Rooster

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Rooster

written by Jerry Cantrell Jr.
performed by Alice in Chains
released in February 22, 1993

[Intro]
Ooh-ooh-ooh-hoo
Ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh-ooh-ooh-hoo
Ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh

[Verse 1]
Ain’t found a way to kill me yet
Eyes burn with stingin’ sweat
Seems every path leads me to nowhere, mm-mm
Wife and kids, household pet
Army green was no safe bet
The bullets scream to me from somewhere, mm-mm

[Chorus]
Here they come to snuff the Rooster, aw, yeah
Yeah, here come the Rooster, yeah
You know he ain’t gonna die
No, no, no, you know he ain’t gonna die

[Instrumental Break]

[Chorus]
Here they come to snuff the Rooster, aw, yeah
Yeah, here come the Rooster, yeah
You know he ain’t gonna die
No, no, no, you know he ain’t gonna die

[Verse 2)
Walkin’ tall, machine-gun man
They spit on me in my homeland
Gloria sent me pictures of my boy, mm-mm
Got my pills ‘gainst mosquito death
My buddy’s breathin’ his dyin’ breath
Oh, God, please, won’t you help me make it through? Mm-mm

[Chorus)
Here they come to snuff the Rooster, aw yeah
Yeah, here come the Rooster, yeah
You know he ain’t gonna die
No, no, you know he ain’t gonna die

[Outro]
Ooh-ooh-ooh-hoo
Ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh-ooh-ooh-hoo
Ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh

_____________________

This song came to mind recently when I saw that someone on Instagram made a reel of roosters and chickens jumping into the air in slow motion, with this song in the background. It was unaccountably cool. The song itself is excellent and with an powerful backstory, too, so here we are.

As one of the ancient people who lived through the grunge music era, I always really liked Alice In Chains because they had a more heavy metal sound than some of their peers. Maybe the cartoons I watched as a kid hardwired me for enjoying aggressive music when I was older. I mean, I was taught by my entertainment sources, starting at infancy, that good versus evil was an ever-present struggle. Evil wasn’t sugar-coated, either. Well, that kind of thing requires a heavier sound. I’d probably like different music if I’d been raised on Barney and Teletubbies, but who knows.

Seriously though… what was going on with children’s programming in the 1980s?

Anyway… back to the song itself. This isn’t as metal as some of the band’s other songs, but it goes hard in its messaging. The song presents a powerful juxtaposition of the emotions of despair and defiance.

Rooster covers a couple of things that are near and dear to me. On a surface level, it’s about personalizing the horrors of war through one man’s experience in it. I don’t think enough of the people who aren’t fighting in wars care enough about those who are, and as the military draft has not happened in decades (at least in the U.S.), war policy is easy for some people to ignore. If it were otherwise, political diplomacy discussions would be somewhat deeper than comparing every single situation to Germany in the 1930s.

Rooster is also a son writing a song about, and immortalizing in the process, his hero dad. I daresay every father ever would hope to have his son write something about him this epic, or to have done something meriting the effort. Apparently the release of this song helped to heal the relationship between Cantrell and his dad, who did not recover easily from his experiences in Vietnam.

(via wiki)

Lyrics

The song was written by Alice in Chains guitarist/vocalist Jerry Cantrell for his father, Jerry Cantrell Sr., who served with the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. “Rooster” was a childhood nickname given to Cantrell Sr. by his great-grandfather, because of his perceived “cocky” attitude and his hair, which used to stick up on top of his head like a rooster’s comb.

Cantrell wrote the song while living at Chris Cornell and Susan Silver‘s house in Seattle at the start of 1991. Silver is Alice in Chains’ manager and was Cornell’s then-wife. Alone, late at night, Cantrell kept thinking about his father and the psychological scars from his time in the Vietnam War that contributed to the breakdown of his family. Cantrell wrote the lyrics from the standpoint of his father.

In the liner notes of 1999’s Music Bank box set collection, Jerry Cantrell said of the song:

It was the start of the healing process between my Dad and I from all that damage that Vietnam caused. This was all my perception of his experiences out there. The first time I ever heard him talk about it was when we made the video and he did a 45-minute interview with Mark Pellington and I was amazed he did it. He was totally cool, totally calm, accepted it all and had a good time doing it. It even brought him to the point of tears. It was beautiful. He said it was a weird experience, a sad experience and he hoped that nobody else had to go through it.

In a 1992 interview with Guitar for the Practicing Musician magazine, in response to the question “Do you feel you communicated with [your father] with this song?”, Cantrell said:

Yeah. He’s heard this song. He’s only seen us play once, and I played this song for him when we were in this club opening for Iggy Pop. I’ll never forget it. He was standing in the back and he heard all the words and stuff. Of course, I was never in Vietnam and he won’t talk about it, but when I wrote this it felt right…like these were things he might have felt or thought. And I remember when we played it he was back by the soundboard and I could see him. He was back there with his big gray Stetson and his cowboy boots — he’s a total Oklahoma man — and at the end, he took his hat off and just held it in the air. And he was crying the whole time. This song means a lot to me. A lot.

Cantrell said of the song in a 2006 interview with Team Rock:

That experience in Vietnam changed him [his father] 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. I didn’t have a lot of my father around, but I started thinking about him a lot during that period. I certainly had 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. 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. 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’. 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.

Chart positions

Chart (1993)	Peak position
Australia Alternative (ARIA)	17
US Mainstream Rock (Billboard)	7

If you read that lyrics article closely, you noticed that Cantrell Sr.’s great grandfather gave him the nickname Rooster. This song is thus a family story stretching over a lot of generations. That’s pretty cool.