Alice In Chains singer/guitarist Jerry Cantrell has revealed that he and late bandmate Layne Staley were listening to Grunge contemporaries like Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, but they had no interest in ripping them off.
Cantrell told Gibson (via Ultimate-Guitar), “Everything happened really fast. It didn’t necessarily feel like it at the time, but in retrospect, it was a lot going on, and the cool thing about Seattle was, it was really insular. We were at this outpost in Northwest, wouldn’t really consider it to be a capital of the entertainment business or anything like that, and I think that’s why we all kind of got to develop what we developed into, and it was always a really artistic town and city.
We had some really great artists to be proud of and call our own: Queensryche, Jimi Hendrix, but there was a lot of us that were basically the same age within a couple of years, like seven-eight bands’ worth of guys in the same kind of zone, and everybody knew everybody because Seattle is not that big of a city. And you knew what was going on. So everybody was well-aware of Green River and Soundgarden, we were aware of Nirvana and The [Screaming] Trees – did I say Mudhoney? Mudhoney was badass.
There was just so much music. Those are the ones that I guess most of the world knows now, but there were so many other bands as well. It was just a cool thing. It was like everybody was in a band, and we would go see each other play and stuff, and it was never like an oppressive thing, like, ‘We’re gonna kick their ass.’
It was more of a supportive thing. Everybody was striving to be an individual or a unit that was unto itself rather than trying to copy, ‘Let’s just do what they’re doing.’ ‘Fuck that. They’re really good at that, so we need to be us and try to be really good at being us.'”
