Alice In Chains singer/guitarist William DuVall discussed the band rehearsing Soundgarden songs in a hotel room to prepare for a Chris Cornell tribute at Rock on the Range in a new NME interview. He mentioned how complicated it was to cover Chris Cornell due to how he tuned his guitar to his voice.
May 18th saw Alice In Chains paying tribute to another of the Emerald City’s fallen sons. To mark the one-year anniversary of Chris Cornell’s passing, William and the band covered Soundgarden’s ‘Hunted Down’ and ‘Boot Camp’ at the Rock On The Range festival in Columbus, Ohio. “That was a very moving and poignant experience,” says William. “We didn’t say much about it beforehand, and we didn’t say much about it afterward, because we thought the music said enough. I wanted to do ‘Boot Camp’, because that was my favourite song on [Soundgarden’s 1996 album] ‘Down On The Upside’, so I went and learned it, but the thing with Chris is, he would tune the guitar to his voice, so it’s kinda complicated to learn from following YouTube!
“In the end, and in the spirit of Chris, I just made up my own version and we practiced it in a hotel room in Chicago. [Jerry] Cantrell wanted to do ‘Hunted Down’, because he already knew it and it’s a rad song. But what I really liked about it is it ended up being these really nice bookends to the first song on the first Soundgarden EP [1987’s Screaming Life], and the last song on the last record Soundgarden made during their first phase.”
