In a recent chat with Total Guitar, Jerry Cantrell said Alice In Chains tried to copy Iron Maiden and Aerosmith.
“I’m a huge fan of Iron Maiden. I wanted Alice to be a guitar duo band precisely because of bands like that. And we kinda are now, since [lead vocalist/guitarist] William DuVall joined,” the rocker shared.
He continued his words, “Earlier on, Layne [Staley, original Alice In Chains frontman] would pick up a guitar and play a little bit, but we were mostly just a three-piece with a singer. Now we actually have two guys playing a lot of guitar, so I got my wish!”
“But when we initially talked about starting a band I wanted another guitar player and that was purely because of Dave Murray and Adrian Smith [in Iron Maiden during the ’80s]. Or the guys from Priest and Aerosmith. I love the Young brothers [AC/DC]. There’s something special about bands with two guitar players working as a unit,” Cantrell added.
“Music was something that was always in our house from a very early age,” Cantrell previously said of his early influences in an interview with Gibson’s ‘Icon’ series. “By that time, I was heavily into rock, like AC/DC and KISS and all the English metal. And I grew up on bands that wrote good riffs.”
He then noted, “I just wanted to play guitar, write songs, and I’m proud to have sprung from the community and so many of my friends. Thirty-three years later they are still going, and the heart of the band is intact. And the reasons and the meaning behind why we all do it, where we all come from and what that means, that’s not lost on any of us.”
In an earlier interview with The Quietus, Cantrell named Iron Maiden’s ‘The Number of the Beast’ as one of his favorite albums.