a weird experience, a sad experience and he hoped that nobody else had to go through it.”
“I’ve been all around the world,” explains Cantrell, “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.”
And yet Rooster’s greatest triumph was ultimately a personal one. Against all the odds, the song repaired the fractured relationship between father and son.
“When I first played it to my father,” recalls Cantrell, “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’. It meant a lot to him that I wrote it. It brought us closer. It was good for me in the long-run and it was good for him, too.”
My uncles, Dave and Claude Jones were Japanese POWs win WW2. They were both airframe mechanics in the US navy, and after retirement from the navy they both worked on base as civilians' till they were in their 60s. Dave lived very near Pensacola NAS and Claude lived near Cecil field NAS. Claude lived across the street from a couple of very nice houses that were on the St Johns River and one was owned by the man that owned the Toyota distributorship for the SE part of the USA. When he sold the business he walked across the street and talked to my uncle and told him to be ready that the new owner was married to a Japanese lady, and they would be moving in soon. Claude kinda avoided her till they were introduced by the original owner. He was very apprehensive, but she made it a point to be very cordial to him. Eventually they became friends and he found that she had lost most of her family during the war and that they both had scares from it. It took almost 50 years for him to get at least that much healing from the war. If Dave had ever uttered a waord about his experience, he may have had more issues than Claude. I miss them both.
Just watched a A.I.C. concert on youtube. The rooster was on stage. Pretty cool. Doug
jds holler
Gold $$ Contributor
I'm 66, still a rocker. My phone has some of the best music made in the last sixty years.
I never really listened to Alice n Chains till fifteen or twenty years after they hit the scene. I like em a lot -- kind of dark, but good.
Things went bad for me for most of the nineties, and I missed a lot of what was going on. It's kind of nice to discover something that I missed and appreciate it. jd
I never really listened to Alice n Chains till fifteen or twenty years after they hit the scene. I like em a lot -- kind of dark, but good.
Things went bad for me for most of the nineties, and I missed a lot of what was going on. It's kind of nice to discover something that I missed and appreciate it. jd
Grunge fan ? I get it. Love drop D or C tuning.
As for AIC. It’s sad that the original singer and bassist both died from drug overdoses.
Upgrades & Donations
This Forum's expenses are primarily paid by member contributions. You can upgrade your Forum membership in seconds. Gold and Silver members get unlimited FREE classifieds for one year. Gold members can upload custom avatars.
Click Upgrade Membership Button ABOVE to get Gold or Silver Status.
You can also donate any amount, large or small, with the button below. Include your Forum Name in the PayPal Notes field.
To DONATE by CHECK, or make a recurring donation, CLICK HERE to learn how.
Click Upgrade Membership Button ABOVE to get Gold or Silver Status.
You can also donate any amount, large or small, with the button below. Include your Forum Name in the PayPal Notes field.
To DONATE by CHECK, or make a recurring donation, CLICK HERE to learn how.