Jerry Cantrell

Jerry Fulton Cantrell Jr. (born March 18, 1966) is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter.

He is best known as the founder, lead guitarist, co-lead vocalist, and main songwriter of the rock band Alice in Chains.

Cantrell was born in Tacoma, Washington, on March 18, 1966, to Gloria Jean Krumpos and Jerry Fulton Cantrell.

He grew up in Spanaway, and is the oldest of three children.

His father is an Army veteran, and his mother was an amateur organist and melodica player who worked as an administrative assistant for the Clover Park School District in Pierce County, Washington.

His maternal grandmother was from Norway, and his maternal grandfather was from the Czech Republic.

After Cantrell learned to write, he documented his goal on Dr. Seuss' book, My Book About Me, filling in the sentence "When I grow up I want to be a..."

with the words "rock star".

Cantrell's father, Jerry Sr., is a combat veteran of the Vietnam War.

Cantrell's first childhood memory is meeting his father for the first time after he had returned from war when he was three years old.

Due to the strain of war, his parents divorced when he was seven years old, and Cantrell was raised by his mother, Gloria, and his maternal grandmother in Tacoma.

The family lived on welfare and food stamps.

Jerry Sr. was the main subject of the song "Rooster", which Cantrell wrote as a tribute to his father, and his mother Gloria is also mentioned by name in the song.

Father and son also appeared together on the music video for "Rooster", in which Jerry Sr. recalls the war.

Cantrell would later name his music publishing company as Rooster's Son Publishing.

Cantrell moved back with his mother to Spanaway where he attended junior high.

His first job was delivering newspapers.

Cantrell attended high school at Spanaway Lake High School, and, before owning his first guitar, he was a member of the high school choir which attended many state competitions.

In his senior year, Cantrell became choir president, and the quartet sang the national anthem at basketball games and won competitions with the highest marks achievable.

He graduated from high school in 1984.

Cantrell picked up a guitar for the first time when he was in sixth grade.

At that time he played clarinet, and his mother was dating a guitar player who handed his guitar to Cantrell and taught him a couple of chords.

Cantrell picked it up very quickly, impressing his mother's boyfriend who suggested that she should buy her son a guitar, so she bought him an acoustic guitar.

It would not be until the age of 17 that he began seriously playing an electric guitar.

Cantrell learned to play guitar by ear, emulating his heroes.

The band rose to international fame in the early 1990s during Seattle's grunge movement and is known for its distinctive vocal style and the harmonized vocals between Cantrell and Layne Staley (and later Cantrell and William DuVall).

Cantrell started to sing lead vocals on Alice in Chains' 1992 EP Sap.

Cantrell also acted in the Alice in Chains mockumentaries The Nona Tapes (1995) and AIC 23 (2013).

He also contributed to the soundtracks of The Cable Guy (1996), John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017), and Dark Nights: Metal (2018), and he has made cameos in films such as Jerry Maguire (1996), Rock Slyde (2009), and Deadwood: The Movie (2019).

Cantrell also has a solo career and released the albums Boggy Depot in 1998 and Degradation Trip Volumes 1 & 2 in 2002.

His third solo album, Brighten, was released in 2021.

He has also collaborated and performed with Heart, Ozzy Osbourne, Metallica, Pantera, Circus of Power, Metal Church, Gov't Mule, Damageplan, Pearl Jam, The Cult, Stone Temple Pilots, Danzig, Glenn Hughes, Duff McKagan, and Deftones, among others.

After Staley's death in 2002, Cantrell took the role of Alice in Chains' lead singer on most of the songs from the band's post-Staley albums, Black Gives Way to Blue (2009), The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here (2013), and Rainier Fog (2018), with DuVall harmonizing with him in the new songs and singing Staley's vocals in the old songs in live concerts.

Guitar World Magazine ranked Cantrell as the 38th out of "100 Greatest Heavy Metal Guitarists of All Time" in 2004, and the 37th "Greatest Guitar Player of All Time" in 2012.

Cantrell was named "Riff Lord" by British hard rock/metal magazine Metal Hammer in 2006.

Guitar World also ranked Cantrell's solo in "Man in the Box" at No. 77 on its list of "100 Greatest Guitar Solos" in 2008.

Cantrell has earned nine Grammy Award nominations as a member of Alice in Chains.

Cantrell has cited his interest in dark musical tones as dating back to this period: "In choir we performed a cappella Gregorian chants from the 14th and 15th centuries. It was scary church music."

His choir teacher and drama teacher were, early on, his two greatest motivators toward a career in music.

When Alice in Chains' first album went gold, Cantrell sent both teachers a gold record.