Alice In Chains singer/guitarist Jerry Cantrell discussed the power of “Man in the Box” and how fans get pissed whenever they snub it from the setlist, dating back to the early 90’s.
Cantrell told Vice, “We were out touring that record for a good period of time. We opened for Extreme for a month and then we went out with Iggy Pop for a month on the Brick By Brick tour. Sometime after that we joined Clash of the Titans—we were opening that tour, which was a revolving headliner of Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeth.
Talk about not really fitting in. [Laughs] In the middle of that tour is when ‘Man In the Box’ dropped and got into heavy rotation on MTV, and overnight we sold half a million records. To this day it’s one of our most recognizable songs. If we don’t play that in the set, a lot of people are going to be pissed. [Laughs]”
He also discussed The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here.
“It’s a trippy record. There are kind of some parallels—in a weird way—to the self-titled. It’s a little more exploratory, too. It goes to some trippy places.”
He was also asked if his writing process had changed over the years.
“I think it’s exactly the same. I’m a kind of a bury-myself-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods writer, where I prefer to go out there and have everybody leave me alone until I’m done. It’s a little bit of a trek into yourself. Which can be fucking scary, man—your head is not a neighborhood you should always travel in alone.”
